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The Murderer Next Door
Rafael Yglesias
for Lewis
Contents
THE MURDER
GRIEF
THE MURDERER NEXT DOOR
UNREMEMBERED SINS
REMEMBERING
A BIOGRAPHY OF RAFAEL YGLESIAS
THE MURDER
BEFORE THE MURDER I WAS GRATEFUL TO LIVE WHERE I live, to work where I work—for all the happy facts. My only fear, besides the timeless one, was that it might change. Count your blessings, I told myself, don’t be smug because everything is as it should be.
The happy facts—what were they? Nothing extraordinary. I was married, a partner in an excellent New York law firm; I had successful, interesting friends. Not taken for granted: I was proud, even vain, of my life.
Why should I have been so glad to be respectable? You know, of course. I was born poor. Born poor in the town of Sargentville, Maine, the daughter of a failed lobsterman, Sherman Gray. My mother too. And his mother, for that matter. All the way back into the gray mist of Maine history, my people have lost their boats to the banks, their traps to rivals. I’ve tried to pinpoint the first luckless Gray without success. Precision isn’t required, however. All the early settlers were descendants of criminals, exiled or escaped or indentured to America. Generations of Grays have lived as if imprisoned in Sargentville, paying penalty for unremembered sins.
“Bullshit,” Naomi used to answer, “the Grays aren’t especially degenerate. Look at the Boston Brahmins. They’re the children of pirates. And they haven’t moved for three hundred years either.”
I was paroled at age eight by Naomi Perlman. She had come to our front yard to buy crabmeat. The crabs were caught inadvertently in Father’s lobster traps, and picked clean each morning by my mother’s reddened and scratched hands. I peeked around one of several rotting cars in my father’s front yard to get an eyeful of her—a new rich summer person. Naomi saw my straight and yellow hair first, so bright that even my filthy condition—there was grime embedded in every pore—couldn’t dim it.
“Whose beautiful blond hair is that?” she asked. Naomi’s tone wasn’t prim and reedy, the usual Boston Brahmin voice; she squawked her question, an aggressive goose, neck extended, chin forward. She had a big animated face, a thick brow, long nose, strong jaw, knobby chin—and her hair was a wild bush, electrified by her brain, sizzling up from her scalp. “My daughter,” Mother answered her in a mumble, eyes cast down—the ashamed, unworthy look of the poor.
“What did you say!” Naomi barked at Mother.
That startled Mother into a normal volume. “She’s Molly, my little girl.”
“Molly!” Naomi walked toward me in her peasant stride, each foot going as wide as it did forward, a three-year-old’s gait.
I was drawn out to Naomi from my hiding place without being aware of it, mesmerized by her brown eyes, big and gentle, curious and willing to love.
“I’m Naomi,” she said, and offered her hand. “Would you like to earn some extra money this summer? I need a mother’s helper.” Tall for my age, she mistook me for ten or eleven. I wanted to go with her anyway, and Mother was glad to have me out of the way, especially if it meant I could earn a few dollars.
Poor Naomi, I wasn’t much help that summer. She did most of the work, not teaching me to care for her one-year-old son, Joshua, but telling me of the world, especially her startling (to me) statement that women were every bit as smart and strong as men. She handed me books to read aloud while she amused her baby boy, defining the difficult words, explaining their amazing ideas. She told me what I should love, what I should hate—and that I should always think for myself.
Her husband was Sam Perlman, an ex-movie-studio president, rich from the script he was given to produce as part of his termination package. The picture had been one of the highest grossing movies of the 1950s, and although he had no other successes, those profits were enough to live on for the rest of his life, even if he turned out to be immortal. Sam was twenty years older than Naomi: she was the adventure of his middle age, a youthful tonic, vigorous, brash, and fertile. An apparently independent wife, she gathered ideological causes for him to support, and netted lost souls, such as me, to help her redeem. I don’t mean to make fun of Naomi. Although she was loud and angry and spoiled, she had the bursting, generous heart of a puppy scrambling after you for your attention and love.
