by Ellie Monago
They come back down, and Sadie’s in a fresh purple onesie that reads DADDY’S GIRL.
“Seriously, Doug?” I say.
He smiles. “You dressed her for Round One. I get Round Two.”
I’d put her in a cute print sundress, not a onesie from the five-pack his mother had given us, which we made fun of when we’d found a pink YOU GO, GIRL! in the mix. But no need to split hairs.
“Should we call it a day?” I ask.
“Did you even see the dessert table? I’m having at least three of those Nutella squares.” He lifts Sadie high in the air and then drops and catches her. It’s a game she finds endlessly delightful. “Come on, Introvert. It’s only one more hour.”
I don’t know where he gets all his energy. Right now, he’s practically vibrating with it. He was recently promoted to senior market research analyst and has been working longer hours, then coming home and still getting in his quality time with Sadie. While the raise couldn’t have come at a better time, there’s no customized Tesla in our future.
“Are you OK?” His question reminds me that we’re in this together, and if it’s not OK right this second, it will be soon. “You don’t have to go back out if you don’t want to. I get that this stuff is hard for you.”
I feel a tsunami of love for him, for them. Doug and Sadie. They’re my life, and it’s good. “Let’s go.”
When we step outside, the party is still in full swing, though the laughter is more raucous (read: drunken). On the curb across the street, the kids are lined up like a photo op, seemingly according to height, their feet in the street, their knees practically touching, while they eat ice-cream cones. I see that there’s an actual silver cart nearby with a pinstriped umbrella, and an adult I haven’t met yet is scooping.
The heat seems to have skyrocketed, and I’m feeling a little faint. Maybe I do need to quit while I’m ahead. Doug is wearing Sadie in the Björn, so I could just go inside and let them carry the torch for our family. At parties, Doug likes to outlast everyone. He says you get the best dirt during cleanup.
I’m looking around, trying to decide where to insert myself, when I notice something. Where people were talking in groups earlier, now they’re talking in pairs. Cross-gender pairs, for the most part, and no one is with his or her own spouse. They’re standing closer than seems customary. Coy smiles, flirtatious laughter, the occasional hand on an arm . . . I’ve been around the block, so to speak. I know what chemistry looks like.
What is wrong with me? It’s daylight. Kids are nearby, and everyone is happy. More than happy. There’s no hint of jealousy, no sense that people feel their partners are behaving in an untoward fashion, and indeed, whatever touch is happening is totally PG.
But I think of the note. Is this what it means to be neighborly? If so, maybe I’m not. I don’t want anyone looking up at Doug the way, say, Tennyson is looking at Raquel’s husband, Bart. Or, for that matter, the way Raquel is looking at Tennyson’s husband, Vic.
It’s just conversation among neighbors, among friends, I’m sure.
Yet I’m still feeling slightly off-kilter when a petite woman in well-fitting jeans, a white tank top, and a chunky necklace approaches me. I haven’t seen her before. She’s got thick, straight strawberry-blonde hair that falls a few inches past her shoulders, which are as freckled as her face.
“I hope it’s OK that I’m crashing the party!” She has the best smile I’ve seen all day, and there have been a lot of smiles. “I live over there.” She points to the huge—and I mean huge—corner Tudor on the 1700 block. It looks new, too, like maybe the owners bought up two houses and knocked them down in order to build it. “I’m Andie Praeger.”
“I’m Kat Engells.” I don’t know what makes me do it, but I lean toward her. “I’m sorry. I’m so tired, I feel like I’m going to fall over.”
“It’s overwhelming, meeting all these new people. Especially when they’re so nice.”
Despite the heat, I feel a chill. “Why especially then?”
“Because you can’t just put in an appearance. You have to small talk for hours. And that is the definition of exhausting.” She glances back toward her house a bit furtively. “Listen, I can’t stay long, and I don’t want to hold you up. I just came to invite you over to our place for dinner. What night works for you?”
I can’t say no. Not that I want to, exactly, but it’s hard to know precisely what I want. I feel disoriented by her directness and by her charisma. It’s like I have no choice. “Um, Tuesday?”
