Music of the Night (13 page)

The other is, I’ll never eat another dog.

Evil Thoughts

The crazy lady’s goddamn dogs were barking again. Fran shunted the breakfast dishes into the dishwasher (what had won her to the new house was that dishwasher) and swore under her breath.

“What’s the matter?” said Jeffrey, as he went on carefully layering books and notepads into his backpack.

Dear Jeffrey. He so charmingly lived in his youthful mind and was so tolerant even when you pointed out to him the things that should be driving him nuts the way they drove you nuts, even though you weren’t an old married couple, only live-togethers, slightly mismatched. By age, anyway.

“I said I wish somebody would run over those damn dogs of hers,” Fran growled. “Save me, Lord, from little dogs! Everybody knows little dogs are crazy, from being so much smaller than everybody else that they’re scared all the time. And in this case their owner is crazy too.”

“Who, Whatsername next door?” Jeffrey said. “I thought she was a nurse. Do they let crazy people be nurses?”

“No, dummy, not that one. I mean Whatsername up the street two or three houses, toward the park,”

Fran said, glaring at the window over the sink; it was stuck again, and would have to be worked on by somebody (not Jeffrey, who was not handy). “That’s where the dogs are. God, Jeff, don’t you hear them?”

“Sure,” he said equably, “but heck, they’re probably the only company she’s got if she’s as nutty as you think. I can’t find my torts text.”

“Nuttier.” Fran rooted under the sink for the dishwashing fluid. “She really is nuts, no kidding. Did I tell you? She yelled at me for walking past her place, in the back. Around twilight yesterday, while the oven was heating up to make dinner, I took a stroll up to the park. As I passed her place, all of a sudden these dogs started yapping and a floodlight came on, if you can believe that, at the corner of the house; and she started screaming from inside. Waving her arms at me through the front window. It was the damnedest thing.”

Jeffrey patiently lifted up the piles of old newspapers, mail, bills, catalogs, and so on, looking for his book. He would be late for class again, but did he get nervous or rushed? Not him. It was one of the things she loved about him, one of the things that had made the move bearable. When she wasn’t feeling completely jangled herself, and resenting his calm.

“Screaming what?” he said. “What did she say?”

“I don’t know, exactly. I could only catch a few words. It was all so violent and wild—something about burglars. Do I look like a burglar to you? I was just an ordinary, undangerous woman walking along a public thoroughfare in broad daylight, and you’d have thought it was the hordes of Genghis Khan, come to rape and pillage or something.”

“Thought you said ‘twilight,’ ” he observed mildly, pausing to read something from the heap of junk mail.

“All right, twilight, but good grief, Jeff, it was ridiculous! What did she think I was going to do? I could hear her shrieking, and those damn little dogs of hers yipping, all the way to the end of the street.”

“Maybe she’s been burgled a lot,” Jeffrey said, putting the paper down, “or pestered to death by commercial solicitations. What was I looking for?”

“Torts.”

He was probably right. Their own house had been equipped at some recent point with a fancy burglar alarm (much too complex, a nuisance to use), which indicated something about the neighborhood, she supposed. Hell, give the crazy lady in 408 the benefit of the doubt. At least the damned dogs had quit yelping at last.

Jeffrey rolled his bike outside, carrying his book-stuffed pack slung on his back. “Hey, Fran?” he called.

“Um?” she said, reading the directions on the inside of the dishwasher cover again.

“How often are you watering the grass? Look: there’s a bunch of mushrooms sprouting on the lawn.”

Fran tied her bathrobe belt more tightly around her waist and padded outside to stand barefoot on the cement front step and look where he was pointing. She saw a clutch of pale, striated bubbles clustered on a little rise in the grass. The raised place was a writhe of half-buried root that had reached far from the thick-trunked mountain cottonwood that leaned toward the house. Roots showed like gnarled dolphins surfacing all over the lawn.

“I’ve been watering three times a week, just as you said to,” she said, “because it’s been so hot, for September.”

“But sometimes it drizzles at night,” Jeffrey replied. “Too much moisture could be bad for the grass. Let’s try cutting down a little.”

“Sure,” she said. She went to the curb on the concrete path and hugged him, and he almost fell over, bike and all. They giggled and made a minor spectacle of themselves, and then he pedaled away up the quiet suburban street toward the university.