I spent my days and most evenings at her house that summer. From the beginning I was made equal: freer, more respected, more loved than I was at home. I sat pretty, not serving, at her elegant dinners. After a month, Naomi became obsessed with the notion that I should go to a better school than the local one. By Labor Day Sam offered to send me to a boarding school.
Naomi and I went together to discuss the idea with my parents. Sam had objected: “You don’t know how they’ll react. You’d better—”
“Shut up, Sam.” Naomi put the flat of her hand on his bald spot whenever dismissing him good-naturedly. “We don’t need Big Daddy.”
I thought we did. I was scared. My stomach gurgled in the passenger seat of Naomi’s Volvo while we drove to my parents’ trailer. The afternoon sun—we timed ourselves to arrive after their dinner at four—flashed across Naomi’s deeply tanned, thick legs. In an effort not to intimidate my parents, she was dressed casually in shorts and a T-shirt. I guess she hadn’t waxed recently because I remember her legs were hairy; usually black, the hairs were tinted red and brown by the sun, flashing as the light penetrated roadside maples, pines, and birches. We passed one yellow-leafed birch, an early victim to fall, standing alone among still-green brothers.
“Look at that!” I pointed to the birch. “She’s turned.”
“Beautiful,” Naomi said dully. She never noticed scenery, she seemed only to see people.
“Why do you think one of them turns before all the others? Is it sick? What makes it different?” I asked.
“That’s clever.” She smiled as if I’d made a joke, glancing away from the road to look at me. Her smile faded at my puzzled expression. She returned to her driving and frowned, worried.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, knowing I had missed a chance to be clever.
“Do you really want me to ask your parents to let us send you to school?”
“I told you so already!”
“It might hurt their feelings.”
“They won’t like it,” I agreed, and my stomach hurt, twisting.
She stopped the car. “Should I turn back?”
I remember staring at the black dashboard. The ashtray was pulled out in the middle, filled with butts, its metal smudged gray. My eyes trailed to her toasted legs, flesh squashed out on the seat, red and brown hairs curled on top. Naomi did something shocking to the locals: she sunbathed topless on her beach, unconcerned if someone happened by. She had big breasts, much larger than my mother’s, and I thought about them then, sitting in the car, although of course they were covered. I wondered how big mine would be. I worried they wouldn’t be nice. “Let’s go back,” I said, giving up.
We returned in silent defeat. Again, Sam offered to go with us. For an answer, I burst into tears, upset by the confusion in my heart, a strong desire to be free of my dreary poverty, and the equ
ally strong fear of a world I didn’t know. Naomi hugged me. I cried into her T-shirt, and then sneezed from her perfume. When I had calmed down, they wrapped me in a blanket and I sat on the floor in front of their huge stone fireplace, big enough for me stand in if I crouched a bit, watching a birch log burn. I thought back to the yellow-leafed tree that had somehow puzzled my will. Naomi brought me a cup of hot chocolate and stared through the fire, unresponsive to the noisy crackling bark, pensive as she knitted one thick eyebrow with her fingers. I thought the oddness of her features was beautiful: long nose, black eyebrows, protruding forehead, argumentative chin—an angry storm of flesh—while her gentle brown eyes were calm and loving at the center. She seemed nervous, twisting her eyebrow hairs, her right foot jiggling.
I’ve let her down, I thought, and felt cold in the warmth of the blanket, shivering from the hot fire. “I want to go. I’m sorry. I changed again.”
Naomi’s foot calmed, she raised her head from the fire and stared at me, the brown eyes quizzical. But she didn’t speak. The birch in the fireplace began to whistle. Father used to say wood made that noise when it was about to be split open by the heat.
Sam answered. He was behind me on the couch. “Take your time. I can call your folks, tell them you’re sleeping here—”
“I want to ask them. I’m not scared anymore.” Sure enough, the log cracked and flames appeared from its middle.
“I scared you the last time,” Naomi whispered.
