by Tim Hennessy
* * *
The mothers eventually learned that the only reason Erin could afford to live in a deteriorating lakefront mansion in the tony suburb of Whitefish Bay, buy a marimba, pay youth symphony fees, and think about sending Leif to Guatemala was because she’d landed a big settlement after her husband was killed in a fireworks accident at a county fair. In her terry cloth short-shorts, Erin could never overcome the two early strikes against her: she was tainted by tragedy and, as Kitty Knapp said, she was “one of those fireworks people.”
Widows like Erin didn’t belong in the village, a place where picking out the best paint color for the family room was a competitive sport. The women were known around town as “North Shore Nancies.” They liked to think of themselves as optimizers, intent on elevating anything that was good to great. They made coffee with twice-boiled distilled water and served Ethiopian teff with blueberries in mason jars with gingham ribbons wrapped around them. They knew about all the latest treatments at the aesthetic center: injectables, lasers, ultrasounds. When yoga got old, they started taking classes where they learned how to floss their nerves.
And then there were their husbands, who outdid each other with their cocktails. Jake Kemp introduced a new kind of ice he’d seen on a business trip to LA, cut into perfectly spherical cubes with slow dilution rates. They moved from muddled to shattered herbs and sprayed their concoctions with elderflower from an atomizer without fear of compromising their masculinity.
Everyone took meticulous care of their homes and double-seeded, underground-sprinkled yards. As Kitty said, “Think of it this way: it’s as if your house is a face and the lawn is the hair. You wouldn’t ever want to be caught with bags under your eyes or your roots showing, would you?” The mothers happily trimmed their topiaries while the husbands mowed the Kentucky bluegrass in neat diamond patterns with freshly sharpened mowing blades and beveled the edges with scissors. Their yards looked clean. Before company, the ladies might even feel inclined to wipe down the leaves of their hostas with a damp cloth. The lawns were so lush and uniform that they could be mistaken for slabs of green concrete, with their boys’ hammocks swinging gently atop the little white EverGreen warning flags.
Well, all but Erin’s. The ladies walked past her driveway and wondered what went on back there. There were rumors of killer wasp nests, marijuana plants, ticks, and garlic mustard gone wild. Janet Marks said she’d heard that Erin even kept a miniature donkey in the garden shed.
Meanwhile, Erin drove around in a rusty black Saab that looked like a boll weevil, complete with bumper stickers that said: Sleep, Creep, Leap! and Lawns Are for Losers. Everyone felt that one was unnecessarily aggressive.
It didn’t take long for the mothers to become less enthusiastic about their boys’ new habit of sleeping in hammocks. Their sons refused to come back inside at night. They said they liked the air, the stars, the freedom, and the ergonomic zero pressure points Leif told them about.
The mothers began to sense how strange their houses felt without their children sealed in the drywall and UV windows, breathing in the HEPA-filtered air. They seemed so exposed out there with just a whisper of nylon separating them from the rest of the mean world, although they took some comfort knowing that outside was more like inside with the new waterproof upholstered sectionals and patio rugs, furniture the salesperson at Laacke and Joys called “outdoor solutions.”
At night, the mothers stood in front of the windows that looked out onto their pristine backyards, so perfect yet sadly invisible in the dark, and listened for the sounds of coyotes and the giggles of girlfriends, or the footsteps of burglars and child molesters who they worried would snake through the village in their rusty old pervert vans. But all they heard was an occasional cough or wheeze and the hum of the outdoor refrigerator.
They would pause at the doors of their sons’ listless bedrooms that smelled less and less like athletic socks and retainer breath and gaze wistfully at the plaid Pottery Barn coverlets gathering dust, the discarded birch mallets, the trophies and ribbons, the calculus textbooks and the Bibles their grandparents gave them that they never read, and they’d think about how they’d molded their lives around their children. They couldn’t wait for summer to be over so their boys would come back inside. It seemed like yesterday they were watching them climb the rock walls on their elaborate cedar play systems—and then? Leif. Now, because of him, their boys were out there all alone, strung up, as Kitty said, “like ground meat in sausage casing.” Soon they’d be off to college, and this new air of abandonment in their bedrooms would calcify into something more permanent and terrifying.
