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I buy a house with the money I've salvaged from my divorce. It’s a quiet neighborhood. It’s the kind of neighborhood where a woman feels safe walking at night. It’s the kind of neighborhood where you can get up in the morning and have your orange juice on your front porch or on your back patio and listen to the birds sing while squirrels chase each other around the thick trunks of 60 foot high trees. Rabbits romp around the yard. The dog sleeps in the soft grass. The cat curls up in the window sill. Yes, all is right with the world.
I finally won the passive aggressive war with the Non-Scooping Poodle-Pooping guy. It took a sign, some words, and a couple of intimidating visits from the dog warden and the police, but it looks like the idiot finally got the hint. Ahhhh…life is good.
Like in any neighborhood, there are some houses for sale. And really, won’t someone really appreciate a place like this? Who wouldn’t really pay top dollar for this life?
I had a 3000 square foot house, an acre and a half lot, and a man I loved. Everything a girl is supposed to want, right?
Only the lot was close to the highway and noisy, the man laid on the couch all day watching the military history channel with the TV turned up so loud that you could hear it outside when the windows were closed. And the windows were always closed and the blinds pulled because the noise of the traffic gave him a headache and the light of the sun made him sick. He didn’t work in the yard, didn’t work at all. He didn’t want the dog on the furniture, didn’t want the dog going in the yard because he didn’t like dog poop in the yard – not that he ever mowed or had to see the yard. If I made a big elaborate dinner – and I can cook – he’d take a look at it and have Hot Pocket’s instead. He didn’t want the cat in the window because the cat hair was impossible to get out of the screen –not that he ever cleaned the windows. He was a constant on that couch with that television, normally with a bong on the table next to him. When I sold the house, I actually wasn’t sure if the new owners inherited him as a fixture on the property or not.
No, I’ve discovered that this sanctuary is what every girl should want. Life with a good book, a glass of wine, a good meal made fresh from one’s own garden with no one to tell you it looks like shit and they’d prefer shit in a pocket, a happy dog, a lazy cat, and the wind rustling through the leaves of the trees. So, when the house across the street sold, I thought someone appreciated this place, this utopia of sorts.
It was about 3 in the afternoon on a Sunday when the house started to shake. The dog jumped awake and ran to the front door barking. The cat jumped out of the window and hurtled herself to some hiding spot. I jump up and look out the window.
There’s a U-Haul backing into the driveway across the street. A woman is standing behind it. She’s wearing gray sweatpants and a pastel blue spaghetti strap tank top; she’s a big woman…BIG and that’s coming from someone who ain’t exactly dainty. The tank doesn’t pull all the way down to cover her gut which is striped with stretch marks. She’s holding an infant in one arm; the baby hangs over her forearm like a sack of potatoes. With her other arm, she’s waving the truck back. The driver is hanging out of the window looking at her. He wears a wife-beater shirt and a doo-rag.
I watch in fascination as it takes them about 45 minutes to get the truck up that driveway and for the music to stop. The driver jumps out of the truck and talks loudly as if he’s on stage for the entire neighborhood. To be fair, he probably is. I can imagine the older folks who’ve lived on this quiet street for 40-some years staring out their windows in horror at the ass crack of the driver who can barely walk from jeans hanging down practically to his ankles—and we all know he’s not wearing underwear, not something you want to know about new neighbors right out of the gate, so to speak. He says “You did a great job getting me in there, Baby.”
She shouts back. “Thank you, Baby.”
He pulls out a cigarette and starts smoking…apparently, it’s smoke break time.
She walks to the Expedition parked on the street and opens the back door.
Diapers and blankets fall out onto the street. And then I watch in fascination. It’s like the clowns in the circus. The kids start piling out. In diapers and barefeet. It’s like some kind of alien pod has opened up and the spores are being released.
By 5 PM, they’re gone. The strangest moving schedule I ever saw, but I suppose he took the week off of work to move and all those kids, well, they have to be neighbor kids or something.
It’s 6 am the next morning. I hear children laughing and screaming. In my half asleep mind, I wonder if the school bus broke down outside my window or something.
I get up and bleary-eyed for a Monday, I look out the kitchen window. For the record, I spend a lot of time at my kitchen window, looking out. I think it’s a prerequisite of all single people to eat breakfast at the kitchen sink.
The Expedition has returned. The kids are running around the yard in barefeet and diapers. They’re going through the trash left by the former owners who stacked it all on the curb on Friday when they moved out. Mom’s standing by the garage watching them go through two garbage cans and several boxes. There’s a baby carrier on the hood of her Expedition. Dad’s standing by the front door, smoking a cigarette.
By the time I leave for work at 8:30 am, they’re gone again.
When I come home from work, there’s the head board and a footboard for a big bed leaning against the garage door.
Tuesday, apparently, they spent the night, arriving sometime after I went to bed at midnight. This is just an assumption, I don’t know for sure. I’m assuming because Dad is standing by the front door smoking a cigarette in his wife-beater and boxer shorts that hang down low enough to keep the air flow around his ass crack. Maybe he has some kind of medical condition that requires a free air exposure to his ass crack. He’s very skinny too, by the way. Imagine Jack Sprat and his wife.
