Mary Quinn listened to the washing machine grumble as she watched the children from her washroom window playing in the next yard. They weren't children, she knew, but it was difficult not to think of them so as they spiked the air with their brief grunts of laughter. Her own daughter Myna sat at the kitchen table coloring, the crayons fanned around her like spilled chunks of gemstones. The aurin fleece of her hair fell across the freckled arm that ratcheted back and forth across the picture. The washing machine hissed through its spin cycle and hummed slowly to a stop. Mary tucked her hair neatly under a kerchief. "C'mon, tyro, time to help." Myna, sweeping her hair back in a short but not ungraceful gesture, slid out of her chair and dragged a wicker basket from the corner where it crouched.
"Why don't you use the dryer?" she asked as her mother shoveled the clothes from the washer to the basket. "We got a dryer." She stood politely waiting, sneakered feet set slightly apart, small tummy protruding.
"Because," Mary said, huffing slightly as she guided a long serpentine sheet into the basket, "I like the smell. The air makes the clothes smell good."
"Even with them next door?" She shifted her stance, scratched her arm. A ribbon of hair clung to an eyelash, bobbed as she blinked.
"Honey, where did you hear that? People like them don't make the air smell bad." Mary leaned over, moved the strand of hair back into place. "People like them next door are gentle people. They're different, not bad." She stood up. "C'mon, trooper, grab the clothespins. We a'gonna make our trek out to the wilderness." The girl, neither smiling nor pouting, unhooked a canvas bag and followed the basket-carrying figure out of the kitchen.
Outside, sunlight ricocheted like arrows off the somnolent grass and grey strictness of the stockade fence. Mary heaved the basket to the ground and Myna, knowing the ritual well, stood next to her like a little aide-de-camp, a clothespin at the ready. Next door Myna could see the arc of a ball over the jagged lip of the fence, then hear the unseen thump as it landed like a stone in a pool of babbling laughter. "Hey there, sport, I need more pins." Myna, squintingly reflective, looked up at her mother while her hand rummaged woodenly in the bag. Mary, unfurling the last end of a sheet, neatly lifted it to miss the ground, pinned it home. "What's on your mind?"
The balled arced up again in the opposite direction. "What's wrong with them?" she asked, a clothespin stuck up in the air, a small image of the Statue of Liberty. "Where did they come from?"
"One question at a time." Mary flapped a towel over the line. "Hard to say what's wrong with them, honey. Hard to say."
Myna, clearly not satisfied, sat down squarely in the fluid dimness of the sheet's shade. Mary knew what that obstinate motion meant: no more work until the questions were answered. She wondered, in the short descent from upright to kneeling, how to explain to this child the intricacies of failed genetics, how ever to outline to her the reasons for the raised voices in their parlor when the neighbors gathered to talk. The ball looped upward -- Myna watched it fall.
"Honey, these people aren't like you and me," Mary began. "They -- "
"Well, I don't know. They talk okay. A little funny, like their noses are stuffed."
"When did you talk to them?" Mary asked, a trifle too quickly.
Myna didn't miss it. "Shouldn't I talk to them?"
"No. I mean yes. Just don't -- " Mary couldn't finish, already outmaneuvered by this freckled upturned face. "Look," she said sternly, regaining control, "they have problems. Not problems like being sick or a broken leg, but something else, something inside their bodies --"
"I don't believe it," Myna said affirmatively, standing up. Her face was even with Mary's.
Mary hesitated, debating whether to push the subject, and finally let out a long chuckling sigh. "Maybe you're right, kitten, maybe you're right." She got to her feet, reached down. "Pin?"
Just then the ball, in a wide friendly parabola, sailed into their yard. Mary and Myna watched as the people next door lined up at the fence, the line of the fence cutting them across the shoulder like a gallery of busts. Except that no busts ever shaped for grave and measured purpose resembled this collection. To a person the five of them smiled, sweat from the morning sun shiny on their faces, and they jostled each other like train cars on a siding. But it was clear they were not children. Two of the males had mustaches, thin affairs, and one woman was clearly well-developed, her hair wholesomely intemperate. "The ball," one of them said, pointing his finger at Myna, "the ball."
