Instead of walking to the front door with the wreath I went next door to the Michaelsons’. At least their house still looked the same; shrubs formed a geometric ring in front of their door, and a basketball hoop hung above the driveway. Their yard, formerly a lawn, was now hard-packed dirt, which I guessed Wylie would’ve approved of. I rang the doorbell.
It was Donny, I was almost positive, who opened the door, wearing long surf shorts dotted with miniature surfers, each catching his own personal wave. Barefoot and shirtless, he was holding a tall glass of milk that had given him a faint white mustache. “Hey,” he said. “Come to check out the old neighborhood, huh?”
“I guess so.”
“I always wondered how come you guys never come by.”
“You did?”
“Well, not, like, literally always or anything.”
I looked at him. “You’re Donny, right?”
“Yeah, you can remember ’cause I’m taller.”
“Right,” I said, not bothering to point out that Darren wasn’t there for comparison’s sake. “Can I come in?”
He glanced quickly behind him, then stepped back from the door. “Um, okay. Can you wait in here for a sec?” he said, and disappeared into a long, dark hallway, where I heard him murmuring to someone whose voice was too soft to make out.
The living room looked like the home of much younger children, with a baseball mitt on the couch and a soccer ball in the corner. An open box of Pop-Tarts was sitting next to some comic books on the coffee table.
Donny strode back in.
“Yup, the old ’hood. Let’s go into the backyard, okay?” he said, leading me out through the sliding patio doors to the back. “The people who live next door to us now are super nice. They’re real religious. They’ve got a sweet garden back there, too.”
I looked over the fence at the yard where Wylie and I used to play. On summer nights we sometimes slept back there in a tent. Now it was divided into neat rows of squash and tomatoes. The Michaelsons’ yard, by contrast, had been let slide. The lawn had faded into dirt splotched with a few patches of yellow grass, and the only sign of life was a battered picnic table under the shade of a pine tree, where Donny and I sat down.
“Remember when we were little, and you and Wylie always played those weird games in your backyard? You pretended you were savages or something.”
I didn’t remember, but nodded anyway.
“Darren and I watched you sometimes. We thought you were total freaks,” he said, shaking his head in a fit of nostalgia. “No offense or anything. Hey, can I get you a glass of milk? Or a soda?”
“I’d take some water.”
“You got it,” he said. He padded inside, and I went back to the fence, hoping to look into our old house through the rear windows, but the glass threw back sheets of glare. I remembered one cookout we had, when Wylie got overexcited and poured a bottle of barbecue sauce right on top of his head; my father reached over with a paper napkin to wipe off his face, and none of us could stop laughing. The paper napkins kept sticking to Wylie and the more my father wiped the worse it got, until they both had to give up and take showers.
From the Michaelsons’ house came the sound of shattering glass, followed by “Shit!” Donny said something else, but I couldn’t hear what. I went inside and saw him standing with a broom at the far side of the kitchen, sweeping up some shards.
“I’m a total klutz,” he said apologetically. “I’ll be just a sec with your water.”
I could hear a woman moaning down the hall, in a bedroom that, in our house, had belonged to Wylie. The door was open, and while Donny took care of the dustbin I walked inside.
Although I couldn’t summon any specific memory of her from childhood, I knew it was Daphne Michaelson. She was sitting in an armchair reading Vogue, moaning softly to herself as she turned the pages. Her finger- and toenails were painted a brilliant shade of red, her brown hair fell in stylish waves to her shoulders, and her pale skin was dusted to an elegant beige. She was wearing a pink dress and brown slingback pumps, and she looked like a million dollars.
“Oh, excuse me,” I said. She crossed her legs and smiled at me, stopping her moaning, and wagged her right foot up and down in its pump. “I used to live next door?”
“I have a permanent wave,” she said, in a not unfriendly tone, but then turned back to the magazine.
Except for the armchair, the room was mostly bare of furniture. Lining one wall, floor to ceiling, were wooden bookshelves that looked homemade, filled completely with hundreds upon hundreds of Vogue magazines, their thick white spines neatly tapped into place.
“Do you remember me?” I said. “My brother, Wylie, and I used to live next door. With our parents. Arthur and Marie Fleming.”
The names, even my mother’s, provoked zero reaction from David’s wife. She flipped a slick page with her index finger and shook her head. “They told me not to get a permanent wave,” she said, “but where hair’s concerned I know what I’m doing. I’ve been a student of hair since I was eleven years old.”
Feeling hot breath on the back of my neck, I jumped. Donny was standing behind me, holding a glass of ice water, his cheeks flushed. He jerked his head sideways, to indicate that I should leave the room, and fast, then closed the door after me. Following him back through the house to the backyard, I tried to remember what his mother was like when we were young, but couldn’t come up with a single thing. For all I knew, she could’ve been in that room reading Vogue the entire time; she’d clearly had the subscription long enough, anyway.
Donny handed me my glass of water and we sat at the picnic table, feet scraping the dirt, while I drank in silence.
“So, Lynnie,” he said. “What are you doing tonight?”
“What?”
“Me and my friends are going to catch a movie, probably, if you wanted to come along.”
I stood up. “Oh, jeez. I promised my mom I’d have dinner with her. Thanks for the water, though.”
“Okay, maybe another time then. Hey, do you like miniature golf?”
“I really should get going, Donny.”
He accompanied me around front to the Caprice, opening and closing the door in a gentlemanly fashion, and waved as I pulled away.
I turned the radio up high and took the highway to my mother’s, driving extra-fast. I couldn’t stop thinking about Daphne Michaelson flipping through Vogue and checking out runway fashions from a world she, so far as I could tell, had never encountered. And what on earth did she do during the school year, with both sons away, one for months on end, and her husband at work all day and then — a thought that tasted bad in my mouth — at some other woman’s condo? Her plight seemed to me terrible. Then, from some distant part of my brain, I managed to retrieve a childhood memory: a backyard party at our house one summer night, a flock of people from the neighborhood, adults with cocktail glasses, kids with sparklers and hamburgers. The two Michaelson boys, toddlers, exhibiting athletic prowess even then, leaping over each other gymnastically, landing on their heads and bounding back up. My mother inside in the kitchen, talking with the other wives. My father at the grill, spatula in hand, frowning at the browning pieces of meat. And Daphne Michaelson by herself in the yard, quiet, exquisitely made up, swaying slightly in a flowered dress.
My mother and I got home at around the same time. Before she could say anything, I proposed that we have dinner together, “unless you have other plans,” and she smiled awkwardly and said that sounded fine. I offered to make something, with the caveat that my cuisine extended only to items unwrapped and placed in the microwave. She smiled and said she’d be happy to cook. There was a kind of elaborate diplomacy between us. Actually, I thought, we could have used some form of simultaneous translation to help us communicate, as if we were foreign dignitaries.