It Looked Different on the Model (16 page)

I really tried hard not to take it personally, and I suppose that it stung that much harder because I liked Martha and her husband, I thought they were nice people, and my feelings were kind of hurt. Yes, I am a jackass who tried to lie my way through a Christmas carol. Yes, I am the neighbor who spazzed out on the shaking of bells and evidently took it too far. Yes, I am the one who would completely mouth the words again if given the chance, because if my hostess thought that was bad,
she should have heard the damage I could have done with my lungs activated and at full blast. People have reacted more calmly to air raid sirens than they have to my singing voice. And here we were. New on our street, already outcasts. I hoped that it was a misunderstanding and maybe this party wasn’t the same sort of party as the holiday party last year; maybe this was a party that we wouldn’t fit in with, much like the parties we had had full of graduate students. Maybe this was a party strictly for the senior center, I tricked myself into thinking. And then, in the window, I saw a different neighbor chatting with another guest, a neighbor that wasn’t a member of the senior center or anything like that. The neighbor was just a neighbor. And I had to admit that we weren’t invited because I was just me.

I had failed the audition for “fun neighbor.”

We didn’t get invited the next year, either, or the year after that, but by then, whenever I saw a stream of jolly, happy holiday people descending on Martha’s house, the sting wasn’t quite so sharp. I had learned to expect it.

And then one day in December last year, Martha rang our doorbell.

My husband answered it, and she asked if he might be free to help move a heavy table for her. He said sure, and when he came back, he mentioned that after he had helped move the table down a flight of stairs, Martha looked at the space in the living room where the table had been and exclaimed, “This year, we’ll have room for dancing!”

I looked at my husband intently.

“Really?” I asked. “She said that?”

He nodded his head.

“What do you think that means?” I prodded further.

“Well,” he began, “I think it means there’s going to be some high kicks over there some night soon.”

“Did she say anything about an invitation?” I queried.

“No,” he replied. “But I have a lot to do today. I didn’t stand around and make small talk.”

“Maybe she’ll put the invitation in the mail, like last time,” I wondered aloud.

“We weren’t invited last time,” my husband reminded me.

“I mean the time we were invited,” I said, a little irritated.

“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I wouldn’t count on it.”

“Well, who would ask someone over to move heavy pieces of furniture to make a dance floor and then not invite them to the party?” I asked. “No one would do that. I think we’re back in. We have to be back in. Right? Don’t you think? Wouldn’t you feel bad if you didn’t invite someone who helped you? I would. I felt bad when the UPS lady delivered the turkey and I didn’t invite her over for Thanksgiving. We’re back in. We have to be back in!”

My husband just shrugged. “I moved a table down some stairs,” he replied. “I didn’t go to Israel and initiate peace talks.”

That following Thursday, there was indeed dancing at Martha’s house. People were breaking out moves you typically only see at weddings with an open bar. It was a good thing she moved the table; she really did need the room. I had to stop a couple of times because I was laughing so hard I could hardly breathe, especially when my husband went for broke and delivered a David Lee Roth high kick that missed a lamp by millimeters.

To be honest, I hadn’t had that much fun in a long time. We danced a little, ate some snacks, and I single-handedly brought “Jingle Bells” back, at the top of my lungs, for all to hear.

I sang it loud and proud, until it annoyed my little dog so much that she jumped up and attempted to push me down,
while my husband used the fake sleigh bells from this year’s storm-wreckage wreath and accented Ev! Ery! Sin! Gle! Syl! La! Ble! In the chorus AND the verses.

Far away and across the street, I doubt anybody at Martha’s had such a good time.

T
o tell the truth, I had walked up into the house through the front door and had gone back to the car three times in the course of the day before I noticed something was wrong. When it finally hit me that things were not as they should be in front of my house, I stopped dead in my tracks and gasped dramatically, “You have GOT to be shitting me!”

Frankly, I don’t know what other reaction you could possibly have once you realize two trees have been stolen from your yard.

The two trees, on either side of my porch in enormous pots, were gone. Simply gone. As in not there. The enormous pots were still there, but the trees themselves—two beautiful azaleas with fuchsia-colored flowers that had just exploded into bloom—were no longer planted in them.

I stood there and stared at the porch, speechless, looking for the trees. Because as anyone who’s had anything stolen from them will tell you, the first reaction you will have when you discover your thing is gone is that you will look for it. As in, “Certainly my eyes deceive me. Humanity cannot be so depraved that someone would thieve up to my front porch in the dead of night and steal two trees from my yard. I have overlooked them
taking a break from being potted trees and they are in lawn chairs sunning themselves on the north side of the yard, because I’m sure it’s frustrating to be a tree and never be able to go anywhere, suffering from Restless Trunk Syndrome.”

And no matter how many times you’ve been stolen from, the reaction is always the same: disbelief. Complete and overwhelming shock to the point that if you go out to the street and your car has been stolen, if there is a fire hydrant within the general vicinity, you will look behind it. Because you cannot believe it. Getting robbed, it seems, never gets old.

As it turns out, this isn’t the first time that I’ve had live goods plucked from within inches of my front door. I’m actually a veteran of plant crime. On Mother’s Day a few years ago, some asshole waddled up to his mother’s house with a ceramic pot full of pincushion flowers and Miracle-Gro potting soil that I had purchased from Home Depot merely eighteen hours before. It hadn’t even cleared my bank account yet when D. B. Cooper jumped off my front steps holding my planter, scurried to his getaway car—which, remarkably, wasn’t registered to me—and showed the jackal who bore him that although he couldn’t be bothered to stop in at Walgreens to get a friggin’ card and a stuffed animal, a son’s love is always worth making a rap sheet a couple of lines longer.