Take that, neighbors, Fran thought, palming her hair back from her face. She almost regretted her youthful looks, which kept it from being obvious (at any distance, anyway) that she was older than Jeffrey. “Older Woman Kisses Law School Lover Goodbye.” Yum.

Never mind, she would show any watching neighbors that she was a worthy householder no matter what. She would tend to her front lawn.

The smooth slope of grass from the front wall of the house down to the sidewalk really was a source of pleasure, roots and all. The sprinkler system was a thrill—all that control, at the mere turn of a handle! All that grass, under the high, dappled canopy of the one large tree. It was a far cry from the little apartment with the tiny brick patio where they had started living together.

She picked her way across the wet grass (alert for deposits left by wandering neighborhood dogs) and inspected the little stand of mushrooms.

They must have popped up overnight; they certainly hadn’t been there yesterday. How nice if they should prove to be edible: sautéed mushrooms, fresh picked, some rare type stuffed with healthful and exotic vitamins, no doubt.

But they didn’t look edible. Seen up close, each mushroom was about as big as a knuckle of her hand, round, and of a particularly unattractive greasy pallor that made her wrinkle her nose. They looked—well,
fungoid
, anything but fresh and wholesome; alien, actually. Alien to the dinner table, anyway, unless it was some French dinner table regularly graced with sauced animal glands and such. Well, sunlight would no doubt kill the pallid little knobs. People grew mushrooms in cellars, didn’t they?

Her newly acquired southwestern lawn was hardly a dark cellar. She was no gardener, but this much she could figure out.

She typed medical transcripts from her tape machine until the dishwasher made a weird sound and vomited dirty water onto the floor. A session with an outrageously expensive plumber, plus his doltish (also expensive) apprentice, followed, and there went the rest of the morning. At least her ancient and rusted Volks started without fuss. But when Fran delivered the transcript pages she had finished, Carmella, her supplier, informed her that two of the doctors were going on vacation (at the same time, of course). There would be less work for a while.

Fran cursed all the way home. If only Carmella had told her sooner that this was coming! If only Fran herself had remembered this seasonal problem from last year (it was exactly the same in Ohio). What could she have done about it, though? Not bought that little rug for the front hallway at the flea market, that’s what.

A package had been left for her with her neighbor on the north, a plump girl who brought it over and introduced herself as Betsy. As Jeff had mentioned, she was a nurse with a late shift at a nearby hospital. To Fran she seemed awfully young and feather-headed to be taking care of sick people. Betsy wandered around admiring the rather scanty furniture and the posters Fran had hung on the walls while she answered Fran’s delicate soundings about the neighborhood around Baker’s Park. Yeah, the “convenience” store down on Rhoades Avenue was a rip-off joint, but the shoemaker next door to it was okay if the work wasn’t anything complicated. And it was a good idea to keep your car doors locked even when it was parked in your driveway. They did have burglaries sometimes, which was why so many people had dogs. Not that the dogs did much good. No, Betsy didn’t have dogs herself and neither did her housemates, one an elementary school teacher, one in social work, all three renting from the older couple (retired now to Florida) who owned the house.

“Anyway,” she added, “those two little monsters in 408 are more than enough for the whole neighborhood!”

Fran laid aside the totally inappropriate blouse her sister had sent her for her birthday (
I’m not a little
old biddy yet
, she thought irritably, but her sister was a decade younger and clearly still had a child’s view of anyone over thirty) and offered Betsy tea. “What
about
that woman?” she said, sitting down across the kitchen table from her visitor. “The one with the dogs?”

“Oh, she’s weird,” Betsy said with cheerful enthusiasm. “Nutty as a fruitcake, if you ask me. I hear her screaming in her place all the time, just yelling like—well, like my mother used to yell at me when I was giving her a really hard time. At first I thought she had kids or something living in there with her, and me and my roommates seriously considered calling the cops in case the old loon was abusing a child or something. It always sounds so
violent
.”

She sat back, shrugging in the oversize shirt she wore in a vain attempt to minimize her sizable bust. “But I’ve never seen anybody else go in or out, not in a year and a half of living here. So I guess she’s just screaming at the dogs, or the TV. I bet she drinks. Female alkies are thin. They drink instead of eating.”

