Early on, some very determined person torched their garage and twice broke into their car before they got the garage rebuilt. Sunburned bikers descended on the vacant lot across the alley to drink Schlitz and grill knockwurst and rev engines at small hours until Patty went outside in sweatclothes and said, “Hey, you guys, you know what?”
Patty frightened nobody, but she’d been a standout athlete in high school and college and possessed a jock sort of fearlessness. From her first day in the neighborhood, she was helplessly conspicuous. Tall, ponytailed, absurdly young, pushing a stroller past stripped cars and broken beer bottles and barfed-upon old snow, she might have been carrying all the hours of her day in the string bags that hung from her stroller.
Behind her you could see the baby-encumbered preparations for a morning of baby-encumbered errands; ahead of her, an afternoon of public radio, “The Silver Palate Cookbook,” cloth diapers, drywall compound, and latex paint, and then “Goodnight Moon,” then Zinfandel. She was already fully the thing that was just starting to happen to the rest of the street.
In the earliest years, when you could still drive a Volvo 240 without feeling self-conscious, the collective task in Ramsey Hill was to relearn certain life skills that your own parents had fled to the suburbs specifically to unlearn, like how to interest the local cops in actually doing their job, and how to protect a bike from a highly motivated thief, and when to bother rousting a drunk from your lawn furniture, and how to encourage feral cats to shit in somebody else’s children’s sandbox, and how to determine whether a public school sucked too much to bother trying to fix it.
There were
also more contemporary questions, like: What about those cloth diapers? Worth
the bother? And was it true that you could still get milk delivered in glass
bottles? Were the Boy Scouts O.K. politically? Was bulgur really necessary?
Where to recycle batteries? How to respond when a poor person of color accused
you of destroying her neighborhood? Was it true that the glaze of old
Fiestaware contained dangerous amounts of lead? How elaborate did a kitchen
water filter actually need to be? Did your 240 sometimes not go into overdrive
when you pushed the overdrive button? Was it better to offer panhandlers food
or nothing? Was it possible to raise unprecedentedly confident, happy,
brilliant kids while working full time? Could coffee beans be ground the night
before you used them, or did this have to be done in the morning? Had anybody
in the history of St. Paul ever had a positive experience with a roofer? What
about a good Volvo mechanic? Did your 240 have that problem with the sticky
parking-brake cable? And that enigmatically labelled dashboard switch that made
such a satisfying Swedish click but seemed not to be connected to anything:
what was that?
For all queries, Patty Berglund was a resource, a sunny
carrier of sociocultural pollen, an affable bee. She was one of the few stay-at-home
moms in Ramsey Hill and was famously averse to speaking well of herself or ill
of anybody else. She said that she expected to be “beheaded” someday by one of
the windows whose sash chains she’d replaced. Her children were “probably”
dying of trichinosis from pork she’d undercooked. She wondered if her
“addiction” to paint-stripper fumes might be related to her “never” reading
books anymore.
She confided that she’d been “forbidden” to fertilize Walter’s
flowers after what had happened “last time.” There were people with whom her
style of self-deprecation didn’t sit well—who detected a kind of condescension
in it, as if Patty, in exaggerating her own minor defects, were too obviously
trying to spare the feelings of less accomplished homemakers. But most people
found her humility sincere or at least amusing, and it was, in any case, hard
to resist a woman whom your own children liked so much and who remembered not
only their birthdays but yours, too, and came to your back door with a plate of
cookies or a card or some lilies of the valley in a little thrift-store vase
that she told you not to bother returning.
It was known that Patty had grown up in the East, in a
suburb of New York City, and had received one of the first women’s full
scholarships to play basketball at Minnesota, where, in her sophomore year,
according to a plaque on the wall of Walter’s home office, she’d made
second-team All-American. One strange thing about Patty, given her strong
family orientation, was that she had no discernible connection to her roots.
Whole seasons passed without her setting foot outside St. Paul, and it wasn’t
clear that anybody from the East, not even her parents, had ever come out to
visit. If you inquired point-blank about the parents, she would answer that the
two of them did a lot of good things for a lot of people, her dad had a law
practice in White Plains, her mom was a politician, yeah, a New York state
assemblywoman. Then she would nod emphatically and say, “Yeah, so, that’s what
they do,” as if the topic had been exhausted.
A game could be made of trying to get Patty to agree that
somebody’s behavior was “bad.” When she was told that Seth and Merrie Paulsen
were throwing a big Halloween party for their twins and had deliberately
invited every child on the block except Connie Monaghan, Patty would say only
that this was very “weird.” The next time she saw the Paulsens on the street,
they explained that they had tried all summer to get Connie Monaghan’s
mother, Carol, to stop flicking cigarette butts from her bedroom window down
into their twins’ little wading pool. “That is really weird,” Patty agreed,
shaking her head, “but, you know, it’s not Connie’s fault.” The Paulsens,
however, refused to be satisfied with “weird.” They wanted “sociopathic,” they
wanted “passive-aggressive,” they wanted “bad.” They needed Patty to select one
of these epithets and join them in applying it to Carol Monaghan, but Patty was
incapable of going past “weird,” and the Paulsens, in turn, refused to add
Connie to their invite list.
Carol Monaghan was the only other mother on Barrier
Street who’d been around as long as Patty. She’d come to Ramsey Hill on what
you might call a patronage-exchange program, having been a secretary to
somebody high level in Hennepin County who moved her out of his district after
he made her pregnant. Keeping the mother of your illegitimate child on your own
office payroll: by the late seventies, there were no longer so many Twin Cities
jurisdictions where this was considered consonant with good government. Carol
became one of those distracted, break-taking clerks at the city license bureau
while somebody equivalently well connected in St. Paul was hired in reverse
across the river. The rental house on Barrier Street, next door to the
Berglunds, had presumably been included in the deal; otherwise, it was hard to
see why Carol would have consented to live in what was then still basically a
slum.