Myna didn't move. Neither did she look at Mary. Instead, in a voice neither shrewish nor mocking, she simply said, "Say please."
The man was perplexed for a moment. With a mixture of pity and apprehension, Mary watched him screw and contort his face as he tried to make the cells of brain connect. Then suddenly, like the first gunshot cracking of ice on the river in the spring, his face unhinged and he shot out, in a clear sharp staccato, "I want the ball, please."
Only then did Myna carry the ball to him. He took it lightly from her hands. Mary, observing all with a bemused yet tender fascination, caught the ball in her gaze just at the pause before it left Myna's hands, and for an odd moment, as if time had lurched a little bit to the side, she saw the two of them, the ball between them, inextricably tangled in the smell of the grass and the brilliance of the white sheets and the uncoiling light of a summer morning. Then the ball was gone and they were gone.
They finished the wash in silence. As they turned to go inside Myna pulled on Mary's slacks. "I heard them the other morning practicing to be polite." Mary tousled the child's hair, her throat tight with love and wonder. They shared a lemonade and colored a sailboat together.
"What're they all looking like thieves for?" Susan asked Mary as she filled Mary's glass with gin and tonic and handed it to her. They were surrounded by the remains of a barbecue in honor of Susan's son Jamie's First Communion. Everyone had been well-fed -- the children, young and not-so-young, played in the backyard. The adults sat in lawn chairs, gin-and-tonics in hand, content and lazy. "What are they talking about?"
Mary said she didn't know, but she knew. It was the one topic of conversation in which her neighbors could indulge themselves without the men retiring to the basement for pool and the women rambling on about diapers and college. When they parleyed like this she tried to be disaffected, gazing at her hands or over the head of her husband who, with ill-concealed impatience, wished she would pay more attention to this "very serious problem." She sipped her drink and put it down: too much gin. She was just about to dilute it when Susan dragged on her arm and pulled her away. "I know. It's the retreads." Mary left the drink on the table.
"Well, here are they are," boomed Carl, Susan's husband. He was a beefy man, mostly bald, solid, like the land contracts he sold. Everyone glanced up and Mary, against her will, smiled sheepishly. Jim, her husband, leaned his chair against the garage door opposite her. She sat next to Susan.
"I think I'd look the other way if one of the kids snuck over there and busted windows. I really would."
"Mark, we don't want to teach our kids to be mean." Carl shifted his weight for emphasis. "This has to be done legally, without violence."
Susan piped up, her gin and tonic precariously balanced on the chair arm. "I don't see what's so bad about 'em. I mean, they don't hurt anybody." Carl rolled up his eyes in mock exasperation. People chuckled.
"Not yet." This from Hester, a mousy woman who everyone suspected of being slightly crazy herself. Her husband Randall stared at his knees. "Every time I drive past the yard there's one or two of 'em gawking at me and waving, drooling -- "
"They don't drool," Mary interjected.
Hester shot her a look. "Drooling!" Mary was overruled. "And who knows what else they do over there? I don't want my childr -- "
"All right, Hester," Carl said officiously, "we've been through that before. Isn't any use -- "
"Well, I have to live next to them!" Hester protested, and Carl sat back, his chairmanship momentarily defeated, his gin the better part of discretion. Mary wanted to protest again, saying that she, too, lived next to them, that they had been gentle and bumptious and no more harm than an addled dog. But she could sense the palpable anger in Hester's voice, in the group, an anger spawned partly by fear but more an anger tinged with pride at the power of their possessions, their satisfaction at raising children and mowing lawns and complaining about government. Mary knew she could not divert this self-congratulation they passed among themselves, could not deny that she partook of it and benefited from it. All she could was strain to hear the voices of the children that streamed over the garage roof and tumbled unnoticed into their midst.
"The question, it seems to me," Mark interrupted, "is what we can do to get rid of them. I mean, if the state wants to plunk them down here, what's to do?"
Mary, hoping her voice would have more control than she knew it would, spoke. "They have no other home."
"They got the institution, haven't they? That nice place the county built 'em just a few years ago? They belong there."
"I mean a 'home,' some place like we came from."
"I never came from a home," Hester blurted out, "I never had -- "
Carl leaned over, his face not quite pitched to her. "They're not like us, Mary. They have to be trained and taken care of and we're footing the bill."
