Jeneration X: One Reluctant Adult's Attempt to Unarrest Her Arrested Development; Or, Why It's Never Too Late for Her Dumb Ass to Learn Why Froot Loops Are Not for Dinner (13 page)

“What did I tell you about your ‘citizen arrests,’ Deputy Fife?” he sighs.

I sigh right back. “That I’m
‘not allowed to dole out street justice with a shovel.’
Even though the dipshit who doesn’t believe in car seats deserves a solid whacking. Have you ever
seen
those highway safety videos they used to show in Drivers’ Ed? An unsecured baby flies through a windshield like a watermelon launched by God’s slingshot! Slam on the brakes once and, ka-blammo! I’m talking front-row seats at a Gallagher show, wiping juice from your cheeks and picking seeds out of your ears.”

He eyes me curiously. “Don’t you have a book to write?”

“That’s the beauty of it,” I explain. “See, I’m, like… an amateur detective. As a writer, it’s my job to be a quiet observer of the human condition.”

“Really?” he says, poking his head out from behind a bifold door. “Because I thought your job was to work out with your trainer today and then write up your notes on the Weight Watchers meeting. How’d that go?”

Sheepishly, I admit, “I gave myself carpal tunnel scrolling through
GoFugYourself.com
so I had to postpone,” punctuating my malady by flexing my sore wrist. “Hey! Stop that! I can see you smirking! Listen, paying attention to what’s happening around us is just as important as exercising for
Such a Pretty Fat.”

From deep in the closet I hear, “You justify that… how?”

“It’s my duty to piece together the lives that I observe, like a jigsaw puzzle. It’s up to me to fill in the blanks. Example? Remember the people on Superior who had the cameras trained on the doors, bars on all their windows, even the second and third floor, and two perpetually pissed-off Rottweilers roaming the front yard? Why do you suppose they did that?”

“They lived in a shit neighborhood and were tired of getting robbed.”

“No! They’re ex-spooks. Former CIA, totally. I mean, come on. They’d never make eye contact and the wife sounded like a big-haired Bond villainess. Clearly the guy was an operative who fell in love with his Soviet confidential informant. He left the Agency and now they live here in witness protection.
That’s
why they always cross the street when we’re out walking the dogs. They know I know.”

“Quite a story. You been watching
Burn Notice
again?”

“No.”
Yes.

“Then, Special Agent Kravitz, how do you explain that I used to work with the guy back when I was at AT&T in the nineties?”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh. His name is Seth and he’s a security consultant. His wife is Zofia and she’s from Poland. She worked for AT&T, too. He was her project manager; that’s where they met.”

That takes the wind out of my sails but I quickly rally. “I’m sure they told you that’s where they met. Besides, people in witness protection can have jobs. Wait, they should have jobs. Yes. This makes perfect sense. If they didn’t work, what would they do all day? Stare out the window at their neighbors?”

“Are you familiar with the concept of irony?”

“Not always. Point is, my theory holds.”

He says nothing but his raised eyebrow says so much. I press on. “I can see you’re not yet sold. So riddle me this, Fatman, if they weren’t ex–field agents, why would they always cross the street to get away from me?”

“Because you don’t have full control of the dogs and Maisy can’t keep her tongue off their baby.”

Oh. He’s got me there. “Well… she is affectionate. Whatever, bad example. How about this? How come the old guy on the top floor
of our place on Orchard never once had a visitor the whole three years we lived beneath him?”

“Because we were busy at our day jobs. Or maybe his friends were also elderly and couldn’t handle all those stairs.”

“Bzzt! Wrong. He was anthropologic, which means fear of people and social situations.”

“I think you mean anthropophobic. And I used to run into him with some blue-haired lady at Starbucks all the time, so no, he was neither anthropologic nor anthropophobic. Still not convincing me that spying is a legitimate use of your time.” He pulls on a polo and zips up his cargo shorts. “Are we done here? Can we go downstairs now?”

“No!” I refuse to accept defeat. “If you’re so smart, why don’t you tell me why the girl across the courtyard in Lincoln Park moved out at three a.m.?”

“You mean the moron who left her laundry in the washing machine for a month because she couldn’t find a quarter? Her?”

I place my hands on my hips, filling up the doorway so he can’t pass. “Yes. Why do YOU think she moved in the middle of the night? I suspect she had an abusive boyfriend and had to move to a women’s shelter.”

“I suspect she was a dingbat with poor time management skills. Can I go to the bathroom now?”

“Yes. As soon as you admit that I’m a good detective.”

He kisses me on the forehead before wedging past me. “Fine. You are a veritable Sherlock Holmes… in footie pajamas.”

I feel vindicated. “Thank you.”

“Hey… did you shower yet today?”

Obviously not.

Constant Vigilance™ doesn’t take bathroom breaks.

