The Neighborhood

 

Even as a small child I would sit at my window and look at all of the neighbors parading daily on the blindingly white sidewalks. My neighborhood was rich with activity. Sounds from outside sidled into my room on breezes passing through my open window; cries of happiness, mostly. Cheerful women would walk down the street with their mummy-like babies in tow; they had to wrap them in linen to keep their tender skin from burning. ‘Bright’ is a perfect adjective to modify my neighborhood. The sun’s rays pierced through the leaves on the sapling trees that flanked the street and dotted lawns, making them glow neon, atop the spindly white trunks; they looked illusory, like Doctor Seuss trees. The people in my neighborhood thrived in the sun, and before long, their skin would transform into toffee leather. The elderly had all looked like withered footballs by the time they died.

The sidewalks and roads were always as whole as the day they were poured. Trees and plants in my neighborhood never seemed to grow though they managed to stay lush, even in winter. Houses never got leveled, hairline cracks were unheard of and no one in the entire subdivision owned an ounce of spackle to fix one, besides. Windows never shattered, rather, baseballs bounced off with no more than a thud. The neighborhood pool, surrounded by a quaint little park in which swing chains never snapped, was eternally clean and leak-free. It seemed that our subdivision was perfection given a body.

I lived in this ethereal place for sixteen years with my parents, the poster couple of the fifties though this was well into the nineties. And accordingly, I had a poster-worthy childhood, though I was insanely sheltered. I didn’t leave the neighborhood often until I started school; we hired people to buy and deliver our groceries to us.

Unfailingly, one of my friends would be knocking on the door, asking if I could go out and play with them. So I spent most of my pre-school days running around the block in the sun. There was no need for caution then, any crime was infeasible. When it got warm enough, and it was always warm enough, we would go swimming under the gaze of a tanned lifeguard. There was hardly a day that I did not spend in the water, much to the pleasure of my sun-loving mother. She had obviously spent her share of days outside as a child; her skin looked like smooth mocha concrete. In this carefree way I passed the days until I turned six and it was time for me to enroll in school.

The dreaded first day of school wasn’t as traumatic for me as it was for most children. My doting mother and I waited outside of the rusty chain link fence that enclosed an imposing brick building. It sat in the midst of a browning lawn spattered with healthy green patches. I had been slightly startled by the darkness of the place, but I forced a smile and pushed the unsettling notion that something was off-keel out of my head. I hadn’t yet learned to trust my instincts. My mother, with baby tears in her eyes, kept snapping photos of me squinting there in my little plaid skirt and heavy bag. Finally, a girl I knew named Macy arrived. We both said our goodbyes to our mothers and skipped happily through the gates.  School went well for me, at first. I glued myself to my neighborhood friends, but I had no troubles with the others. I amaze myself with how different I became.

 I had the privilege of going to a good, private girl’s school located only a few streets outside of our neighborhood, as my mother often reminded me when I would complain about it. My father would be sitting in the living room watching golf on our big television.

“Andy, please tell your daughter that she should be grateful we’re even paying tuition for that school,” my mom would yell to him, asking in her tone for him to back her up.

My father, with all of his clever banter, would say, “Ruby, please be grateful that we are paying tuition for your school,” and settle back down into his puffy leather chair. This happened more than once in my adolescence.

I suppose it wasn’t until seventh grade that I truly realized that there was something wrong about my neighborhood. I placed the blame on my school, then. It had been responsible for educating me not only about the American Revolution, but about what normalcy was supposed to be. I had learned from it and from my outside peers all of the things that I should have grown up with; rain, for instance, and breakable things; concepts that I had not previously been exposed to. When I asked my father why things were so different where we lived, he shrugged his shoulders uncomfortably, leaving me with the idea that my life was too perfect. This was like ivy in my head, slowly creeping around my brain and getting it in a stranglehold. For a while I feared that I was going to go crazy; there were too many unknown things for me to just accept. It was like I had been living on a luminescent, alien planet. This disillusionment would have happened sooner if my naïveté hadn’t protected me.

