A Crime in the Neighborhood

by Suzanne Berne

  “He says it’s got nothing to do with that bugging business. He says his wife asked him to quit.” My mother raised one eyebrow. “You know what I think?

  “Men don’t quit their jobs because of their wives.”

  She had begun drinking white wine with dinner, something she had never done before. As dinner went on her political speculations became alarming.

  “This whole country is going insane,” she muttered one night with grim enthusiasm. “Nothing works right anymore. Nothing happens the way it’s supposed to. We’ll all probably get blown up tomorrow.”

  “Mom,” said Julie. “We’re eating.”

  As for Watergate, which from the beginning she followed on the news as avidly as the other mothers on the street followed Guiding Light and General Hospital, my mother’s main observation was that it proved that the government was more stupid than criminal. “Those break-in guys were morons,” she said, more than once. “They got caught because of a dumb mistake. A mistake. That’s all it was. If they hadn’t made a mistake, nobody would have ever known and everything would have gone on the same.”

  This seemed to strike her as a painful, even devastating truth.

  “Just you wait, children,” she announced one evening, not long after the Japanese couple toured our house. “This break-in stuff is going to turn into a big disaster. Sometimes things like this start small, but then they get out of control. That’s what happens. It doesn’t take long for a lousy mistake to turn into a crime.”

  “Dear Dad,” I wrote in my Evidence notebook:

  How are you? I am fine. My favorite TV show is the Partridge Family. I think it would be wonderful to be the Partridge Family and drive around in a school bus to play concerts. You could play the piano and sing. I would play the guitar. Guess what, I have the hiccups. Today it rained like crazy. Julie and Steven are being pigs as usual. I got a puzzle from the drugstore. It is hard! Well I really don’t have much to say. So I will say it in some short words! Bye Dad!

  Too bad I didn’t have his address. Some of my letters were very affecting, I thought.

  Around the middle of July—July 20th to be exact, three and a half weeks after my father and Aunt Ada disappeared—I was sitting on our porch with my notebook in my lap reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Every now and then I scanned the street with a pair of pink plastic binoculars I’d gotten for Christmas. From the kitchen, my mother’s voice faltered through her telephone calls, stiff and cordial, speaking Peterman-Wolff as if it were Portuguese. Julie and Steven had gone to the mall to flip through magazines in the drugstore and, since their allowances had been canceled, to shoplift packs of gum from the candy racks.

  Every so often I glanced up from the page I was reading and surveyed the street to make sure nothing had changed since the last time I’d looked. The Sperlings’ fat tortoiseshell cat stalked across their lawn. A few moments later little Mrs. Sperling appeared carrying Baby Cameron. She walked to the middle of her lawn, swinging him, diapered bottom first, into the air. Upsy-daisy, she exclaimed. Then she sneezed, and her straight brown hair fell into her eyes. The cat rolled in the grass. A cloud floated overhead. From somewhere near the mall, a whistle blew.

  At 4:44 that afternoon, just as I looked up with my binoculars to find where a squirrel was clucking and complaining in one of the dogwood trees, I saw Mr. Green’s car drive past our house, two hours before he normally got home from work. I recognized the license-plate number.

  The car did not pull into Mr. Green’s driveway, but kept on going and turned left on Ridge Road.

  A few minutes later, my mother took a break from her telephone calls and came onto the porch fanning herself with a Peterman-Wolff magazine. “It must be a hundred degrees,” she said. “I feel like a rag.”

  “It’s eighty-nine degrees,” I said. “Guess what. I just saw Mr. Green’s car drive by.”

  She stopped fanning and bent over the begonias, nipping off a few shriveled leaves with her fingernails. “He must be coming home from work early.”

  A car full of teenagers drove past, shouting something unintelligible. My mother picked up the watering can and watered the potted ficus in the corner, then checked it for spider mites.

