The Neighbor

4

Sitting in my room, at the window, watching the house next door through a gap in the otherwise closed draperies, I tried to remember everything I knew about Rupert Clockenwall. He had taught English at Jefferson Middle School for forty years. He was scheduled to retire at sixty-two, but he died a month before the end of the school year.

During his career, he twice received the city’s Best Teacher of the Year award. He had never been married. Some people thought he might be gay, but he had never been seen in the company of a companion of that persuasion. Those were the days when people were ignorant enough to think that all gay men minced or lisped, or both, and had no bones in their wrists. Mr. Clockenwall exhibited none of that behavior. He never went away on vacations. He said that he was a bad traveler and a homebody. He always declined with regrets when he was invited to a neighbor’s house, and to express his gratitude for the invitation, he sent flowers. He never spoke an unkind word about anyone. His voice was soft and melodious. He had a warm smile. He liked to putter in the yard, and he grew amazing roses. Around the house, he favored Hush Puppies, khaki slacks, and long-sleeved plaid shirts; cardigans on cooler days. He’d once found an injured bird and nursed it back to health, releasing it when it could fly again. He always bought Girl Scout Cookies, usually ten or twelve boxes. When the local troop sold magazine subscriptions, he bought a lot of those, too, and when once they peddled hand-woven pot holders, he’d taken a dozen. He had a soft spot in his heart for Girl Scouts. He had no pets. He said that he was allergic to cats; dogs frightened him. He stood about five foot nine. He weighed maybe a hundred sixty pounds. Washed-out blue eyes. Pale-blond hair, going white. His face was no more memorable than a blank sheet of typing paper.

Rupert Clockenwall seemed to have been too bland a soul to come back from the grave on a haunt. The more that I thought about what had happened in his house earlier, the more certain I became that I had misunderstood it. After an hour, when I saw nothing of interest through the gap in my bedroom draperies, I went downstairs to help Amalia with her chores.

We worked together for half an hour, making the beds in our parents’ room, using the vacuum cleaner, dusting, before I asked if she was ready to talk about what had happened. She said no.

Forty minutes later, in the kitchen, after we had toted that barge and lifted that bale, as we were peeling carrots and potatoes for dinner, I asked her again, and she said, “Nothing happened.”

“Well, something did.”

Focused intently on the potato that she was skinning, Amalia said, “Something happened only if one or both of us insists it did. If both of us decide nothing happened, then nothing happened. You know what they say — if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to see it, then it didn’t fall. Okay, all right, I know that’s not how it goes. If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one to hear it, maybe it didn’t make a sound. But my version is a logical corollary. Entirely logical. No tree fell in the Clockenwall house, so there was nothing to hear or see. You’re twelve, so maybe that doesn’t make sense to you, but when you’ve had a few more years of math and a course in logic, you’ll understand. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“If nothing happened, what is it you don’t want to talk about?”

“Exactly,” she said.

“Are you scared or something?”

“There’s nothing to be scared of. Nothing happened.”

“Well, at least now we’re talking about it,” I said.

She threw a ribbon of potato skin at me, and it stuck to my face, and I said, “Sibling abuse,” and she said, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”