Apparently, Erin didn’t feel the same pangs of loss that they did. They heard that Erin had bought herself her own hammock. On the nights when Erin’s weird boyfriend Cody didn’t stay over, she’d “toss her ’mock” between the white pines she’d planted when she moved in, as if she needed more trees back there. Erin once told Kitty that she loved white pines because they grew so tall and straight and true, like her Leif.
“What do you think they do out there?” asked Maureen.
“Who knows,” said Marci. “Smoke cloves and recite Walt Whitman or whatever.”
The women imagined the mother and son drifting off to sleep under the stars, dreaming of Leif’s mysterious dad before he got blown to smithereens.
* * *
Apparently Cody, Erin’s horticulturist boyfriend, was to blame for Erin’s jungle of a yard. She’d met him after she hired his company, Middle Earth, to save her trees during the bad drought several years earlier. He drenched her magnolia roots and fertilized her sugar maple with Vigor Trigger after it exhibited iron chlorosis. Erin suggested to the boys that they tell their parents to hire Cody too, but the fathers took the simpler route: they began to cut their ailing trees down. By that summer, so many trees had been cut down that many of the boys had to hang their hammocks from metal hammock stands.
That summer Kitty felt particularly generous—or perhaps curious was a better word—and invited Erin and her “special friend” to her annual costume party. She figured that Erin might be a safer guest if she dressed as someone other than herself. That was a mistake. Erin and Cody, pleased, after all these years, to finally get an invitation to a social event in the Bay, happily rose to the occasion. Cody offered a bag of handpicked chanterelle mushrooms as a housewarming gift. He had twigs and leaves glued into his hair, and he was dressed in a shaggy brown-suede tunic, furry vest, and pointy-toed slippers. “Let me guess,” said Marcus. “You’re a turd, right?” He gave Cody such a hard pat on the back that he knocked him into Kitty’s jockey statue.
Cody corrected him and said he was Noldo, which meant nothing to anyone. He had to explain he was the Tolkien elf of the second clan, which still meant nothing. As for Erin, well, she wore a halo headpiece made with fragrant irises she said she’d picked from her yard, and she was practically naked in a wispy dress Janet had seen on clearance at Oh My Gauze!, the store on Silver Spring Drive. Her breasts were incredibly firm and ripe, and her glitter-covered skin was luminescent under the adorable string of twinkling martini-shaped lights Kitty had strung up around the patio. The husbands, who had all decided to dress as Boy Scouts, had to hold their craft cocktails over the crotches of their brown shorts to hide their erections.
“What are you?” Kitty asked Erin.
Erin said she was the wood nymph, Daphne, as if she was surprised Kitty couldn’t guess this.
The women didn’t know how to talk to Erin, but they certainly didn’t want her to talk to their husbands, so they took turns holding her hostage in the corner near the decorative sundial that Erin said wasn’t set right. They bragged about their sons’ ACT scores and made small talk that got depressing. “Marcus has developed this horrible wheeze,” said Janie Aberg. “I think it might be asthma.”
“You should see Elliott’s hands shake,” said Marci, who was dressed up like a cowgirl. “It’s like he has Parkinson’s, like my dad.”
Annie was Jackie O. in her pillbox hat, pearls, and a smear of ketchup on the shoulder of her jacket. “Owen can’t concentrate anymore,” she said. “He just stares into space, and I’m like, Are you there? Earth to Owen!” Annie clapped her hands hard, right in front of Erin’s face, making her jump.
“It’s all the chemicals they’re exposed to,” Erin said.
“What chemicals?”
“That stuff you put on your lawns.”
“Our lawns are fine,” they said.
“They’re perfect.”
“Beautiful.”
“It’s just allergies.”
“Gluten sensitivity.”
“Dairy intolerance.”
“Well,” said Erin, “you might want to give it some thought. They started getting sick about the same time they started ’mocking.”
“Whatever.”
“You know there’s nothing wrong with dandelions,” Erin said. “We eat the leaves at our house. We fry them up with—”
“You eat them?” asked Kitty, as though Erin had just told her she ate her own shit.