“Perfect. My husband, Nolan—he says welcome, too, by the way—works way too many hours, so it’s a treat to be able to tell him he has to be home early on Tuesday. And my son, Fisher, is about Sadie’s age. I think we’ll all get along famously.” Another brilliant smile.
Fisher’s not with her, so she must have a nanny. Of course she does, with a house like that. She probably has a whole staff. A maid to clean, a butler to answer the door and mix martinis, and a nanny for Fisher. How else could the mother of a four-month-old look so fresh?
“Is six o’clock OK?” she asks, and I nod. “Can’t wait for Tuesday!” She sashays back to her house.
Doug comes over, and we’re both transfixed by Andie’s retreat. It’s not like she’s the prettiest at the party—that title would go to Tennyson or Yolanda—but she’s got a way. Your eyes follow her entrances and her exits. You want to know what she knows.
“That’s Andie,” I say. “She wants us to come over for dinner on Tuesday.” We watch her go inside the Tudor.
“I have to agree with you,” he says. I raise an eyebrow questioningly. “About the garbage. Can you imagine a woman like Andie inviting us to dinner with a garbage mountain in front of our house?”
He kisses the top of my head, and I lean into his shoulder. One of the neighbors shouts, “Get a room!” and everyone laughs, myself included. I realize the clusters are back. No more coupling with other people’s spouses. Tennyson, Raquel, and their husbands have become a convivial foursome. It’s like I’d imagined the earlier configurations, the flirting, the scent of sexual possibility. It’s a block party, a perfect summer day, with tipsy neighbors who truly like and trust each other.
The AV is utopia, and so egalitarian that you can even talk about money. No matter what you have, you’re good enough. Andie Praeger just sought me out. It’s a brave new world.
As Doug and I stand together, surveying, the tide starts to turn. It happens that quickly sometimes. One influential family says their goodbyes, and then everyone’s packing up, packing it in, leaving in droves, back to their houses. We’re not in party mode anymore; we’re in get-shit-done mode, the story of a parent’s life. A party is an organism with a natural life span, and this one is expiring quickly.
“Let’s go home,” Doug says into my hair.
“You don’t need to stay till the bloody end?”
He kisses my head again. “Not today.”
“You don’t want to be part of the cleanup crew? That’s when you’ll get the best dirt on our new neighbors,” I tease.
“Nah. We’re the guests of honor. Besides, whatever dirt there is, maybe we don’t want to know. Maybe they can all just stay pristine.” He calls out, “Thanks, everybody! You throw a hell of a party!”
A chorus of exclamation points comes back: “Thanks for coming!” and “Glad to have you in the neighborhood!” and “See you soon!” and “You’ve got to come watch a Giants game with us!” and “No, an A’s game!” and “No, Giants!”
I behold the street, with all the industrious worker bees cleaning up and then disappearing inside their beautiful houses. I take in the banner they put up in our honor. I’m one of them. I’m home.
A feeling comes over me, starting in my stomach. It tells me that all that light has to have a shadow, that all the camaraderie and the community could just be a mirage, a cover for something darker. That maybe the AV is too good to be true after all. That we’ve made a colossal mistake, and it’s going t
o cost us a lot more than our life savings.
No. This is just an example of what Dr. Morrison told me, that I have trouble believing I deserve good things. It took me a long time to trust Doug, and look how that turned out.
CHAPTER 3
“Did you meet Tennyson? Really hot and, later in the party, really drunk?” I whisper.
“No. I met her husband, Vic.” Doug speaks at normal volume. He says that’s one of the benefits of having Sadie down the hall in her own room. I still wish her crib were at the end of our bed like it was in the old apartment. I miss her like a phantom limb.
“I met Vic just for a second,” I say. “He seemed like a nice guy. But what’s with the clown outfit? And I hear he’s the Easter Bunny, too. Oh, and Santa Claus.”
Doug laughs, and I fight the urge to shush him.
