That Night (2 page)

Their front door was wide open that night behind the aluminum screen door, as were the front doors all up and down that side of the street on this, on every, warm summer evening. We could see just faintly the white stair steps beyond the door. There was a window fan, a blur in the front upstairs window.

My mother put her hand to her heart and looked at the house, and I looked with her. It could not have seemed more forlorn, more unprotected.

“I’m sure they told him she’s not there,” she said.

“I hope they told him,” Mrs. Evers said, sucking her teeth. “He’s a troublemaker.” She nodded emphatically at the word, for Sheryl was indeed “in trouble” and surely he had made it.

My mother shook her head. “None of those cars is his.”

Mrs. Evers was halfway to her own side door when the faint guttural sound of their approaching engines came upon us again. Now curtains in other windows began to stir. Mr. Carpenter, our neighbor across the street, paused while setting a sprinkler out on his lawn. His wife appeared in the window behind him.

I noticed this time that when the first car stopped at the corner, the second stopped just past Sheryl’s house, the third just in front of it. No one in the cars turned to look at her house, at any of our houses, and yet it was easy to imagine that despite what seemed a steady forward pace, it was before and around Sheryl’s house that they lingered.

When they had passed, my mother mentioned this. My father, who this time had watched the full progress of the cars down our street, the paper for once forgotten, said, “You could just as well say they’re interested in our house. All their cars stop in front of us, too.”

I saw that the young childless couple who lived next to the Everses—they had what the other women in the neighborhood called “the unlikely name of Sunshine” (always tagging the accusation with a mouthed “Jewish,” as if that both explained the name and made it even more unlikely)-were now out on their driveway and that Mr. Meyer, who lived on the opposite corner, was already on his porch.

I looked again at Sheryl’s house. There was only the spinning fan, the pale shadows behind the thin screen door.

The sun by this time was just below the houses across the street, but not yet low enough to give any real hint of darkness. Since it was a usual night except for the cars, other children had begun to come out. I remember the Meyer twins tossed a ball on their front lawn. Billy Rossi crossed the grass between their driveways and was admitted through the Carpenters’ side door. Jake, the little retarded boy from the end of the block, rode his bike up our driveway and then, as he did every evening, called for help until my father went down to turn him around. From here and there, the sound of lawn mowers rose like the staccato drill of locusts.

I don’t remember hearing any arguments that evening, none of those strained, echoey exchanges between husbands and wives, parents and children, that made us turn to one particular house as if to a radio, raising our noses as we listened, as if strife were a scent on the air.

And as far as I can recall, no neighbors went out looking showered and flushed and, the wives especially, unusually polished, for anniversary dinners or wakes. (Whether these were really the neighborhood’s two most common social engagements, I can’t be sure. I’m relying now only on my mother’s comments. When we saw the wives emerge in silver blue dresses or sequined tops, my mother would say, “It must be their anniversary.” If they left the house on a weekday night dressed in simpler Sunday clothes, my mother would say, “They must be going to a wake.”) Except for the cars, a usual evening. My parents, as usual, keeping vigil from behind the rhododendron bushes. Enough, too much, has already been said about boredom in the suburbs, especially in the early sixties, and I suppose there was a kind of boredom in those predictable summer evenings. I suppose boredom had something to do with the violent, melodramatic way the men later rushed to Sheryl’s mother’s aid. But I remember those nights as completely interesting, full of flux: the street itself a stage lined with doors, the play rife with arrivals and departures, offstage battles, adorable children, unexpected soliloquies delivered right to your chair by Mrs. Evers or Mrs. Rossi or whoever happened to climb our stairs. It’s nostalgia that makes me say it, that most futile, most self-deluding of desires: to be a child again, but there was no boredom in those suburbs, not on those summer evenings, or at least not until this one. For after this, after the cars and the sudden spinning onto her lawn, the boys with their chains and the fight and the chilling sound of her boyfriend’s cry, after this, no small scenes could satisfy us, no muffled arguments, no dinner-at-eight celebrations, no sweet, damaged child, could make us believe we were living a vibrant life, that we had ever known anything about love. Venus, as I’ve said, was already bright.

