Deadly Housewives Read online

  “Has she been exposed to anything toxic?” the lady vet asked after whisking Cleopatra from my sight into that strange country behind the examination rooms.

  Only my daughter-in-law, I wanted to answer. “We moved from the Midwest a month ago. She was fine there.”

  The vet grimaced a smile. “I hope she’ll be fine here. We’ll do some tests.”

  The waiting room was clean and clever. Glossy pet magazines lay fanned on low coffee tables like women’s magazines at a doctor’s office. Bulletin boards featured photos of happy feline and canine clients and a few heartbreaking notices of found dogs and cats who needed homes. An espresso-machine-and-microwaved-chocolate-cookies setup reigned side by side in a niche with a designer water dispenser. Lots of people brought dogs and cats in and out. And…no word on Cleopatra.

  I was finally called in again, where the vet set her clipboard on the examining table and asked me to sit down.

  “She’s very ill. I have to advise you to put her down.”

  “But she was in perfect health when I had her looked over before the move a month ago! May I see her?”

  “Of course. But we’ve had to put her in an oxygen chamber.”

  The vet led me back beyond the examining room, where I found Cleopatra gasping for breath in an oxygen chamber, her blue eyes unfocused and the usually invisible inner lid clouding their sky-blue brightness.

  I felt my own heart seizing. “Can nothing be done?”

  “Nothing.” The young vet’s brown eyes brimmed with tears.

  “What is it? What happened?”

  “We think it’s some domestic intoxicant. Check your residence for anything a cat could get into.”

  “My place is so small, there’s barely room for Cleopatra and me.”

  “Look for lethal chemicals, cleaning items, sprays, plants.”

  Plants.

  “I received a…gift when I and Cleopatra moved here. A house warming gift. A snake plant. Mother-in-law’s tongue they also call it.”

  “Oh, good God! Lethal. To cats. I’m so sorry. We can do an autopsy to make sure.”

  The white-coated young female assistant clasped my hand as I watched Cleopatra’s sides labor in and out in the death throes of toxic destruction.

  “Get rid of that plant,” the vet urged.

  “I will,” I said. Swore. “Now that I know.”

  III. Tea for Two

  This plant is called Mother-in-Law’s Tongue because of the liquid this plant contains. Given in a small dose in coffee or other drink, they paralyze the vocal cords of the person drinking the concoction.

  My long walks now became brooding sessions. Cleopatra’s ashes were in a vase that a five-toed dragon figure guarded on her sunning shelf. I kept the plants, of course. I found it soothing to stare at their stark lancelike stalks rather than agitating. Had Madison murdered Cleopatra? Did she hope losing my beloved cat would make living in the mother-in-law apartment we’d shared too painful? Did she assume I’d then move to the senior-care apartment she’d always urged Sonny to provide for me? Or hadn’t she known the plant was lethal to cats?

  I asked her up for tea, after having driven in my little Neon to the library and consulted several books on distilling tinctures.

  “Tea, Mother? How quaint.”

  “It’s herbal.”

  “Green, too,” she said approvingly. “Supposed to be very good for the immune system and the complexion.” She sipped hers, then said, “I hope you won’t annoy William with plans to acquire another cat. He has much more important things to think of.”

  “It wouldn’t bother anything up here.”

  “Still, it might live a long time, and of course it couldn’t accompany you anyplace else.”

  “Like an assisted-living facility?”

  “Exactly. We must face facts, Mother. You won’t be here forever.”

  “The women in my family are very long-lived.”

  Her face turned slightly green, like the color of the tea.

  “Really…” Her voice was a bit hoarse. She coughed. “I don’t want to argue with you. I think, uh…Kyle has an animal-hair allergy.”

  “But he’s so seldom here.”

  “The hair remains and gets in the vents and poisons the whole house. If you have any consideration for us at all, you’ll forget about getting another cat.”

  I nodded. She cleared her throat.

  “I’m glad we had this talk,” Mad said, standing. “Now we know where we stand.”

  The next morning she complained of having contracted a horrible cold at the gym. She complained in writing at breakfast because she had completely lost her voice.

  It was some comfort to know that the snake plant was living up to its legend and could bite Madison as well as Cleopatra, but I was looking for something a bit more effective.

