Music of the Night

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  “Anyway,” she added, “those two little monsters in 408 are more than enough for the whole neighborhood!”

  Fran laid aside the totally inappropriate blouse her sister had sent her for her birthday (I’m not a little old biddy yet, she thought irritably, but her sister was a decade younger and clearly still had a child’s view of anyone over thirty) and offered Betsy tea. “What about that woman?” she said, sitting down across the kitchen table from her visitor. “The one with the dogs?”

  “Oh, she’s weird,” Betsy said with cheerful enthusiasm. “Nutty as a fruitcake, if you ask me. I hear her screaming in her place all the time, just yelling like—well, like my mother used to yell at me when I was giving her a really hard time. At first I thought she had kids or something living in there with her, and me and my roommates seriously considered calling the cops in case the old loon was abusing a child or something. It always sounds so violent.”

  She sat back, shrugging in the oversize shirt she wore in a vain attempt to minimize her sizable bust. “But I’ve never seen anybody else go in or out, not in a year and a half of living here. So I guess she’s just screaming at the dogs, or the TV. I bet she drinks. Female alkies are thin. They drink instead of eating.”

  Fran admitted that she hadn’t had a good look at the crazy lady yet but had mostly just heard her.

  “Oh, she looks okay, sort of,” Betsy said cautiously. “But boy, is she nuts.”

  Fran laughed. “Then I guess it’s lucky that Jeff and I didn’t end up living right next to her. Poor you, being so much closer!”

  “I’ll say,” Betsy said vehemently. “She’s craziest of all about men. Watch out, Fran. If that cute guy I saw leaving this morning was your Jeff, she’ll be after him in no time.”

  “Then she’ll have a fight on her hands,” Fran retorted. “Jeffrey is mine, as in significant other, life partner, whatever they call it these days.”

  In the evening before dinner, while the stew simmered, Fran and Jeffrey walked up the block toward the uneven triangle of green that was Baker’s Park. Passing the crazy lady’s house on the stroll back, Fran looked across the street and saw the bluish glimmer of a TV screen inside the big front window. The house itself was pretty from the front, with a shapely porch, and two jauntily nautical porthole-shaped windows flanking the recessed doorway.

  Suddenly a report like a gunshot snapped out from the porch: the screen door, banging hard against the front wall. Two little dogs came skittering down the brick walk, barking wildly, and skidded to a dancing halt at the edge of the crazy lady’s lawn.

  “Jeez!” Jeffrey said, protectively grabbing Fran’s arm and picking up their pace, “what did she do, sic them on us? We’re not even on her side of the street!”

  “I told you,” Fran said. “The woman is bonkers, and everybody knows it.”

  “Well, at least they’re not Dobermans,” he said, looking back over his shoulder at the bouncing, yammering animals.

  “Shh,” said Fran, “you don’t want to give her any ideas.”

  Secretly, she was relieved to have the little dogs come after her and Jeffrey like that, validating what she had told him about the woman and her animals. And after what Betsy had said, better the dogs than the woman herself, with Jeffrey there.

  She cut the grass the next day with the old hand-mower they had found in the tool shed. The mower kept sticking on the raised roots that veined the turf, and she gave up with the job half-done (it was a lot harder than she had imagined).

  But she made sure to drag the machine back and forth a couple of times over the bubbly clot of white mushrooms, like greasy blisters, which had expanded rather than drying up and blowing away as she had hoped. Under the grinding blades the mushrooms disintegrated with satisfying ease.

  The tape she transcribed after lunch was from Doctor Reeves, a plastic surgeon who specialized in burn patients. His dry, dispassionate notes on two children who had been caught in a burning trailer out on the west edge of town made her feel sick.

  She quit (there was no rush, with the volume of work slowed to an impoverishing trickle) and went for a walk, hands jammed in her jeans pockets.

