A Crime in the Neighborhood (6 page)

But for what kind of fight? That's the question that keeps needling me—whether in the end Ada persuaded herself that she loved my father or hated my mother. It had to have been one or the other for her to do what she did.

Or could she simply have made a terrible mistake? And once she was caught in the middle of it, she couldn't see how
to get out of it. Or maybe she even fell in love with her own confusion—there was her grand passion, her way at last to be different, extraordinary, to make her sisters stop claiming that they knew who she was. For a little while at least, her mistake might even have looked like bravery.

Because the truth is, mistakes are where life really happens. Mistakes are when we get tricked into realizing something we never meant to realize, which is why stories are about mistakes. Mistakes are the moments when we don't know what will happen to us next. An appalling, exhilarating thought. And while we entertain it, the secret dreaming life comes groping out.

So my father and Ada snatched a couple of days together, went to the beach, probably Virginia Beach because it was close. They would have rented a motel room with a view of the ocean, a little cement balcony where they could sit in the evening with their drinks. They wore their coats, a cold ocean breeze chapping their faces as they glanced back and forth between each other and the sand. They watched the waves scrolling in toward shore, gazed past the surf to a flat, wide distance. That span encouraged them; perhaps it looked like an open margin between themselves and the rest of the world.

In April the Chiltons moved out of the house next door, taking their sweet cross-eyed baby and leaving their broken picnic table and a square lawn full of crabgrass for the man who moved in. His name was Mr. Green. I woke up one morning and fumbled on my glasses to see an orange moving van parked on the street and chairs and tables being carried out of it.

“Somebody's moved into the Chiltons' house,” I announced at breakfast.

“Have they?” said my mother, from behind the newspaper. She had begun sitting at my father's place at the table; no one sat at hers. “How do they look?” she said eventually, turning a page of the newspaper.

“Regular,” I said. “It's a man.”

I was pleased to be the first to notice our new neighbor; it gave me a kind of claim on him. Otherwise I noted only that he appeared to be a bachelor, which was unusual in our neighborhood
but satisfied me because now I wouldn't have to worry about meeting strange children and having to invite them to play Ping-Pong in our basement. Nothing could be expected from me regarding Mr. Green, except courtesy, so I waved to him that afternoon when Julie and I walked home from the mall. He was unloading boxes from the van. I remember that he paused to balance a box on one knee in order to wave back. He was a squat man, with a pinkish face, blandly familiar, although he didn't actually resemble anyone I knew. When he bent his head, I saw that he had a bald spot, shaped like a heart.

“He looks like a creep,” said Julie.

It had been wet in March and early April, then suddenly it got very hot. In just a few days, our big front yard went from a brown mat to a seething tangle of color. Lilacs and wisteria bloomed, and the azaleas and the crab apple tree. Tulips, daffodils, irises driving up like spears. Blooming saturated the air, seeping in through open windows and under doors and into the sofa's upholstery. The storm drains clogged with apple blossoms; all the car windshields gathered greenish pollen, frothing against the windshield wipers.

A kind of lawlessness infected everything. Next door, eight-year-old Luann Lauder decorated herself with toothpaste one Sunday morning and ran across the lawn in only her underpants. Boyd Ellison appeared on the playground one afternoon with a ten-speed bicycle he said was a birthday present but which looked just like our neighbor David Bridgeman's
bicycle, which had recently been stolen. Blue jays screamed all day long. Even the grass looked an unearthly green, as it does right before an electrical storm, when the air starts to hum and your hair stands on end.

And yet our neighborhood was anything but lawless. With its tidy lawns, pruned dogwood trees, and sputtering lawn mowers, Spring Hill still strikes me as the most wonderfully inoffensive of places whenever I drive through it. Our house was the oldest one on the block, a bungalow throwback to when people used to summer by the river. We had a screened front porch, shade trees, and a wide front yard set up on the top of a hill, with a view of half the street.