  I had given up making another acquaintance in the neighborhood besides Mrs. Berwick. Then someone made mine.

  I was walking on the park sidewalk alongside the shallow excuse for a creek that puddled alongside it when a young voice hailed me.

  “Lady! You got a handkerchief on ya?”

  Of course it was a boy, squatting on the back of the putrid creek, squinting up at me.

  “No handkerchief.”

  His ten-year-old face fell. I wasn’t used to seeing emotion reflected on faces in the neighborhood.

  “But I do have some plastic newspaper sleeves I carry to pick up…litter.”

  “Dog poop? Yeah, that’d work. Can I have one?”

  “May I.”

  He screwed up his face. “You already have it. I only need one. Or two.”

  “Come and get them, then.”

  He scrambled up the bank, his tennies gray with mud, T-shirt and baggy shorts sopping wet. A moment later something wiggling between his clasped hands slid down the throat of the plastic bag I held open.

  I screeched a little.

  “It’s just a baby garter snake, lady. Musta got lost from the bunch.”

  I examined the grass next to the sidewalk.

  “Won’t hurt you. Not that kind. I know. I have lots of snakes at home.” Since I must have looked impressed at this information, he went on. “And toads and turtles and tortoises, which are different from turtles, and hamsters and ferrets. A whole wall of my bedroom is terrariums with reptiles.”

  “Lovely. And why are you Snake Boy?”

  “It’s my hobby. I study ’em.”

  By then we were walking back to Meandering Lane. “Which house is yours?”

  He pointed with the snake bag.

  Oh. The home-school house: 4329. A big brick colonial whose mater familias I had never even glimpsed. None of the neighbors knew much more than that about the Effertz family. They had two kids seldom seen. Snake Boy was named Ethan, he told me. Mr. Effertz drove vehicles much despised for bringing “down” the neighborhood tone: huge, boxy, reconditioned Checker cabs painted Virgin Mary blue and canary yellow. Mary Ann was a harried-looking faded redhead who dared to be forty pounds overweight and shop at Sack ’n’ Save instead of Tom Thumb or Central Market.

  The Banes of the Block, in other words.

  “Well, young man,” I said fondly to Ethan, “I am most interested in your collection. Do you suppose you could show me where this little fellow will find his new home?”

  Of course I understood that it was in just such isolated home-school families as these where desperate house wives could suddenly drown all their children and everyone would puzzle and try to figure out why.

  “We’ll have to sneak back in,” he warned me.

  “Fine. I haven’t had a good sneak in years.”

  I continued to walk ferociously as Halloween came and went and the weather remained hot. No one else did. Walking was for umbrella-carrying ladies of the African persuasion who were leaving the minimansions to catch phantom buses back to the vague distant neighborhoods in which they lived.

  Nothing growing slackened, except for a few fallen leaves from
deciduous trees. The trumpet vine along the backyard fence still sent out aggressive runners. My own snake plants were thriving at their window-side quarters, growing even taller and more sharp-edged.

  I stopped, on one of my walks, to admire Mrs. Berwick’s now fully mature foundation plantings. “What is that tall, leafy plant, with the golden-orange blossoms?” I asked.

  “Ah. My calla lilies. Excellent around pools. Very dramatic. But I don’t think that they’d thrive indoors.”

  I smiled tightly. Mrs. Berwick well understood that the only world I commanded was a sparse eight hundred square feet above my son’s garage.

  “These irritating kids!” she added, wading into her perfect flowers to pluck out a lime-green fuzzy tennis ball that reminded me of a moldy green apple the Wicked Queen might have doled out to Snow White. “Keep tossing their balls into my garden, even though they’re not allowed to play outdoors. Even though they might be my near neighbors’ children.”

  I lifted an eyebrow, about all I was allowed to do on Meandering Lane. “You’re not saying that my daughter-in-law, Madison, would allow her children outside privileges when at home from school?”

  “Probably not,” Mrs. Berwick admitted. Madison was too totally controlling to accuse of supporting anything amusing. Mrs. Berwick sighed. “I wish it was so simple. Between the kids themselves and their awful projectiles, my life is a nightmare.”