Fran admitted that she hadn’t had a good look at the crazy lady yet but had mostly just heard her.

“Oh, she looks okay, sort of,” Betsy said cautiously. “But boy, is she nuts.”

Fran laughed. “Then I guess it’s lucky that Jeff and I didn’t end up living right next to her. Poor you, being so much closer!”

“I’ll say,” Betsy said vehemently. “She’s craziest of all about men. Watch out, Fran. If that cute guy I saw leaving this morning was your Jeff, she’ll be after him in no time.”

“Then she’ll have a fight on her hands,” Fran retorted. “Jeffrey is mine, as in significant other, life partner, whatever they call it these days.”

In the evening before dinner, while the stew simmered, Fran and Jeffrey walked up the block toward the uneven triangle of green that was Baker’s Park. Passing the crazy lady’s house on the stroll back, Fran looked across the street and saw the bluish glimmer of a TV screen inside the big front window. The house itself was pretty from the front, with a shapely porch, and two jauntily nautical porthole-shaped windows flanking the recessed doorway.

Suddenly a report like a gunshot snapped out from the porch: the screen door, banging hard against the front wall. Two little dogs came skittering down the brick walk, barking wildly, and skidded to a dancing halt at the edge of the crazy lady’s lawn.

“Jeez!” Jeffrey said, protectively grabbing Fran’s arm and picking up their pace, “what did she do, sic them on us? We’re not even on her side of the street!”

“I told you,” Fran said. “The woman is bonkers, and everybody knows it.”

“Well, at least they’re not Dobermans,” he said, looking back over his shoulder at the bouncing, yammering animals.

“Shh,” said Fran, “you don’t want to give her any ideas.”

Secretly, she was relieved to have the little dogs come after her and Jeffrey like that, validating what she had told him about the woman and her animals. And after what Betsy had said, better the dogs than the woman herself, with Jeffrey there.

She cut the grass the next day with the old hand-mower they had found in the tool shed. The mower kept sticking on the raised roots that veined the turf, and she gave up with the job half-done (it was a lot harder than she had imagined).

But she made sure to drag the machine back and forth a couple of times over the bubbly clot of white mushrooms, like greasy blisters, which had expanded rather than drying up and blowing away as she had hoped. Under the grinding blades the mushrooms disintegrated with satisfying ease. The tape she transcribed after lunch was from Doctor Reeves, a plastic surgeon who specialized in burn patients. His dry, dispassionate notes on two children who had been caught in a burning trailer out on the west edge of town made her feel sick.

She quit (there was no rush, with the volume of work slowed to an impoverishing trickle) and went for a walk, hands jammed in her jeans pockets.

Her new neighborhood was made up of small, sturdy houses in an unexpectedly whimsical mixture of styles, most of them several decades old by the look of them. Some showed endearing turns of fantasy, like the two with roofs of tightly layered green tiling cut like the thatched roofs of English cottages, and a small white house higher on the hill that had a miniature fairy-tale tower for a front hallway. There was nothing like the bland sameness of the city’s newer developments; Fran’s spirits lifted. She found herself at the foot of her own street, and out of sheer devilment—and to see what would happen this time—instead of going in she walked up the lane that ran behind the houses on her street, back toward Baker’s Park.

The sandy wheel-track was choked with weeds, vines, and branches hanging over from adjacent yards. The lanes, she knew, had once been used for garbage pickup. Then the city had bought a whole new fleet of garbage trucks which were only afterward discovered to be too wide for the lanes, which now served the purposes of kids, gas men who read your meter with binoculars from their truck windows, the occasional pair of discreetly parked lovers, and (to judge by the crazy lady, anyway) burglars. As Fran swung boldly toward the head of the lane, a sharp rapping sound snapped at her from the back of the crazy lady’s house. A lean figure in a flowered housecoat hovered behind the closed kitchen window: the crazy lady herself, presumably, in a beehive hairdo, banging her fist on the glass in a kind of manic aggression.

Fran smiled and waved as if returning a friendly greeting and walked on, managing not to flinch from the incredible racket of the little dogs shrilling at her back. The crazy lady must have let the dogs into the side yard just so they could rush to the back wall and bark at Fran.