  Across the street, old Mrs. Morris passed by in her faded denim sun hat, walking her Jack Russell terriers. Mrs. Morris was English—not British the way Felicia and Rodney were British; she’d probably never read a word of Evelyn Waugh. Now and then she invited me over to have tea with her in her dining room while the Jack Russell terriers growled at each other under the table. We always ate Lorna Doones from gold-rimmed china plates and drank milky tea from china cups so thin that light glowed through them. Mrs. Morris told me the cups were all that remained from her mother’s bone china. In one of those surreal misapprehensions that make childhood so interesting, I thought the cups were made from her mother’s bones. I would hold my cup delicately with my fingertips, wondering which bones I was touching. A thigh? An ankle? “A spot more tea?” Mrs. Morris would ask, in her dry lilty voice, lifting the teapot. “Another biscuit?” And I would nod, feeling damp and a little tired in her shadowy dining room, with its spider plants and tiny oval portraits and the sound of Mr. Morris snoring softly in the living room.

  Mrs. Morris waved. My mother waved back.

  “Mr. Green always comes home from work at the same time every day,” I said. “The exact same time. Six-forty. P.M.”

  “Why are you so interested in Mr. Green?” My mother twitched off a ficus leaf, then pointed her watering can at me. “And what have you been writing? Every time I turn around, you’re writing something. Is that a diary?” She made a motion with her free hand as if she meant to pick up my notebook, where I had been taking notes, Sherlock Holmes–style, on everything that happened on the street.

  “It’s not a diary,” I said, clasping my notebook to my chest.

  “Don’t be so touchy,” she snapped. “Privacy is something I respect, and I hope you do, too.”

  The floorboards quaked as she walked across the porch. I heard her pick up the phone in the kitchen; a minute later she cleared her throat and then her voice began its loop: Hel-lo. This is Lois Eberhardt, and I went back to watching the street.

  Mr. Green’s car pulled up six inches from his drainpipe that evening ten minutes before his usual time. He looked sallow as he got out of his car, a little bruised around the mouth, and he had a Band-Aid stuck below his lower lip. As usual he walked up his front walk, pausing to hail Mrs. Lauder, who was standing on her steps watching Luann try a handstand in the grass. Mr. Green waited for Mrs. Lauder to wave back and for his pains was rewarded with a display of Luann’s white underpants as her sailor dress flew over her head.

  “Luann,” shouted Mrs. Lauder. “Quit fooling and get in here.”

  Mr. Green continued up his front steps, then reached behind his azalea bush to turn on his sprinkler. It started up with a pffft! and pattered the leaves of one of our dogwoods.

  As he stooped to fiddle with the spigot, I found myself contemplating his bald spot. He had tried to comb his front hair back to hide it. I imagined him standing in front of a smudged bathroom mirror carefully combing Brylcreem into his thin hair, turning his head from side to side as he combed. His bald spot was sunburned, which gave it a tender look.

  Two weeks before I had watched Mr. Green start building a barbecue pit in his backyard. By the time I got out to the porch that Saturday morning, after helping my mother and Julie tidy up the house for another visit from Mr. McBride, a pile of bricks sat near the picnic table and Mr. Green was mixing cement in a big metal tray.

  It was already hot, and he had taken off his shirt. I remember being startled at the sight of his bare chest. It was much broader than I would have imagined, more muscular. On his right arm, just below the shoulder, where his bicep bunched, was a bare-breasted mermaid. As he worked, the mermaid undulated, as if she were being rocked by invisible currents.

  He knelt on the ground, using a trowel t
o slap concrete on the half-moon of bricks he had already laid. I watched his arm rise and lower, revealing a thatch of dark hair glistening at his armpit. And then there was my mother standing in the doorway behind me. She watched, too, as Mr. Green’s arm rose and fell, scooping up cement like heavy icing and spreading it onto the bricks. His chest gleamed with sweat. After a few minutes, during which neither my mother nor I spoke, Mr. Green sat back on his heels, wiping his forehead with his wrist.

  As he caught his breath, my mother suddenly sang out: “If you want something cold to drink, we’ve got lemonade.”

  Mr. Green rocked forward and blinked toward our house. Then he groped for the shirt crumpled on the ground beside him, fumbling with the buttons in his hurry to put it on, squinting at what must have seemed to him a mass of shadows beneath a mass of leaves on our vine-covered porch.

