I’ve lived in this neighbourhood for nearly ten years now. Not alone, of course; I have the requisite wife with her weekly manicure appointments, and the requisite dog with her poufy tail, and the requisite two point four children. Two of the children are easy to find. They each have a bedroom on either side of our bedroom, one pink, one blue, in day-glo shades that would burn out your eyes if you stared too long at the walls. As for the other four tenths, he’s not so easy to find—at least not if you’re looking for him. But he pops up in odd ways. He’s there in the vestiges of a teen-aged immaturity. He’s there in a spate of disappointed hopes, the sense, as we survey the lovely homes above and below us, that it will never get any better than this. He’s there, too, in the pressure to strut, to buy bigger toys, to program our kids with lessons and play groups and sports teams until our days are one long breathless sprint. Point four.
It isn’t a bad neighbourhood. It’s a cul-de-sac with five two-story houses facing another five two-story houses, and seven more in the sac part of the cul-de. It’s genteel. It’s polite. We all find gracious ways to ignore one another. We all find civil ways to hide the fact that we couldn’t give a shit about one another. We chat amiably about one another’s cars, and the latest losing streak on the sports channel, and we all laugh har har about the way our guts are beginning to spill over our belts. We all walk up and down the street carrying ourselves like bowls of rice that have been steamed too long in pots too small. And we pick up dog shit in plastic baggies that we swing in circlets until they’re wound around our index fingers. Then we point our fingers at one another—you know that hokey gesture—with thumb up, like the sights on a pistol—and we fire it off. “How ya doin’ old buddy?” “Great to see ya.” Bang. Off goes the shot. Only we don’t shoot imaginary bullets. We shoot shit. Always shooting the shit. When we were married, this is what Madge and I had dreamt of; this is what we had hoped for. And now we’ve got it. Or it’s got us. But it isn’t a bad neighbourhood.
There’s a funny thing about the neighbourhood: it all slopes down to the Jeffries’ house at the farthest point of the sac. When you enter the street, you’re at the top, looking down, steep enough that you’re standing at the same level as the highest branches of the Jeffries’ tallest trees. It almost has a European feel to it, except that it sucks for the kids who want to play street hockey. The other thing that’s funny about the neighbourhood is the unmistakable progression from top to bottom. At the top of the cul-de-sac, the lawns are always pocked with brownish patches; the flowers always wilt and by the end of the summer, they’re wizened and crinkly; the leaves on the maple trees are splotchy and drop early. The Orsens, who live on the right as you enter the street, shrug it off. Something about the soil, they say. Doesn’t matter what they do, it makes no difference. Still the same brown patches and wilted petals and rotten leaves. They’ve even hired a professional landscaping company to take care of things for a year. I remember seeing a mustachioed, dark-tanned, sombrero-wearing impresario strutting around the Orsen place ordering his underlings to weed this and water that. But even by mid-summer it was obvious to all the neighbours that no measure of skill could rehabilitate the Orsen yard.
Then there’s the Jeffries. Down at the bottom of the slope, they have immaculate lawns that are always lush and greener than green with that fine close-cropped grass you find on putting greens. There are terraced flower beds and roses and ornamental shrubs. There are spring flowers like hyacinths and daffodils and tulips, and there are late-bloomers too like sedum and black-eyed Susan, and twenty other varieties for the times in between. Always an explosion of colour and always well-tended. Next door, on either side of the Jeffries, the yards are almost as nice. Still the same explosion of colour and immaculate landscaping, but they fall short in little ways. On the north side, the Wilson’s always have trouble with tent caterpillars in their purple sand cherry. And on the south side, the Singh’s have a wasp problem in their juniper; once, it even cost them a case of scotch to keep the mailman from suing after a particularly vicious swarming incident.
A little further along, closer to our yard, there’s the odd dandelion in the lawn and sometimes even a dried-up petunia, but still a presentable yard. Further up the slope past us, the gardening goes downhill—in a manner of speaking. To be fair, I’ve seen Milt out in the springtime, busting his ass with an aerator and a push fertilizer, and Milly across the road from him has always been conscientious about her watering, giving the grass an evening soak, but not so much that it would weaken the roots. Despite their best efforts, their yard care is abysmal, an embarrassment, a landscaping atrocity. And then there’s the Orsen’s. I grant they’re nice folks. But nice is no substitute for lawn-savvy. I’ve been tempted on more than one occasion to organize a neighbourhood drive to apply for a court order compelling them to sell to people who can take proper care of a yard. But I keep my mouth shut and smile.
The problem can go too far in the other direction. The Jefferies sometimes carry themselves with a hoity-toity air that doesn’t smell quite as sweet as the rose blossoms in their yard. It carries more a whiff of the sanctimonious. They try their best to hide it. They try their best to be just another neighbourly couple. But in every smile and in every passing wave you can sense it just below the surface: we’re the ones who can grow lawns that are greener than an Irish park; we’re the ones who grow roses for the toreadors to hold between their shining teeth.