By the late eighties, Carol was the only non-gentrifier
left on the block. She smoked Parliaments, bleached her hair, made lurid talons
of her nails, fed her daughter heavily processed foods, and came home very late
on Thursday nights (“That’s Mom’s night out,” she explained, as if every mom
had one), quietly letting herself into the Berglunds’ house with the key they’d
given her and collecting the sleeping Connie from the sofa where Patty had
tucked her under blankets. Patty had been implacably generous in offering to
look after Connie while Carol was out working or shopping or doing her
Thursday-night business, and Carol had become dependent on her for a ton of
free babysitting. It couldn’t have escaped Patty’s attention that Carol repaid
this generosity by ignoring Patty’s own daughter, Jessica, and doting
inappropriately on her son, Joey (“How about another smooch from the
lady-killer?”), and standing very close to Walter at neighborhood functions, in
her filmy blouses and her cocktail-waitress heels, praising Walter’s
home-improvement prowess and shrieking with laughter at everything he said, but
for many years the worst that Patty would say of Carol was that single moms had
a hard life and if Carol was sometimes weird to her it was probably just to
save her pride.
To Seth Paulsen, who talked about Patty a little too
often for his wife’s taste, the Berglunds were the super-guilty sort of
liberals who needed to forgive everybody so that their own good fortune could
be forgiven, who lacked the courage of their privilege. One problem with Seth’s
theory was that the Berglunds weren’t all that privileged; their only known asset
was their house, which they’d rebuilt with their own hands. Another problem, as
Merrie Paulsen pointed out, was that Patty was no great progressive and
certainly no feminist (staying home with her birthday calendar, baking those
God-damned birthday cookies) and seemed altogether allergic to politics. If you
mentioned an election or a candidate to her, you could see her struggling and
failing to be her usual cheerful self—see her becoming agitated and doing too
much nodding, too much yeah-yeahing. Merrie, who was ten years older than Patty
and looked every year of it, had formerly been active with the S.D.S. in
Madison and was now very active in the craze for Beaujolais nouveau. When Seth,
at a dinner party, mentioned Patty for the third or fourth time, Merrie went
nouveau red in the face and declared that there was no larger
consciousness, no solidarity, no political substance, no
fungible structure, no true communitarianism in Patty Berglund’s
supposed neighborliness, it was all just regressive housewifely bullshit, and,
frankly, in Merrie’s opinion, if you were to scratch below the nicey-nice
surface you might be surprised to find something rather hard and selfish and
competitive and Reaganite in Patty; it was obvious that the only things that
mattered to her were her children and her house—not her neighbors, not
the poor, not her country, not her parents, not even her own
husband.
And Patty was undeniably very into her son. Though
Jessica was the more obvious credit to her parents—smitten with books, devoted
to wildlife, talented at flute, stalwart on the soccer field, coveted as a
babysitter, not so pretty as to be morally deformed by it, admired even by
Merrie Paulsen—Joey was the child Patty could not shut up about. In her
chuckling, confiding, self-deprecating way, she spilled out barrel after barrel
of unfiltered detail about her and Walter’s difficulties with him. Most of her
stories took the form of complaints, and yet nobody doubted that she adored the
boy. She was like a woman bemoaning her gorgeous jerky boyfriend. As if she
were proud of having her heart trampled by him: as if her openness to this
trampling were the main thing, maybe the only thing, she cared to have the
world know about.
“He is being such a little shit,” she told the other mothers
during the long winter of the Bedtime Wars, when Joey was asserting his right
to stay awake as late as Patty and Walter did.
“Is it tantrums? Is he crying?” the other mothers asked.
“Are you kidding?” Patty said. “I wish he cried.
Crying would be normal, and it would also stop.”
“What’s he doing, then?” the mothers asked.
“He’s questioning the basis of our authority. We make him
turn the lights out, but his position is that he shouldn’t have to go to sleep
until we turn our own lights out, because he’s exactly the same as us. And, I
swear to God, it is like clockwork, every fifteen minutes, I swear he’s lying
there staring at his alarm clock, every fifteen minutes he calls out, ‘Still
awake! I’m still awake!’ In this tone of contempt, or sarcasm, it’s weird.
And I’m begging Walter not to take the bait, but, no, it’s a quarter of
midnight again, and Walter is standing in the dark in Joey’s room and they’re
having another argument about the difference between adults and children, and
whether a family is a democracy or a benevolent dictatorship, until finally
it’s me who’s having the meltdown, you know, lying there in bed,
whimpering, ‘Please stop, please stop.’ ”
Merrie Paulsen wasn’t entertained by Patty’s
storytelling. Late in the evening, loading dinner-party dishes into the
dishwasher, she remarked to Seth that it was hardly surprising that Joey should
be confused about the distinction between children and adults—his own mother
seemed to suffer from some confusion about which of the two she was. Had Seth noticed
how, in Patty’s stories, the discipline always came from Walter, as if Patty
were just some feckless bystander whose job was to be cute?
“I wonder if she’s actually in love with Walter or not,”
Seth mused optimistically, uncorking a final bottle. “Physically, I mean.”
“The subtext is always ‘My son is extraordinary,’ ”
Merrie said. “She’s always complaining about the length of his attention span.”
“Well, to be fair,” Seth said, “it’s in the context of
his stubbornness. His infinite patience in defying Walter’s authority.”
“Every word she says about him is some kind of backhanded
brag.”
“Don’t you ever brag?” Seth teased.
“Probably,” Merrie said, “but at least I have some
minimal awareness of how I sound to other people. And my sense of self-worth is
not bound up in how extraordinary our kids are.”
“You are the perfect mom,” Seth teased.
“No, that would be Patty,” Merrie said, accepting more
wine. “I’m merely very good.”