I feel the cold, metallic contempt for my parents that I developed resurfacing. My father became more of a recluse to his study as I grew older, working as an agent for ‘up-and-coming’ golfers. When he first started doing this, I missed his presence and wanted him to concentrate more on my mother and I, but the yearning quickly died. He would leave on trips frequently, but I didn’t ask much about them; I didn’t really want to know. It was expected that he had enjoyed himself. My mother did what made her happiest and stayed at home as an obsessive housewife, pottering around in the garden in her free time. I left them alone, keeping the unspoken agreement that we would all do as we pleased. I took comfort in my books, slipping out of my window to read by moonlight on the roof as often as I could. They helped me to ignore the sickening perfection that I dwelled in.

I noticed that I was slowly morphing into a different person, but I didn’t have the urge to stop. I liked the sad defiance of blowing off my friends to hide in the haven of my room. I liked the reckless way I did things. I placed little pieces of glass in our driveway, I would throw anything I didn’t need on the floor, like gum wrappers and paper; little things. But occasionally I would get inspired and skulk out of my window at night to take my mom’s car on joyrides. Or I would walk the block to little park in the center of the subdivision with a blanket and sleep on a pool chair. I couldn’t have gotten into too much trouble for that, but it was my version of taunting perfection. I once decided to make oatmeal in out toilet bowl, just to see if it would work. Of course, the toilet didn’t clog, so I felt no repercussions for my actions. I pushed the limits of my parent’s tolerance as far as I could without getting into real trouble; I didn’t want that. I wanted someone to try and tell me that I couldn’t do what I wanted to. 

At school, I distanced myself from my old friends. In my righteous new mindset, I realized how ignorant they were. They knew that our neighborhood had something odd about it, but they didn’t know what, nor did they care. I couldn’t stand to be around them; it frustrated me to no end. I gravitated to a new group of people who I felt were more like me. There were a few girls in it that lived in my neighborhood, one of which I became close to. Her name was Joan, with auburn hair and a nose piercing that she did herself. She reminded me of an edgier Elizabeth Bennet, which is part of the reason why I liked her so much more than the other girls. They seemed very flat to me. Funny, how the band of renegades who were supposed to think for themselves didn’t even do that.  

Even with Joan for company I spent a lot of time in my room then, a mid-sized second floor affair. There was one dormer window in it with a large window seat. I had a desk on one wall and my bed on the other. The flowery wallpaper that my mother had put up for me when I was born was covered with posters, my attempt to cover it up completely. The window was my favorite part of my room, though. It had a deep window seat and looked down on the street below. I could see many of my neighbor’s bland colored houses from it. There wasn’t a lock on it either, so it granted me easy access to the roof, and thus, outside.

I had a sort of obsession with what all the neighbors were doing; I had a lot of free time on my hands to develop it. During the time I spent in my room, much of it was used looking out of my spotless window down at the street below. Pairs of women patrolled the sidewalks with their babies secured in those ridiculous harnesses that strap onto one’s back. I surveyed bikers and cars riding by, always obeying the speed limit of twenty, I might add. It made me think differently about my quaint, odd little neighborhood, what I saw sometimes. After the sun had retired to the welcoming horizon, people’s real personalities came out.

Notably, I saw one of our neighbors across the street outside on a porch swing with a man. I knew her to be married with two children, though this man didn’t look like her husband. It was hard to make out his face in the darkness and at a distance, but it was his stature that was different. The woman’s husband was a thin, tall man, but the Unknown One was more muscular. The two of them had sat down on a porch swing, closer to each other than what was necessary if he was just a friend of hers. For a while it seemed that they just talked, though she occasionally reached up as if to rumple his hair. Finally though, they leaned in and kissed each other. In my room, I knew that I was witnessing something that I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away. They quickly broke apart, though, and she led him back into her house by the hand. Sometimes I would catch them doing the same thing on different nights, but after a while, I paid it no mind. Scandalous things no longer ruffled me. I was just hoping that I wouldn’t miss it when her husband drove up in his car to discover them kissing on the porch.

