The Sociopath Next Door (28 page)

As she is about to leave for school, the phone rings a second time. She thinks it must be Tillie again, but instead it is another neighbor, sweet, soft-spoken Sunny, and she is in tears. Sunny tells Catherine that Tillie has made her park her car in the driveway, and now she is trapped. Can someone help? Can Catherine and Fred take her to the store today? Learning about this newest exploit of Tillie's, Catherine feels the blood rushing angrily to her face, but in her calmest voice, she reassures Sunny that of course Fred will drive her to the store. How about lunchtime? Also, Fred knows the chief of police very well, and maybe something can be done about the problem with Sunny's parking space.

Teaching her class of sixth graders all day, Catherine forgets about Tillie, but when she gets home at about 4:30, she remembers the early-morning phone call and begins to feel uneasy all over again. She was planning to take a nap before dinner, but as she sits down on the bed, her uneasiness gets suddenly stronger, and she is drawn to the window. The bedroom is on the second floor, and from here, Catherine has a clear view of the whole backyard, and Tillie's as well. The day has been unseasonably warm, and all those nice forsythias Fred planted at the back edge of their yard are beginning to bloom. There is the wide back lawn, and beyond that the long row of little yellow forsythia blossoms, and then the gray-brown shadow of the still-leafless conservation forest that borders all the backyards on this side of the street.

And also, rather strangely, there is Tillie, standing right in the middle of her lawn. She is still wearing her checkered blue-and-white dress and has added a wide-brimmed straw hat, as if she were about to do some ladylike gardening.

But Tillie never gardens.

As Catherine watches from her bedroom window, Tillie looks around the yard, seems to spy something she wants, and marches over to it. She bends and, with obvious effort, lifts an object from the ground that looks to Catherine like a large white rock, about the size and shape of a small watermelon. Studying the scene more intently, Catherine realizes that the object is indeed a rock, a small boulder really, and nearly too much for Tillie to hold. But Tillie embraces the rock with both arms, stooping in a way that is painful to watch, and begins to waddle unsteadily in the direction of Fred's forsythia plants.

A phrase from the morning's phone conversation echoes in Catherine's head—“in the back, between our properties”—and in this same moment, Catherine knows exactly what Tillie is doing. The groundhog's burrow! Tillie is going to use that rock to plug up the den of the groundhog she told her about.

Catherine is appalled. She feels light-headed and sick, almost as if she were witnessing a murder. She needs to do something, but going out and confronting Tillie directly would be like arguing with a rabid wolverine. In truth, though Catherine does not like to admit this to herself, Tillie frightens her in general, for reasons she cannot even put into words. Why should a rather insignificant seventy-year-old woman frighten her?

And how did Tillie know she would be watching from the house right now?
Did
she know?

Catherine begins to pace across the bedroom, from the window to the old oak dresser and back to the window. She sees Tillie drop the rock clumsily onto a spot just beyond the forsythias, midway between two small willows at the edge of the woods, and she marks the location carefully in her mind. Then she paces back to the dresser and stares at herself in the antique mirror. While Tillie swipes at loose dirt on the front of her dress and parades back across the lawn to her deck, Catherine continues to stare into her own eyes in the mirror. That poor little animal, she keeps thinking. What if he's trapped?

Finally, Catherine knows what she wants to do. And she must tell Fred. He can help.

Fred has been at the newspaper, visiting with some of his old friends. When he comes home, Catherine tells him what Tillie has done. He says, “Well, I guess in this case Tillie got two with one stone, literally.”

“What do you mean?”

“You and the little woodchuck, both.”

“Oh, right. That's really true, isn't it?” says Catherine glumly.

“It would appear so. Sure you don't want me to go over there and have it out with her?”

“No. She'd just do it again. I want to help the groundhog, so he'll be okay. Go with me?”

“Do I have a choice?”

Catherine smiles and hugs him. “Not really,” she says.

They make dinner together, as is their habit, and wait until about nine o'clock, when it is completely dark outside. Fred suggests flashlights, but Catherine thinks Tillie would see them.