Things came, Patty complained, too easily to Joey. He was
golden-haired and pretty and seemed innately to possess the answers to every
test a school could give him, as though multiple-choice sequences of “A”s and
“B”s and “C”s and “D”s were encoded in his very DNA. He was uncannily at ease
with neighbors five times his age. When his school or his Cub Scout pack forced
him to sell candy bars or raffle tickets door to door, he was frank about the
“scam” that he was running. He perfected a highly annoying smile of
condescension when faced with toys or games that other boys owned but Patty and
Walter refused to buy him. To extinguish this smile, his friends insisted on
sharing what they had, and so he became a crack video gamer even though his
parents didn’t believe in video games; he developed an encyclopedic familiarity
with the urban music that his parents were at pains to protect his preteen ears
from. He was no older than eleven or twelve when, at the dinner table,
according to Patty, he accidentally or deliberately called his father “son.”
“Oh-ho, did that not go over well with Walter,” she told
the other mothers.
“That’s the kind of thing teen-agers all say to each
other now,” the mothers said. “It’s probably a rap thing.”
“That’s what Joey said,” Patty told them. “He said it was
just a word and not even a bad word. And, of course, Walter begged to differ.
And I’m sitting there thinking, Wal-ter, Wal-ter, don’t get into it, point-less
to ar-gue, but, no, he has to try to explain how, for example, even though
‘boy’ is not a bad word, you still can’t say it to a grown man, especially not
to a black man, but, of course, the whole problem with Joey is that he refuses
to recognize any distinction between children and grownups, and so it ends with
Walter saying that there won’t be any dessert for him, which Joey then claims
he doesn’t even want, in fact he doesn’t even like dessert very much,
and I’m sitting there thinking, Wal-ter, Wal-ter, don’t get into it, but Walter
can’t help it—he has to try to prove to Joey that, in fact, Joey really loves
dessert. But Joey won’t accept any of Walter’s evidence. He’s totally lying
through his teeth, of course, but he claims he’s only ever taken seconds of
dessert because it’s conventional to, not because he actually likes it, and
poor Walter, who can’t stand to be lied to, says, ‘O.K., if you don’t like it,
then how about a month without dessert?,’ and I’m thinking, Oh, Wal-ter,
Wal-ter, this isn’t going to end well, because Joey’s response is ‘I will go a year
without dessert. I will never eat dessert again, except to be polite at
somebody else’s house,’ which, bizarrely enough, is a credible threat—he’s so
stubborn he could probably do it. And I’m like, ‘Whoa, guys, time out, dessert
is an important food group, let’s not get carried away here,’ which immediately
undercuts Walter’s authority, and, since the whole argument has been about his
authority, I manage to undo anything positive that he’s accomplished.”
The other person who loved Joey inordinately was the
Monaghan girl, Connie. She was a grave and silent little person with the
disconcerting habit of holding your gaze unblinkingly, as if you had nothing in
common. She was an afternoon fixture in Patty’s kitchen, laboring to mold
cookie dough into geometrically perfect spheres, taking such pains that the
butter liquefied and made the dough glisten darkly. Patty formed eleven balls
for every one of Connie’s, and when they came out of the oven Patty never
failed to ask Connie’s permission to eat the one “truly outstanding” (smaller,
flatter, harder) cookie. Jessica, who was a year older than Connie, seemed
content to cede the kitchen to the neighbor girl while she read books or played
with her terrariums. Connie didn’t pose any threat to somebody as well rounded
as Jessica. Connie had no notion of wholeness—was all depth and no breadth.
When she was coloring, she got lost in saturating one or two areas with a
felt-tip pen, leaving the rest blank and ignoring Patty’s cheerful urgings to
try some other colors.
Connie’s intensive focus on Joey was evident early on to
every local mother except, seemingly, Patty, perhaps because Patty herself was
so focussed on him. At Linwood Park, where Patty sometimes organized athletics
for the kids, Connie sat by herself on the grass, unbored, her hands fashioning
a clover-flower ring for nobody, and let the minutes stream past her until Joey
took his turn at bat or moved the soccer ball down the field and quickened her
interest momentarily. She was like an imaginary friend who happened to be
visible. And Joey, in his precocious self-mastery, seldom found it necessary to
be mean to her in front of his friends—indeed, he may have figured that to have
an actual groupie could only reinforce his social primacy. Connie, for her
part, whenever it became clear that the boys were going off to be boys, knew
enough to fall back and dematerialize without reproach or entreaty. There was
always tomorrow.
When exactly Connie and Joey started fucking wasn’t
known. Seth Paulsen, without evidence, simply to upset people, enjoyed opining
that Joey had been eleven and Connie twelve. Seth’s speculation centered on the
privacy afforded by a tree fort that Walter had helped Joey build in an ancient
crab apple in the vacant lot. By the time Joey finished eighth grade, his name
was turning up in the neighbor boys’ replies to strenuously casual parental
inquiries about the sexual behavior of their schoolmates, and it later seemed
probable that Jessica had been aware of something by the end of that
summer—suddenly, without saying why, she became strikingly disdainful of both
Connie and her brother. But nobody ever saw them actually hanging out by
themselves until the following winter, when the two of them went into business
together.
According to Patty, the lesson that Joey had learned from
his incessant arguments with Walter was that children were compelled to obey
parents because parents had the money. It became yet another example of Joey’s
extraordinariness: while the other mothers lamented the sense of entitlement
with which their kids demanded cash, Patty did laughing caricatures of Joey’s
chagrin at having to beg Walter for funds. Neighbors who hired Joey knew him to
be a surprisingly industrious shoveller of snow and raker of leaves, but Patty
said he secretly hated the low wages and felt that shovelling an adult’s
driveway put him in an undesirable relation to the adult. The ridiculous
moneymaking schemes suggested in Scouting publications—selling magazine
subscriptions door to door, learning magic tricks and charging admission to
magic shows, acquiring the tools of taxidermy and stuffing your neighbors’
prize-winning walleyes—all similarly reeked either of vassalage (“I am
taxidermist to the ruling class”) or, worse, of charity. And so, inevitably, in
his quest to liberate himself from Walter, he was drawn to entrepreneurship.
