Screaming Woman, Man with Gloves

Neighbor Essay #3

It was the same neighborhood but I started to see it, and hear it, differently.  There was the usual blend of grown-ups and kids; some had more than others.  Mrs. Collins down the block had three boys and wanted a girl so bad that she was always putting her scarf on her head and going to church and praying for a girl.  Mother said “be careful what you wish for” cause she had four girls and knew how much trouble they were, but Mrs. Collins prayed hard and often, and before you know it, she had a girl.  She named her Mary, as she had promised the Blessed Mother she would (she had two more girls after that, but Mother said she hadn’t prayed for them).

There was the short man who wore white gloves all the time and held his hands up in the air kind of, and walked with his mother, even though he was a grown up himself and he didn’t talk to anyone.  And there was Eddie, who had beautiful smooth tan skin and happy eyes, but my Mother said not to get too friendly with him.

The new apartment was larger and lighter.  It had a front room that we called the porch, with windows facing onto the street; the TV was there, and Mother had her African violets on the windowsills.  It was just big enough for two chairs and a small bookcase.  In later years, that room would be a safe haven for boyfriends, situated as it was, at the very front of the railroad style apartment and out of hearing range from the kitchen where my father sat every night after dinner.  Our new landlords had an overweight cocker spaniel named Ginger who didn’t like kids, and had to be carried up the flight of stairs, because something was wrong with her. The landlady’s huffing and puffing, together with her humming, (why doesn’t she get a tune, Mother would say) was a familiar and annoying sound to us. 

My sister and I shared a narrow bedroom, right off the kitchen.  We had twin beds with carved pineapp-ley things as bed posts.  My bed, closest to the door, overshot the doorway by a few inches, so the door could not close.  The window in our bedroom faced the downstairs apartment next door, with an alleyway in between that led to two garages in the back of the houses.  The alleyway was so narrow that Fred the landlord scraped the side of his car more than once as he backed out of the garage. My mother said he should get new glasses.

In the apartment across the alleyway lived a pale young woman named Vivian, with her two pale faced toddler children who had startlingly whitish, blond hair. Her skin was the whitest I’d ever seen and it stretched tight across her face and her pointy nose. She was very thin and narrow and she wore dark, narrow skirts and crisp shirts.  She was rarely seen in the neighborhood, and hardly spoke to anyone if she did. My mother said if she took the children out once in a while, they would get some color in their faces. 

There were early mornings when the sun was barely up, and some evenings when it was just going down, in warmer weather, when private sounds carried chillingly across the narrow alleyway through the windows, cracked open to catch a soft spring breeze. 

It began with the muffled sounds of the children crying or yelling or fighting with each other.  And then she would start yelling and it would get louder and louder, until the wobbly screeching of her voice filled me with terror.  It was different from my mother’s screams, or maybe we are inured to our own family dramas.  Her screams would soon be mixed with the sound of the toddlers, quietly sobbing.  My sister and I would press our pillows over our heads to escape the sound, wishing it to stop. 

It became a part of our lives, and one that we never got used to.