I knew why, of course, but I wanted to hear them say it.
“Bitch,” Mr. Tolliver said.
I saw the line of distress cross Mr. Warner’s face. This was not, at least, what he had intended. It was also not what two or three others had wanted. I could see them splitting up behind Mr. Warner. There was Mr. Tolliver and the man I didn’t know, both of them wearing Phoenixville Steel softball jackets. And there were the others, like Mr. Forrest before them, who were beginning to edge closer to the corner of the yard, tripping into the front vegetable garden in which, since my earliest childhood, my father had planted and tended and snipped herbs for my mother.
It was this that finally pushed me to make a move. When Mr. Serrano, who was an accountant and had a young daughter, crushed my father’s Italian parsley, I dropped the quilt from my shoulders and stepped forward.
“You’ll kill it.”
It was that word.
Mr. Tolliver’s friend was suddenly to my right, but I was watching Mr. Serrano step carefully back from the border of the herb garden. Just as I exhaled, I felt the sting of a slap across my face.
I fell onto the grass, my own hand going up to my cheek. Mr. Warner was jumping past me to restrain the unknown father, whom Mr. Tolliver was patting on the back. I saw Mr. Serrano look down at me as he fled the yard. It was not my first awareness of the pity people had for me, pity like a vast sea that was impossible for me to cross.
The good men left with sincere apologies thrown over their shoulders, but not to me. They apologized to Mr. Warner. I was on the ground. I was a teenager. I didn’t matter. Mr. Warner said, “No problem.” He said, “Talk later.” He said, “Take care.”
He had stopped the man who’d slapped me from doing more, and so I supposed I should have been thanking Mr. Warner, but I wasn’t. I was edging toward the quilt, which I’d dropped a few feet behind me. It seemed the only thing in the yard to offer protection.
Mr. Tolliver and his friend had appeared ready to storm the house and find my mother, but they were no match for the law Mr. Warner laid down, and, I imagine, a female teenager in cutoffs and T-shirt lying on the ground was probably scary to them. The sight of me begged a question neither had intended to pose. Mr. Warner told them to go sober up and get some food. “Go home to your wives,” he said.
The spring evenings stayed light for a long time, but the day had just crested that point where darkness was inevitable and the sun had begun to descend into the line of fir trees that separated our yard from the Levertons’.
I had reached the quilt, and sitting up, I grasped it to my chest. I would not cry. I remember promising myself that, despite the sting in my cheek. What was oddest was that my father’s crushed parsley seemed worse to me than the slap. It was one of the joys he brought into the house for my mother. When he did, clipping rosemary or marjoram or thyme, the scent would linger on his fingers, and he would run them through my mother’s hair to make her smile.
“You can tell your father,” Mr. Warner said, standing above me, “that it is the consensus of the neighborhood that your family should move.”
“We have the right to stay,” I said. I had chosen my side.
He stared at me a moment and then shook his head.
He left the yard, and I wrapped myself tighter in the quilt. It was a memory quilt that we’d bought at the Kutztown Fair. “See that?” the woman who sold it to my father said. “That’s all handwork. No machines at all.”
My father had bought it, sure that my mother would be impressed. She had been. She put it over the arm of the couch, and during aimless afternoons when Natalie was busy and I had to keep myself entertained, I would spread the quilt out over the sofa and make memories up for my family.
“This bright red patch symbolizes a slap on the cheek to Helen when she was sixteen,” I whispered to myself that night in the yard. Already it worked. The slap fell into the hole that was my accumulating past, and I stood, walked inside to clean up the casserole from the floor, and heard the scratchy sound of a big-band radio station as I passed the bathroom door.
NINE
The night the men came to our yard, there were two adults within my reach: my mother, hiding in our downstairs bathroom, and Mr. Forrest down the street.
As I grabbed my jacket off the hook by the kitchen door, I spied one of the photographs of my mother from years ago. It was a small one, 4x6, and in it she wore a slip with an ornate lace bodice. The ecru one. It sat propped up among a grouping of knickknacks beside the red-velvet love seat, which to me was the most uncomfortable piece of furniture in existence.
“It encourages people to leave sooner,” my mother would say when I complained.
“What people, Mom?” I’d respond.
I walked over to the photograph and paused. I wanted to hurt her, but she was always crumbling and crying, barking and biting, and to reach her seemed impossible to me. I lifted it and traced the outline of her body with my finger. I slipped the frame into my jacket pocket, and I left as quietly as possible through the front door. There was no way my mother could have heard me over the noise of the radio.
After twilight the streets seemed deserted. No one was outside on their lawns anymore. I thought briefly of what an aerial view of our neighborhood would look like with all the roofs sheared off. In how many houses would happy families be settling in for the night, watching TV with bright bowls of popcorn in their laps? In Natalie’s house her mother would be slowly passing out, assisted by what she called “a little splash.” Natalie would be up in her room, mooning over Hamish Delane, who had just moved to America with his family. Over and over again she’d drawn inscrutable lines on a page until she confided it was “Mrs. Natalie Delane.”
To take the tops off all the houses and mingle our miseries was too simple a solution, I knew. Houses had windows with shades. Yards had gates and fences. There were carefully planned out sidewalks and roads, and these were the paths that, if you chose to go into someone else’s reality, you had to be willing to walk. There were no shortcuts.
His door opened before I could ring the bell.
“I hoped I might see you,” Mr. Forrest said. “Come in, come in. Let me take your coat.”
“I brought you something,” I said.
I reached into my jacket and pulled out the framed photograph.
Mr. Forrest took it from me. I stood in the hallway and looked around, past the porcelain umbrella stand and into the drawing room, which I had seen only from the outside, and into the dining room behind that, which was elevated by three wide wooden steps.
I had been fuming on my way over, and inside his house I could feel the heat of it on my cheeks.
“She’s a beautiful woman, your mother,” Mr. Forrest said, looking at the picture.
“Right.”
“Let’s sit down in the drawing room, shall we?”
It had taken me this long to notice that Mr. Forrest was being incredibly nice to me, even solicitous. I knew how extraordinary this was. Mr. Forrest had no use for almost anyone in the neighborhood other than my parents. He was never rude, but he was perfectly pleasant in a way that, I would realize as an adult, was the suburban equivalent of a stiff-arm.