Somebody, maybe even Carol Monaghan herself, was paying
Connie’s tuition at a small Catholic academy, St. Catherine’s, where the girls
wore uniforms and were forbidden all jewelry except one ring (“simple,
all-metal”), one watch (“simple, no jewels”), and two earrings (“simple, all-metal,
half-inch maximum in size”). It happened that one of the popular ninth-grade
girls at Joey’s own school, Central High, had come home from a family trip to
New York City with a cheap watch, widely admired at lunch hour, in whose
chewable-looking yellow band a Canal Street vender had thermo-embedded tiny
candy-pink plastic letters spelling out a Pearl Jam lyric, “DON’T CALL ME
DAUGHTER,” at the girl’s request. As Joey would later recount in his
college-application essays, he had immediately taken the initiative to research
the wholesale source of this watch and the price of a thermo-embedding press.
He’d invested four hundred dollars of his own savings in equipment, had made
Connie a sample plastic band (“READY FOR THE PUSH,” it said) to flash at St.
Catherine’s, and then, employing Connie as a courier, had sold personalized
watches to fully a quarter of her schoolmates, at thirty dollars each, before
the nuns wised up and amended the dress code to forbid watchbands with embedded
text. Which, of course—as Patty told the other mothers—struck Joey as an
outrage. An entrepreneur develops a great new product and is following the
rules, and then the rules suddenly change?
“It’s not an outrage,” Walter told him. “You were
benefitting from an artificial restraint of trade. I didn’t notice you
complaining about the rules when they were working in your favor.”
“I made an investment. I took a risk.”
“You were exploiting a loophole, and they closed the
loophole. Couldn’t you see that coming?”
“Well, why didn’t you warn me?”
“I did warn you.”
“You just warned me that I could lose money.”
“Well, and you didn’t even lose money. You just didn’t
make as much as you hoped.”
“It’s still money I should have had.”
“Joey, making money is not a right. You’re selling
junk those girls don’t really need and some of them probably can’t even afford.
That’s why Connie’s school has a dress code—to be fair to everybody.”
“Right—everybody but me.”
From the way Patty reported this conversation, laughing
at Joey’s innocent indignation, it was clear to Merrie Paulsen that Patty still
had no inkling of what her son was doing with Connie Monaghan. To be sure of
it, Merrie probed a little. What did Patty suppose Connie had been getting for
her trouble? Was she working on commission?
“Oh, yeah, we told him he had to give her half his
profits,” Patty said. “But he would’ve done that anyway. He’s always been
protective of her, even though he’s younger.”
“He’s like a brother to her . . .”
“No, actually,” Patty joked, “he’s a lot nicer to her
than that. You can ask Jessica what it’s like to be his sister.”
“Ha, right, ha-ha,” Merrie said.
To Seth, later that day, Merrie reported, “It’s amazing,
she truly has no idea.”
“I think it’s a mistake,” Seth said, “to take pleasure in
a fellow-parent’s ignorance. It’s tempting fate, don’t you think?”
“I’m sorry, it’s just too funny and delicious. You’ll
have to do the non-gloating for the two of us and keep our fate at bay.”
Toward the end of that winter, in Grand Rapids, Walter’s
mother collapsed with a pulmonary embolism on the floor of the ladies’ dress
shop where she worked. Barrier Street knew Mrs. Berglund from her visits at
Christmastime, on the children’s birthdays, and on her own birthday, for which
Patty always took her to a local masseuse and plied her with licorice and
macadamia nuts and white chocolate, her favorite treats. Merrie Paulsen
referred to her, not unkindly, as “Miss Bianca,” after the bespectacled mouse
matron in the children’s books by Margery Sharp. She had a crêpey, once-pretty
face and tremors in her jaw and her hands, one of which had been badly withered
by childhood arthritis. She’d been worn out, physically wrecked, Walter said
bitterly, by a lifetime of hard labor for his drunk of a dad, at the roadside
motel they’d operated near Hibbing, but she was determined to remain
independent and look elegant in her widowed years, and so she kept driving her
old Chevy Cavalier to the dress shop. At the news of her collapse, Patty and
Walter hurried up north, leaving Joey to be supervised by his disdainful older
sister. It was soon after the ensuing teen fuckfestival, which Joey conducted
in his bedroom in open defiance of Jessica, and which ended only with the
sudden death and funeral of Mrs. Berglund, that Patty became a very different
kind of neighbor, a much more sarcastic neighbor.
“Oh, Connie, yes,” her tune went now, “such a nice little
girl, such a quiet little harmless girl, with such a sterling mom. You know, I
hear Carol has a new boyfriend, a real manly man, he’s like half her age, which
is so great, after all these lonely years. I’m really happy for her. Wouldn’t
it be terrible if they moved away now, with everything Carol’s done to brighten
our lives? And Connie, wow, I’d sure miss her, too. Ha-ha. So quiet and nice
and grateful.”
Patty was looking a mess, gray-faced, poorly slept,
underfed. It had taken her an awfully long time to start looking her age, but
now at last Merrie Paulsen had been rewarded in her wait for it to happen.
“Safe to say she’s figured it out,” Merrie said to Seth.
“Theft of her cub—the ultimate crime,” Seth said.
“Theft, exactly,” Merrie said. “Poor innocent blameless
Joey, stolen away by that little intellectual powerhouse next door.”
“Well, she is a year and a half older than him.”
“Calendrically.”
“Say what you will,” Seth said, “but Patty really loved
Walter’s mom. She’s got to be hurting.”
“Oh, I know, I know. Seth, I know. And now I can honestly
be sad for her.”
