A Crime in the Neighborhood (3 page)

Perhaps the twins and I talked about our parents among ourselves that week. Perhaps one night I cornered my sister, Julie, and asked her what she thought was happening. But I don't think I ever did. She and Steven had each other for confidantes—they were twins after all, and at fourteen plunged into intrigues with each other and their friends that I found unfathomable until I got to be fourteen myself.

Also Julie despised me. Whenever I asked her anything she mimicked my questions back at me in a lisping voice. She had a passion for British novels in those days and had adopted an affected Oxford tone straight out of Evelyn Waugh, which made every nasty thing she said sound even nastier. “The Child,”
she and Steven called me, “Marsha the Swamp,” or simply “Swamp.”

My aunts spent hours talking to my mother. Their voices sailed out from the living room, swooping back to a whisper if my mother reminded them we might be listening, only to rise again, flapping upward like shorebirds. When she arrived, Aunt Claire had given me a conch shell from Bermuda. I remember being embarrassed by the shell's glossy pink interior, which looked to me like an exaggerated version of my mother's broad upper lip. My mother had never had what you could properly call a harelip, but her lip was wide and gently peaked at the top. “Go on,” said Aunt Claire, when I hesitated to press my ear next to the shell's opening. “Hear the ocean talking.” From then on the cloistral roar of the conch shell was what I always imagined when I passed the living room and heard my aunts' voices.

They both thought my mother should give my father time, that he needed to get “it” out of his system. “Not that we're excusing
her
,” they often said, sometimes in unison. “Don't think that for a minute. You know us.” Vigorously they nodded their cropped, delicate-looking heads.

Who knows why my father decided to stay in the house during that week. Perhaps he thought it was a show of strength or, more likely, an act of atonement. In the early mornings before he left for work, and in the evenings after he got home, my father drifted through the house like smoke from my
aunts' cigarettes. He played “As Time Goes By” and the easier parts of “Moonlight Sonata” before dinner on our upright piano in the living room; but now he didn't ask me to turn the pages of his music books, and he made more mistakes than usual. In the evenings after dinner he mixed Scotch and milk in a Flintstones glass and drank it standing up by the refrigerator.

Sometimes he paced back and forth on our screened porch. More often he disappeared. I began hunting him through the house even after I was supposed to be in bed, finding him in odd places like the basement near the boiler or in the kitchen hovering by the back door. Late one night I found him standing outside his own bedroom.

“Hi there,” he said. He looked like someone waiting to be called into the dentist's office.

We stood a few moments together, examining the hallway's orange carpet with its rushing pattern that always reminded me of goldfish swimming upstream. Here and there the carpet had worn thin in places; some of the goldfish had nearly vanished.

“You know,” my father murmured, looking at the carpet and twisting a button on his cuff. “You know a lot's been happening around here. A lot of changes. Not about you, though. None of this is about you, sweetheart.” He smiled at me sadly. “So you just keep on with what you were doing, Marsha honey. Do whatever you need to do.”

“But I wasn't doing anything,” I said.

“That's all right.” He seemed anxious to reassure me, but uncertain about the direction this reassurance should take.

That night, cross-legged on my bed in my pink nightgown, I wrote him a note on a strip of notebook paper. “Hi, Dad. This is from your daughter Marsha. Bet you're surprised to find a note in your pocket. I just wanted to say you do whatever you need to do, too!” This last bit didn't sound quite right, but I couldn't think how to change it and I was suddenly very tired, so I stumbled downstairs and slipped the note into his overcoat.

A night or two later, I sat watching
Laugh-In
on television in the living room with my father and the twins. I had been sitting close to my father's armchair, holding his hand by the wrist, when halfway through the show I suddenly felt I had to see my mother. I wanted her in that way of very young children, a muddled, weepy kind of lust.

I searched first in the kitchen, then in the basement, finding traces of her everywhere—a coffee cup with lipstick prints, a crumpled tissue. Finally, as I padded into the dark upstairs hallway in my stocking feet, I heard first her voice and then my aunts' as they talked in her bedroom.

