Marta Stephanopoulos gave a heaving sigh as she pressed the red-phone button on her cell. Unable to speak at the moment, her fingers flew to her temples where they mashed the plastic skin there.
Two calls, one right after the other (indeed, she was mid inhale after the first conversation when the phone rang again!) of two old biddies in the neighborhood accusing one or all of her four sons of vandalism. Their words thrashed about in her head as she kept rubbing and rubbing that spot where her glasses frames normally hovered close to. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could rub out problems out like this? She thought. Then she thought about rubbing and mashing miniscule versions of Edna Andrews and Annalee Edwards into red pulpy mounds.
The thoughts of violence passed and she imagined the scene described to her over the phone. “Dust Everywhere!” one cried. “Paint chips in the street!” said the other. For years those old women had done battle in their yards. One collected Gnomes of the garden variety and the other collected gaudy and racist lawn jockeys. Marta couldn’t remember who collected which. The war had gotten to such a heated state a few years back that every square inch of lawn was covered with either gnomes or jockeys. No grass, nor flowers, nor dirt, nor sunlight remained on those lawns: only plaster
Their homes faced each other across Park Avenue in this little town of Springdale so that they could conveniently eye each other’s collections around the holidays when they painstakingly decorated their decorations.
Like I said, it had been a few years since every spot of lawn had been covered with statues and since then the yards had become complacent. Mrs. Edwards and Mrs. Andrews had been locked into their cold war so long they surely would have never expected the events of the previous evening coming. They were too busy watching each other.
God knows if they were still married or widowed or divorced. Mr. Stephanopoulos once joked—after having a whole bottle of wine more than he should have—that Mr. Andrews and Mr. Edwards had passed into the Lord’s keeping by their own hands long ago and that their respective old ladies had simply been too busy to notice that their husbands no longer came up from the basement to the dinner table. Mr. Stephanopoulos, rather tactlessly added, “Their smiles are like this!” as he pointed a finger from each hand to his temples.
Mrs. Edwards and Mrs. Andrews discovered that a veritable genocide had been perpetrated in the dead of night. Nearly every one of their plaster-of Paris statuettes had been smashed to bits. It was a grave atrocity, on par with the shelling of Sarajevo, Mrs. Edwards implied over the phone. It was akin to the Ukrainian Holodomor, Mrs. Andrews squawked in the way that only old ladies can squawk.
It was, indeed, a huge mess. It stretched from one porch across the street and to the other porch. Mr. Stephanopoulos, who was fond of telling tall tales when the night was right and tight, would later claim that they had to call in the snow plows to part the piles of plaster dust so that errant cars, lost in this Midwestern suburban hell get through. When he recounted this particular tale, Marta would just sigh and nod, a distinct smile on her face as she reminded herself of why she loved him. He could flip from being nuclear-holocaust serious to a professional bullshit artist at the speed of sound. She appreciated this dichotomy—though it often resulted in social awkwardness for the entire family—she recognized it as a coping mechanism for the juggernaut-like boredom he encountered every day as a certified public accountant.
It was surely one of the Stephanopoulos boys, the old biddies crowed. They’re the only boys in the whole neighborhood.
However, that was not strictly true. The Tate brothers who lived down by the creek were also prone to acts of madness and chaos, but their obvious and seemingly eternal presence in the most forward pews of the nearby Presbyterian Church gave them carte blanche in the eyes of the blue-hairs. “Smart boys, the Tate brothers,” Marta thought, “They’ll probably end up serial killers.”
Mrs. Stephanopoulos sighed again, but this time with a guttural “hhhhgggg” sound. “It probably was one of the boys,” she said softly, “Goddamnit.” She looked up and through the floorboards of the house imagining what each of her sons would be doing:
Truman, 14, or as he insists that his friends call him, TJ, would be in his room painstakingly picking through the complex lines of guitar tabulature he bought last week only pausing occasionally to imagine, only briefly and nebulously, what a groupie’s vagina would feel like.
Marcus and Ned would be scorching out their eyeballs to the infinitely tiny Red-Green-Blue pinpoints of light their television beams to their retinas as they play Call-of-Duty. The X-Box whirs away as they accuse complete strangers of being faggots. They are twins and they are 12.
Dylan would be drawing intricate scenes of epic battles between stick figures, the boy couldn’t draw worth a damn and as a result you could only tell which side a particular character was on by the direction they faced. Left facing, bad; right facing, good. Then again there were those ambiguous figures that either looked toward or away from the viewer. But anyway, the “Left bad, right good” dichotomy was what he told the shrink after she found at least a hundred of these scenes in his closet one morning and she feared for his little 5 year old mind. “He’s just being imaginative, Mrs. Stephanopoulos,” he said.
