Neighborhood Watch by Cammie McGovern Page A

me. I keep thinking I should buy a can opener and then I don’t.” Was she joking? I wondered, and laughed hopefully. “Mostly I eat cereal,” she said, nodding down at her cart filled with boxes. “But I was trying to remember how you make onion soup. Do you know?”
    Paul didn’t eat onions so I never bothered.
    “I’m guessing onions, right? But then what?”
    Had she lived in a foreign country? Been isolated in some way? “Broth, I guess. Beef, maybe.”
    “Right. That makes sense.”
    I started to push my cart away but stopped. “Do you need any help, Linda Sue? Setting up your house? Getting situated?” As far as any of us could tell, she still had no curtains or furniture beyond the three canvas director’s chairs she’d arrived with. She had no TV or stereo. From the glimpses we’d gotten, she made an evening’s entertainment out of flicking her lighter and smoking cigarettes. Was all this a cry for help?
    “Getting situated?” she said.
    “I can help you measure for curtains if you need it. We just got new ones ourselves. It’s a terrible chore, I know.”
    She blinked at me. “Why do people buy curtains?”
    “Well.” I looked around, wondering if I was on Candid Camera . “Privacy, I guess.”
    “Yeah—I don’t care about that.”
    “Window treatments can really pull a room together, I find. You’d be surprised.”
    “Yeah, I don’t care about that, either.”
    As we came to understand, she didn’t care about much. The yard, her trash, what anyone thought of her. All the rules that I’d assumed for so long were sacrosanct.
     
     
    A month after Linda Sue moved in, Marianne started passing out flyers for a Neighborhood Watch group she wanted to form, not in response to any burglaries reported, she said, but to a “feeling” she had of “menace” in the air. Until Marianne brought it up, none of us had thought much about being robbed. We left our garages open with our dust-covered bikes there for the taking. For Paul and me, it wasn’t unusual to come home and find our door unlocked with nobody home. Sometimes I sat in my car, a four-step walk from rectifying the problem, and thought, Why bother? and drove away. We had so few belongings of value, why would any burglar waste his time with us? And then I thought of something strange: the stain on our mattress, from the night our longest-lasting baby left us after five and a half months of growing what were already tiny hands and feet. It was the closest thing I had to a picture of his face, a brown outline shaped like a swan on our mattress. My heart seized at the thought of someone stealing that.
    “All right,” I told Marianne. “I’ll be there.”
    At our first meeting, the speaker was a female police officer with ebony hair broken in front by a small stripe of white. She looked like Susan Sontag dressed in a police uniform. “A property crime occurs somewhere in this country every three seconds,” she said. “Every day I see people lose everything they have.”
    Earlier, Geoffrey and I had made jokes about this meeting and rolled our eyes, though we both said we would go. The woman up front continued, “You should all know that a hollow core door is a burglary waiting to happen and a solid door is only as good as its lock. Anything less than a double cylinder with a six-inch throw is like leaving your house open. You might as well stick some bubble gum in there.” She opened a briefcase and pulled out the only dead bolt guaranteed to stop a burglar. It took two hands to hold and looked like a tire jack.
    As she passed around order forms for purchasing one of her dead bolts, I turned around and saw Geoffrey sitting in the back, wearing a black turtleneck that so flattered him, I once embarrassed myself by saying so. Geoffrey widened his eyes as if to say, Is this woman serious?
    Ever since he moved onto our block, I’d worried that the inanity of our lives might be too much for him, that at some point he’d announce