On their fifth or sixth time past our house, my mother said, “Maybe I should call the police.”

“And tell them what?” my father asked her.

She considered this briefly. “That they keep driving around.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” he said.

My mother looked at me. I could tell she didn’t want to call. If she’d wanted to, she simply would have gone inside and done it.

“Somebody’s probably called already,” my father added.

Now we were simply waiting, waiting for the cars to return, for whatever was going to happen to happen. Mr. Rossi was again at his front door, his shirt off and the newspaper now open and loose in his hand. There was a blue television light behind him.

We saw Elaine Sayles walk to the mailbox on the opposite street (my mother swore she only pretended to put something in it) and then stop to talk to Mr. Carpenter, who was now sitting on his front steps with a beer. We saw them both glance up and down the street as they spoke. Mrs. Sayles was a tidy little blonde, the only woman in our neighborhood to wear tennis whites to the supermarket—to wear tennis whites at all, I suppose. She was said to have come from money, although her husband wore gray work clothes and carried a lunch pail She left him and their three children for Harvard while I was in college, but on that night she was still a silly short woman in a tiny white skirt, flirtatious, nosy, quite capable of merely pretending to put something in the mailbox.

This time when the cars passed, the boy in the front passenger seat of the first one turned full face to us and grinned an enormous Sergeant Bilko grin. He wore sunglasses, maybe mirrored ones. I don’t know if he had a counterpart on the other side of the car, but when the last of the three had once again passed, Mrs. Sayles was already hurrying back to her house. Mr. Carpenter, still sitting on his stoop, was beginning to look somewhat mean-eyed.

“She’ll probably call the police,” my mother said, a splinter of annoyance in her voice.

But the cars passed again: we calculated that they’d just driven around the block; and again, they must have gone to the boulevard and back; and once more: around two blocks, or maybe as far as the grammar school and back. We waited.

Now night was beginning to show itself, along the hedges, in the bushy center of trees. As we waited for them to return, the interval growing longer and longer, becoming the longest yet, we saw Mr. Rossi turn from his door and go back into his living room. We saw Mr. Carpenter crumple the beer can in his hand, stand and, bringing the can to the garbage, look up and down the street one last time. He too went inside, and Mrs. Sayles turned on a light and drew her curtains. We were beginning to spot lightning bugs. Down the block, the Sunshines (who were sports minded it was assumed, because they were childless) practiced a few golf swings with an imaginary club, he standing behind her, her arms inside his, and their cheeks together. The Meyer twins began tossing their small pink ball with a vengeance, aiming at each other’s thighs. One or two cars passed. The streetlights snapped on. My parents began to discuss something else entirely.

I suppose we all believed that the boys had given up the game; that with the beginning of darkness they had gone on to the highway or to the broader, less peopled territory of the schoolyard or the parking lot outside the bowling alley; that they had grown bored with teasing us, scaring us, laughing at us, and had finally moved on to their real fun, to adventures that we, even as observers, couldn’t share.

None of the boys in those cars was more than nineteen or twenty and yet they obviously, maybe instinctively, knew something about courtship.

When we finally heard the engines again, that constrained roll and tumble of slow-moving, muffler less motors, we merely sighed, not daring to smile. We turned our backs to them, tossing our heads like hurt girls, snubbed tramps. Mr. Rossi did not leave his television; Mrs. Sayles’s curtain didn’t stir.

They traveled in the same order: the blue one followed by the green, then the white one with its red devil stripe or a black flourish shaped like a striking snake.

The first was just at Sheryl’s house when all the engines seemed to explode and the cars, as if the road itself had suddenly leaped and tossed them into the air, were over the curb, one on Sheryl’s lawn, one perpendicular to it, up over the sidewalk, the third at an odd, twisted angle in her driveway.

My mother grabbed my arm at the sound, pulled me even, as if she would have me run, although both of us were still in our chairs. My father had jumped up, his arms raised, a caricature of rough-and-ready. The other men were already out of their homes.

