A Crime in the Neighborhood by Suzanne Berne

rest of the world.

Four
    In April the Chiltons moved out of the house next door, taking their sweet cross-eyed baby and leaving their broken picnic table and a square lawn full of crabgrass for the man who moved in. His name was Mr. Green. I woke up one morning and fumbled on my glasses to see an orange moving van parked on the street and chairs and tables being carried out of it.
    â€œSomebody’s moved into the Chiltons’ house,” I announced at breakfast.
    â€œHave they?” said my mother, from behind the newspaper. She had begun sitting at my father’s place at the table; no one sat at hers. “How do they look?” she said eventually, turning a page of the newspaper.
    â€œRegular,” I said. “It’s a man.”
    I was pleased to be the first to notice our new neighbor; it gave me a kind of claim on him. Otherwise I noted only that he appeared to be a bachelor, which was unusual in our neighborhoodbut satisfied me because now I wouldn’t have to worry about meeting strange children and having to invite them to play Ping-Pong in our basement. Nothing could be expected from me regarding Mr. Green, except courtesy, so I waved to him that afternoon when Julie and I walked home from the mall. He was unloading boxes from the van. I remember that he paused to balance a box on one knee in order to wave back. He was a squat man, with a pinkish face, blandly familiar, although he didn’t actually resemble anyone I knew. When he bent his head, I saw that he had a bald spot, shaped like a heart.
    â€œHe looks like a creep,” said Julie.
    It had been wet in March and early April, then suddenly it got very hot. In just a few days, our big front yard went from a brown mat to a seething tangle of color. Lilacs and wisteria bloomed, and the azaleas and the crab apple tree. Tulips, daffodils, irises driving up like spears. Blooming saturated the air, seeping in through open windows and under doors and into the sofa’s upholstery. The storm drains clogged with apple blossoms; all the car windshields gathered greenish pollen, frothing against the windshield wipers.
    A kind of lawlessness infected everything. Next door, eight-year-old Luann Lauder decorated herself with toothpaste one Sunday morning and ran across the lawn in only her underpants. Boyd Ellison appeared on the playground one afternoon with a ten-speed bicycle he said was a birthday present but which looked just like our neighbor David Bridgeman’sbicycle, which had recently been stolen. Blue jays screamed all day long. Even the grass looked an unearthly green, as it does right before an electrical storm, when the air starts to hum and your hair stands on end.
    And yet our neighborhood was anything but lawless. With its tidy lawns, pruned dogwood trees, and sputtering lawn mowers, Spring Hill still strikes me as the most wonderfully inoffensive of places whenever I drive through it. Our house was the oldest one on the block, a bungalow throwback to when people used to summer by the river. We had a screened front porch, shade trees, and a wide front yard set up on the top of a hill, with a view of half the street.
    In 1972, Washington suburbs like ours were dowdy, provincial places, like the city itself. The Whitehurst Freeway still ran past an old rendering plant, which smelled so rankly of boiled hooves in the summer that motorists rolled up their car windows even on the hottest days. The Whitehurst emptied behind the battery-shaped Watergate Complex, still known only as elegant apartment buildings. Locusts banged against the screen doors of houses all the way up Capitol Hill. The spring before, millions of locusts had crawled out of the mud after a seventeen-year sleep, buzzed like madness for a week, then died. Their fat brown bodies piled up in drifts, so that we wore rainboots when we ran outside. The whole city filled with a drowsy insect racket on summer nights, which radiated from the pavement right into the