Neighbors who were closer to Patty than the Paulsens
reported that Miss Bianca had left her little mouse house, on a minor lake near
Grand Rapids, exclusively to Walter and not to his two brothers. There was said
to be disagreement between Walter and Patty about how to handle this, Walter
wanting to sell the house and share the proceeds with his brothers, Patty
insisting that he honor his mother’s wish to reward him for being the good son.
The younger brother was career military and lived in the Mojave, at the Air
Force base there, while the older brother had spent his adult life advancing
their father’s program of drinking immoderately, exploiting their mother
financially, and otherwise neglecting her. Walter and Patty had always taken
the kids to his mother’s for a week or two in the summer, often bringing along
one or two of Jessica’s neighborhood friends, who described the property as
rustic and woodsy and not too terrible bugwise. As a kindness, perhaps, to
Patty, who appeared to be doing some immoderate drinking of her own—her
complexion in the morning, when she came out to collect the blue-wrappered New
York Times and the green-wrappered Star-Tribune from her front
walk, was all Chardonnay splotch—Walter eventually agreed to keep the house as
a vacation place, and in June, as soon as school let out, Patty took Joey up
north to help her empty drawers and clean and repaint while Jessica stayed home
with Walter and took an enrichment class in poetry.
Several neighbors, the Paulsens not among them, brought
their boys for visits to the lakeside house that summer. They found Patty in
much better spirits. One father privately invited Seth Paulsen to imagine her
suntanned and barefoot, in a black one-piece bathing suit and beltless jeans, a
look very much to Seth’s taste. Publicly, everyone remarked on how attentive
and unsullen Joey was, and what a good time he and Patty seemed to be having.
The two of them made all visitors join them in a complicated parlor game that
they called Associations. Patty stayed up late in front of her mother-in-law’s
TV, amusing Joey with her intricate knowledge of syndicated sixties and
seventies sitcoms. Joey, having discovered that their lake was unidentified on
local maps—it was really just a large pond, with one other house on it—had
christened it Nameless, and Patty pronounced the name tenderly, sentimentally,
“our little Nameless Lake.” When Seth Paulsen learned from one of the returning
fathers that Joey was working long hours up there, cleaning gutters and cutting
brush and scraping paint, he wondered whether Patty might be paying Joey a
solid wage for his services, whether this might be part of the deal. But nobody
could say.
As for Connie, the Paulsens could hardly look out a
Monaghan-side window without seeing her waiting. She really was a very patient
girl, she had the metabolism of a fish in winter. She worked evenings, busing
tables at W. A. Frost, but all afternoon on weekdays she sat on her front stoop
while ice-cream trucks went by and younger children played, and on weekends she
sat in a lawn chair behind the house, glancing occasionally at the loud,
violent, haphazard tree-removal and construction work that her mother’s new
boyfriend, Blake, had undertaken with his non-unionized buddies from the
building trades, but mostly just waiting.
“So, Connie, what’s interesting in your life these days?”
Seth asked her from the alley.
“You mean, apart from Blake?”
“Yes, apart from Blake.”
Connie considered briefly and then shook her head.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Are you bored?”
“Not really.”
“Going to movies? Reading books?”
Connie fixed Seth with her steady, we-have-nothing-in-common
gaze. “I saw ‘Batman,’ ” she said.
Blake was a goateed young backhoe operator whom Carol had
met across the counter at the license bureau. His arrival on Barrier Street had
been heralded by a dramatic change in Carol’s look: out had gone the complicated
hair and escort-service dresses, in had come snug pants, a simple shag cut, and
less makeup. A Carol nobody had ever seen, an actually happy Carol, had hopped
buoyantly from Blake’s F-250 pickup, letting anthem rock throb up and down the
street, and slammed the passenger-side door with a mighty push. Soon Blake
began spending nights at her house, shuffling around in a Vikings jersey with
his work boots unlaced and a beer can in his fist, and before long he was
chainsawing every tree in her back yard and running wild with a rented backhoe.
On the bumper of his truck were the words “I’M WHITE AND I VOTE.”
The Paulsens, having recently completed a protracted
renovation of their own, were reluctant to complain about the noise and the
mess, and Walter, on the other side, was too nice or too busy, but when Patty
finally came home, late in August, after her months in the country with Joey,
she was practically unhinged in her dismay, going up and down the street, door
to door, wild-eyed, to vilify Carol Monaghan. “Excuse me,” she said, “what
happened here? Can somebody tell me what happened? Did somebody declare war on
trees without telling me? Who is this Paul Bunyan with the truck? What’s the
story? Is she not renting anymore? Are you allowed to annihilate your trees if
you’re just renting? How can you tear the back wall off a house you don’t even
own? Did she somehow buy the place without our knowing it? How could she do
that? She can’t even change a light bulb without calling up my husband! ‘Sorry
to bother you at the dinner hour, Walter, but when I flip this light switch
nothing happens. Do you mind coming over right away? And while you’re here,
hon, can you help me with my taxes? They’re due tomorrow and my nails are wet.’
How could this person get a mortgage? Doesn’t she have Victoria’s Secret bills
to pay? How is she even allowed to have a boyfriend? Isn’t there some fat guy
over in Minneapolis? Shouldn’t somebody maybe get the word out to the fat guy?”
Not until Patty reached the door of the Paulsens, far
down on her list of go-to neighbors, did she get some answers. Merrie explained
that Carol Monaghan was, in fact, no longer renting. Carol’s house had been one
of several hundred that the city housing authority had come to own during the
blight years and then, as neighborhoods rebounded and cash-starved mayors
looked around for windfalls, had begun selling off at bargain prices to
insiders.
“How did I not know this?” Patty said.
“You never asked,” Merrie said. And couldn’t resist
adding, “You never seemed particularly interested in government.”
“And you say she got it cheap.”
“Very cheap. It helps to know the right people.”
“You know, I always loved this neighborhood,” Patty said.
