Elf Sternberg

The neighbors gave us a better peek into their lives Sunday, despite D., the mother's, insistance that the children not say anything to the neighbors because then we'll know something about them and when you know something about somebody you have power over them. She must take hints from my ex. One of the boys, M., was having his birthday party. It had been put off and put off and put off, as far as we had been told, for various reasons but we were now promised that it would be happening between two and four in the afternoon.

At two, nobody was home.

Kouryou-chan was very upset. They showed up around 2:45, and they weren't ready, but the children invited Kouryou-chan and Yamaarashi-chan over to play with them, so they did. We discovered that the war of the sexes is alive and well next door: the men drink beer and watch sports until they're tired of listening to their wives yell at them, they get up and do what is demanded half-heartedly and then they go back to drinking beer. D. is in charge. They keep chickens in their unfinished basement and pour their dog's food onto the ground in little piles. They bought a brand new trampoline a couple of weeks ago. Already, the safety netting is torn, the padding that held it up shredded, and thanks to children climbing on it half the bars are broken and twisted at the top so that it looks like some sadistic collection of god-sized dental picks and scrapers looming over us. For all D.'s whining about the driveway, their backyard has gone to hell pretty fast.

The party was a chaotic mess. M. was deeply disappointed, and his father treated him less like a son and more like an embarassment, when he paid attention at all. They got around to hot dogs and cake around 7. There was no plan, no games arranged, no thought put into it. I feel sorry for those kids.

I got home from my bicycle ride Monday night to find Omaha and Kouryou-chan getting ready to walk to the park. Exhausted from the Miller Creek Ravine ride, I decided to stay home make dinner instead. We were worried about the eldest boy, who's 9, because one of the things he had gotten for his birthday was a gas-powered pocketbike, one of those micromotorcycles that quite are illegal on public streets. As it turns out, his parents aren't so idiotic as we thought: it has a governer on it preventing it from going more than 12mph and he has a full set of helmet, knee and elbow pads.

On the other hand, we discovered that the 13 year old girl, A., and the 16 year old boy who often watch over the other five kids are not dating; no, he's her nephew. They're not qualified to watch the other kids, not that many. We discovered that A. had been giving all the neighborhood kids vitamins straight out of the bottle, and Kouryou-chan was taking them-- a double dose if she ate any. Fortunately, Omaha found them because Kouryou-chan had left one in her pocket and it had gone through the laundry, so we've advised Kouryou-chan not to eat anything she gets from the neighbors without our permission.

It's kind of scary, actually getting a real window into a family that qualifies under Dalrymple's "not knowing how to live," whose lifestyle consists primarily of drinking, sex, consuming loud and pornographic entertainment, and whose primary method of communicating with their children begins and ends with screaming and yelling. They've taken the fun out of dysfunctional. It's a bit of a shame that we're now in the "Don't take anything from strangers" camp with the neighbors but I'm just not taking any chances with them and my kids.

I'm reluctant to write this because I don't know what happened, but here's what I saw and heard: yesterday, while Omaha and I were getting ready to drive to a restaurant, the woman of the house next door (you know the one) came riding up in her white riced Nissan, driving much faster than the 15 MPH limit our private road demands. We were busy getting Kouryou-chan to put her shoes on but the sound of a child screaming got our attention. Suddenly, we hear the woman next door screaming at the babysitter, who can't be much older than fifteen years old himself: "How you could leave them outside like this? They're not supposed to be outside like this! Get me a fucking towel! Get me a fucking towel now!" The child is still screaming. The babysitter is standing at the front door, arms out at his sides, palms up. We can't hear what he's saying, but she says, "Just shut up and get me a fucking towel!" We step outside in time to see the woman next to her car bundle the child into a big towel and hustle into the house.

A minute or two later, we pull out onto the road and drive by the neighbor's house. Her car is there, awkwardly angled in the driveway. The driver's side door is open.

Beside the driver's side rear panel, a lone child's shoe lay on the asphalt.

So, Omaha's off doing her political thing and Kouryou-chan wants hot dogs, so after an hour of weeding and mowing the front lawn I get to sit on my (admittedly somewhat tatty) deck and sip a tall glass of half 7-Up, half Hogue Late Harvest Reisling over ice and watch as the grill heats up, my laptop in lap and wireless to the downstairs feeding me a really bad Pokemon clone with a really cute catboy in it.

This is life. Kouryou-chan's out front, playing with the neighbor kids. The neighbor to the west, that is, the ones we've known for many years.

While I was weeding, I was distressed to note that the neighbors to the east, as if trying to cement their stereotype, had a pair of dead refrigerators on their lawn on the lee side of the house where it is mostly quiet and shady. Their children are in the yard but seem to be avoiding the kids from the neighbors to the west. I'm not sure what to make of that.

On the other hand I was heartened, if briefly, by the noise coming from the yard: a weed-whacker. I stopped and looked up the man doing the lawncare.

"Hi!" I said. "Same thing I'm doing, huh?"

"Yeah. Gotta do it." He wore a beer-related t-shirt. Scrawny guy with a mustache that is usually described as, well, pardon the expression, "a shitty little mustache."

I nodded. "You the new neighbor?" I pointed at the house.

"Nah. My wife, her and her boyfriend. And my kids. I just came over to see 'em and offered to do her lawn for her. Y'know, just to make a couple of bucks for gas."

Damn. Damn, damn, damn. I really should lower my expectations.