  Her new neighborhood was made up of small, sturdy houses in an unexpectedly whimsical mixture of styles, most of them several decades old by the look of them. Some showed endearing turns of fantasy, like the two with roofs of tightly layered green tiling cut like the thatched roofs of English cottages, and a small white house higher on the hill that had a miniature fairy-tale tower for a front hallway. There was nothing like the bland sameness of the city’s newer developments; Fran’s spirits lifted.

  She found herself at the foot of her own street, and out of sheer devilment—and to see what would happen this time—instead of going in she walked up the lane that ran behind the houses on her street, back toward Baker’s Park.

  The sandy wheel-track was choked with weeds, vines, and branches hanging over from adjacent yards. The lanes, she knew, had once been used for garbage pickup. Then the city had bought a whole new fleet of garbage trucks which were only afterward discovered to be too wide for the lanes, which now served the purposes of kids, gas men who read your meter with binoculars from their truck windows, the occasional pair of discreetly parked lovers, and (to judge by the crazy lady, anyway) burglars.

  As Fran swung boldly toward the head of the lane, a sharp rapping sound snapped at her from the back of the crazy lady’s house. A lean figure in a flowered housecoat hovered behind the closed kitchen window: the crazy lady herself, presumably, in a beehive hairdo, banging her fist on the glass in a kind of manic aggression.

  Fran smiled and waved as if returning a friendly greeting and walked on, managing not to flinch from the incredible racket of the little dogs shrilling at her back. The crazy lady must have let the dogs into the side yard just so they could rush to the back wall and bark at Fran.

  Jesus, Fran thought, striding quickly around the corner and back down the street toward her own place. I shouldn’t have waved at her, I should have fired a rock through her damned window! Who the hell does she think she is, the witch! The lanes are city property, I can walk in them if I like.

  What if she has a gun? A paranoid like that, she probably does. Hell, I bet she could shoot me and say she thought I was a burglar and get away with it! People like that shouldn’t be allowed to live on their own. The woman should be in an institution.

  The mushrooms were back the next morning, but they were different. Fran couldn’t help noticing them when she went out on the porch to look for the mail. They were brown and flat, growing in overlapping layers along the shaggy arm of root that seemed to be the seat of the infestation.

  She went over to squat down and examine them. They were wet from the overnight showers and their frilled edges glistened a pallid pink.

  “Yuch!” she said aloud. “What evil-looking mushrooms!” She prodded them gingerly with a twig dropped by the huge old cottonwood above her.

  “They’re your evil thoughts.”

  It was a hoarse voice from the sidewalk, the voice of the crazy lady (Fran knew this before she looked up; who else could it be, saying that, in that voice?). There she stood, disconcertingly thin and slight in a pastel pantsuit, a cigarette smoldering between two of her sharp-knuckled fingers. She had enough lipstick on for six mouths, and she wasn’t smiling.

  Fran gaped at her, at a loss for words. The woman looked like a bona fide witch out of a modern fairy tale, and what do you say to a witch who comes calling? With intense satisfaction Fran said to herself, She’s older than I am. She’s older, old, like an old witch is supposed to be!

  The crazy lady said, “Have you seen a little dog? He’s about a foot high, with black and white spots.”

  “No, sorry,” Fran said with forced heartiness. “I’ve been in the back of the house, working.”

  “He got out this morning,” the crazy lady said, looking around with a frown. Did she think the dog might pop up at any moment from under Fran’s lawn
?

  Fran said, “If I do see him, I’ll be sure and let you know.”

  “Thank you,” the crazy lady said, as if she had never banged on the window or screamed at Fran—maybe she didn’t recognize her? She walked away, holding her cigarette out from her side at an elegant angle that she must have picked up from Bette Davis or some other glamour queen from the days of black-and-white movies.

  Fran stared at the mushrooms. “Those are your evil thoughts”? What kind of a thing was that to say to her?

  The woman was a crackpot just as Betsy had said, one step short of being a bag-lady talking to herself on the street. She must be living on an inheritance or the pension left by a dead husband, so she could keep a roof over her head. A person like that couldn’t possibly hold down a job.