“I loved living here, even at the beginning. And now suddenly everything looks
so dirty and ugly to me.”
“Don’t get depressed, get involved,” Merrie said, and
gave her some literature.
“I wouldn’t want to be Walter right now,” Seth remarked
as soon as Patty was gone.
“I’m frankly glad to hear that,” Merrie said.
“Was it just me, or did you hear an undertone of marital
discontent? I mean, helping Carol with her taxes? You know anything about that?
I thought that was very interesting. I hadn’t heard about that. And now he’s
failed to protect their pretty view of Carol’s trees.”
“The whole thing is so Reaganite-regressive,” Merrie
said. “She thought she could live in her own little bubble, make her own little
world. Her own little doll house.”
The add-on structure that rose out of Carol’s back-yard
mud pit, weekend by weekend, over the next nine months, was like a giant
utilitarian boat shed with three plain windows punctuating its expanses of
vinyl siding. Carol and Blake referred to it as a “great-room,” a concept
hitherto foreign to Ramsey Hill. Following the cigarette-butt controversy, the
Paulsens had installed a high fence and planted a line of ornamental spruces
that had since grown up enough to screen them from the spectacle. Only the
Berglunds’ sight lines were unobstructed, and before long the other neighbors
were avoiding conversation with Patty, as they never had before, because of her
fixation on what she called “the hangar.” They waved from the street and called
out hellos but were careful not to slow down and get sucked in. The consensus
among the working mothers was that Patty had too much time on her hands. In the
old days, she’d been great with the little kids, teaching them sports and
domestic arts, but now most of the kids on the street were teen-agers. No
matter how she tried to fill her days, she was always within sight or earshot
of the work next door. Every few hours, she emerged from her house and paced up
and down her back yard, peering over at the great-room like an animal whose
nest had been disturbed, and sometimes in the evening she went knocking on the
great-room’s temporary plywood door.
“Hey, Blake, how’s it going?”
“Going just fine.”
“Sounds like it! Hey, you know what, that Skil saw’s
pretty loud for eight-thirty at night. How would you feel about knocking off
for the day?”
“Not too good, actually.”
“Well, how about if I just ask you to stop, then?”
“I don’t know. How about you letting me get my work
done?”
“I’d actually feel pretty bad about that, because the
noise is really bothering us.”
“Yeah, well, you know what? Too bad.”
Patty had a loud, involuntary, whinny-like laugh.
“Ha-ha-ha! Too bad?”
“Yeah, listen, I’m sorry about the noise. But Carol says
there was about five years of noise coming out of your place when you were
fixing it up.”
“Ha-ha-ha. I don’t remember her complaining.”
“You were doing what you had to do. Now I’m doing what I
have to do.”
“What you’re doing is really ugly, though. I’m sorry, but
it’s kind of hideous. Just—horrible and hideous. Honestly. As a matter of pure
fact. Not that that’s really the issue. The issue is the Skil saw.”
“You’re on private property and you need to leave now.”
“O.K., so I guess I’ll be calling the cops.”
“That’s fine, go ahead.”
You could see her pacing in the alley then, trembling
with frustration. She did repeatedly call the police about the noise, and a few
times they actually came and had a word with Blake, but they soon got tired of
hearing from her and did not come back until the following February, when
somebody slashed all four of the beautiful new snow tires on Blake’s F-250 and
Blake and Carol directed officers to the next-door neighbor who’d been phoning
in so many complaints. This resulted in Patty again going up and down the
street, knocking on doors, ranting. “The obvious suspect, right? The mom next
door with a couple of teen-age kids. Hard-core-criminal me, right? Lunatic me!
He’s got the biggest, ugliest vehicle on the street, he’s got bumper stickers
that offend pretty much anybody who’s not a white supremacist, but, God, what a
mystery, who else but me could want to slash his tires? Apparently it’s not
enough for them to nail a barn onto the back of their house, they’ve also got
to sic the cops on me because I don’t happen to love the sound of Paul Bunyan’s
router at ten at night outside my bedroom window.”
Merrie Paulsen was convinced that Patty was, in fact, the
slasher.
“I don’t see it,” Seth said. “I mean, she’s obviously
suffering, but she’s not a liar.”
“Right, except I didn’t actually notice her saying she
didn’t do it.”
“My question is, where is Walter?”
“Walter is killing himself earning his salary so that she
can stay home all day and be a mad housewife. He’s being a good dad to Jessica
and some sort of reality principle to Joey. I’d say he has his hands full.”
Walter’s most salient quality, besides his love of Patty,
was his niceness. He was the sort of good listener who seemed to find everybody
else more interesting and impressive than himself. He was preposterously
fair-skinned, weak in the chin, cherubically curly up top, and had worn the
same round wire frames forever. He’d begun his career at 3M as an attorney in
the counsel’s office, but he’d failed to thrive there and was shunted into
outreach and philanthropy, a corporate cul-de-sac where niceness was an asset.
On Barrier Street he was always handing out great free tickets to the Guthrie
and the Chamber Orchestra and telling neighbors about encounters he’d had with
famous locals such as Garrison Keillor and Kirby Puckett and, once, Prince.
More recently, and surprisingly, he’d left 3M altogether and become a
development officer for the Nature Conservancy. Nobody except the Paulsens had
suspected him of harboring such reserves of discontent, but Walter was no less
enthusiastic about nature than he was about culture, and the only outward
change in his life was his new scarcity at home on weekends.
This scarcity may have been one reason that he didn’t
intervene, as he might have been expected to, in Patty’s battle with Carol
Monaghan. Walter had strong feelings about courtesy and fairness and amity, and
he was borderline uxorious as a husband, but he was apparently willing neither
to support his wife nor to curb her. His response, if you asked him point-blank
about her battle, was to giggle nervously. “I’m kind of a neutral bystander on
that one,” he said. And a neutral bystander he remained all through the spring
and summer of Joey’s sophomore year and into the following fall, when Jessica
went off to college in the East and Joey moved out of his parents’ house and in
with Carol, Blake, and Connie.