That morning, I even looked behind the folding chair I also had on the porch for the twenty-pound pot of flowers, just in case I had misplaced it.

But you know what? There’s no misplacing trees. I mean, you can gasp and shake your head all you want, but you’ll never find your tree under a paper towel on the coffee table or behind a loaf of bread on the kitchen counter. It wasn’t like they were hiding in the mailbox or stuffed behind a solar light.

When I finally recovered enough to speak, I yelled to my
husband to come outside quickly, and when he did and I explained what had happened, the first thing he did was look for them, too.

“The trees?” he said, his eyes darting from corner to corner. “They took the trees? Are you sure? How does someone steal trees? They were as big as you. They were as tall as you are!”

And then, since I’d had extensive and thorough detective training because
Law & Order
was Nana’s favorite show, I began to search for clues. Yet, oddly enough, there weren’t any.

“This is creepy,” I said to my husband, pointing to the facts of the case. There was no soil spillage. The area around the pots was completely clean. It was as if the trees were surgically removed, as if someone used a laser.

“It’s like a cattle mutilation,” I dared to whisper, a little bit in awe. Frankly, I can’t pull a tomato plant out of a four-inch pot without spraying dirt in a five-foot radius like a soil-filled jack-in-the-box, so I could only come to the conclusion that whoever helped themselves to my trees had some sort of extraordinary method of extraction.

“This was planned,” my husband said, who had a couple of
Law & Order
marathons under his belt, as well. “This wasn’t a random shrubbery theft. This was a deliberate hit.”

“You know, I’m inclined to think that,” I said, almost laughing. “But in this town that would mean we were insinuating that a couple of hippies got together and coordinated something more complex than who was bringing the pot and who was bringing the bong.”

“Believe me, I know how impossible it sounds,” my husband agreed. “But this was planned. There’s no way someone drove by here at three in the morning after the bars closed, noticed that we had some particularly lovely trees, and happened to have a shovel and tarps. I’ve never known a drunk to choose
digging over a three-for-a-dollar taco run. No, this was brazen. I highly doubt these were the first trees they’ve abducted. Now it’s your turn to say something snappy, Len.”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “Why would drunks steal trees when three blocks away there are still two street signs left on High Street?”

“I guess we’ll never know what kind of person steals trees,” he said simply, clapped his hands together once as if the case had been solved, and went inside.

But I had an idea.

The tree theftery wasn’t the first such ridiculously bizarre event to happen in my front yard, and this wasn’t even the same front yard where my potted flowers had been stolen. Several months earlier, my sister was due to pull into the driveway with her son and my brother-in-law for a visit, when my little dog, Maeby, went nuts over something she spotted while standing guard at the screen door. My sister had never been to my new house before, and I knew that whatever went down during their vacation—good, bad, and downright ugly—was going to be in the full debriefing report she would supply to my mother upon her return home. After which there would be a phone call from my mother, who was still quite upset that I had moved beyond running distance from her, and who would delight in telling me that her suspicions about my new abode were absolutely confirmed, relaying that “Your sister said there were weeds in the cracks in your sidewalk, you still haven’t learned to vacuum, and your dog isn’t as smart as you said she is.”

Thinking my sister had arrived early, I went to the door and took a peek outside but saw nothing and chalked it up to a taunting squirrel. Five minutes later, Maeby went nuts again, and this time I walked out into the front yard for a more thorough investigation. It didn’t take more than three steps to see what was causing the commotion.

There, in my fertilized, mowed green grass, was a heap right under the biggest tree in the yard. A heap of human. It was wearing a hoodie, baggy pants belted basically at the knees, and a backward baseball hat. Initially I wasn’t sure how to proceed, but I marched right over to the tree and hoped that I would figure it out once I got closer.

The heap, it turned out, was a guy, lying on his back, his skinny legs bent up, and his arms splayed wide across the grass. He had not been there five minutes prior when Mae alerted me to the presence of an intruder, but he was there now, sprawled out in my yard with less than ten minutes to the touchdown of my sister. He was a young guy, teens, maybe early twenties, but no older than that, I decided, as I looked at his bony, angular, and paler-than-any-pale-should-really-be complexion. But I stopped wondering about the drained color of his skin once I saw an ant crawl across his eyelid.

And then another ant. And another ant.

Now, to say that a swarm of ants was marching across his face may be a bit too suggestive, but I have to emphasize that “swarm” is a relative term when creatures have more than two legs and they appear in multiples. To me, that’s a battalion, and to make matters worse, when they’re invading a landscape that happens to be a face, there’s usually only one reason for that: The face is on a corpse.

My stomach flipped and a curtain of horror dropped on me.

“… and your sister tells me that when she drove up to your house, there was a dead person in your yard!” I could hear my mother dig. “Who has a dead person in their yard? No normal person has a dead person in their yard! There is not one single person in my neighborhood who ever had their sister visit when there was a dead person in their yard! EVER. Why do you have dead people in your yard? Do you think it’s funny to have dead
people in your yard? Well, let me tell you, your sister was
very
upset! And it’s not funny!”

I had approximately three to four minutes to move the carcass from my yard into my neighbors’ yard so my sister would think it was
their
dead person. But, ever the optimist, I decided to hope against hope and resuscitate him with the power of fright.

“Young man,” I commanded loudly, as I stood over him and the kingdom of the ants. “
Young man
! Are you all right?”