“Mornin’ Dave.” It’s Sam Jeffries, the husband, walking his strutting standard poodle with a baggie of dog shit in one hand and his wife’s hand in the other.
I nod and smile from my front porch as I take up the paper.
“Lovely day, though, isn’t it?” That’s Emily, the wife, the woman who clips all the roses and dead heads all the petunias. She pours out her sickly-sweet greeting like syrup from a thin-necked bottle.
“Indeedy-do,” I say, then wonder what the hell I meant by such a folksy comment.
Sam is saying something else, but the words get lost in the roar of a truck that’s just rounded the corner and is braking all the way to the bottom of the slope. It’s a big flatbed hauling a backhoe. Trailing it is a cube van with the words “Coring and Concrete” stenciled on the side. When the trucks halt at the bottom of the slope out in front of the Jeffries’ place, I find I can hear Sam again. I swear, the guy must’ve been talking the whole time and didn’t care that nobody could hear him.
“…municipal notice to start on … well whoever heard of starting on a Saturday for Christ sake. I mean, can’t a guy get some peace. Been traveling … with work of course. Just one day. That’s all I ask. Just one fricken day. Know what I mean?”
I grin and jack my head up and down, and even though I haven’t a clue what the man is saying, I’m sure he figures me for a good guy, straight-up, an ally against whatever bureaucratic forces have proclaimed Saturday the proper day to start sawing asphalt and chewing it up with a backhoe.
“What they up to anyways?” I ask.
“Replacing the water mains.”
And almost as if the words are a cue, another flatbed truck starts down the road with a load of blue pipes. And so it begins: the piercing whine of an asphalt saw, a backhoe cracking three-foot slabs of asphalt and dropping them into idling dump trucks, the roar of trucks fighting their way up the slope, the excavation of mud and dirt. Over the next couple days, the subcontractors for the city sink a trench along the length of the road from the Jeffries’ front lawn all the way up to the Olsen’s, and in front of each house they dig a smaller trench perpendicular to the main trench. Late on the third morning, I pull up with a load of coffees for all the guys, hoping I’m not being too obvious with my bribery. I just want to smooth things over. I just want to make sure they don’t block my driveway for more than an hour here and there, persuade them to drop all their big concrete tubes across the road instead of leaving giant tube-shaped impressions deep in my lawn.
When I approach with trays of coffee in hand, everything falls silent. They’ve already switched off the machinery, even the backhoe. The operator has stepped down from the cab so he can join the others lined up on either side of the trench. They’re staring intently at the gravel and the dirt and the old pipes that still have to be hauled up and carted away. There are fingers pointing and whistles under the breath and “whoo-whee’s” and broad grins and looks of puzzlement and shaking heads. One man—the one I’d taken for the foreman—has pulled off his hard hat and is holding it cupped over his stomach like a man at a funeral, only it can’t be that grave a situation because some of the men are smiling and joking around. I dole out coffees and ask what’s up. Nobody drinks their coffee. They just stare into the trench.
The foreman points with a stubby finger. “Lookit.”
I lookit, but I’m not sure what’s so special about whatever I’m supposed to be lookiting. “What?”
The foreman kneels and dangles an arm into the trench. He points at big concrete tubes that run up the hill to the Orsen’s place, and down the hill to the Jeffries’ place. Then he points to smaller tubes that connect with the big tube. “See these.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, twenty years ago—or however long ago it was—they hooked everything up all wrong. See, there’s you’re water.” He points to half inch copper piping that juts out from the main. “That’s the feed for your water. But that …” He points to a wider pipe, maybe the width of an average man’s arm. “See that? That’s the sewage hookup. Only nobody ever hooked it up.”
“You mean the waste went straight into the ground?”
“Not exactly.”
“Well, then, what?”
The workers look up at one another across the trench, uneasy, grinning. The foreman hefts himself to his feet and wipes a swath of dirt from his hard hat. “They hooked waste water to the main. Mister, you all have been drinkin’ one another’s piss.” Ceremoniously, he holds his coffee in front of him and pours it into the trench. “I wouldn’t drink your coffee if you paid me.”
Just then, just as the foreman is dumping his pisswater coffee into the trench, Sam Jeffries breezes past, power walking his poodle with a huff and a puff. “Mornin’ gentlemen.” He pauses to catch his breath and follows everybody’s gaze to the trench. “What’s so interesting?”
“Nothing,” I say.
“Oh.” Sam straightens up, getting ready to resume his power walk.
“Only, Sam, from now on I think you’re gonna need fertilizer on your lawn just like the rest of us.”