The Invaders (4 page)

Tuck winked at me as he got back up on his bike and said, “Your loss.” He pedaled away, glass in hand.

“He thinks because someone in his family was the president he can do whatever he wants,” Lori said.

Maybe it had been Tuck under that bridge.

Lori cut through my daydreaming and said, “You'll be liable for any property damage, Cheryl. I don't want to have to do that to you.”

She made a face of grave concern, like she really was looking out for my best interest. We were living in a presidential neighborhood, and even if the lineage had been corrupted with boozing and laziness, everything had to look exactly so.

“I'll have Jeffrey take another look,” I said and started walking away, hoping to diffuse the situation. She kept following me and I stopped at the edge of her fence next to a big yellow sign illustrated with a dog in motion with snarling teeth and the words
MY DOG DOESN'T LIKE STRANGERS
in bold black letters. It seemed unnecessary for this neighborhood; who would be skulking in the yards here? The association paid to have a guard drive around in his little Dodge Neon every night, so there was no need to advertise the fact that her dogs were assholes.

“Don't you think things like this create disharmony in the neighborhood?” I asked, pointing at her sign. I wanted her to feel like she was doing something a little bit wrong.

We heard whistling and she looked past me and said, “Oh God.”

I turned around and saw a man peeing in between two cars, right on the road. He was a fisherman, a white bucket and a pole next to him. He finished, zipped up, and looked at us like he wanted something from us or just wanted us. He had the kind of tan you get from sleeping outside. Lori moved closer to me. “Don't look scared,” she whispered as I tried to act normally. We narrowed our eyes at him, unified. I searched for Tuck but didn't see him or his bicycle anywhere. He was probably refilling his beer or antagonizing children by the club. Lori started getting closer to me again and I got nervous.

“Who do you think you are? You can't just do that here!” I said, trying to be courageous and mean.

The urinator looked at us and mumbled something in Spanish. Lori pulled still closer to me and whispered something I couldn't hear.

“What?”

“He's Mexican,” she said. “We have to do something.” Lori shouted at the man. “You are not allowed to walk on my beach. You shouldn't be out there!”

What did she mean by “my beach,” anyway?

“You better leave right now! I have dogs!” she yelled loudly.

I stared back at her sign—the snarling dog in midflight. I was curious if she'd leave me on the street to let the dogs out to chase him. But I knew they wouldn't even get out of the yard because they had those collars that Tasered them if they stepped outside of the invisible line. I looked around and didn't hear any leaf blowers or mowers and I realized that we were probably alone on the street, us against him. Lori ran through the gate into her yard and slammed it behind her, jamming her finger deep into the latch and yelping loudly. The man and I were both startled as Lori clutched her hand. I was surprised by my fear. He was just a fisherman, after all.

“My finger!” she said. She looked at the man and snarled at him, “It's your fault!”

Lori was taking it upon herself to square off with him, but I had had enough and told her, “Let's go.”

“Where are you going?” Lori said with indignation. She launched out of her yard and trailed after me, cradling her finger, as the man stood in the street, unmoving.

“I'm going to go get help,” I said.

“Don't leave me behind,” Lori said, worried.

“Are you okay?” I asked, trying to get a look at her finger.

“I'm hurt pretty bad,” she said. I looked down at her shaking hand. The finger was swollen and turning purple.

“
Gringas
,” he said, shaking his head.

I turned to Lori, who looked terrified.

“What does it mean?” she asked.

“White women,” I said matter-of-factly.

“Who does he think he is?”

I started walking toward my house with my arm around her for support and she whispered that we had to call the police. I ignored her at first, but then she convinced me. She said that this could be the beginning of an escalation of violence.

My front door was nearly wide open and at first we were afraid to go inside.

“He broke in,” Lori whispered.

I looked around and saw that the seashell where I hid the house key was overturned and figured it must have been Teddy.

I pushed in and called “Hello!” while Lori stared out into the street at the fisherman. There was no answer and I went to call the police as Lori locked the door, closing us in together. I looked around and didn't see a sign of Teddy. He wasn't in the backyard, either.

“Who are you screaming for? You think robbers are going to respond?” she asked.

“It's just Teddy.”

“This guy knows where you live now. We should have gone somewhere else,” she said.

Lori was acting like we were in our own episode of
Dateline
. She was always coaxing us to discuss if we thought our husbands were the murdering kind. If our net worths were worth it. On last Friday's episode, a woman had vanished from her home—“without a trace,” Lori kept saying. We all had our theories because we all watched the show, but Lori was the loudest. It was the husband. It was always the husband. I wondered if she walked around worrying that her own was trying to snuff her out. Their net worth was worth it.

I could see the wheels in her mind rolling, readying herself for her TV interview, saying things like “We used to be an all-doors-unlocked community.”

“We should have snuck around the beach way to lose him,” I said, imagining my own version of the story.

“What a disaster,” she said.

“Nine one one, what's your emergency?”

“Hello, I'd like to report a suspicious man in Little Neck Cove. He's carrying a fishing pole and a bucket. He was urinating in the street. Yes, public urination.”

I stared at Lori, who was hunched over and peeking through my curtains, and realized that I had never let her in my house before. I looked around and saw that there was dust on the plants, things in disarray.

Lori came away from the window and started looking around, inspecting things.

“He drove off,” she said.

“He drove off,” I said into the phone.