“Sure, they’re a rich source of beta-carotene. Not to mention Vitamin C, potassium, fiber, calcium.”
“Oh gross,” said Fiona. “I’ll tell you, it’s the dandelions that are dangerous. Remember that ratty overgrown soccer field at Cahill Park? The boys used to trip all over them. I’m so glad they replaced it with Astroturf.”
Erin said, “Have you tried corn gluten? Aeration? Those chemicals you use, they’re dangerous. You do know that, don’t you?”
“Don’t be a downer,” Kitty said. “Let me get you another drink, hon.”
“Cody says that stuff is like nerve gas.”
“What does Cody know?”
“He’s a certified botanist.”
“Look,” said Marci, “we’ve used EverGreen for years, and we’ve always been fine.”
Erin looked over to where Cody stood. He was losing traction with the husbands, who laughed when he referred to the trees in Erin’s yard as his “community,” and were unsympathetic when Cody told them about the aggressive invasives that kept him up at night, like the mile-a-minute vine, pale swallow wort, and the Alabama jumping worms that were making the soil look like coffee grounds.
“Mow that shit down, you’ve got nothing to worry about,” said Bruce.
“Cheers to that,” said Marcus, who was on his fifth of Bruce’s signature cocktail—a drink made with potato vodka, blood orange bitters, and shattered tarragon. He called it the FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Reason).
* * *
The heat and rain that summer created the perfect condition for buckthorn, goldenrod, and Bishop’s gout, leaving no choice but for the husbands to double down on their lawns. When the steam weeders and the EverGreen spray stopped working, the husbands went to the hardware store and marinated their grass in new combinations of chemicals. It was fun for them to compete against the so-called experts at EverGreen, mixing up their own more powerful concoctions. For their wives, it was exciting to watch them try each new application; it was a little bit like getting their hair highlighted when they waited to have the foils pulled out to see if the color would take.
A few weeks later, their grass was as colorless as dead flesh, but at least the weeds had been baked out of them. “With some fertilizer and rain they’ll grow back good as new,” the husbands said. Everyone held their breath in anticipation of rain, and in dread for the next windy day, when the seeds from Erin’s yard would inevitably drift over like all those refugees they read about in the news, looking in vain for hospitable soil.
* * *
It was a bad summer. The Fords, the new young couple on Upper Berkeley Boulevard, walked past Kitty’s brown lawn with slumped shoulders. Ashley’s poor baby had a rare condition and was born without eyeballs. Then Annie, like everyone else, had a suspicious mammogram. “Probably nothing,” her doctor said, but still he seeded her breast with metal beads so he could keep an eye on it. Same thing happened to Gloria. The women had done so many self-checks that their breasts were bruised and tender. “Mitts off, ladies!” said Marci, when she saw that they were all checking themselves for lumps while they drank margaritas on her patio. She’d invited them over earlier that day with an e-mail: Dress code? Village Casual.
The mothers used to talk about the latest home collection from Serena and Lily. Now Tracy Pearson said that her husband Greg pulled off his athletic socks after an afternoon of yard work, and bits of his skin got stuck in the cotton. Jane’s track-star daughter had to quit the team because she’d developed sports-induced asthma. And then there were the poor dogs who’d turned lumpy and practically died all at once. Lymphoma, the vet said. Traci replaced hers with a shepadoodle she named Mutt. Soon, everyone had a shepadoodle.
The boys became so lethargic and sick that the neighborhood, usually a whirl of activity in the summer, was locked in an unsettling stillness under the blinding light of the sun, light that was no longer dappled through the tree branches. Well, except for Leif, who banged away at his depressing marimba at all hours. He was about to participate in a statewide youth competition for a big scholarship. The boys said that Leif was working on an incredibly difficult, conceptual piece called “Fantasy on Japanese Woodprints.” Everyone could hear it for miles. It wasn’t like any music they’d ever heard before; it made everything seem off, like when they test the tornado sirens at noon on Wednesdays.
