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The tyranny of fashion
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[06/21/99]

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By Jill Wolfson

June 28, 1999 | My front door flew open and two neighborhood children, a self-possessed, moon-faced girl of 7 and her 5-year-old brother, pigeon-toed and shy, came rushing into the living room. From outside on the street, I heard adult voices, loud and punctuated with hard, dangerous-sounding consonants.

"She says he's wacko," the boy announced.

"He turned over the kitchen table!" the girl said.

My two children, with their fine-tuned antennae for drama, came running from upstairs. Who's he? What kitchen table?

At the time, we were new to the street. My first instinct was to lock the door, corral them all, until I figured out who was wacko and just how wacko this particular wacko was. But I didn't move fast enough. The front door flew open again and Debra came rushing in. Debra is their mother, a pleasant enough woman from our brief, front-yard conversations. Her daughter inherited her apple cheeks and a smile that takes up half her face. I don't think I've ever seen someone smile as much as Debra.

But right then, she was a wild woman, nostrils flaring, her skin both ashen and blotched. In her arms, she balanced her curly haired infant daughter. "This is it!" Debra yelled. "I've had it. I mean it. I'll go to the shelter. He's gonna kill us all one day."

I felt those words -- "kill us all" -- like a slap and I saw that they'd had the same effect on my children. They stopped talking mid-sentence. Their eyes scanned Debra's face, waiting for her to wink or to do one of those reassuring adult things to prove that she wasn't speaking literally.

On the other hand, Debra's kids could have been watching a boring rerun. The infant was too young to understand the words, but I expected her to be reacting to the emotion in her mother's grip. Yet the baby was smiling, doing an infant's flirt with me. The 7-year-old said to my daughter, "Want to play Monopoly or something?"

I was especially taken aback by the 5-year-old, who kept repeating the word, "wacko!" with delight. He obviously loved hearing such a kid word being spit from a grown-up's mouth. Then he rolled his eyes skyward. When he did this, he suddenly looked like a 35-year-old who has seen more life than he cares to remember.

I know people have trouble reading stories about domestic violence. We switch the channel, fold the newspaper against the victim's face to block the ripples of her suffering. I assure you that nobody gets hurt in this story, at least not physically.

It's been more than two years since the police showed up that day. They listened to her side, then listened to his side, then handed her a card with a phone number for domestic violence counseling, then suggested that he take a walk around the block to cool down. The two officers glanced at the kids and when they didn't see blood or broken bones, they didn't see any victims. Then they said something into their radio, wrote something in their book and pulled away.

Later, the elderly woman who lives sandwiched between Debra's house and mine leaned over the fence to fill us in: That wasn't the first ugly scene and -- welcome to the neighborhood! -- it wasn't going to be the last. "It's a lovely street, quiet," she assured me. "Except for ... well, the rental house."

She used the term "rental house" the way people talk about a haunted house, as if that explained everything. Every neighborhood seems to have one of each. The haunted house is usually some dilapidated, boarded-up building where ghosts supposedly run amok and children dare each other to cross the threshold.

The "rental" house usually means trouble in a more flesh-and-blood way. There are too many children, too little discipline, too many emotions spilling into the street. Debra's front yard is often littered with broken refrigerators and assorted car parts. In the summer, hundreds of pieces of fruit drop from a gorgeous plum tree and stain the sidewalk with leaking red pulp. Our street is populated with roller-curled widows who learned their frugal housekeeping skills during the Depression. This waste of perfectly good fruit drives them nuts.

And don't even get the neighbors started on Debra's teenagers, who come and go, slamming doors, yelling obscenities at their mother and her partner.

I have to admit that I too would rather not have to witness this kind of family chaos day after day. It's not that I don't know it exists. As a journalist, I have buttoned up my emotional armor and gone into battered women's shelters and juvenile halls. I have looked into the haunted eyes of beaten women, abusive men, children in hip-to-thigh casts.

I understand why the neighbors peek out from behind the curtains, shaking their heads in disgust or frustration or pity when the shouting at Debra's house begins. Why doesn't she throw him out? How does she live in such a mess? How did she get herself into this situation? Those poor, poor children!

Next page | I didn't want to put my own kids in danger