In 1972, Washington suburbs like ours were dowdy, provincial places, like the city itself. The Whitehurst Freeway still ran past an old rendering plant, which smelled so rankly of boiled hooves in the summer that motorists rolled up their car windows even on the hottest days. The Whitehurst emptied behind the battery-shaped Watergate Complex, still known only as elegant apartment buildings. Locusts banged against the screen doors of houses all the way up Capitol Hill. The spring before, millions of locusts had crawled out of the mud after a seventeen-year sleep, buzzed like madness for a week, then died. Their fat brown bodies piled up in drifts, so that we wore rainboots when we ran outside. The whole city filled with a drowsy insect racket on summer nights, which radiated from the pavement right into the trees.

As I remember it, the Washington suburbs didn't get expensive
until the Reagan years. During his presidency, money exploded into towns that had been shabby, somnolent, often little more than two gas pumps, a Baptist church, and a post office. Suddenly every backwater had a foreign car dealership, a gourmet grocery, and a colonial-style brick bank. Malls erupted. Office parks moved into Rockville; the computer industry swarmed up around the Beltway. Across the Potomac, Roslyn of the pale green willow trees disappeared beneath a wilderness of skyscrapers. Jaguars and Mercedeses backed up along Sagamore Road, twisting out past the defunct amusement park by the river. If my father had remained a real estate broker, we could have been rich. Little houses became big ones, while big houses became mansions, and the bigger the houses got, the less their inhabitants seemed to know about the people who lived near them. Until finally what you had were “residential areas,” places where someone could be murdered on the next block and you wouldn't know who he was.

Nowadays our old neighborhood is settled mostly with young lawyers, a few systems analysts, maybe a lobbyist or two, maybe a retired two-star general. Twenty years ago mostly low-level government workers lived there, GS 3s and 4s, along with a few insurance adjusters, pharmacists, and small-business owners. They drove Chevrolets and dented Ford station wagons. They kept bowling trophies on the mantel in the paneled den and invited their neighbors over for iced tea and mixed nuts while their kids played skidoo in the rumpus
room. Even though it was rumored that the brick Defense facility behind the mall was really the president's secret underground bunker, where he would be hidden away during a nuclear war while the rest of us melted, none of our neighbors seemed particularly nervous about the future.

Their politics were desultory and middle-of-the-road. Most of them had voted for Nixon; they had also voted for Kennedy two terms before. For them, as for the rest of the country, Kennedy had been a romantic choice. Nixon seemed more pragmatic. It was there in the flat ring of his voice, the way he said, “My fellow Am
ari
cans.” The times demanded pragmatism. There were the Soviets to consider, the Chinese, the student protests, the war in Vietnam. Nixon, with his shovel face, his unhappy, determined little eyes, could handle them. He was thrifty and basic. He had no illusions. He was someone you could trust.

Of course it was still early in 1972. Our neighbors called Nixon Tricky Dick, like everyone else, but joking about crooked politicians was just a way of looking savvy; they didn't believe he was any worse than any other politician. Or rather, they didn't yet believe that there was no such thing as good government—just a few bad politicians. Neither did they lock their doors at night, or dream of applying the word “dysfunctional” to families.

Vietnam was so distant for most of them, a glimpse of jungles or rice paddies on the evening news. The Cold War seemed frozen far away. About as activist as our neighbors got
was to sign a petition my mother had circulated in January to save the patch of woods behind the mall from being made into a parking garage.

In those days I still loved the quiet brick view of the Morrises' and the Sperlings' split-levels from our porch, with their box-shaped lawns and square-trimmed hedges. I loved the sight of metal trash cans lined up on the street every Wednesday morning. I loved neat leaf piles. I also loved the quickening smell of lighter fluid and charcoal on summer evenings, when every house became a campsite, the street became a river, and we ran through dark backyards to the sinuous burble of television sets.

Then my father left, and a few months after that Boyd Ellison was killed behind the Spring Hill Mall, and what happened in our neighborhood began to seem less and less like what happened in neighborhoods.