“She'll know we liberated him, and she'll just cover him again tomorrow.”

“We'll have to take at least one, to find the burrow once we get there.”

“Yes. Right. Okay, maybe a penlight? For when we get there.”

They set out across the yard at a snail's pace, so as not to trip in the darkness. Fred takes the lead, and Catherine follows, arms held out in front of her like a sleepwalker's, to keep her balance. When they get to the far end of the lawn, they follow along the row of forsythia bushes until there are no more forsythias. Then, in wonder, like a child, Catherine takes a step into the even more complete darkness beyond, hoping that her hands, and not her face, will find one of the willows.

She feels a branch, takes a deep breath, and whispers, “Okay, Fred. Penlight.”

Fred takes the light out of his pocket, holds it close to the ground, and turns it on. After a few moments, they find the melon-size rock, somewhat more easily than they could have hoped, because the rock is smooth and white and the surrounding earth is dark. Catherine exhales and pushes a loose strand of hair behind her left ear. She and Fred bend down and lift the rock together, revealing a surprisingly small hole in the ground, considering it is used by a fat little groundhog.

Catherine has an impulse to shine the penlight into the hole to check on its occupant. But then she realizes that she will not see much, and that she may scare the animal.

Arm in arm, whispering and containing their laughter, she and Fred stumble home.

Tillie does not see them. As they return from their mission, she has already been drinking and sulking for several hours, as usual. She sits on a sofa in her living room and pours herself glasses of Glenlivet, trying to drown out the monotony of her life and the idiots she continually has to deal with. The only thing that makes this evening different from any other is the accumulation of packing boxes now stacked around her.

Inside her drunken fog, she congratulates herself on her brilliant idea not to put up a
FOR SALE
sign this time. She thinks, I'll take these cretins by surprise. Their stupid mouths will gape.

The good-for-nothing real estate agent keeps telling her that not using a sign is shooting herself in the foot, and that he really thinks she should wait for a higher offer. This buyer came in under her price. But Tillie cannot wait. She has never liked waiting. She will have her moment, and her moment will be tomorrow morning. And then everyone in this whole horrible neighborhood will be in complete shock about her move. She is sure of it. The agent does not understand why secrecy matters, but he is a fool, so why listen to him? She has taken losses before when she wanted to get out of a house fast. It's all in the game, she thinks to herself. All in the game. You can't stay in a place where the people won't listen to you. And giving them a parting shot is extremely important.

Tillie has a trust fund from her deceased father that has supported her for most of her life. These days, she says she is “retired,” but she never really worked. She used to paint watercolors sometimes when she was younger, but she never sold any of them. She would like to purchase grander houses, but her wretched mother keeps hanging on, and so she cannot get her hands on the rest of the money. Her mother is nearly a hundred years old, and still she has not died. Tillie is stuck in these dreadful middle-class neighborhoods, knowing that, by rights, she should have a wealthier lifestyle. She visits her mother periodically, because she certainly does not want to be written out of the will, and the bedridden old woman always reminds her of a half-plucked parakeet squawking in a cage. What she has to say is just about that interesting.

Nothing is very interesting, really. Suffocating the rodent was okay for a few minutes, and she hopes Catherine was watching. Catherine would have a stroke. But then that project was over, and there was nothing else to do. She cannot imagine what these absurd people on all sides of her do that seems to occupy them so completely as they scurry about their little lives. They must have brains the size of peas.

She pours herself another drink and consumes it in one gulp. Not yet packed into a box, a painting that she made when she was still in her twenties hangs over the unused fireplace, so faded that the image can hardly be made out in the shadows of the ill-lighted living room. Hunched on the sofa, she looks up at it and dimly recalls the beach scene she stood in all those decades ago. Then all she sees are the pinpoints of stars before her eyes that she waits for most nights of her life, just before she blacks out.

The next morning is Saturday, a bit cooler than yesterday, and not a cloud in the sky.