When I’m home Tuesday night, I’m putting down mulch in my flower beds – it’s spring. And I hear some glass being shoved around. I glance behind me and Dad—he’s wearing baggy shorts again, thank God—is going through the garbage. I watch in fascination as he collects it and tosses what he doesn’t want into the front yard. He carries the stuff he does want inside. This stuff has been out on the curb since Friday, this is Tuesday, it rained and stormed on Friday, this is Tuesday. He’s scavenging garbage after it’s been in the weather for 5 days, with stray cats around, squirrels, rabbits, skunks, mice, spiders, worms...you can’t make stuff like this up.
The rest of the week is fairly quiet. I’m sure they’re getting ready to go back to work this week. But no. Well, maybe they took two weeks off. Let’s hope, I’m pretty tired of getting woken up in the morning by people yelling “Get in the fucking car!!”
I start to get curious. I used to be a reporter and I was good at it then. I’m better at it now, I have a computer and I’m older so I know more about where to look. I find out the owner. I find out they bought the house specifically to rent to these people because they had an extra kid and needed a bigger house. I find out the tenant’s name. Technically, this is the only part of the search which should have been difficult, but it turns out you mention to cops, teachers, school officials, and charities that your neighbors came from their district and have 7 kids, they are surprisingly well known. And no wonder, because when I check their names under the court house records, they have just under 100 charges between the two of them. Everything ranging from speeding to theft to child endangering to domestic violence. They don’t have time to work, there are WAY too many court dates to make.
They “make” the police blotter in the paper for trying to steal a swimming pool. Three days later, a swimming pool shows up crumpled up on their driveway, not in a box. It actually looks like someone had a pool, emptied the water out and delivered it to them without bothering to roll it up or fold it. I’m sure that’s what happened.
It’s a quiet evening, about 11:30 pm. I’m sitting outside with the dog. I hear a voice ring out through the darkness: “Stop running down the fucking sidewalk, you got shit running down your leg. Your mom should change your diaper sometime.” This is not cute. Crap filled diapers are not cute. They’re not cute to people who have kids. They’re even less cute to people who have no children. Trust me on this. Ew. Of course, the dumb dog is barking now—apparently dogs aren’t fond of announcements like that either.
The neighbors are complaining about things being stolen. This has never happened here before. No one has reported a missing pool that I know of.
By now, I’m used to the swearing, the yelling, the loud stage talking that interrupts my solitude. I’m used to the lights of the cops filling the night. I’m even used to the Expedition with the expired tags sitting on the street while their brand new minivan drives around with the plates that should be on the other vehicle. I know I’m a snob when I ask how people with no jobs and 7 children manage to afford a brand new vehicle; actually forget I asked. I’m sure someone bought it for them, some charity who felt sorry for this clan of 9 with 7 children who range in age from 7 to newborn. I know I’m a bitch when I suggest that instead of a minivan someone should have bought some birth control and stopped this madness. Normal people don’t have children they can’t afford and irresponsible people shouldn’t be allowed to have children period.
I admit that much of this problem is mine. I mean, they’re playing in the street at 11:30pm, but Dad is standing right there smoking his cigarette watching them. Mom throws them in the house while she traipses around in her camisole top and flannel short shorts. I’m really trying not to be offended by the fact that they’ve been irresponsible their entire lives and yet have ended up in the same place that I worked to get to. Plus, I’ve managed not to punch someone who calls me insensitive about people who put more importance on family than on work and feel that society should support these people. Frankly, I think we should take these kids away and put them in some kind of home where they’ll be taught the value of hard work, personal responsibility, and rules. But, that’s really wrong of me to say—how dare I suggest a child be taught these things anyway, who do I think I am??
Last week, I’m standing at my kitchen sink cleaning spinach for dinner and the lights flicker. I glance at the light bulb I’ve just changed and curse because I just changed that bulb and it can’t be going out again—after all, thanks to the government helping us, light bulbs have gone from 25 cents to 16 dollars a piece, but that’s another blog. Then the clock on the stove goes out. I look out front and I see smoke coming from the sidewalk under the electric transformer on the pole across the street. There are sparks coming off it.
Six kids jump out of their new pool and run towards the smoke and sparks. They’re wet and barefoot and looking at the smoke and up at the sparks. Mom is on the porch and the baby carrier is on the driveway on the opposite of the minivan, out of her sight. I hear her say, “Do you see anything?” to the kids.
I say, “Yeah, I see seven dead kids,” I say. She can’t hear me because I reserve my stage voice for noisy bars and standing in front of classrooms when I teach.
The dog hears. She tilts her head and gives a soft little “ruff” as if she’s agreeing—and using her inside voice as she was taught by her responsible mother.
I roll my eyes at the dog. “Oh, who cares,” I say. “They’ll just make more.”