  IV. Domestic Hiss

  Mother-in-law’s tongue gets its nickname from the long, pointed shape of its leaves. Perhaps the plant’s stubborn tenacity has something to do with it as well, but I could find no further explanation in all my books.

  And would Mrs. Berwick want my dreams? I wondered. My lovely, lost Cleopatra crouching on her carpeted window shelf in the moonlight, the loathsome snake plants shooting tall and straight to either side of her delicate, ghostly form. Gross, green blades as thick as putty knives. And outside that very window, a peephole on the suburban perfection that covered treachery and corruption the way a good ground cover hides slug-and bug-ridden soil. I’d never been much for digging in dirt.

  When Sonny was home from a business trip over the Thanksgiving holiday, I volunteered to cook a pot-roast dinner to welcome him back.

  “Pot roast?” Madison wrinkled the skin between the bridge of her nose and her waxed and colored eyebrows until she resembled a Ferengi from the Star Trek universe. On earlier visits I’d used to watch television with young Kyle before he’d been shipped off to a military academy. I doubted it was a Star Trek academy.

  “A midwestern dish,” I said. “Takes time to achieve the tendernesss. We don’t have specialty butchers beating our beef to death before we buy it.”

  “Sounds quaint, Mother Hubbard.” Mad produced her supercivilized smile. “Be sure to scour the pots when you’re through. My girl won’t touch a copper pad. It ruins her manicure.”

  So even the hired help is ritzier than me.

  I cooked all day. Young Kinsey and Kyle came tagging along, asking about the strange ritual of using the oven for hours. I set the children to chopping parsley and slicing carrots into the zigzag shapes of french fries. There were rosemary red potatoes. Green beans with sliced almonds and bacon bits. A banana cream pie for dessert.

  The house smelled like a church supper, redolent with the incense of sensible food.

  Sonny joined us in the kitchen, plucking lids off pots and inhaling as if he were fighting a ten-day cold. The kitchen was hot, steamy, filled with voices and laughter.

  “What a fatty piece of meat,” Madison said the moment she put a toe of her Cole Haans over the threshold. “Roasted potatoes! Really, William, what wine will you serve with this, this…mess-hall assemblage.”

  “A cask of Amontillado,” I suggested smoothly.

  The ignorant fool merely frowned. “Spanish wine would be a disaster with American pub food. Look up some beer, dear.” I read the subtext. Preferably canned. Possibly lite. Obviously piss-poor.

  V. Child’s Play

  The succulent varieties seem to be extremely thick-skinned. You can press the leaves hard between your fingers and nothing happens. One especially tough customer, Sansevierea halli, is nicknamed “baseball bat” for obvious reasons.

  November in Texas can still be warm, but warm weather had the advantage of sending Madison into the shopping malls for a pre-Christmas shopping orgy. After all, she was shopping for two: her gifts to the children and Sonny, and also all the luxurious things Sonny would “give” her.

  I unbagged the Louisville Slugger I’d bought for Kyle and the Christmas tree. Nothing like a preholiday workout. The after-school streets were deserted until the workaholic husbands came home around six or seven. The women were out shopping until five or six. That gave us two hours.

  I’d coaxed Kyle into rounding up some neighborhood boys and girls his age for an oddly enthralling new game that long Thanksgiving weekend. Stickball in the street. I insisted they use poison-green tennis balls so no one could get hurt if a line drive hit someone.

  Even Ethan removed the screen from his first-floor bedroom window and managed to join us, watching his house nervously over his shoulder and the windows with all the miniblinds tightly closed. That was another thing Madison had against the Effertzes: miniblinds, not expensive plantation shutters. I’d heard her rant. It brought the whole neighborhood down!

  No, I’d thought. Just you.

  Of course the tennis balls went astray and landed in nearby yards. Ours. Mrs. Berwick’s.

  I made sure the kids scattered before their unfettered shouts penetrated the windows, closed and shuttered to keep the air-conditioning in and street life out.

  Of course I vanished around the curve of our driveway when Mrs. Berwick charged out to order the kids away, pulling tennis balls from her front flower beds as if uprooting weeds, and threatening to keep them.