  But the mushrooms really did look evil, old and wrinkled and evil. They looked like—

  Fran sat back on her heels, blushing. What an idea! They looked like an exaggerated parody of the folds of her vagina, that was what they looked like. No, not hers, some old hag’s swollen and discolored sex.

  She scrambled to her feet muttering, “Don’t be an idiot, you idiot,” and with the back of the straight rake she whacked the new crop of fungus to flying fragments.

  Over pizza that night with a few of Jeffrey’s friends from law school, she didn’t mention the conversation with the crazy lady. She didn’t feel altogether comfortable with Jeffrey’s friends, except for a woman a little older than herself who had begun law school after a divorce.

  On her way next day to pick up some tapes from a backup source who sometimes gave her work, Fran saw the crazy lady’s dog, or anyway it might have been the crazy lady’s dog, jittering back and forth on the far side of Rhoades Avenue. It made one mad dash to cross, was honked at by an approaching car, and dodged back again to the far side where it hopped up and down furiously on its stiff little legs and barked ferociously at the traffic.

  She considered driving back to tell the crazy lady, but she had lost time over the pizza and beer last night and she was in a hurry now. And when she did get back, she didn’t see the dog again and besides the crazy lady was occupied.

  She was having an altercation with a jogger, from the safety of her porch. Fran parked and sat in the Volks and watched.

  The jogger marked time at the curb, his head turned toward 408 with its two round windows flanking the open doorway. “I’m not doing anything in your yard, lady,” he declared. “I didn’t touch your yard.”

  On the porch the crazy lady stood with her hips shot to one side in an aggressive slouch and shouted furiously, “I saw you on my grass! You ran over my grass!”

  “I don’t run on grass,” he answered. “It’s slippery, and you can’t see your footing.” He was middle-aged and a bit flabby around the middle, but he held his ground, running in place while he argued.

  “I saw you!” the crazy lady yelled. Her remaining dog shot past her ankles, barking. It made mad little dashes in the direction of the jogger, none of which carried it more than halfway across the lawn. “This is private property! You stay off it!”

  “Gladly,” the jogger retorted. “Lady, you’re nuts, you know that?” He headed on up toward the park, shaking his head, elbows pumping, pursued by the barking of the dog. The crazy lady began screaming at the dog, which finally gave up barking and skulked back into the house, whereupon the screen door gave another mighty bang, and all grew quiet.

  Oh the hell with it, Fran thought, I’m not going to say a thing about the other dog. Someone like that shouldn’t even have pets, any more than she should have kids. The little beast is probably better off in the traffic.

  She locked the car and walked up onto her own patch of grass, where she automatically checked the mushroom site. A new crop, and a different type again, seemed to have sprouted there overnight.

  There were six of them, tallish, on spindly stalks, and they had elongated, domed caps with dark, spidery markings along their lower fringes. Like odd, tiny lampshades trimmed with black lace, or six otherworldly missiles waiting to be launched.

  Evil thoughts.

  Oh, bull, Fran thought, looking up the street at the crazy lady’s house. What about her evil thoughts, where were they displayed?

  She didn’t touch the new crop. Let them just sit there and do whatever mushrooms did until they reached their natural term and died. She was tired of beating them to bits and then having them show up again. It was too much like losing some kind of struggle, which was ridiculous, because there was no struggle. You don’t have a struggle with a bunch of mushrooms.

  She blew up at Jeffrey about the records he brought home that night. She hated salsa for starters, and then there was the expense. It didn’t help that they were used, of course, very cheap, from the secondhand bookstore on Rhoades.

  Of course they made up, and made love. He was forgiving by nature, and she had no defense against his lanky charm. Look at the gangly length of him, the lively tumble of his auburn hair, his intent young face. How did I get so lucky? Oh, how did I get so lucky, to have this lovely boy to love me?

  Fran couldn’t sleep right away afterward. She lay on her back and amused herself wondering which of her evil thoughts those slender, silvery mushrooms represented.