Dylan just wanted to keep his imagination to himself. He never wanted his pictures up on the fridge, displayed for everyone to see and critique. He felt much more comfortable disappearing into his own elaborate narrative.
The boys were close and if she had any chance to find out what had happened last night she had to interview them one at a time. If they were together it was like they turned into an improv class whose assignment is to convincingly corroborate a murderer’s alibi. They were inventive and crafty together, but alone they would break.
She decided to go in alphabetical order this time. She went from shortest to tallest last time and that had been a mistake. She had to go through three of them before she caught the culprit of the Great TPing Scandal. The perpetrator was obviously Truman, since he was the only one old enough to be able to go out past sunset.
Marta Stephanopoulos stood up and filled her diaphragm with dense, humid air, “Dyyyyyylan!” she bellowed so that the whole house could hear her mighty mom-call. She sat back down at the kitchen table and listened to the irregular thudding of feet traversing not one, not two, not three, but four flights of carpeted steps.
Dylan stepped into view, “Yes, mom?” Dylan was a small child with dense black hair that he never combed. Marta had lately taken to licking her palm and giving the top of his head a lingering slap to sort some of the follicles before dragging him to school or church.
“Dylan, do you know what happened to the Andrews’ and Edwards’ yards last night?”
“Their statues got all busted up,” Dylan said, his brows slightly furrowed as if to say, where have you been?
“How do you know that?” Marta snapped. She had her suspect, now for the confession!
“You can see the mess from the attic window.”
A likely story, Marta thought.
“Do you know what happened?” She tried a different tack.
“Yeah, I do,” Marta lifted her eyes to the lamp hanging above the kitchen table, relieved. Now all she had to do was hear the confession, extract the apology and write the check for damages. This would be over soon.
“What happened?”
“The gnomes and the lawn jockeys didn’t like each other very much so they had a war.”
Marta’s face frowned a little, but she continued to listen. If you interrupted them, well, that was it. They might as well be mute because they aren’t likely to talk again.
“The gnomes thought that the jockeys were too skinny and the jockeys thought the gnomes were too fat and so every night when everyone is asleep they decided to fight each other. The big-deal generals were Nestor on the gnome side, and Ankles on the jockey side. Those aren’t their real names, Mrs. Andrews and Mrs. Edwards has names for them all. Their general names were ‘gnomesdeegar.’”
“Nom de guerre?”
“Yeah, that’s it, like that guy in that movie.”
What the hell movie did we watch where that phrase would come up? A French war film? Is there such a thing as a French war film? We’ve really got to do a better job of screening films for the Kindergartener, Marta thought.
“Go on,” Marta prodded.
“Well, they fought a lot because that’s what they’re supposed to be doing. It was the big war and someone had to win and somebody had to lose and Nestor was sure he was going to win and Ankles though that he was going to win. They fought until almost all of their soldiers were dead and then there was going to be the big fight between Nestor and Ankles, but they both slipped in all the dust because gnomes and lawn jockeys don’t bleed, mom, they just turn to dust and stuff when they break. They looked around and the saw the big mess they had made and they felt bad because they did something bad and they decided to go home and leave each other alone. They even shook hands on it, mom, so you know it’s for real,” Dylan ended his speech with a deep gasp and a nodding head as if that would somehow make the handshake more sincere.
Marta’s eyes widened and her lips tightened into a straight line as the epiphany washed over her. This was a confession, a lie and an apology all wrapped up into one story. Oh God, each set of these kids get weirder and weirder. No more kids! That’s it! God forbid I get pregnant again. Frank Zappa fully grown would just jump out after nine months, she thought, then shuddered.
“Tell me, Dylan. What was the weapon of choice during this epic and morally ambiguous war?”
“A hammer,” Dylan said, his head now buried in his neck.
“Take off your shoes,” Marta Said. Dylan was truly frightened now. His eyes wide as his brain became aware that he was found out. He must have known it was coming, but that doesn’t stop the panic from welling up in you when you know you’re mom just found you out.
“Take off your shoes and go upstairs with your brothers,” Dylan kicked off his shoes with such great force that the plaster that had been caked onto them turned into a cloud of dust as he turned tail and ran back upstairs.
Marta listened to the fading sound of ascending thumps as she opened the garage door and found the hammer, covered in white powder, on the wall shelf. She threw both the hammer and the shoes into the grass beside the tomato plants and blasted them with the hose until the ground was wet and brown and no longer white and dusty.
As she set the shoes out in the sun to dry, she thought to herself, At least I’m not burying mutilated cats like Anne Tate.