The Candy House, page 23
You won’t know for sure until you see them crouching above you, their faces taut with hope, ready to jump.
The Perimeter: Before
“How do we know that man is really her brother?” Mom asks after dinner one night when Brian and Molly have gone upstairs to start their homework and I’m helping her load the dishwasher.
“What man?” Dad says from his recliner in the study beside the kitchen. “Whose brother?”
“It just seems a little… coincidental,” she says. “He moves in, and nine months later, boom. The husband moves out.”
“Ah,” Dad says. Not because he agrees with Mom’s latest conspiracy theory—he never does, none of us do—but because he’s figured out who she’s talking about: our next-door neighbors, the Salazars.
Mom leaves the kitchen and stands beside Dad’s recliner, looking down. “They don’t look remotely alike,” she says. “Do you see any sibling resemblance?”
“We’ve never been on good enough terms with him for me to get a close look at his face,” Dad says.
“I think he’s given up on the journalism,” Mom says. “He’s around the house a lot.”
“You’re around the house a lot,” Dad points out.
“I’m keeping an eye on him.”
Dad carefully sets down his newspaper—the equivalent, for Dad, of standing up and staring fixedly into Mom’s eyes. “Observe the property line, Noreen,” he says. “If you encroach on their property again, I can’t protect you. Hannah, are you listening?” he calls to me through the kitchen door. I’m always listening. “You are my witness.”
“What if he encroaches?” Mom asks.
A few months after Stephanie Salazar’s brother moved in with Mr. and Mrs. Salazar, Mom saw him climbing into their house through a window (he’d forgotten his keys) and called the police to report a break-in. She knew exactly who he was but didn’t trust him, she told Dad (who told me), having received hostile looks while gardening near the split-wood fence that separates our yard from the Salazars’ yard. What Mom didn’t know was that Stephanie’s brother was on parole, which resulted in the police taking him away in handcuffs. That night, the Salazars came over to talk to Mom and Dad about Stephanie’s brother and his mental health. Bennie Salazar discovered Dad’s favorite band, the Conduits, and produced all their songs, so Dad broke out the bourbon and nodded sympathetically while Mom gazed at the window like she was distracted by a sound that no one else could hear. Sure enough, while that conversation was going on, a portion of the fence between our two yards tipped drastically in our direction, violating our “airspace,” as Mom put it, and “aggressing” one section of her pink phlox. A few weeks later, Mom dug up one of the fence posts with an electric shovel-drill she rented from Ace Hardware and moved the post five inches onto the Salazars’ property. She was giddy when we got home from school. She sang as she cooked and chuckled as she folded laundry. That night, I answered the front doorbell and found Stephanie Salazar’s brother standing there, pale and shaking with rage, clutching a tape measure. I called for Dad, and they went into the backyard and looked at the fence post together. Dad agreed that it had been moved and hired a handyman to move it back.
That was two years ago, when I was a freshman. We were all sorry when the Salazars split up, Dad most of all. Bennie Salazar moved to Manhattan, and now we only see him when he picks up or drops off their son, Christopher, who’s a year older than Molly. Bennie Salazar waves to us from the window of his sports car. “What a loss,” Dad always says.
After Mom and I finish cleaning up, I stay downstairs with Dad, studying for my AP finals, while Mom goes upstairs to help Brian and Molly with the many things they need help with. Brian’s cup underwear is uncomfortable and he has a baseball game tomorrow, so Mom drives to the Modell’s four towns over that’s open late to pick up new cup underwear one size bigger, and afterward she helps Brian with his math (Mom is freakishly good at math). Later I hear Molly crying to Mom about her friend sagas, which are never-ending. I stopped bringing my problems to Mom a few years ago, as she predicted I would. “I can only help you until high school, Hannah, maybe not even, and after that you’ll be on your own,” she used to say over my objections and denials. But she was right: By high school, I saw Mom differently. Now it’s Dad I turn to.