During his practice breaks, Leif made a shuffleboard court on Day Avenue with duct tape. He fashioned cue sticks out of upside-down brooms, and he cut up the Frisbees he’d bought at Winkie’s Variety Store for discs. When the boys showed up, drawn to Leif as if by secret signals (Leif didn’t even have a cell phone), they could hardly muster the energy to even focus on the rules. Daniel “Lunk” Morello had boils on his neck, and he complained of dizzy spells, and Joey “Fizz” Robinson had Bell’s palsy. Lunk and Fizz sat on the curb and stared at the pavement.
“What’s wrong with you, my brothers?” asked Leif.
“Probably Lyme disease,” said Lunk, although Leif couldn’t hear him, because the truck spraying for gypsy moths was passing by, even though almost all the oak trees were gone now. The vapor hung in the still air.
“My mom says it’s just the heat,” said Fizz.
Daz tried to make a shot, but his right arm was rocked with a sudden spasm. The disc hit Leif so hard in the head that he was knocked onto the pavement. His tinted glasses flew off his face and shattered when they hit the street. The boys were beside themselves. They’d never seen Leif without his glasses, or on his ass.
* * *
Klode Park was one of the few Erin-free zones in Whitefish Bay, a relic of life before she and Leif had moved in. But suddenly there she was, spread out on a lounge chair like a porn star in her crochet-knit bikini, giant bubble sunglasses, and chunky Dr. Scholl’s sandals hanging perilously off her unpainted toes. She was reading a Smithsonian magazine. On the cover was a photo of a leopard about to pounce and the headline “Return of the Big Cats.”
“Oh, hi, Erin,” Annie said. “We don’t see you here often.”
“It’s a nice day,” she said.
There was no arguing that Erin had a great body. The women weren’t too bad, but they had the occasional varicose vein, and you could see the cottage cheese under their thighs when they sat down, which is why their tankini bottoms had little skirts sewn into them. Watching Erin, they instinctively sucked in their bellies and adjusted the bras to cover stretch marks, cursing themselves for letting their CrossFit memberships lapse. Kitty stood behind Erin’s chair and pointed at her boobs. Fake, she mouthed.
“I like your suit,” said Maureen. “Did you make it?”
Erin set her magazine on her lap and sat upright. Her breasts didn’t even jiggle. Her glasses slid down the sheen of grease on her tiny nose. “I bought it at Kmart.”
The women almost died.
“We hear Leif’s big competition is coming up,” said Ma
rci.
“Next week,” Erin said. “He’s been busy practicing.”
Katie said, “You don’t need to tell us. We hear him banging on his marimba day and night. The sound really carries.”
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Erin said. “It’s like the music moves through him, like he is the music. I never get tired of listening to him play.”
“Well, good luck,” Kitty said. “We hope he wins.”
“Thanks. The piece is so difficult, so delicate. I hope you’ll all come to the competition. I put tickets in your mailboxes.”
“Yeah, sure,” they said, although they had no intention of going.
“It would mean so much to Leif. He’s been through a lot. Your boys, they’re like a family to him. That’s why we moved here, so he could be part of a neighborhood.”
This sentiment made the women feel good: a neighborhood, yes. An actual village.
“How’s Skeech?” Erin asked Kitty.
“Don’t call him that. His name is Connor.”
“He was pretty sick the other day. I’ve been worried. He threw up in my birdbath.”
“He’s fine. Just a few bad oysters.”
“You know I like Connor. I like all your boys. I care about them,” Erin said. “But they’re all getting so sick, I thought we could talk about it.”
Maureen said, “They’re just a little under the weather.”
“Daz only had one seizure last week,” said Katy.
“Nerves,” said Annie. “I think it’s just the stress of thinking about college. That’ll be a big change.”
Erin said, “I’m sure it’s the pesticides. We talked about this before. Cody says—”
“Cody isn’t a doctor. Give us a break.”
“Are you accusing us of knowingly putting our kids in danger? Look, we love nature. And we love our boys. Why do you think we let them sleep outdoors? What could be healthier?”
“But they got sick as soon as they started ’mocking. Maybe you could lay off the spray, see if it makes a difference. Just try.”