"But they are like us!" Mary could feel Jim's impatient puzzlement.
"Mary, they're not." His tone was like that of an indulgent parent. "They don't produce anything. All they do is take up space. Personally, I wouldn't be hurt if they were quietly put to sleep. Of course we can't do that -- yet. But it does them no good to be around people like us and see what they can't ever have."
For a moment the group was silent. The children were in the house now -- the sound of a television crackled against the oncoming twilight.
"Well, we're no further along than before." Mark looked at his watch. "Frankly, I'm tired of complaining. What alternatives do we have?"
Carl sat forward, his face lifted by a small ironic smile. "Jim?"
Jim leaned forward awkwardly, running his hand through his hair, and glanced around at the people slowly receding into the dusk. "Well, I've been doing a little research into the state law that set these people loose and there are some loopholes." Everyone watched him. He shifted his weight. "If we can show significant dissatisfaction with the arrangement, they may have to be moved."
"What is 'significant dissatisfaction'?" Hester shot out.
"The sort of things we've been talking about here, arranged in proper legal depositions, the right language, -- but I can take care of that end. Then we can file a motion -- "
"How much will all this cost?" Carl asked.
"Well, my services are obviously free. The only fees will be for filing papers, court work. Affordable." Again everyone was silent.
Cart stood up. "It's time we got going. Almost dark. Jim, do you have the paperwork?"
"It's in the house."
"Okay. Everybody, let's go inside."
Mary heard the creak of the released chairs and the soft lilt of ice on glass. The people filed into the house. She lingered outside for a moment, saw the first star open out its light. Then the door slowly sighed closed behind her.
The children, grumpy, stuffed, tired, were lumped on the couches and chairs while their parents gathered around the dining room table. On the table were fanned out papers, all a dull legal off-white, each with a single name on it. "There are the affidavits. They must be filled out and given back to me by next week. The court is in session soon." Jim looked up. "Any questions?"
"What about incorporation?" Carl prodded.
Jim shot Carl a glance, impatient, corrective. "We should incorporate as a neighborhood group. It'll give us more leverage and publicity if we need it."
"Publicity?" Randall asked. "Why should we need publicity?"
"To fight this thing in the open," Hester reprimanded him, "if we need to."
"She's right," Jim said, giving Randall a more perturbed look than he had intended. "Studies show that these half-way houses fail if neighborhood annoyance is strong and public. The inmates can't handle the social pressure well." Randall shook his head. "Well, here are your papers." Carl picked up a sheaf, Jim another, and handed them out.
"I can't take this, Carl," Mary said, when he got to her.
"Why not?"
"I don't think it's right. We don't have the authority."
Jim's voice splashed over her. "It's legal."
"I don't care." How far, she thought, from the eloquence of making a stand, with her voice shaking, her hands slick and limp. She glanced straight into Jim's eyes, gathered sound in her throat once more, said, "I don't care."
"But honey," Susan said, "what about Myna?"
"They wouldn't hurt anybody."
"Maybe Mary, but Myna -- do you want her growing up with that kind of craziness next door?"
"It doesn't matter," interrupted Carl, "if she takes the paper or not. We'll have Jim's."
"They're not crazy."
"Mary, you have to do it for the good of the neighborhood."
She didn't take the paper. She knew they looked at Jim, shrugged, their mute faces saying to him, She'll come around, she'll understand. But she wouldn't. The party dissolved. In the living room she saw Jim take a crystal paperweight, its insides jumping with snow, from Myna's sleeping hands and hoist her gently into his arms. She went out the door. Carl and Susan, on the porch, their Jamie tiredly pulled into his mother's hip, her arm protectively around his shoulders, waved goodbye. And soon the street swallowed them all up.
Neighborhood. That last word wove in and out of the echoes of their goodbyes, in their voices now lost in the dull vault of sky. All along the street, from windows speckled with the same yellow light, from lawns slowly gathering dew, from decks and porches and asphalt driveways, came the same ineffable, tangled yet steadfast magic, as if they had invoked tonight a talisman to ward off forever the eclipse of the sun as it arced its way through their heaven. They would fashion good homes for their children. All she could do was color pictures with her daughter and face the window with hardened heart.