I’m enjoying the spooning and the talking (we’re usually too tired to do much of it), but there’s a bit of a disconnect in terms of our moods. Doug is in a state of pure, unadulterated happiness, convinced he did the right thing for his family by moving here, and I want to be where he is, I really do. Yet a tiny but significant part of me remains unsettled.
I’m about to ask Doug if he noticed anything unusual about our neighbors, if they seemed just a little too friendly with one another, when he says, “My dad called.” Is it just coincidence that he picks that moment to roll away? “I should probably hop to it and call him back.”
“Now?”
“That’s the deal, right? He calls, I jump.” He adds, “We jump.”
It’s only eight thirty at night, so it might not be that unreasonable for Doug’s dad to expect a callback, but it seems that way to me. Meeting all those new people and trying to make a good first impression takes its toll. Any other parent would understand that, but Doug’s parents don’t have to understand anything. That’s part of the deal, too.
I haven’t mentioned the note to Doug. I don’t normally keep things from him—well, present-day things; the past is a different story.
I just don’t want to tell him that I’ve already managed to piss off one of our neighbors. I’m pretty sure I figured out who wrote the note and why.
First the who: it’s got to be Gladys.
Someone who’s that territorial about a parking space she doesn’t even use obviously has a screw loose. The good news is, she’s got to be eighty years old. She’s harmless. She’s a joke. At the block party, people were literally laughing at her.
But it’s my fault that her ire is targeted toward me. Since we moved here, I’ve been nothing but neighborly, except for that one time, that one lapse in judgment.
Yesterday morning—barely morning, four a.m.—I’d woken up from the chronic sleep deprivation and the stress of the impending party. You could argue I hadn’t been of sound mind.
I’d gotten out of bed carefully and creaked into the hall. I had to fight myself because the pull toward Sadie’s room was so strong. Yet I knew that opening her door was likely to wake her and trying to catch a glimpse would just be selfish. Doug says that he and I need to have our intimate space back, that we’ve been living like roommates since Sadie. But I have so much tactile connection with her that I feel sated. I can’t tell him that, though. It would be too hurtful.
Sometimes I can’t believe I’ve inhabited motherhood for only four months, this strange land with its own customs and vocabulary (sippy cups and breast shields and onesies, oh my!). It seems like I’ve been living in disorientation, exhilaration, and anxiety for much longer. It’s such a different love than I feel for Doug. He’s fully formed, but I have the power to screw her up totally.
These are four a.m. thoughts.
Once downstairs, I peeked out the window, marveling at the beauty of our neighborhood in the half-light. It was dimmer than that, actually, more like two-thirds dark. No one was out, and I assumed no one was up.
I couldn’t help seeing the twelve full garbage bags and untold pounds of cardboard that I’d broken down the day before and that now rested against the front of the house, way too much to fit in the cans that Doug had lined up neatly along the curb. Doug’s plan was to let all the garbage accumulate and then schedule a big pickup. “It’ll be hauled away in one fell swoop,” he’d said, doing an expansive motion with his arm to underscore the point. Wiped clean, all at once. It was an appealing idea. But I was staring at an ugly reality. That’s when I thought of the block party, and I went into a true what-would-the-neighbors-think? panic.
On this block where everything is so geometrically neat (every hedge, even the garbage cans along the curb are precisely horizontal), I was gripped with fear. They were throwing us a party, and we were sullying their perfect neighborhood. We stuck out, worse than a sore thumb. We were a dirty thumb. All the other houses dwarfed ours, and we had our own trash mountain, like it was Appalachia.
Plus, Doug hadn’t even set up the big trash pickup yet. He told me not to worry, he’d handle everything, but how could I not worry? Given his procrastination issues, when I add things to his to-do list, I never really let go of them. The item on my to-do list simply becomes, “Ask Doug if he’s done x or y.” That’s way worse than just doing x or y, because it turns me into a nag. I’m not a nag; I’m a doer.
June from next door had happened to mention that she hoped we were early risers because trash pickup was at the crack of dawn. So, by the time everyone woke up, our trash mountain could be gone.