As soon as she said that, I knew she was right. She had weakened my resolve. Somehow, my inspiration had also been my nemesis. “Yes,” I answered. “I want to go to that school. Let’s go ask them.”
“You’re the bravest girl in the world,” Naomi said.
We got back into the Volvo. This time I covered my eyes when we passed the prematurely yellow birch.
My mother and father were unsettled by Naomi’s appearance. They both came out of the house to meet us in the yard, and they didn’t ask her in, as if there were something horrible inside she couldn’t be allowed to see. Mother nervously pushed down on the legs of her jeans while Naomi talked, the way a girl might if her skirt was too short. Father held the brochure about the school in his hand without opening it, without grasping it in his fingers, without a glance at its contents. To me it described a paradise.
“You’ll pay?” were the first words my father said.
“Of course,” Naomi said. “We’ll pay for the extras too, clothes, books.”
“They’ll take her?” my mother asked.
“I’m sure they will,” Naomi said. She was scared of them, or their reaction: I could tell from her formal tone. Her lack of nerve surprised me again.
“Do her good,” my mother mumbled to Father, glancing shyly, fearfully, at him.
I felt no worry now. I was happy. The decision had been made and I knew that it was right. Father wouldn’t have to worry about paying for me, Mother would have less work, and I could be part of the other world, where it didn’t freeze for seven months, where you could become anything you wanted.
“Molly,” my father said, moving to stand in front of me, the brochure pointed at my chin. “Don’t you mind being so far from home? We can’t come get you if you’re homesick, you know. Can’t afford to, anyways—”
“If she needs to come back, that’ll be—”
“I have to hear you say it, Molly.” What should have been my father’s soft fair skin had been enameled by the ocean’s shadeless sun, browned and hardened, a dark setting for his blue, blue eyes. They shined bold and clear, looking at me without love or pity or worry or anger. Merely curiosity.
“I don’t mind,” I said, and then my stomach fell, knowing I had made a mistake. I hadn’t understood his question until after I answered: he’d meant, didn’t I mind not being his daughter anymore?
He hit me. Naomi told the story to anyone who expressed the slightest doubt that she had done the right thing. On many a summer evening I lay awake upstairs, furious because I overheard Naomi whisper it to an amazed houseguest.
Every thought in my head exploded from the blow. He used his fat callused hand, the same hand that held the brochure, stuck to his open palm. Its slick paper slid across my jaw. My plummeting face hit first. I stayed down, tasting the smelly ground between my teeth, mashing my mouth in even farther to eat the soil as it mixed with the blood on my lips, wanting to burrow into the shitty earth. Mother, of course, said nothing. Naomi screeched at Father. He ignored her. Instead, he stared down at me with blue, blue eyes, glowing in their sockets.
“Take her,” he said, watching me writhe. “But she don’t come with a money-back guarantee.” He silenced Naomi with a turn of his head. “She changes her mind, you’re stuck with the bitch.”
I NEVER CHANGED MY MIND. I VISITED MY PARENTS ON holidays and, of course, saw them summers. Mother wanted me to spend more time, or so she said. I’ll be blunt: once you live without the smell of fish, the headache of black flies, the beery thick-mouthed jokes of drag-racing heroes, you’re happy to face a panhandler, a cockroach, and hear a construction worker’s smooching call. Without a defense against the outdoors, the country is filthy: a seasonal parade of mushy snow, chunks of mud, pillars of sand, smears of grass, whittles of bark, windowsill graves of dead bugs, and the agonized noise of trapped living insects. Then there’s the live-in relationship with weather: cold knifing at the border of every window, sneaking up your legs from a floorboard, blasting your back at every exit and entry; or the ripe smell of chest-heavy humidity, the bone-aching damp of mist and fog. When you’re poor, the first thing you notice about a wealthy home, whether it’s an apartment on Fifth Avenue or a weekend house in Vermont, is the tight vacuum seal against Nature, the absolute control of environment. I never really looked back to that trailer or my sad parents. I’m not proud of my flight, I don’t say that my father’s slap gave me a right to leave. I had to take my chance at freedom: the pursuit of happiness is ruthless.