The move was a stunning act of sedition and a dagger to
Patty’s heart—the beginning of the end of her life in Ramsey Hill. Joey had
spent July and August in Montana, working on the high-country ranch of one of
Walter’s major Nature Conservancy donors, and had returned with broad, manly
shoulders and two new inches of height. Walter, who didn’t ordinarily brag, had
vouchsafed to the Paulsens, at a picnic in August, that the donor had called
him up to say how “blown away” he was by Joey’s fearlessness and tirelessness
in throwing calves and dipping sheep. Patty, however, at the same picnic, was
already vacant-eyed with pain. In June, before Joey went to Montana, she’d
again taken him up to Nameless Lake to help her improve the property, and the
only neighbor who’d seen them there described a terrible afternoon of watching
mother and son lacerate each other over and over, airing it all in plain sight,
Joey mocking Patty’s mannerisms and finally calling her “stupid” to her face,
at which Patty had cried out, “Ha-ha-ha! Stupid! God, Joey! Your maturity just
never ceases to amaze me! Calling your mother stupid in front of other people!
That’s just so attractive in a person! What a big, tough, independent man you
are!”
By summer’s end, Blake had nearly finished work on the
great-room and was outfitting it with such Blakean gear as a PlayStation,
Foosball, a refrigerated beer keg, a large-screen TV, an air-hockey table, a
stained-glass Vikings chandelier, and mechanized recliners. Neighbors were left
to imagine Patty’s dinner-table sarcasm regarding these amenities, and Joey’s
declarations that she was being ignorant and unfair, and Walter’s angry demands
that Joey apologize to Patty, but the night when Joey defected to the house
next door didn’t need to be imagined, because Carol Monaghan was happy to describe
it, in a loud and somewhat gloating voice, to any neighbor sufficiently
disloyal to the Berglunds to listen to her.
“Joey was so calm, so calm,” Carol said. “I
swear to God, you couldn’t melt butter in his mouth. I went over there with
Connie to support him and let everybody know that I’m totally in favor of the
arrangement, because, you know Walter, he’s so considerate, he’s going to worry
that it’s an imposition on me. And Joey was totally responsible like always. He
just wanted to be on the same page and make sure all the cards were on the
table. He explained how he and Connie had discussed things with me, and I told
Walter—because I knew he’d be worried about this—I told him that groceries were
not a problem. Blake and I are a family now and we’re happy to feed one more,
and Joey’s also very good about the dishes and garbage and being neat, and
plus, I told Walter, he and Patty used to be so generous to Connie and give her
meals and all. I wanted to acknowledge that, because they really were generous
when I didn’t have my life together, and I’ve never been anything but grateful
for that. And Joey’s just so responsible and calm. He explains how, since Patty
won’t even let Connie in the house, he really doesn’t have any other choice if
he wants to spend time with her, and I chime in and say how totally in support
of the relationship I am—if only all the other young people in this world were
as responsible as those two, the world would be a much better place—and how
much more preferable it is for them to be in my house, safe and responsible,
instead of sneaking around and getting in trouble. Connie’s a special person
and I don’t know what would have happened to her if it wasn’t for Joey. I’m so
grateful to him, he’ll always be welcome in my house. I said that to them.
“And I know Patty doesn’t like me, she’s always looked
down her nose at me and been snooty about Connie. I know that. I know a thing
or two about the things Patty’s capable of. I knew she was going to throw some
kind of fit. And so her face gets all twisted, and she’s like, ‘You think he loves
your daughter? You think he’s in love with her?’ In this high little
voice. Like it’s impossible for somebody like Joey to be in love with Connie,
because I didn’t go to college or whatever, or I don’t have as big a house or
come from New York City or whatever, or I have to work an honest-to-Christ
forty-hour full-time job, unlike her. Patty’s so full of disrespect for me, you
can’t believe it. But Walter I thought I could talk to. He really is a sweetie.
His face is beet red, I think because he’s embarrassed, and he says, ‘Carol,
you and Connie need to leave so we can talk to Joey privately.’ Which I’m fine
with. I’m not there to make trouble. I’m not a troublemaking person.
“Except then Joey says no. He says he’s not asking
permission, he’s just informing them about what he’s going to do, and there’s
nothing to discuss. And that’s when Walter loses it. Just loses it. He’s got
tears running down his face he’s so upset—and I can understand that, because Joey’s
his youngest, and it’s not Walter’s fault that Patty is so unreasonable and
mean to Connie that Joey can’t stand to live with them anymore. But he starts
yelling at the top of his lungs, like, ‘YOU ARE SIXTEEN YEARS OLD AND YOU ARE
NOT GOING ANYWHERE UNTIL YOU FINISH HIGH SCHOOL.’ And Joey’s just smiling at
him, you couldn’t melt butter in his mouth. Joey says it’s not against the law
for him to leave, and anyway he’s only moving next door. Totally reasonable. I
wish I’d been one per cent as smart and cool when I was sixteen. I mean, he’s
just a great kid.
“But it made me feel kind of bad for Walter, because he
starts yelling all this stuff about how he’s not going to pay for Joey’s
college, and Joey’s not going to get to go back to Montana next summer, and all
he’s asking is that Joey come to dinner and sleep in his own bed and be a part
of the family. And Joey’s like, ‘I’m still part of the family,’ which, by the
way, he never said he wasn’t. But Walter’s stomping around the kitchen—for a
couple of seconds I think he’s actually going to hit him, but he’s just totally
lost it, he’s yelling, ‘GET OUT, GET OUT, I’M SICK OF IT, GET OUT,’ and then
he’s gone and you can hear him upstairs in Joey’s room, opening up Joey’s
drawers or whatever, and Patty runs upstairs and they start screaming at each
other, and Connie and I are hugging Joey, because he’s the one reasonable
person in the family and we feel so sorry for him, and that’s when I know for
sure that it’s the right thing for him to move in with us. Walter comes
stomping downstairs again and we can hear Patty screaming like a maniac—she’s
totally lost it—and Walter starts yelling again, ‘DO YOU SEE WHAT YOU’RE DOING
TO YOUR MOTHER?’ Because it’s all about Patty, see, she’s always got to be the
victim. And Joey’s just standing there shaking his head, because it’s so
obvious. Why would he want to live in a place like this?”