When I was little, I had a fear of dying in my sleep. Mom never said, “That’s silly. You’re going to live forever, sweetheart, and so am I, and so is our whole family and everyone we love.” Instead, she got out her stethoscope, hospital-grade thermometer, and blood pressure cuff and took my vital signs.
“Normal,” she said. “You won’t die tonight.”
According to Mom, you have to be careful or the forces of doom will line up against you. Things are more connected than they seem. The world is cruel and irrational, the strong thrive at the expense of the weak, and happy endings are purely a matter of framing. She emphasized this last point at the end of every fairy tale she read to us:
“We’ll see if the prince still loves her when she’s middle-aged and has stretch marks, or whether he trades her in for a newer model.”
“Yes, the prince inherits his rightful kingdom—until an enemy prince invades it and slaughters them all.”
“ ‘Happily ever after’ so long as the hundreds of serfs toiling in the fields and scores of servants that make a castle habitable keep slogging away.”
“In the real world, there’s only one ending, and it isn’t happy,” Mom has been telling us for as long as I can remember. And when these dire pronouncements made us cry, she would gather us into her arms and murmur, “My beloved children, things are interwoven in ways we don’t understand. There are conspiracies. There are plots. I am your mother. You come from my womb. And I will kill anyone I have to kill to protect you.”
Nowadays I find it painful to have a mom who’s widely perceived as unhinged—a mom my friends laugh at. But when I was young and she was all I knew, I lived inside a force field that shielded me from every danger without concealing it. She made me strong.
Sometimes I think that Mom is like a character from a fairy tale: engrossing until I outgrew that kind of story. Now I want to read other things.
* * *
The next night, while Brian and Molly are at the dinner table, Mom says, “He doesn’t like me.”
“No one likes you,” Dad says with that little half-smile that’s Dad’s version of a grin. “Except us.”
“We love you,” Molly says.
In the world of moms, ours is solitary. She’s not invited to moms’ meetings or moms’ parties, not included in moms’ book clubs or wine tastings or sample sales or theater trips or spa weekends or even moms’ round-robins, although she was once a competitive junior tennis player.
“He’s a convicted felon,” she says.
“Let’s not go there,” Dad says. “He’s a normal person who went off the rails. You of all people should understand that.”
“I have never gone off the rails.”
“Arguably, you’ve never been on the rails,” Dad says with a wink at me.
“Bruce,” Mom says very softly. “That is hurtful.”
She rises from the table and floats upstairs with her sewing basket, which contains fluffy white yarn for the kitten cap party she’s organizing for Molly to win back her monstrous best friend, and several shirts whose labels Brian needs removed because they scratch the back of his neck. You can’t just cut off a label with scissors because that leaves a prickly label stub that’s worse than the label itself. Mom snips each tiny, nearly invisible stitch that attaches the label to the shirt, using minuscule scissors that have to be special-ordered from Germany and stored in a deionized glass cylinder or they will lose their sharpness overnight.
Brian, Molly, and I clear the table and clean up while Dad sits in his recliner reading The Wall Street Journal. In the absence of Mom, the silence becomes oppressive.
“Dad,” I tell him, looming over his recliner, “you need to apologize.”
“Please don’t use that tone with me, Hannah,” he replies mildly.
A while later, Molly climbs into his lap, mussing his newspaper, and kisses his cheek—the sort of thing you can get away with when you’re nine. “Please say sorry to Mommy?” she coos.
“I’ll think about it, pumpkin.”
Brian, never a big talker and becoming less so by the minute, stands three feet from Dad’s chair and toes the carpet. Finally, he mutters, “Dad.”
“Yes, Brian?”
“Come on.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You know.”
“What do I know?”
“Do it.”
“I’m missing the topic of our conversation, Brian.”
“Now, Dad.”
“Now what?”
Brian takes a long breath and screams into Dad’s face, “SAY SORRY TO MOM!!!”
Dad slowly returns his recliner to an upright position—the equivalent, for Dad, of springing out of his chair. “I was just about to do that, son,” he says, walking calmly toward the stairs. “Thank you for reminding me.”