The dispatcher asked me if we saw the car and I asked Lori and she said it was white, maybe a hatchback, “a shitty little car,” she called it. “That's how you know he didn't belong,” she added. To Lori, being poor meant desperation; it meant being a criminal. I had driven a “shitty little car” for half my life until I met Jeffrey. I remember the first time I got into his luxury sedan, how roomy it was. There were no crumbs anywhere. The polished wood on the steering wheel gleamed. The leather was soft on my bare legs. I had never felt leather so soft. I couldn't believe they made cars like that. I had tried to sew the worn-down seat-cover seams in my own car many times, but they just kept splitting open, showing the yellowing liner underneath. The first time Jeffrey rode in my car, I could feel the heat coming off my face as he looked at the radio with the broken tape player and when he tried the passenger-side window that only I could roll down and reached for the broken-off door light I had in my center console. Asking, “What's this?” When I tried to explain, it still didn't make sense to him.
How did someone not fix the short in their door light? What do you mean it would run out the battery? These things
can be fixed.
These were the things I imagined him saying to me, or perhaps, even,
Why do you have so many clothes littering the backseat?
, while eyeing the work shirts and weekend-wear from overnight stays. I worried he'd say it looked like a hoarder's car. Instead he said, “I'll pamper you
.
”

We had met when I was working as the assistant manager of the men's department at the Ralph Lauren store at the outlet mall off I-95. He had come in, bashful and cute, needing new dress shirts for work. I had never dated a customer before, but he was persistent. It had taken him months to work up the courage and then he wouldn't let up until I said I'd have coffee with him. I told him it would have to be the food court because my breaks were short. After that, things went quickly.

“He left beer cans on the street! Extra-large ones.”

I told the dispatcher and hung up the phone as Lori stopped in front of the splatters.

“I was going to clean that.”

“It's so difficult sometimes,” she said, clucking her tongue. She stared out at the rocks, at the fishermen sitting far out there. It still felt impossible that something like this could be mine, even secondhand.

“How can you stand them?” she asked.

“Who?”

“All those strange men sitting out there. I'd be so scared.”

She had lived in tiny towns, no-name places, married well, and ended up here. She made no secret of it. Everyone was a threat to the life she cultivated in this beach community. I stared out and watched the men fishing. They lived somewhere the highway led you to, away from here, somewhere women like Lori never ventured to. Her farthest trip was circling the crowded parking lots of warehouse-size grocery stores at the edge of town. The only news coming from the outside world lived on her television set with frequent reenactments of medium-size city gun battles that kept her and everyone else here huddled in their community.

“It's disgusting,” she said. “When they need to use the restroom, they just go out there. They pee in the ocean. They do other things in the ocean, too.”

“I think it's been established that peeing in the ocean is okay. Other stuff like what?”

“I suppose you're fine with people peeing in the street, then.”

“Didn't you just see me call the police?” I asked.

“Are you really going to make me say it, Cheryl?” She waited, then said, “Susan Humphrey told me she saw them pooping from her window.”

I shook my head in disbelief. She didn't even know I was faking my shock, making fun of her
just a little
. I liked to get the ladies riled up sometimes, if only to feel a part of something. A collective outrage. It was only fair after so many “lost” invitations to get-togethers or watching all the girls grab a table together by the pool with no room for me to join in. These little hurts accumulated and I tried to get back at them in the smallest, most discreet ways possible. I didn't know what else I could do to make myself fit in and I was finally tired of trying. Worn out, exhausted. Done in. Some people here looked like they just casually rolled out of bed every morning and got on the golf course, but I pressed my clothes, I made sure my hair always had a shine, I did the things that I learned over time were absolutely necessary here for me. When Mary Ann said orange was unflattering, I listened and threw out anything with an overly citrus feel. When Lori exclaimed that everyone had to take Pilates with the visiting instructor, Beth, or they truly didn't
get it
, I did it. Yet it almost felt like the one time they had asked me to walk at the fashion show, it was out of pity. I had really given it my all. I had learned moves, I had practiced in front of Jeffrey, and I had even taken his suggestions. To not be asked back year after year was embarrassing. Now to pretend I was up for it and then snub me, well, it had taken all I had left. Jeffrey always said that if he saw my potential, they had to, too. He said it over and over again like it must be true, until
he got tired of saying it. Maybe he stopped seeing my potential, too. Maybe I had been a bad bet all along. Why I still cared, I don't know.

I stared at Lori's big, watery eyes and knew I wanted to be her neighbor forever, no matter what nonsense came streaming out of her mouth. I had nowhere else to go.

“My children swim in that water,” she said. “No one should use the ocean as their restroom.”

Yes, I understood what she was saying, that I would never be able to comprehend what it felt like to have my own children swim in a sea full of feces. She was right. I only had a stepson and the idea of Teddy doing laps in a cesspool only made me feel slightly bad. And right now, if he was passed out upstairs, not bad at all.

“There's a lot of pollution out there, with the boats and all,” I said.

“Clearly that's a different situation. They belong here. Those people don't belong here. Look what that man was doing. What he almost did to us. He could take it a step further and attack someone,” she said.

“We can build a fence, gate up the community,” I said, joking.

“You're so right, Cheryl. A gate would raise property values, anyhow. You know what? I'm going to call a special meeting with the association. We have to get the dangerous element out of here. Think about the children.”

Everyone was always thinking about children. She looked at me with pity in her eyes because I was never thinking about the children, and that was a problem.

“We can think about it a little while before we call a meeting, maybe,” I said.

“The time to act is now. Before something happens, not after.”

“I don't want anything to happen to any child, that's for sure,” I said. “But maybe they're just enjoying the summer.”

“Don't be absurd,” Lori said.

I went back to the window. I stared at a family making their way
onto the rocks. The father carried a white bucket, his two small children carried petite fishing poles, and they didn't look dangerous at all. He just looked like he was trying to show his family something nice.

I called for Teddy again and got no answer.

“I should really go check on him,” I said.

She smiled and said, “What a nice surprise to have him here.”