  “I don’t believe we’ve properly met,” she called, stepping up to the screened door. “This is my daughter Marsha.” She opened the door and gestured to me. “And I’m Lois.

  “Eberhardt,” she added. “Like the pencil. Eberhard Faber? Except with a ‘t.’”

  Mr. Green stood up and brushed for a fraction too long at his bare knees. He was wearing stained blue cotton shorts and old canvas shoes; it was the first time I’d seen him untidily dressed.

  “Hello,” he said, neglecting to offer his own name, or perhaps imagining that we already knew it. He stepped forward a few paces and held up his hand to shield his eyes from the sun. Then he stopped, felt around in his back pocket, produced a black comb, and in two quick, stealthy motions, combed his hair backward over the crown of his head before the comb vanished and he walked around the hedge and into our yard.

  “You must be dead,” said my mother as he approached our porch steps. When Mr. Green looked startled, she added loudly, “Of thirst. It’s broiling today.”

  “I’m all right.” He still looked startled. “Thank you very much.”

  “So, would you like a glass of lemonade?” My mother had moved onto the top step, unconsciously mimicking him by lifting one hand to her eyes.

  “Thank you very much,” he said again, a tendon jumping in his neck.

  “With ice?”

  A pause. “Yes. Thank you very much.”

  “It’s tropical lemonade,” said my mother a little wildly. She must have just remembered that I had tinted the pink lemonade lavender with blue food coloring that morning. I thought lavender lemonade would taste cool on such a hot day.

  Mr. Green waited on our lawn by the porch steps while my mother went into the kitchen. He regarded me through the screen without speaking, and I gazed back at him. A heat rash had started up his neck and sweat trickled down the side of his face.

  My mother returned with a round rattan tray on which she had placed two tumblers of lavender lemonade, ice cubes clinking. A tense minute followed during which she hovered inside the porch door with the tray and Mr. Green hovered outside by the bottom of the steps. Finally my mother said, “Marsha, help me with this,” and Mr. Green sprang forward to wrench at the door handle.

  I stayed in the love seat while my mother offered the tray to Mr. Green. He stared a moment, but selected a glass without comment.

  “A little whimsy,” explained my mother.

  “Thank you,” said Mr. Green.

  “Marsha,” she called sharply; when I hobbled to the screen door, she handed me the empty tray. “Put this back inside, honey.” She smiled over my head.

  After broaching several conversational possibilities—the weather, the upcoming election—my mother moved quickly on to the subject of grass. Mr. Green had done wonders with his grass. Mr. Green must have a green thumb. Her own lawn looked like it had leprosy. “Look at those brown spots,” she said, sweeping a hand at our grass.

  Dutifully, Mr. Green turned to examine two or three small yellowing patches in our lawn. But just as my mother prepared to criticize our dogwood trees, the rhododendrons, and the treacherous crab apple from which I had fallen and broken my ankle, he said reluctantly, as if he regretted making such a confession: “I’m from the country myself. Sometimes I look out at your yard and something about it makes me feel like I’m in the country.”

  My mother seemed impressed by the frankness of this remark. Her eyelids fluttered. “Well,” she said. Then she paused and examined our bushes and trees from the perspective of someone pining for a rural vista. “I think I see it,” she consented at last. “I see what you mean. I should stop complaining.”

  Mr. Green finished his lemonade with a sharp tilt of the glass, which must have been sharper than he intended because lavender lemonade spilled down his chin and onto his white shirt. He looked down at himself. My mother pretended not to notice. The moment for offering him a paper towel came and went. Mr. Green’s eyes shifted back to his little tumulus of bricks, then returned to my mother’s face as she launched into a paean to country life. “No, there’s nothing like it,” she said, as if continuing an extended discussion. “Living in the city makes us forget that real life happens in the country. And the suburbs.” Here she paused to glance across the street at the Morrises’ cubelike boxwoods. “The suburbs are neither here nor there. In fact,” she went on breathlessly, “I sometimes think the suburbs are a distortion.”

  Mr. Green cleared his throat and bobbed the empty glass in his hand. A bee buzzed between them. My mother swatted at it, already opening her mouth to introduce a new subject. A neighbor’s television began to gabble.