  She paid for the sleepless hours, as usual. In the morning she looked hagged-out. She always checked herself in the bathroom mirror when she woke up, searching for the dry skin and branching wrinkles that Jeffrey was bound to see someday, someday.

  Not yet, though.

  She crawled back into bed and stayed there while he made himself breakfast, so that he wouldn’t see her without the repairs of makeup. She looked too awful, sagging and bruised around the eyes.

  She was gratified to see that the overnight chill seemed to have killed some of the damned mushrooms. Four of the six had withered so that their caps hung upside-down from stalks that looked as if they had been pinched hard in the middle. The flattened caps drooped inside-out, exposing the blue-black slits of their undersides to the sky. She thought of the gills of strange fish, dead and decaying in the cool morning air, fossil remains of ancient forms from prehistoric seas.

  On the other hand, several new growths had come up.

  It hadn’t rained for two nights. The grass looked a little dry, but she didn’t turn on the sprinklers.

  That afternoon Fran took a welcome break from unpacking books and organizing them on the brick-and-board shelves Jeff had made (she had to re-set everything for balance, of course) and observed the crazy lady in what seemed at last like civilized conversation with a man out in front of 408.

  He was a heavy guy in gray work clothes and he stood with his head bent, listening to her. Then he would crouch down and examine something in the grass, and stand up and talk and listen some more, and they would move over a little and do it all again. For a moment Fran thought, My God, she’s got mushrooms too. She felt a tilt of vertigo (more evil thoughts, out on show—hers? Or Fran’s, on some kind of northward mushroom-migration? The Thoughts That Ate Baker’s Park).

  Then she realized that the man was examining the heads of the crazy lady’s sprinkler system. You would never have guessed this from the way she minced and preened and waved her cigarette. Her voice, if not her words, carried: a high, artificial mewling tone like the voice of Betty Boop, while her red mouth twisted in a parody of a fetching smile.

  She was positively grotesque. Fran watched from her own porch, fascinated and repelled, until the crazy lady sashayed back up to her front steps, trilling over her shoulder in an impossibly arch manner at the workman, and opened her screen door. Then came a flurry of screams, presumably at the little dog (it must be trying to get out), and finally the customary door-slam.

  The man in gray headed for a truck parked in front of Betsy’s house.

  “Excuse me!” Fran waved.

  He ambled over.

  “You’re a lawn-man, right?” she said. God, he was massive as a steer; she caught a whiff of stale tob
acco and beer on his breath. This was what the crazy lady had been flirting with?

  She felt a sudden stab of deep, embarrassed pity. After all, the crazy lady couldn’t be all that much older than Fran was herself, and Fran only had Jeffrey by wild, undeserved, and unpredictable good luck.

  “Maybe you can advise me about this mess that keeps coming up over here.” She showed the man the mushrooms.

  He hunkered down and stared at them. “I only do sprinklers,” he said. “Don’t know much about grass. But it’s been wet this fall, and it looks like you got a dead root running along under here. Mushrooms like to grow on old dead wood.”

  Today the cluster had a new addition. There was a grayish round one, a small gourd-like shape, trailing a snaky little stalk like a withered umbilical cord. She preferred the silvery ones with their inky hems, which by comparison at least had a sort of gleaming style about them, the polished perfection of bullets aimed up at her out of the crooked elbow of the exposed root.

  “That’s a dead root?” she said uncertainly. “I thought all these roots belonged to the big tree, there.”

  He shook his head and looked around. “Nope. This one’s dead, and that root there looks dead too. Must have been another tree here once that got took out.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I’ve never had a lawn before, I don’t know a thing about this. The mushrooms aren’t likely to spread, then, and crowd out the grass?”

  “What, these fellers?” he said, drawing a blunt fingertip along the edge of one of the silvery ones. “Heck, no, they’re real fragile. Soon as it gets a little colder you won’t see no more of them.”

  Fran suddenly saw the similarity of the silver mushrooms to penises, polished metal phalluses with a delicate tracery of dark veins under their thin skins. The lawn man’s grimy finger touching one of them made her skin prickle.