I also got a chance to witness the darker side of the neighborhood from my window. Down the street to my left there was an iron bench cemented into the sidewalk. I have never been able to figure out why it was there, really. Sometimes while I was sitting by my window reading, I would notice a well-dressed man sitting on the bench in the dark, partially illuminated by the streetlight over his head. While I curiously watched, he would sit there, straight-backed, and wait. Usually (because this happened about twice a week), another man would meet him there after about fifteen minutes. There were three men who would meet him there frequently; a tall, gangly blonde guy, a man who was short with a beard and who wore the same pair of red pants every time, and the Unknown One who I would see with my neighbor on her porch.

It was always the same routine for their meeting, the first man would stand up, talk to whoever happened to be meeting him, and they would shake hands and leave in separate directions. After this had happened a few times, I realized that when the men would shake hands, they traded something off to each other. I sat on my window seat on the third night and tumbled what I had found out around in my head. I recalled the way the Unknown One would look over his shoulders when he shook hands with the first man. After mulling over all of the pieces-- the man who was always there, their handshake, the general shadiness of what they were doing—a suspicion that they were dealing drugs took root. My parent’s efforts to shelter me hadn’t worked as well as they would have liked.

After I got a chance to think about it though, I became indifferent. There was no reason for me to nose around in people’s private business, though I was curious. I reminded myself that I wasn’t supposed to see them. I kept what I saw to myself and let them go on with their business, though there was always a nagging uneasiness in my stomach every time I would watch them.

On one night in particular, the night that changed everything for me, I was leaning against a large, dense hedge in the center park to read, though I wasn’t really concentrating. The leaves had turned a less paranormal green, and I was absently watching cars pass. I heard footsteps a little way away from where I was hidden come nearer and stop. As reeled my mind in from its wanderings, a sucking feeling in my stomach cautioned me to stay motionless where I was. I waited tensely for something to happen. I had been thinking about leaving quietly when I heard more footsteps slapping the concrete.

 “Hello, Jacob. How are you today?” a man asked in a monotone. He was only across the street from me; I froze behind the bush, listening with my entire being.

 “Fine, Fine.” I detected uneasiness in Jacob’s voice. I had the terrifying, swelling notion that the two men who I was eavesdropping on were part of the neighborhood drug deal. If that was true, then the monotone man was probably the creepy one who wore suits.

 “Listen, man, do you have the stuff?” Jacob asked, “Because I need to be somewhere real soon.” My adrenaline pumped to all of my muscles, but I couldn’t do anything. I imagined the handoff being executed.

“I can expect you back here next week?” the monotone man asked.

Jacob hesitated for a second, “… Yeah. I’ll be here.”      

Footsteps fell quietly, but I didn’t dare to move. I probably couldn’t have anyway. One set halted, leaving the other empty and staccato, and I braced myself. I just kept thinking about staying absolutely still.  

“Hey!” the creepy man’s voice traveled across the night clearly. He continued in an undertone, I assume, once he had Jacob’s attention, because the other pair of footsteps stopped.  “This isn’t enough for what I gave you.”

No. I shut my eyes tightly. I wasn’t sure if I was going to live through the night, at that point. I had read about violence often enough to know that it could happen over anything. My instincts were wailing at me not to move. Jacob started running.

He didn’t even make it ten steps before the sickening crack sounded, followed by a heavy thump. I simultaneously inhaled, realized that I hadn’t breathed in eons, and locked my body to stifle the overwhelming need to move. My eyes opened in time to see all of the lights blow out. I listened for the footsteps of the slimy man, my arms shaking from the terror and shock. I finally heard him running away after a few seconds, but I waited until I couldn’t hear them at all to fight my way to my feet.