  “Mom.” I got up, knocking over my milk crate and making the begonias shiver. “My foot itches.”

  “Marsha is my youngest,” my mother told Mr. Green, not turning around. “As you may have noticed, she has a broken ankle.”

  Mr. Green glanced through the porch screen and gave me a quick little nod.

  “You don’t have any children?”

  “No ma’am.”

  “They are—” I could see my mother searching for something clever. “They are a challenge,” she said at last, frowning.

  Mr. Green nodded again.

  “You know, I didn’t catch your first name.”

  “Alden. Alden Green. Junior,” he added. He thrust his glass forward. “Thank you very much.”

  “Like John Alden?” My mother took the glass and held it under her chin. “Wasn’t he a Pilgrim?”

  His forehead was perspiring in the sun; he kept dabbing at it with the back of his wrist. My mother asked him what he thought of “this Watergate business.” Across the street, the Sperlings’ Buick drove up. The Jack Russell terriers began barking from inside the Morrises’ house.

  “Those dogs,” said my mother. “Yippy and Yappy.”

  Mr. Green smiled formally.

  “Well,” she sighed at last. “I should let you get back to work.”

  Mr. Green ducked his head, thanking her again for the lemonade. A few moments later he had trudged back to his yard and was kneeling once more among his bricks.

  “It’s always a good idea,” observed my mother when she came back onto the porch, “to get to know your neighbors. You can never be too careful.” The screen door banged. As she bent to take the tray, I saw that her cheeks were flushed and her eyes bright and that she was still smiling the same lavender smile she must have turned on Mr. Green.

  All that week my mother made a point of waving to Mr. Green if she happened to be in the yard when he drove into his driveway or came out to his car. She always called out something to him, usually a comment about his grass or the straggle of marigolds he had planted around his front stoop.

  “How do you keep slugs from biting the heads off your marigolds?” she demanded one evening.

  Mr. Green had just stepped out of his car, hadn’t yet even closed the door; my mother’s question made him jerk around as if someone had tapped his shoulder from behind.

  She pushed up the brim of Steven’s baseball cap, which she had taken to wearing outside, and smiled as though she had just asked Mr. Green how he liked hi
s coffee.

  “Slugs,” he repeated. His white shirt was sticking to his chest, revealing the outline of his undershirt beneath. He gripped the handle of his briefcase, edging it a little higher across his stomach.

  “They’re decapitating my marigolds,” she announced, advancing toward the box hedge that separated our yard from Mr. Green’s driveway.

  Mr. Green turned to look at his marigolds, then faced my mother again, his face moist and pouchy over his white shirt collar. “Baking soda,” he said in his soft, twangy voice.

  “Baking soda,” repeated my mother. She swung her weeding fork.

  “Or you can sprinkle salt on them,” he added unwillingly. “So they shrivel up.”

  My mother stopped swinging the weeding fork. It must have occurred to her simultaneously as it occurred to me that Mr. Green had done just such a thing, waited outside with his saltshaker, watching for a silvery trail to catch the moonlight.

  That Sunday she caught him sitting in his aluminum folding chair reading the newspaper. This time he seemed to be ready for her and stood up as soon as she called to him from behind the screen door.

  He was in his usual weekend outfit of madras shorts and khaki shirt, which made him look like a cross between a tourist in Florida and Marlin Perkins on Wild Kingdom. His hair had been combed meticulously over his bald spot, and he’d used hair oil—a sign of low class, my father once said when a barber had slapped hair oil on Steven after a haircut. My father himself had thick, springy hair that curled naturally away from his forehead. He also had a lanky body and an ingratiating, loose-limbed way of moving, with none of the squat, dense heaviness of Mr. Green, who even with his pink face seemed dark as an olive.

  “Isn’t it hot?” my mother cried. She couldn’t believe how hot it was; she thought if it got any hotter she’d be hardboiled.

  Rolling his newspaper into a tight cylinder, Mr. Green nodded once as he strode toward the hedge, then twice again for emphasis.

  She opened the screen door. “Maybe we’ll get a tornado,” she said as she walked down the steps. “A quick little tornado would be so nice.”