The street was entirely still, with not even a drape twitching. Conditions were perfect. If the neighbors knew, they’d thank me. But I was sure they’d never know.
I put a jacket on to conceal my pajamas and stepped outside. With a surreptitious look around, I walked over to Fanny’s cans and lifted the lid. I felt a twinge, like it was a form of theft, that I was taking something that wasn’t mine. I should ask permission, no excuses. But who was awake except me? If I waited to ask, I’d miss this week’s pickup entirely.
I was just so tired, and I could hear the garbage trucks rumbling, blocks away. There wasn’t much time to make a decision. If I was going to do it, I had to do it right then. I thought of the block party in our honor and first impressions. I needed to be good enough, to appear good enough. Decision made.
With twelve bags of trash and untold amounts of recycled cardboard, I must have loaded up practically every can on the block. I remembered Tennyson and Vic had extra cans, which made sense given the size of their brood, and I tossed a bag or two in their auxiliaries. Raquel’s can, for sure, and Wyatt and Yolanda’s, and who else’s? Gina’s. Brandon and Stone’s, but they would never leave a note like that. June’s cans were too full, which made me wonder how two people could generate that much refuse in a week.
I stayed on our block. Nothing went in Andie’s can.
It had been too easy, and I’d felt light-headed with success. Or maybe that was just sleep deprivation and lack of food. I’d been forgetting to eat lately.
I even came up with a name for it: distributing. It was kind of like being part of the tiny house movement. Ridding the neighborhood of trash and doing as much recycling as I could—in that second, it seemed like I had discharged a civic duty.
“Distributing?” Doug repeated when I told him later. He broke out in a big grin. He clearly thought it was nuts, but in a cute / quirky / Zooey Deschanel way. It made him laugh to imagine the neighbors catching me on my clandestine trash run down the block. “New Mother Skulks through Neighborhood, Clutching Cardboard,” he said, his fingers splayed out, like it was a newspaper headline.
Wait. The realization dawns on me. I never used Gladys’s cans. Does that mean the note couldn’t have come from her?
It had to have. Everyone else on the block is so nice, so welcoming. None of them could be behind such a stunt, even if my stomach just dropped, trying to suggest otherwise.
Anxiety craves a certainty it’ll never get, Dr. Morrison once told me. But the majority of the time, the most obvious suspect is the right suspect. If a wife
is murdered, chances are the husband did it. Or vice versa.
CHAPTER 4
DO YOU THINK THEY ACTUALLY LIKED YOU?
My eyes roam the street for someone who’s lying in wait, watching for the moment I’d find this next note on the windshield of my car.
There’s no one around. The street is as silent as it was at four a.m. on trash day.
They’ve used another square of cardboard from the box containing the dining room chairs. I try to remember which recycling can got that particular piece, without success. I didn’t commit that kind of detail to my already overloaded memory. Bandwidth is scarce these days, and it’s not like I thought it would turn out to be a clue.
I could understand the first note. It was a rebuke, telling me to keep my trash in my own cans. I assumed it was specific to an action I’d taken, one that I’d make sure never to repeat.
This note is different. More global and yet more personal, it strikes at the heart of my insecurities, where I’m the most vulnerable. It’s like this person knows me.
I’m trembling. It’s Monday morning. Sadie’s already buckled into her car seat in the Outback, and we were going to try out a Mommy and Me class before our trip to the supermarket. I’ve avoided a lot of activities with “Mommy” in the title since my experience with the moms group in my last town. But this is my fresh start.
I make a snap executive decision to skip the class this week. It’s better to go when I’m in the right frame of mind, so I can make the right impression. But there’s no avoiding the supermarket.
“Hey! Yoo-hoo! Kat!”
I blink in the sunlight, startled. Tennyson is running across the street toward me, all legs in a pair of white silk hot pants and a short-sleeve silk blouse with a tie at the neck, almost like a cravat. I don’t know how she can pull off that outfit or move that fast in three-inch heels.
I drop the cardboard and kick it under the car, hoping she won’t see, hoping she won’t ask.