In terms of Constant Vigilance™, best thing that ever happened to me was moving into our last house in the Logan Square neighborhood of the city. After we’d been there a couple of days, I noticed all kinds of detritus in the breezeway between my garage and back fence. At first I was pissed off, thinking, “So I’ve moved into yet another
throw-our-McDonald’s-bags-into-your-yard
kind of place, have I? We’ll just see about THAT.”

While I stomped around picking everything up, I eventually realized that due to a heavy wind, this was just overspill from the construction site next door. What blew in were documents the neighbors had left behind.

As I examined them, I solved the mystery of why no one wanted to rent my pretty house with the huge transom windows. Turns out the vacated-as-of-November-1 place next door wasn’t a cute, vintage apartment building. Rather it was a fifty-unit SRO [
Single room occupancy, guaranteed to drop property values for a three-block radius.
]… essentially a transient hotel. No wonder the apartment broker remarked on how happy she was that the place next door was going condo.

Because I’m all about urban archeology, I scooped up the wet pile of garbage, drying out the pieces on paper towels lining my counters. And, oh, the pay dirt I unearthed!

I found a letter to an ex-resident from the State Unemployment Office explaining that one cannot
file
for unemployment if one has never actually
held a job
. [
Ooh, burn!
]

Another piece was a bill for six months of car insurance for thirty-six dollars. Thirty-six dollars. For six months. Seriously.
What the hell were they driving? A rickshaw? Conestoga wagon? One of those old-fashioned bikes with the enormous front tire piloted exclusively by he-men sporting handlebar mustaches, wearing leotards, and carrying anvils?

I discovered programs from gang members’ funerals and receipts for inmate commissary purchases in the Cook County Department of Corrections. [
Ask me how much a pack of Kools cost in 1997 at Cook County lockup because I totally know.
] Plus there were tons and tons of those tiny zippy plastic bags that my creative girlfriends use to separate beads for when they do crafts. (Clearly the ex-neighbors were running a jewelry-making business.)

Then I found a letter that was like winning the
Gladys Kravitz Nosy Neighbor Memorial Sweepstakes
. Here’s what it said:

That’s where the first page ended. Fletch arrived home to find me scaling the construction Dumpster with my good whacking shovel in search of the second page because I couldn’t stand not knowing what happened next.

Yes.

That was well received.

Not only did Fletch forbid me from additional adventures in
urban archeology, but he made me store my shovel in the garage before washing my hands no less than six times.

At his behest, I grudgingly promised to hang up my (figurative) binoculars because we were in a nice house and an up-and-coming neighborhood and he didn’t want me to alienate myself exactly like everywhere else we ever lived.

“Fine,” I replied. “Then I’ll just watch television.” [
We all know how that turned out.
]

Unfortunately for those of us in the
Gladys Kravitz Anonymous Twelve-Step Program
, this proved difficult not because I lacked the willpower, but because we lived in such tight quarters with the house to the right. Our homes were so close we could hear our neighbors sneeze and the ding of their microwave when their Orville Redenbacher Kettle Corn finished popping. We heard them yawning and watching
American Idol
and running their dishwasher. And the night one of them had a bad egg salad sandwich?

Let’s just say there’s some stuff you can’t unhear.

Our balconies were practically on top of each other with nothing between us but two iron porch rails and a three-foot strip of sidewalk. Such was our proximity that I could identify every legume in their three-bean salad picnic suppers.

Many of our windows lined up with those next door, so the first thing I did upon move-in was to hang completely opaque blinds because I’m a big, fat hypocrite who believes in spying but not being spied upon. [
I said it so you don’t have to.
] However, we had a particularly large set of transom windows over the stairway in that house and they couldn’t be covered with anything that wasn’t custom-made. We
immediately sought out estimates on drapes because my desire to not be seen without pants outweighed my thirst for information.

Due to excessive width and the height, we’d have to pay over a thousand dollars to insure no one saw my underwear as I dashed from the bathroom to the bedroom. I wasn’t about to drop that kind of cash on a rental home, so I spent seventy bucks on a pink terry-cloth robe from L.L. Bean. Monogrammed and everything! Problem solved, problem staying solved… or so I thought.

Here’s the thing… if you can see into my house, I can also see into yours. That’s how regular glass works. Why the sight of me zipping past in a blur of damp hair and shame didn’t spur some flash of realization with the folks next door, I’ll never know. Ergo, I felt… somewhat justified in seeing snatches of their lives, rationalizing if they didn’t want me serving witness, they’d close their blinds. I mean, all I was doing was climbing my stairs—no crime in that, yes?

At first, the window into their home office was a lot like watching the boring bits of
Big Brother
, only with a lot fewer camera angles and no Power of Veto competitions. Due to our proximity, I could read the titles of the books on the shelves. I could tell whether or not the wife had dabbed on zit cream. Like it or not, their world was my (voyeuristic) oyster.