* * *
Mom attributes her exclusion by the other moms to the poisonous influence of one pivotal mom: Kathy Bingham, whom Mom refers to as the High Priestess of Bitches. Kathy has five children, all criminally neglected (according to Mom) while Kathy plays obsessive tennis at the Crandale Country Club, where she’s been ladies’ singles and doubles champion for the past eight years. According to Mom, Kathy controls every aspect of ladies’ tennis at the CCC with the cutthroat brutality of a racketeering boss. Kathy won’t look at Mom, much less speak to her, although Mom insists she’s done nothing to warrant Kathy’s hatred. “I think it’s my hair,” she says, and it’s true that she bleaches her hair a much whiter blond than the other moms’ subtle highlights.
“I’m going to kick the bucket one day, make no mistake,” she has told us. “And given what’s in the peroxide I’m using, it may be sooner than expected.”
When we begged her to stop using the peroxide, Mom said, “Not a chance. Life is all about bargains, and I’m willing to forfeit a couple of years to have hair like Marilyn Monroe.”
* * *
A few nights later, while Dad is grading my practice SAT test at the table after dinner, Mom says, “Bruce, I’m disturbed by your indifference to the very real threat I face.”
Dad pushes back his chair. Dad is a lawyer. “Has he threatened you?”
“He stares at me angrily across the fence.”
Dad takes off his reading glasses and looks up at Mom. “Why are you so often by that fence, Noreen?”
“I’m gardening. It’s May, peak gardening month.”
“Please, just stay on our side,” Dad says. “That goes for you and the fence.”
“You say that a lot, Bruce.” Mom uses Dad’s name when she is unhappy with him. “I’m starting to tune it out.”
“Tune it any way you like. Just don’t cross the property line.”
“You’re saying it again.”
“I really can’t say it too much.”
“Yes, you can, Bruce,” Mom says. “You’re saying it too much right now.”
They stare at each other. Then Mom turns and walks out the back door into the garden. Dad returns to my SAT, pretending not to care, but he can’t pull it off. He goes to look out the kitchen window, then strolls briskly through the back door—the equivalent, for Dad, of taking off at a sprint. Through the kitchen window, I see that Mom has jumped the fence between our yard and the Salazars’ yard and is standing on their lawn. Her platinum hair shimmers in the dark.
“I’m over the property line, Bruce,” Mom calls. “What’s going to happen?”
“That’s not up to me,” Dad says from our side of the fence. “You are beyond the scope of my protection.”
“You weren’t protecting me in the first place.”
“I protect you in ways you’re hardly aware of,” Dad says, “but I can’t protect you from yourself.”
I duck away from the window at the sight of Stephanie Salazar coming outside, but I can’t resist creeping out our back door and crouching behind Dad’s grill, with its floppy rain cover. Stephanie has short black hair and looks nothing like the other moms. A few months after the Salazars first moved in, she became doubles partners with Kathy Bingham, the High Priestess of Bitches. They did a lot of winning until Bennie Salazar moved out, at which point Stephanie and Kathy stopped being doubles partners and also stopped speaking. That led to whispers about whether Kathy had played a part in the Salazars’ breakup, but the whispers were very quiet because (according to Mom) no one wants to risk having Kathy rub them out.
Then came last year’s singles match between Stephanie and Kathy for the 2006 Ladies’ Championship at the Crandale Country Club. The match took almost five hours. Every game went on forever; every set went into tiebreakers that required tiebreakers themselves to be broken. Eventually, scores of people gathered from all over the club to watch. When Kathy finally won, Stephanie dropped onto the court with her face in her fists and let out an animal howl and then began to sob. To everyone’s wonderment, Kathy went around the net and knelt beside Stephanie on the clay and put her arms around her—something nobody could believe and later thought they hadn’t really seen; it must have been a trick of the twilight. But it happened: I saw it. Kathy pulled Stephanie onto her feet, and they walked to the locker room together. After that, they were doubles partners again. They haven’t lost a match.
“Hi, Noreen,” Stephanie says, crossing her lawn toward Mom in a friendly way. “Everything okay out here?”