Across the street and down a few houses, Sunny opens the lace curtains in her front window, and as the sun streams in, she takes in the happy view of her car parked where it is supposed to be—on the street. And there it will stay parked. Fred talked to the police chief yesterday after lunch, and got everything all squared away for her. “
Freedom,”
she breathes to herself. She tries to think what she can do for Fred and Catherine. Maybe she can bake them something. Imagining how much they will like that, she feels even more cheerful.

In the house up the hill, Greta has the weekend off, and she and Jerry sleep late. When they slowly rouse themselves and go out to the sunroom to drink their coffee, they notice a big moving truck in Tillie's driveway.

“Does that mean what I think it means?” Jerry asks, staring at the truck. “Or are we still in bed, dreaming?”

“Got to be dreaming,” says Greta, also staring. “I never saw a sign. Did you ever see a sign over there?”

“Nope.”

Just now, two men wearing canvas coveralls come out of Tillie's house, each carrying one end of a sofa. Greta and Jerry look at each other and begin to laugh. Jerry laughs so hard, he spills some of his coffee.

Greta asks him, “Why do you suppose she kept it a secret?”

“Why does she do anything? But it doesn't matter anymore, does it? Unbelievable.”

Greta is thoughtful for a moment, and then says, “How old do you suppose she is?”

“I don't know. Not young.”

“I wonder whether she ever had any children. Oh wow. Can you imagine being one of her
children
?”

“Worse yet, can you imagine being
her
?”

“So, do you think we should feel sorry for her?” Greta asks.

Jerry grins and waves his hand dismissively at the furniture-moving scene in the distance. “Well, I'm not sure, sweetheart. But if we're going to feel sorry for her, let's do it over breakfast, okay? Remember that strudel?”

“Yes!” says Greta, smacking her lips. She picks up both coffee mugs, and they abandon the view from the sunroom in favor of the pastry in the kitchen.

Since they are in the house next door to Tillie's, Catherine and Fred also notice the activities of the men from the moving truck, and wonder why they never saw a
FOR SALE
sign or heard from Tillie that she was moving. Fred rolls his eyes again, and Catherine shakes her head. But then they are distracted by another phone call, this one from their daughter and son-in-law, who say that in two weeks they and four-year-old Katie are flying out for another visit. Catherine is beside herself with excitement, and Tillie's moving day, still in progress outside, is forgotten.

Two hours later, when the truck pulls away from Tillie's house, no one is watching. All is quiet again.

In Catherine and Fred's backyard, by the forsythias at the far opposite end of the row, the groundhog clambers out of his second hole and stands up as tall as he can on his short hind legs. His black eyes glinting in the bright sunlight, he peers over at a big white rock lying near his first hole, at the other end of the yellow bushes. Then he gazes up toward Tillie's empty house. Finally, his attention settles on a patch of dandelions growing in the soft earth just in front of him. Another groundhog, slightly smaller, wiggles out of the hole. They sit down groundhog-fashion, share a leisurely luncheon of new stems, and amble off into the woods.

TWELVE

conscience in its purest form: science votes for morality

He is not a perfect Muslim who eats his fill and lets his neighbor go hungry.

—Muhammad

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

—Jesus

The man who knows how to split the atom but has no love in his heart becomes a monster.

—Krishnamurti

O
ne way or another, a life without conscience is a failed life. Those of us who love and have conscience are really very lucky, even as we go about our everyday lives of work, reflexive give-and-take, and ordinary pleasures.

And usually conscience is just that: reflexive and ordinary. Without fanfare and mostly without being noticed, conscience grants little bits of meaning to our normal and spontaneous day-to-day interactions with everyone and everything around us. Catherine and Fred were not thinking about high-minded principles when they set out to liberate the groundhog, which, as it turns out, was not trapped in the first place. They were not being pious or courageous, not particularly effective, and certainly not rational. It was simply that trying to help the animal seemed right and somehow made them
feel good.
Moving that rock was, to use an old and universally understood expression, “good for their souls.”