  “I don’t know what’s got into you kids,” she railed. “Acting like street gangs. Playing all over everyone’s yards.”

  “We stay in the street,” Kyle said. “It’s just the balls that bounce out of bounds. And we don’t dare go in the yards to get them back.”

  “I should hope not, young man. This St. Augustine takes a lot of time and money to get looking so nice. And I’m not your ball boy! Your mother is not going to like seeing you tossing nasty old tennis balls into her foundation plantings. Why don’t you go to the club house and play?”

  Because play is meant to be part of a neighborhood, I answered her silently. A real neighborhood, where childish squeals were treasured, not quashed. Where games like Frying Pan and Simon Says and hide-and-seek were still going strong as the sun went down. Where there weren’t bad-air days and where the sharp smoky smell of the first fall fires being lit was something you stood outside to savor, not something never noticed while dashing from house to garage to street and back to garage and house.

  Neighborhoods were meant to breathe.

  That night I made my move at 2 A.M. Dressed in black like a cat burglar, I tiptoed down the spiral stairs of my aerie. It was right off the kitchen. I collected two never-used oven mitts and a set of sterling-silver salad tongs. I would have preferred grocery-store steel, but one can’t have everything. I put them in a black canvas tote bag I hitched over my shoulder. CARPE DIEM, read the letters on one side, which I turned against my body so they wouldn’t be visible.

  At the door leading to the backyard I turned off the security system, unlocked it, and eeled through. This was the tricky part. I was too old to climb the brick and lumber fences isolating every house. I’d have to ease down our driveway to the street, my black sneakers making no sound. I was more worried about triggering the outside security lights at the corners of every house.

  Soon I was strolling up the empty street in what could have been Stepford. No cars in sight, no sign of life. I turned in at the Effertzes’ driveway and finally stepped on their grass. Not Bermuda. Another cardinal sin on Meandering Lane, where adultery was preferable to loiterin
g and littering children having simple fun. Ethan’s bedroom window was down the house’s sidewall, next to the droning air-conditioning unit. Sonny at that age had slept like a hibernating bear.

  I lifted aside the screen the clever home-schooled Effertz boy had made into an easy exit. I don’t approve of home-schooling. It strikes me as a way to brainwash children, to insulate them from stimulating social differences. In this case, home-schooling had done me a favor. The Effertz parents had not put their funds into yards or decor, but poured them into any enthusiasm one of their children showed. Ethan’s fascination with reptile life had produced a pet store ambience I wouldn’t care to lay me down to sleep in every night. Soft, purple-toned night-lights lit his wall of terrariums holding bats and toads and lizards and snakes, oh my.

  I knew just the fellow I had come for. I had recognized him at once during my earlier visit. Luckily, he was a Texas native. Ethan, of course, knew what he was and had taken precautions. I lifted the cover, donned my oven mitts, and maneuvered the sterling-silver tongs over a two-foot-long rope of scaled skin draping a dead twig.

  The job’s most ticklish part was pressing firmly enough to extract the snake without crushing or riling it. In a moment its colorful body was coiling into one of the soft velvet sacks in which Madison’s high-end holiday brandy bottles had come. I had seen it in a kitchen drawer and found its royal purple color worthy of my reptilian friend.

  I made my way out, retraced my steps, and left the bag in the front plant bed of Madison’s house, along with three dirty and lurid tennis balls, one on the grass, one on the brick edging, and one on the soil.

  In minutes I was back in my “quarters,” out of my sneak-thief outfit and into my nightgown. I slept as fast and hard as young Ethan.

  I usually rose the earliest and went outside to collect the paper. The thick St. Augustine was wet, how or why in this dry climate I wasn’t sure. This morning I had clattered around the kitchen first, the surest alarm clock that control-freak Madison would respond to.

  “Mother Hubbard!” Madison stood in the front doorway in her thick terrycloth robe with THE GREENHOUSE SPA embroidered on it, triumphant at having caught me misbehaving like a naughty child. “Get off the grass. Your slippers will get all wet and track it inside. That stupid woman who delivers the paper is supposed to throw it on the dry driveway. Why they let her do the job if she’s too feeble to manage it, I don’t know. There goes her Christmas tip.”