Although some neighbors did undoubtedly take satisfaction
in Patty’s reaping the whirlwind of her son’s extraordinariness, the fact remained
that Carol Monaghan had never been well liked on Barrier Street, Blake was
widely deplored, Connie was thought spooky, and nobody had ever really trusted
Joey. As word of his insurrection spread, the emotions prevailing among the
Ramsey Hill gentry were pity for Walter, anxiety about Patty’s psychological
health, and an overwhelming sense of relief and gratitude at how normal their
own children were—how happy to accept parental largesse, how innocently
demanding of help with their homework or their college applications, how
compliant in phoning in their after-school whereabouts, how divulging of their
little day-to-day bruisings, how reassuringly predictable in their run-ins with
sex and pot and alcohol. The ache emanating from the Berglunds’ house was sui
generis. Walter—unaware, you had to hope, of Carol’s blabbing about his night
of “losing it”—acknowledged awkwardly to various neighbors that he and Patty
had been “fired” as parents and were doing their best not to take it too
personally. “He comes over to study sometimes,” Walter said, “but right now he
seems more comfortable spending his nights at Carol’s. We’ll see how long that
lasts.”
“How’s Patty taking all this?” Seth Paulsen asked him.
“Not well.”
“We’d love to get you guys over for dinner some night
soon.”
“That would be great,” Walter said, “but I think Patty’s
going up to my mom’s old house for a while. She’s been fixing it up, you know.”
“I’m worried about her,” Seth said with a catch in his
voice.
“So am I, a little bit. I’ve seen her play in pain,
though. She tore up her knee in her junior year and played another two games on
it.”
“But then didn’t she have, um, career-ending surgery?”
“It was more a point about her toughness, Seth. About her
playing through pain.”
“Right.”
Walter and Patty never did get over to the Paulsens for
dinner. Patty was absent from Barrier Street, hiding out at Nameless Lake for
long stretches of the winter and spring that followed, and even when her car
was in the driveway—for example, at Christmastime, when Jessica returned from
college and, according to her friends, had a “blow-out fight” with Joey which
resulted in his spending more than a week in his old bedroom (cynics noted that
he’d moved back just in time to be eligible for Christmas presents)—Patty
eschewed the neighborhood get-togethers at which her baked goods and affability
had once been such welcome fixtures. She was sometimes seen receiving visits
from fortyish women who, based on their hair styles and the bumper stickers on
their Subarus, were thought to be old basketball teammates of hers, and there
was talk about her drinking again, but this was mostly just a guess, since, for
all her friendliness, she had never made an actual close friend in Ramsey Hill.
By New Year’s, Joey was back at Carol and Blake’s. A
large part of that house’s allure was presumed to be the bed he shared with
Connie. He was known by his friends to be bizarrely and militantly opposed to
masturbation, the mere mention of which never failed to elicit a condescending
smile from him; he claimed that it was an ambition of his to go through life
without resorting to it. More perspicacious neighbors, the Paulsens among them,
suspected that Joey also enjoyed being the smartest person in the house. He
became the prince of the great-room, making its pleasures available to everyone
he favored with his friendship (and making the unsupervised beer keg a bone of
contention at family dinners all over the neighborhood). His manner with Carol
verged unsettlingly close to flirtation, and Blake he charmed by loving all the
things that Blake himself loved, especially Blake’s power tools and Blake’s
truck, at the wheel of which he learned how to drive. From the annoying way he
smiled at his schoolmates’ enthusiasm for Al Gore and Senator Wellstone, as if liberalism
were a weakness on a par with masturbation, it seemed he’d even embraced some
of Blake’s politics. He worked construction the next summer instead of
returning to Montana.
And everybody had the sense, fairly or not, that
Walter—his niceness—was to blame. Instead of dragging Joey home by the hair and
making him behave himself, instead of knocking Patty over the head with a rock
and making her behave herself, he disappeared into his work with the Nature
Conservancy, where he’d rather quickly become the state chapter’s executive
director, and let the house stand empty evening after evening, let the flower
beds go to seed and the hedges go unclipped and the windows go unwashed, let
the dirty urban snow engulf the warped “GORE-LIEBERMAN” sign still stuck in the
front yard. Even the Paulsens lost interest in the Berglunds, now that Merrie
was running for city council. Patty spent all of the following summer away at
Nameless Lake, and soon after her return—a month after Joey went off to the
University of Virginia under financial circumstances that were unknown in
Ramsey Hill, and two weeks after the great national tragedy—a “FOR SALE” sign
went up in front of the Victorian into which she and Walter had poured fully
half their lives. Walter had already begun commuting to a new job in
Washington. Though housing prices would soon be rebounding to unprecedented
heights, the local market was still near the bottom of its post-9/11 slump.
Patty oversaw the sale of the house, at an unhappy price, to an earnest black
professional couple with three-year-old twins. In February, the two Berglunds
went door to door along the street one final time, taking leave with polite
formality, Walter asking after everybody’s children and conveying his very best
wishes for each of them, Patty saying little but looking strangely youthful
again, like the girl who’d pushed her stroller down the street before the
neighborhood was even a neighborhood.
“It’s a wonder,” Seth Paulsen remarked to Merrie
afterward, “that the two of them are even still together.”
Merrie shook her head. “I don’t think they’ve figured out
yet how to live.”
[The End]
From The New Yorker
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