Miss Neighborhood, 1987.

Journal Entry: Sunday, December 10, 2000

It was the late 1980's. Our neighborhood was typical of the stale hot part of California east of the San Francisco Bay. In our section of Concord, we had an Elvis impersonator, we had a retired HAM radio operator, even a recycler. We had schoolteachers. We had psycho sex offenders and soccer moms and soccer kids and kids who beat up soccer kids and men who beat up their soccer mom wives. We had a Naval weapons facility; it lay at the fingertips of an arm of water that stretched eastward from the Bay, double-jointed and impossible, made possible by blasting and dredging and money. Ships and trains arrived daily trafficking nuclear weapons to and from earth-covered bunkers, scattered with antelope and invisible from the air.


The yards of the houses in the town were dotted with all types of fruits and vegetables now seemingly exotic and even incredible to me as an assimilated Midwesterner: walnuts, peaches, plums, guavas, figs, pomegranates, kumquats, loquats, oranges, apples, grapefruit, Swiss chard, persimmons. It seldom rained. It was seldom windy. Lawns were watered daily, garbage picked up weekly, and every other Thursday at dusk, dozens of pounding, black helicopters descended to dump Malithion onto our homes to exterminate our fruit flies. The government recommended we remain indoors.


I lived with my mother, her fourth husband, Jeffrey, and a truckload of insecurities in an Army green rambler on Margo Drive. My parents drove matching Dodge Darts and worked at the same middle school in Walnut Creek. Apart from that they had nothing really in common, save for an interest in Louis L'Amour novels and Gewürztraminer. On Sundays we'd have waffles for breakfast and then cruise the flea market at the Solano drive-in. They'd look for Louis L'Amour novels and I would covet old hi-fl gear and Beatles LPs. Apart from that, we weren't a family.


The only one-on-one interactions I had with my stepfather were boots to my bed when I slept through my paper route alarm and stern warnings about door-slamming. He knew a guy over in Solano who invented a little rubber device to make trees grow straight and so after his janitorial shift at the middle school, Jeffrey would go work at Grow-Strait until quite late. Doing god-knows-what. The weekends saw him shut in the garage turning wood on an industrial lathe or manipulating band saws, drill presses and the like to produce bizarre dishes and implements.


Each morning for five years I sat on the tiled floor of the front entry and folded newspapers. The smell of newsprint and recycled rubber bands collided with the exhaust from my stepfather's bright yellow Dart as it drifted through the screen door as he left it running endlessly in the driveway. He was very particular about his car. Once out of the house, I enjoyed the still, dark neighborhood and stumbled around throwing my papers and inspecting the yards and cars to see what had changed from the day before. I studied the front page of the paper: the extended weather forecast, the headlines, the pictures. The ink built up on my hands and I wet them with the dewy grass, wiping them clean on my canvas bag.

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There was a girl who lived on my route named Shelly Doorak. She went to Concord High and dated a boy who drove a white Camaro. She was kind of a bad girl and never looked at me when our paths crossed. At sixteen, she was the cutest girl in the neighborhood and had never said a word to anybody I knew. At the end of the month I went around to each house to collect the $7 subscription fee and! actually prayed, to some god, that Shelly would answer the Doorak's avocado green door. She never did, but one morning in late summer there was a bra lying on the welcome mat where the paper needed to go and I picked it up, a little white piece of cotton, and wondered about it. I became nervous and didn't know what to do with it... leave it on the mat? Throw it in the bushes? Wrap it up in their newspaper? I decided the best thing was to stick it in my bag and take it home. I hid it inside of a toy helicopter and every now and then I took it out and looked at it but usually I was afraid to, until one day it was gone and I was paralyzed with fear and guilt. Who had taken it? My mom? Was I in trouble? How did she think a little bra ended up in my helicopter? What was she doing looking in my helicopter?


I was fourteen and my sexual slate was clean. Squeaky-cleaa In fact it had not yet been unpacked from the box. Rumors were all around school about Shelly and her sexual exploits with various high school bad boys. Standing in the Doorack's dark front yard. forty papers in my shoulder beg and breathing on my cold fingers, I watched her pull on sweaters and make her bed and put on lip-gloss. Huey Lewis played on my headphones and I watched her talk on the phone, flip over cassettes in her boom box and fight with her mom. I watched her brush, curl, crimp, tease and blow-dry her hair. I saw where she hid her cigarettes and where she kept her socks. I was looking in on Shelly Doorak's life and knew things about her that even the white Camaro guy didn't know. When I'd see her smoking behind the grocery store on the way home from school I knew how many shirts she tried on that morning and the color of her underwear.


In the summertime the sun came up early and I lost my window to Shelly's life. I knew it would be months before I would know her again. The sun pinned our town down like a tanned wrestler. The hills turned to gold in the distance, the antelope danced around on the nuclear missiles and my parents consumed more Louis L'Amour and Gewürztraminer. I saw Shelly smoking by the dumpsters behind the store and wondered how many shirts she had tried on beibre school. The yellow Dart choked me, the alarm was ignored and the bed was kicked for three more months. The helicopters dumped cancer and we remained indoors, windows closed, air conditioners on. I wondered about my older sister who ran away from home and whether she had a boom box in which to flip tapes or a hair dryer wherever she was living. I waited and waited until the cold weather and daylight savings would again change my world.