The car doors—the ones that faced the house—swung open and the boys slid out. They seemed eerily nonchalant; some even stretched, as if they’d simply stopped for gas in the middle of a long trip. Rick was with them, of course, and he strode unhurried across the lawn and up the three steps. He knocked, not violently, more a polite rattle at the screen door, while his friends stood in loose formation by the cars, looking around and behind themselves as if they planned to stay awhile.

It was their calm and his, especially his as he stood there at the front door, waiting for someone to come, his shoulders hitched back, his fingers slipped into his rear pockets, that must have kept us all at bay. We had seen him standing there in just that way a hundred times before; we had seen Sheryl come to the door, seen Sheryl’s mother, on countless Saturday nights, greet him and let him in, and even those of us who knew Sheryl was gone, even those who knew why, must have considered the possibility that this was some crude and spectacular rite of hood courtship and that to interfere, to call the police, to run, at this moment, to her mother’s aid, would have been foolish, either terribly childish or terribly middle-aged. Except for the sound of the idling motors, the smell of exhaust, the black strip of torn grass, it seemed harmless enough.

I don’t know when we would have noticed the chains.

Rick rattled the door again and then cupped his hand to the side of his face to look inside. I thought I saw, but only faintly, Sheryl’s grandmother appear on the stairs. And then her mother was behind the screen.

There was some exchange of words. Sheryl’s name must have been heard by the boys scattered around the lawn, by the neighbors standing nearby. Rick suddenly glanced up at the house; his movements for the first time somewhat abrupt, nervous. He said something else through the screen and then quickly grabbed at it, pulling it open. He spoke again, as if the opened door would give him more meaning. We saw him lean inside, his foot on the threshold. His voice grew louder, but his words were still unclear. Then, in one swift movement, he pulled Sheryl’s mother through the door. He was holding her forearm. I remember she wore green Bermuda shorts and pale blue bedroom slippers. He swung her around and off the steps. She fell with her arms out, the dry hedge catching her hips and her legs. I don’t know if she screamed, but at almost the same moment she fell, the front door slammed—the real door this time, not the screen—and Rick began to yell.

Now the men in the neighborhood were running to their garages, calling to one another with what I remember only as sounds, sounds with lots of go’s and ca’s. “C’mon,” I suppose they said. “Let’s go.” My father answered in kind, barking one syllable from our porch and then rushing past us. My mother, who still had a death grip on my arm, said, “Go call the police.”

Rick had kicked the door and then run down the steps, yelling for Sheryl. He sidestepped across the lawn, looking up to the bedroom windows, to the one spinning fan. Her mother cried, “She’s not here,” and he looked down at her, made as if to kick her, and then, spinning around, called again. He was bouncing now, almost jiggling. He moved backward across the lawn, looking up at her house, yelling for her. You could hear the men running in the street. You could hear the boys gathering up their chains.

Rick bent as if he might fall, danced a little and then drove his fists into his thighs. His cry rose above the idling engines, the footsteps, the hum of backyard filters and window fans, the hard sounds that passed between the running men. For just one second before the fighting began, it was the only sound to be heard.

While we, the children, roamed through our neighborhood like confident landlords, while we strolled easily over any lawn, hopped into any yard, crossed driveways and straddled fences as if all we surveyed were our own (looking shocked and indignant when someone suggested otherwise, or simply smiling ruefully, dismissing some adult’s demand to stay off the grass as we would any bad idea), while our mothers knew the kitchens and dining rooms and side doors of any number of our neighbors and could chat as casually on a street corner as in a breakfast nook, our fathers, until that night, were housebound and yard bound Once their cars had delivered them home each evening, they might be seen puttering on the lawn or taking the garbage to the curb or sitting on their porches, but until that night, the night of the fight, the sidewalks for them might have been like those two closet-sized bedrooms in each of our homes, might have been meant for children only, meant only as a place to line up for the school bus to push a doll carriage, to ride a bike until you had grown coordinated enough to ride in the road. Seen out upon them, usually late at night and usually with a dog, our fathers seemed huge and foolish, like fullbacks on tricycles. They smoked cigarettes, hunched their shoulders, hugged the curb. They walked quickly and quickly returned to touch home.