I’m concerned that you not think Naomi was capricious or thoughtless or inconstant. She tried hard to repair the damage done to my family’s feelings. She nagged me to write them, spend my holidays there (at least for a few years), invited them to dinner (Father said no), and squashed the terrible snobbishness I exhibited as a teenager.
I wince at the memory of me at fifteen, dressed in preppie clothes, the caw of my Maine accent yawned into a lockjawed drawl, parading about Naomi’s glassed-in dining room among her startled guests. I had had a glass of wine with dinner—and another secretly in the kitchen—before Naomi stopped me from pouring more at the table. Over dessert, a middle-aged woman began an anecdote about driving on an inland road, passing shacks and trailers, yards full of wrecked cars, describing the routine sloppiness of the poor with a kind of thrilled horror, a pleased superiority disguised as compassion. “Those poor people,” she concluded.
“Why do they sit in their cars?” her husband said. “Have you noticed? They sit—”
“There’s nothing to do.” Naomi talked over him. She didn’t return my look, so I knew she thought the conversation was hurting my feelings and that confirmed my belief I had something to be ashamed of. “The government has completely failed to—”
“It’s like their porch.” The husband ignored Naomi. His wife caught my eye. She smiled at me and nudged him. But he didn’t take the hint to be quiet. “They have the highest retardation rate in the country, did you know that?”
“That’s on the islands!” Naomi waved her ornate antique silver serving fork at him. “You don’t know what you’re talking about! During the winters, those islands used to be cut off and there was a lot of inbreeding—”
“They’re boneless!” he went on, and most of the company laughed. “Have you seen them in the malls? Boneless people, waddling through the aisles.” Now they were all laughing, except for Naomi. What did he mean? I wondered, feeling the heat of shame gather about my face.
“That’s disgusting!” Naomi shouted, and flicked
the fork in his direction, spotting him with a fleck of blueberry pie juice. “You’re being incredibly insensitive! It makes me sick. Who the fuck do you think you are? What do your people on the Lower East Side look like?”
While Naomi ranted at him, the man finally looked at me, and obviously remembered who I was. I couldn’t meet his eyes. Boneless People, I repeated in my head, the words worrying me. They made me feel I came from creatures—science-fiction aliens—and that I would never be normal. I Am a Teenage Boneless Person.
“You would know,” he said to me, a bold look in his eye. He must have decided that if he pretended to be unashamed, we would all assume he meant no insult. “Why do they sit in their cars in their driveways?”
“Don’t be a schmuck,” Sam said, wearily.
“They drink,” I said. I had a part to play, I realized with relief. I could be the Boneless Person Expert. “They can roll up the windows, smash a couple of mosquitoes, and know that no more will get in. They can neck. It’s like an extra room.”
“I see.” He nodded. Everyone seemed to relax. I looked at Naomi for applause. She smiled gently.
“Anyone want more pie?” she asked.
“They’re trash,” I added, greedy for their attention and approval. “Can’t read. Don’t know any better. Drunks. Trash.” I nodded sagely. “They act pretty retarded, so maybe they are—”
I don’t remember how Naomi began, I don’t really remember her whole speech. She shamed me, said I knew better than anyone that Maine’s poor were victims, suffering from lack of opportunity. While she talked I sensed that every eye was on me, every mouth shut to restrain either amusement or pity. The lecture was painful. I had no real family, only Naomi. She meant to teach me the same compassion she had felt for me, but when she said, “You were one of them, you know how hard their life is,” I heard only her separation from me, that I was different from her, from her smart guests, from the world I now inhabited. I gripped my chair on the sides, pressed my fingertips against the wood, wishing to shut my eyes and disappear, yet also not wanting to show any of them that I was bothered. I didn’t feel angry, or sorry for myself. I felt unworthy.
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