From what I could hear, they were getting ready to trim one another's hair, and Aunt Claire was proposing to give my mother a henna rinse in the bathroom.

“Take off your blouse,” one of them ordered. My parents'
bedroom door had been hung backward, so that it opened into the hallway; it stood partly ajar, and almost without thinking, I stepped behind it.

“You know, you're going to have to face up to the situation,” Aunt Claire was saying. “Confront it. Then you have to go on.”

“That's easy for you to say,” said my mother.

“Of course it is,” said Aunt Claire. “But it's still true.”

“What you have to do,” Aunt Fran said, “is forget about dignity.”

“Believe me,” said my mother. “Dignity is about the last thing on my mind these days.”

I edged around so that I could squint through the crack between the hinges and the doorjamb, hoping, and fearing, but hoping more intensely, that my aunts would take off their clothes. I believed they would still be wearing that pillowcase underwear I had heard about, and I wanted to see what it looked like—I even pulled my glasses out of my pocket and put them on in anticipation of this possibility. I was also interested in seeing their breasts, which I imagined as fleshy megaphones topped with glowing red doorknobs. That's what breasts looked like in Steven's drawings, which he hid under his bed. He called them “tooties.” Why I assumed my mother's breasts, glimpsed occasionally in her bedroom or in the women's changing room of our community pool, were not “tooties,” I'm not sure, except that nothing belonging to my mother seemed unusual to me then, or seemed to belong to anyone but her.

My mother and my aunts abruptly stopped talking, and for an instant I thought they had seen me behind the door. But then they began again, talking now with the stiff casualness of people who are forced off a subject that interests them.

“It'll give you a lift,” Aunt Claire told my mother, standing close behind her. She ran her fingers slowly up the back of my mother's hair while they both stared at themselves in the mirror over the dresser. “Auburn highlights. That's all it is.”

“I don't know,” said my mother in a querulous voice.

Aunt Fran sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled off her sneakers. “You have the cutest figure, Lois,” she said, smiling at my mother's back. “Really. What a nice little package.” She leaned over and gave my mother a swat on the bottom.

Staring gravely at herself in the mirror, my mother turned her head from side to side, Aunt Claire's fingers still sifting her hair. “You don't think I'll look silly?”

Aunt Claire slid her hand out of my mother's hair and let it rest loosely on her shoulder. “You'll look beautiful. You look beautiful now.”

“Ha,” said my mother.

“Oh, you don't know.” Aunt Fran pushed her green tweed slacks down around her hips. She stood up to wriggle them down to her knees, then stepped out of them and left them crumpled on the floor. She wore plain white underwear, a fringe of dark hair curling tightly out from under the white fabric at the top of each of her legs. As she unbuttoned her
blouse, I could see the front of her brassiere, a bit of lacy panel. She let her blouse hang open and sat back down on the bed, crossing her legs. “You've always been the beautiful one.”

“I am not,” said my mother, but she smiled a little into the mirror, one corner of her broad lip lifting.

“Much more beautiful than Ada,” said Aunt Claire.

“Ada's getting fat,” said Aunt Fran, gazing again at her own long, muscular legs.

“I don't want to talk about Ada.” My mother moved away from Aunt Claire and headed toward the bathroom, out of my sight. Aunt Claire raised her eyebrows at Aunt Fran, who shrugged.

“Take off your blouse and skirt,” Aunt Claire called after my mother. “And bring out the scissors. We'll trim your hair first while the henna dissolves.” She sat down with a bounce on the bed next to Aunt Fran and began unbuttoning her own blouse. “All I want is about an inch off the ends. How much do you want?”

“Oh I don't care. I had my hair cut last week. I'm just doing it to be part of things.”

Aunt Claire smiled as she pulled off her blouse. She wasn't wearing a brassiere at all. Instead of the two cones I'd been expecting, a pair of small, flattened-looking eyes confronted me, oatmeal-colored save for the brown, protruding, button iris—bizarre, almost horrible, plain human flesh.