“I’m just making a point,” Mom says.
“Well,” Stephanie says. “It’s a beautiful night.”
“True,” Dad agrees from across the fence, and it is true: The sky looks dark and clear, and everything smells fresh from a rainstorm earlier in the day.
“Your lilacs are going crazy,” Stephanie tells Mom. “God, that smell—I wish I could live in it.” She’s good at handling Mom—but is she handling Mom, I think, or just being nice?
“Thank you,” Mom says, and begins edging back toward the fence.
Just then the door to the Salazar house flies open and Jules, the felonious brother, bursts onto the lawn with Stephanie’s son, Chris, and a little girl named Lulu who’s staying with them for some reason. Jules hasn’t changed since I saw him on our doorstep two years ago: He’s pale and overweight, his button-down shirt untucked. He looks normal except for his eyes, which are frantic.
“What are you doing out here?” he asks Stephanie. “Why is she on our property?”
“We’re discussing the lilacs,” Stephanie says.
“She’s standing on our lawn. There is no reason for her to be doing that.”
“Noreen,” Dad says, “why don’t you—”
“Get off our property,” Jules orders Mom. “Now.”
Stephanie wheels around on her brother. “Don’t speak to her that way, Jules! She’s our neighbor. Jesus.”
“It isn’t your property,” Mom corrects Jules. “It’s your sister and her husband’s property.”
“Actually, we’re divorced,” Stephanie says. “So it is my property.”
“I’m her brother,” Jules says. “Get off.”
“Jules, stop it!”
“There is no sibling resemblance between you,” Mom says.
“She’s crazy,” Jules says to Stephanie. “You’re letting a crazy person stand on our lawn. Why?”
Dad and Stephanie approach Mom from opposite sides of the fence. “Noreen, please come back over,” Dad says, and I hear in his voice the anxiety he gets when he thinks laws are about to be broken.
“I apologize for my brother’s rudeness,” Stephanie says.
“He’s rude, but he’s right,” Dad says.
“A sane person!” Jules cries. “Thank you!”
“You’re hopeless,” Mom tells Dad.
“Noreen, is there something you need over here?” Stephanie asks, and I realize that she is handling Mom, and what makes her so good at handling Mom is having to handle her brother on a daily basis. “Because if not, I think Jules would be more comfortable if you—”
“GET. OFF. THIS. PROPERTY!” Jules hollers at the top of his lungs. The sound ricochets between our two houses.
“I will not be screamed at,” Mom says fiercely.
“Let her stand there,” Stephanie tells Jules. “Who cares?”
“You’ve lost your mind, Steph. Why do you cut her so much slack?”
“Jesus Christ, Jules, we’re talking about a fucking fence,” Stephanie says, raising her voice for the first time. “The Middle East is imploding, you’ve got refugees trying to raise their kids under plastic tarps with no running water—I mean, there are conflicts over space in the world that actually matter, but our suburban split rail is not on the list.”
I listen to Stephanie Salazar and I worship her. Dad worships her. Her son, Chris, worships her, as does Lulu. Stephanie is a publicist for rock stars, but she should be a rock star.
“If more people respected each other’s fences, we wouldn’t have those problems,” Jules sniffs.
“I give up,” Stephanie says, and walks back toward her house. “Chris, Lulu, come on. We’re going in.” And they do. Stephanie doesn’t turn back around. She says she’s going inside, and she goes.
There is a long pause. Dad, Mom, and Jules stand like chess pieces in their respective positions. Finally, Dad says, “I’m going in too, Noreen,” and I dart back into the house ahead of him.
Dad sits in the study watching the eleven o’clock news but really waiting for Mom. I watch from the kitchen window as she and Jules face off in silence. They look eerie in the dark, like sculptures of people. Jules hasn’t moved any closer to Mom. He’s afraid of her. And she is afraid of him.
“There’s a sitcom version of this story,” I tell Dad. “We might even have seen it.”
“Sitcoms leave out a lot,” Dad says. “That’s what makes them funny.”
