A Crime in the Neighborhood by Suzanne Berne

from Peterman-Wolff Communications Distribution could listen in on our telephone; they would report her if she even asked, “How’s the weather in Sandusky?”
    This rule made sense to my mother. “When you have a successful formula,” she told us, “stick with it. That’s the law of nature.”
    Her own formula for those days rarely varied. Breakfast at exactly seven-thirty on the front porch, with the radio tuned to a news station, and the card table set the night before. Orange juice, Shredded Wheat, coffee for her, milk for me, Fresca for Julie—who was dieting—and nothing for Steven, who usually slept through breakfast. We sat on collapsible director’s chairs. Although I was allowed my nightgown and Julie wore a T-shirt and an ancient pair of gym shorts, my mother now wore lipstick and earrings even when she wasn’tplanning to go out on an interview, dressing neatly in a skirt, blouse, and sandals. Once breakfast was over and the dishes washed, she went over the want ads, or made up a grocery list, or put in the laundry. She never mentioned that by then Uncle Roger had traced my father and Aunt Ada to a tiny Nova Scotia seaport called Annapolis Royal, where they were living in a rented room. I discovered all of this by eavesdropping.
    Monday and Wednesday mornings were the times she reserved for job interviews—selling magazines was what she called “a stopgap.” That summer she interviewed for secretarial jobs, administrative-assistant jobs, clerk-typist jobs, saleswoman jobs, receptionist jobs. For each interview she dressed up in one of her suits—she had two, a cherry-colored linen ensemble from Woodward & Lothrop and almost the same thing in a salmon pink nubbly fabric—and then spent half an hour turning in front of her bedroom mirror, trying to see herself from every angle. “How do I look?” she would ask Julie, holding her arms away from herself. “Do I look professional?”
    She always came home around eleven-thirty for lunch before she began her telephone calls. Our lunches were as unvarying as breakfast: carrot sticks and cheese sandwiches. On Sundays, my mother made twenty cheese sandwiches—two slices of bread/two slices of American cheese/a smear of butter—and stuck them in the freezer. Every weekday morning she would take four out to thaw. We had to economize, she said.
    â€œHow was it?” Julie would ask, if she had been to an interview.
    â€œOh, you know,” she’d say, looking into her plate. “It’s a lengthy process.”
    At five o’clock, she hung up the phone, spent twenty minutes tabulating the day’s sales in a specially provided Peterman-Wolff vinyl-covered logbook, then reapplied her lipstick and went outside to sit in what was left of the sun in the side yard, joining Julie and Steven, who were oiled like sardines and splayed in two folding lawn chairs they had dragged partially behind the rhododendrons. They had begun smoking cigarettes that summer and always just before my mother came outside there would be an important flurry of tossing butts under the rhododendrons. Julie would fan the air with a magazine. Steven dug out breath mints for both of them.
    â€œIf you tell,” Julie warned me from under her tennis hat, “I will put Nair on your eyebrows while you’re asleep.”
    But I had no intention of telling on them. Their smoking seemed daring and mature, and secretly I loved hearing them drawl, “Cig, darling?” at each other, in low nasal voices.
    Although breakfast and lunch were spartan, dinner became increasingly ambitious. I missed my dinnertime ritual of standing beside my father as he sat on the piano bench, turning the page of music for him whenever he gave a nod. But my mother tried to make up for this loss by whistling Cat Stevens tunes as she prepared dinner in the kitchen. Not only did she set the table with her Minton china and