My fifth-grade teacher, Miss Sullivan, had begun reading a few pages from
The Hound of the Baskervilles
every afternoon before the final bell while the class drew pictures in their notebooks or rested their heads on their desks. Those boggy, sulfurous moors haunted me like something out of a recurring dream; every afternoon I sank into them, my hair knotted by the wind, my eyes bleared with staring into the yellow night, relaxing only when I crept through the fog and the drafty gloom of the Baskerville mansion back into my seat at Clara
Barton Elementary School. Whenever Sherlock Holmes noticed a small detail, one I knew would turn out to be important later, I would grip the edge of my desk and hold my breath. One afternoon my face must have turned red because I heard someone laugh. Miss Sullivan looked up and fixed her maidenly trout eyes on me.

“Marsha,” she said sadly. “Is there a joke you'd like to share with the rest of the class?”

The trick, I realized, was to notice everything.

And so it was that the day after Mr. Green, our new neighbor, moved in, I began keeping a notebook in which I documented my travels through our house. I noted the worn patches in the hallway's Oriental runner, the scuff marks on the stairs, the scorch at the back of the lampshade in the living room. The screen was coming away from the screen door in one corner, curling away from the metal frame like a leaf. The volume-control knob had fallen off the hi-fi, leaving a forked metal bud. Steven had spilled India ink on the sofa, and if you turned over the left cushion, you found a deep blue stain shaped like a moose antler. I had never realized our house contained so many damaged things. Soon it seemed I couldn't look at anything without finding something wrong with it.

On the cover of my notebook, I wrote “Evidence.”

Mr. Green was not an especially interesting person, but around this time I also began noticing him, at first casually while I sat on the porch. Every morning he left his house carrying
a bag lunch and a thermos of coffee. He climbed into his car, carefully backed out of his driveway, then drove off down the street, keeping an eye out for children on bicycles.

In the evening he returned, always at the same hour. Mothers would be calling through screen doors for their children to come in for dinner; in shirt sleeves and loosened ties, fathers dragged green garden hoses onto their lawns to water the shrubbery. I think he must have been between forty-five and fifty. His most distinctive feature, aside from the bald spot, was a long nose that seemed at odds with the pink anonymity of the rest of his face. This was the Mr. Green I began to follow every evening, and in reverse every morning as I sat on the screened porch listening to the catbirds squall in our crab apple tree.

Mostly he moved methodically from his house to his car, or from his car to his house, only varying this pattern to mow his lawn with a chattering push mower, or to pull a few weeds that sprouted, always in the same place, beside his front stoop. On weekend afternoons he sat in his shady backyard, where an enormous copper beech rose like a waterspout from its pool of dirt. But other than his initial wave the day he moved in, we hadn't exchanged any greetings.

Then one Saturday evening that spring, as I crouched near the fence in our backyard, I heard a man's voice say, “Hello there,” and I looked up to see a gray shadow; and then suddenly there was Mr. Green looming bulkily from behind a lilac bush.

I'd been singing to myself as I built an ant village in the dirt in a shaded corner that I'd always considered absolutely secret. It made my heart turn to realize that someone had been watching while I constructed tiny ant ranchettes and ant apartment buildings and sang “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” a song that always brought me to tears, which is why I sang it.

“Hi,” I said, blinking back at him.

We regarded each other for several moments. “What you building there?” he said finally, lilac leaves brushing his head as he cracked his knuckles.

“It's a science project.”

“Aha,” he said, beginning to edge away.

“For school.” I felt emboldened by his lack of interest. “Last year we studied amoebas.”

“Ameobas,” he repeated.

“You can only see them through microscopes. Even then you have to look carefully. We also looked at a cow's eyeball under a magnifying glass.”

“Yes,” he said, as if he'd already known this. “Well, goodbye there,” he added.

And he walked slowly across his backyard, past his copper beech tree and his aluminum chair, up his two back steps and into his house. This was perhaps the first private conversation I had ever had with a man who was not my father or one of my uncles. It left me with a peculiar feeling fluttering between excitement and disappointment, and something else that even
now I'm not sure how to name. It wasn't really much of an encounter, and yet it has remained troublesome enough to make me wonder if that small violation, that quiet little intrusion, was what first set me against Mr. Green.