Aunt Fran had now taken off her blouse and was standing
by the bed in her bra and white underpants. She looked like a giraffe, she was so tall and sinewy, so unnaturally unencumbered as she shifted from one leg to another, flexing her leg muscles, her smallish, sleek head lifting suddenly, blinking at the sight of herself in the mirror. On the bed, Aunt Claire leaned over to pull off her penny loafers and then her knee-high nylon stockings. Her pale back was spattered like a dog's belly with large brownish freckles.

She sat up again and fluffed the back of her hair with one hand, yawning, then looked toward the bathroom. “Lo?” she called. “Are you ready?”

Both of my aunts sighed as my mother came suddenly back into view. She was wearing a green towel around her head; otherwise she was completely naked. It was a surprisingly sad thing to see my mother naked. I had seen her naked before, but not, it seemed to me, for a long time, and certainly not in this way. She looked diminished and ribby and white—and unexpectedly hairy. She also looked on display, like a store mannequin waiting to be dressed. A thin, pinkish scar I remembered but had forgotten sliced along her lower belly, ending in a grim bristle of hair.

Was this what my father saw when he looked at her at night in their bedroom? I imagined my mother demanding that he touch it, touch her scar. He would be afraid; he would curl his fingers back at the last moment. And I guessed that this scar must be the root of their trouble, their fighting, their silence, that my mother's body should have been perfect, as mine was
perfect. She put one hand on her hip, one on the doorjamb, and waited.

“Why look at you,” cried Aunt Fran. “Venus on the half shell.”

My mother smiled blankly. The lenses of my glasses fogged up. I closed my eyes and counted twice to one hundred by tens. When I stopped counting, my mother had gone back into the bathroom.

The very next night I was sitting on my mother's bed with her and Aunt Claire, when my mother abruptly got up and flung open the bedroom closet where my father's suits hung neatly on the rod. “I guess we should think about giving these old clothes away,” she said. Perhaps I imagined it, but the creak on the stairs seemed to be my father, shifting back down to the kitchen.

“Lo,” said Aunt Claire. “This isn't the way to handle it.”

“Tell me another way,” said my mother, tightening her lips.

By then she was already referring to my father in the past tense. “Larry used to like that show,” she might say if we were all in the living room trying to watch television.

He would look up and lightly shudder.

“Larry always ate his grapefruit after he finished his coffee,” she might tell my aunts at the breakfast table, “because if he had them together he said they left a moldy aftertaste.” And
there my father would be, holding his coffee cup, his grapefruit untouched in front of him.

Once she got going, she couldn't stop. The fast put-down. The cruel, humorous revenge. Having the Mayhew Girls in the house inspired her.

“It can't be sex she wants him for,” she said loudly to Aunt Fran on the last morning of my aunts' visit, just as my father was leaving for his office. “That thing hasn't had batteries for years.”

The twins smirked nervously at each other.

“Lois.” Aunt Fran pointed her big chin at me over the cereal boxes.

“Oh, they don't even know what sex is,” said my mother.

“
Lois
,” said Aunt Claire.

But my mother had already added: “They're his kids, after all.”

And then from the doorway, my father said, “That's
enough.
”

We all looked up. He was standing in his dark blue overcoat, his hat in his hand lifted halfway to his head so that it looked as though he were doffing his hat to my mother. My note must still have been in the pocket of that coat; as soon as he put his hand in his pocket, he would feel it rustle against his fingers, slender as a fortune from a fortune cookie.

As I recall that moment now, the pause thickens, grows greenish and dense; a shadow blows across the kitchen windows,
darkening the room. From a street away, a dog begins to bark. In the flat chill of that morning, sound carries acutely; the dog could be barking in our own kitchen. Someone yells at the dog to shut up. The dog barks louder. My father continues to stand in the doorway, still in his attitude either of leave-taking or congratulation, or perhaps supplication, his hat cradled in his hand.

The shadow blows past; sunlight washes back through the windows; the dog stops barking. My father stares at my mother, and she stares back.

“That's enough,” he says.

And in a reasonable, almost pleasant voice my mother says, “I agree.”