Once I started processing thought again, I hobbled over go see if there was any hope for Jacob, though I felt it with my consciousness that there wasn’t. He had been in too close of a range for the man to miss. I approached his form lying on the concrete, face-down. I saw the bloody hole in his back, a little to the right and below his shoulder blade. There was a small pool of dark blood beneath his chest beginning to blossom out, and as I looked around, I saw the sprinkles of it that extended a few feet from where his head fell, like a feather. I stood staring at him for a while longer not paying any attention the shafts of light that were being cast across the street like knives by curious neighbors, before I noticed that there were cracks in the sidewalk beginning to creep outwards from his head. They traveled with little popping noises, going under my feet and making me lose my balance. My fragile psyche was brimming with the trauma of the night, so I didn’t know what was happening. Once the earth started rumbling and the trees started to shoot upwards, first the trunks, then branches, then leaves that spread wide, deforming the concrete even more, I completely lost all grip on what was happening. I broke down, collapsing onto the concrete, trying to stop my vision from spinning and letting tears roll like down my face. The concrete buckled beneath me, but I didn’t care. I looked up, wanting and trying to see what was going on instead of blindly having to listen to what I thought was the end of the neighborhood. The other streets that emanated like rays of sunshine from the central park, it seemed, were all acting in the same manner, and in ten seconds, the trees had grown thirty feet. I avoided looking at the broken, bloody corpse and turned my attention to the houses.

I could hear foundations cracking as if the earth were twisting her weary back. The house that my eyes had fallen on listed to the right until it was crooked. Ivy sprouts on the bricks climbed rapidly up the walls and into the windows, which broke like light bulbs. In a chain reaction style, windows of other houses cracked and exploded, spraying glass like the blood from Jacob’s chest. Roofs crashed in upon their charges; a nearby fire hydrant rusted on the spot and spurted water into the night. Along the street, I could hear the screams and shouts of my panicking neighbors as they ran out of their crumbling houses. Some houses ended up collapsing due to the shaking and their splintering beams. A few broken streetlights fell over onto cars, including the one on my corner. The noises of people and car alarms, dogs barking, crunching glass and metal, all poured out into the night air and joined in my head to form a huge spiraling mass. I sat paralyzed on the sidewalk and closed my eyes again until the ground stopped shaking.

Distant sirens preceded the arrival of help. When they appeared at the gates of our subdivision, the police men had to get out of their cars and walk wherever they went since the streets had been completely ruined; the same for the ambulances and fire trucks. I sat by Jacob’s body until a fireman came to shut off the fire hydrant. He took one look at me, numbly crying by a dead man in the dark and looking dead myself, and called for backup. Then, he checked Jacob’s pulse halfheartedly, knowing that there was nothing he could do, as I did. He gave me a sorrowful look and I nodded.

 While I was still in the park, I checked the pool. I figured that it had deteriorated, too. True to what I thought, the pool had cracked and drained. What water was left had turned black and fetid. I turned away from where I had so many days of my happy childhood and went to the swings, where I had spent many adolescent nights brooding. The swings were lying beneath the frame in the dirt, and the frame itself had rusted. I kicked it to test what I thought was going to happen and it fell over; I wasn’t surprised. After I perused the ruins of the park, I meandered down my street to evaluate my own house. All of the windows had been blown out, and half of the roof had fallen in, urged by the ivy that covered it from a tiny plant that we had kept. The corner of the house where the kitchen had been had collapsed, leaving the dust-covered innards of our house open to the night. My mother was near hysterics when they finally pulled her out from underneath the wreckage of our kitchen. She tried to hug me, asking if I was okay and sobbing. I stood there and humored her for a minute until I couldn’t bear to listen to her anymore.

“Mom, let go of me,” I said, exhausted and unfeeling. She didn’t want to let me go, but I pulled myself away from her. “I’m going to go walk around to see how everyone else did.”

“No! Don’t walk away from me, Ruby. You are going to stay right here!” she sobbed at me. Thankfully, my father forced her to let me go. I set off, skirting sinkholes and broken waterlines, letting my shaky feet carry me where they wanted to. It came to me that what had happened was related to Jacob’s death, but I wasn’t sure how or why. I heard my mother’s scream as she realized that there was a dead man on the sidewalk, but I just plodded on.

Author's Note

I'm toying with the idea of making her a lesbian, to heighten the contrast between her and perfection. Any suggestions about that, or how i could do it?