T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

The police — it took her a minute to realize that the shorter of the two was a woman — were on Muriel’s front porch, looking stiff and uncertain in their razor-creased uniforms. The man knocked first — once, twice, three times. Nothing happened. Then the woman knocked. Still nothing. Meg folded her arms and waited. After a minute, the man went around to the side gate and let himself into the yard. Meg heard the sprinklers die with a wheeze, and then the officer was back, his shoes heavy with mud.

Again he thumped at the door, much more violently now, and Meg thought of Sonny. “Open up,” the woman called in a breathy contralto she tried unsuccessfully to deepen, “police.”

It was then that Meg saw her, Muriel, at the bay window on the near side of the door. “Look,” she shouted before she knew what she was saying, “she’s there, there in the window!”

The male officer — he had a mustache and pale, fine hair like Sonny’s — leaned out over the railing and gestured impatiently at the figure behind the window. “Police,” he growled. “Open the door.” Muriel never moved. “All right,” he grunted, cursing under his breath, “all right,” and he put his shoulder to the door. There was nothing to it. The frame splintered, water dribbled out, and both officers disappeared into the house.

Meg waited. She had things to do, yes, but she waited anyway, bending to pull the odd dandelion the gardener had missed, trying to look busy. The police were in there an awful long time — twenty minutes, half an hour — and then the woman appeared in the doorway with Muriel.

Muriel seemed heavier than ever, her face pouchy, arms swollen. She was wearing white sandals on her old splayed feet, a shapeless print dress, and a white straw hat that looked as if it had been dug out of a box in the attic. The woman had her by the arm; the man loomed behind her with a suitcase. Down the steps and up the walk, she never turned her head. But then, just as the policewoman was helping her into the backseat of the patrol car, Muriel swung round as if to take one last look at her house. But it wasn’t the house she was looking at: it was Meg.

The morning gave way to the heat of afternoon. Meg finished the watering, made the pasta salad — bow-tie twists, fresh salmon, black olives, and pine nuts — ran her errands, picked up Tiffany, and put her down for a nap. Somehow, though, she just couldn’t get Muriel out of her head. The old lady had stared at her for five seconds maybe, and then the policewoman was coaxing her into the car. Meg had felt like sinking into the ground. But then she realized that Muriel’s look wasn’t vengeful at all — it was just sad. It was a look that said this is what it comes to. Fifty years and this is what it comes to.

The backyard was an inferno, the sun poised directly overhead. Queenie, de-fleaed, shampooed, and with her toenails clipped, was stretched out asleep in the shade beside the pool. It was quiet. Even the birds were still. Meg took off her Nikes and walked barefoot through the sopping grass to the fence, or what was left of it. The post had buckled overnight, canting the whole business into Muriel’s yard. Meg never hesitated. She sprang up onto the plane of the slats and dropped to the grass on the other side.

Her feet sank in the mud, the earth like pudding, like chocolate pudding, and as she lifted her feet to move toward the house the tracks she left behind her slowly filled with water. The patio was an island. She crossed it, dodging potted plants and wicker furniture, and tried the back door; finding it locked, she moved to the window, shaded her face with her hands, and peered in. The sight made her catch her breath. The plaster was crumbling, wallpaper peeling, the rug and floors ruined: she knew it was bad, but this was crazy, this was suicide.

Grief, that’s what it was. Or was it? And then she was thinking of Sonny again — what if he was dead and she was old like Muriel? She wouldn’t be so fat, of course, but maybe like one of those thin and elegant old ladies in Palm Springs, the ones who’d done their stretching all their lives. Or what if she wasn’t an old lady at all — the thought swooped down on her like a bird out of the sky — what if Sonny was in a car wreck or something? It could happen.

She stood there gazing in on the mess through her own wavering reflection. One moment she saw the wreckage of the old lady’s life, the next the fine mouth and expressive eyes everyone commented on. After a while, she turned away from the window and looked out on the yard as Muriel must have seen it. There were the roses, gorged with water and flowering madly, the Impatiens, rigid as sticks, oleander drowning in their own yellowed leaves — and there, poking innocuously from the bushes at the far corner of the patio, was the steel wand that controlled the sprinklers. Handle, neck, prongs: it was just like theirs.

And then it came to her. She’d turn them on — the sprinklers — just for a minute, to see what it felt like. She wouldn’t leave them on long — it could threaten the whole foundation of her house.

That much she understood.

(1987)

Just outside the sleepy little commuter village of Irvington, New York, there stands a subdivision of half-million-dollar homes, each riding its own sculpted acre like a ship at sea and separated from its neighbors by patches of scrub and the forlorn-looking beeches that lend a certain pricey and vestigial air to the place. The stockbrokers, lawyers, doctors and software salesmen who live here with their families know their community as Beechwood, in deference to the legend hammered into the slab of pink marble at the entrance of Beechwood Drive. This slab was erected by the developer, Sal Maggio, in the late nineteen-sixties, though there are few here now who can remember that far back. For better or worse, Beechwood is the sort of community in which the neighbors don’t know one another and don’t really care to, though they do survey each other’s gardeners and automobiles with all the perspicacity of appraisers, and while the proper names of the people next door may escape them, they are quick to invent such colorful sobriquets as the Geeks, the Hackers, the Volvos, and the Chinks by way of compensation.

For the most part, the handsome sweeping macadam streets go untrodden but for the occasional backward jogger, and the patches of wood are ignored to the point at which they’ve begun to revert to the condition of the distant past, to the time before Maggio’s bulldozer, when the trees stretched unbroken all the way to Ardsley. Fieldmice make their home in these woods, moths, spiders, sparrows, and squirrels. In the late afternoon, garter snakes silently thread the high rank thick-stemmed morass of bluegrass gone wild, and toads thump from one fetid puddle to another. An unpropitious place, these woods. A forgotten place. But it was here, in one of these primordial pockets, beneath a wind-ravaged maple and within earshot of the chit-chit-chit of the gray squirrel, that Irv Cherniske made the deal of his life.

Irv was one of the senior residents of Beechwood, having moved into his buff-and-chocolate Tudor with the imitation flagstone façade some three years earlier. He was a hard-nosed cynic in his early forties, a big-headed, heavy-paunched, irascible stock trader who’d seen it all — and then some. The characteristic tone of his voice was an unmodulated roar, but this was only the daintiest of counterpoint to the stentorian bellow of his wife, Tish. The two fought so often and at such a pitch that their young sons, Shane and Morgan, often took refuge in the basement game room while the battle raged over their heads and out across the placid rolling lawns of Beechwood Estates. To the neighbors, these battles were a source of rueful amusement: separately, yet unanimously, they had devised their own pet nickname for the Cherniskes. A torn, ragged cry would cut the air around dinnertime each evening, and someone would lift a watery gimlet to his lips and remark, with a sigh, that the Screechers were at it again.