Cheryl Wagner – on being a good neighbor.

New Orleans, Louisiana
September 6, 2000

Tanio –

The little girl next door is driving me crazy. I think she wants something from me. Tucker says I’m just imagining it.

She must be about thirteen now – a medium brown black and maybe Spanish girl with hair tied back in a perfect bun. In the two years that I’ve lived next to her she’s grown about two feet and gotten her first real bike – a Wal-Mart mountain bike that at first she only used to navigate the small yard and cracked sidewalks in front of our houses. But now she’s gone biking for hours at a time. I’d tell you her name but I’ve blocked it, though she knows mine. I don’t remember ever telling it to her.

Since we both live in shotguns, the alley between our houses is maybe five feet wide – like at our place on Palmyra, except smaller. Since I started growing tomatoes, bananas, eggplant and whatever else I can get to sprout in my backyard, the little girl has been hanging around on the wood stoop outside her bedroom, overlooking my backyard.

Gabriella. That’s her name. It just snuck up on me when I wasn’t trying to think of it. I just turned thirty and I’m already losing my mind. Okay so first Gabriella likes Buster.

Is that a hot dog? she’d ask.

A basset hound, I’d say.

Why’s he so short?

He was made like that so he could sneak under bushes in the woods better when hunting foxes in another country – France.

He hunts?

No. Well, yeah, but just chicken bones and beer and french fries and stuff when we go on walks – no foxes in New Orleans.

Is he a pit bull? the boy cousins would say when they came over.

No! Gabriella would boss.

A wiener dog like on TV? A hush puppy?

A basset hound, I already told you, Gabriella would say.

Sometimes I would hear her through my screen door whispering Buster’s name over and over through the chicken-wire/butterfly-chair fence I made so he wouldn’t escape and go eat stuff under people’s houses. Her cousins would come over and I think maybe they were slipping him candy and Chee-Wees and bubble gum, because I would find wrappers all around Gabriella’s little stoop by the fence. She and Buster bonded because you know he wags himself in half when anyone says his name. Wish I was like that.

Here comes the bad part. This spring Gabriella gets a plant and puts it outside on her side stoop by where I’m gardening and waters it when I’m gardening, and her plant does okay for a while. But she doesn’t water it every day, so it starts to brown and curl, so I start watering it for her. One day I give her six Miracle-Gro sticks to bury near its roots because it looks so wilty I feel bad for her. Other than that, I try not to get involved, because you know how attached kids around here can get. Does that make me a bad person?

Her mother has this terrible boyfriend. He’s tall, wide, imposing – bushy beard, old work truck, brings crawfish, crabs, and fish by in burlap sacks that sit and steep in the sun in our alley. Drinks Miller tall boys by the case on their front steps. The works. (Though in his defense I should say that he does toss the cans in my recycling bin instead of on the ground under the house.) The boyfriend and the mother, a wiry woman in her late thirties, get drunk on Saturdays (sometimes Fridays, Thursdays, and Sundays) and scream and yell and throw things while I imagine Gabriella hides in her bedroom by our backyard.

Which brings me to: is it just fighting or more? You know I’m not opposed to calling NOPD at the drop of a hat when I hear what sounds like beating. But I can’t figure out if this is beating or just yelling. No one has any visible bruises, but it sounds like chairs and couches against walls, Gabriella’s whole home being ransacked. I can hear it in my living room and in my bedroom even with my and their music turned up. And if it’s just fighting, I don’t think Gabriella should have to listen to all that You are NOT going to stand there and talk to ME like a BITCH and use THAT language in front of MY daughter!

Last fall and spring, the mother sat with Gabriella on our side stoop and helped her with her homework. Some days I’d hear her calmly chiding her to clean up her room. This summer rolls around and the lunkhead boyfriend’s been around all the time. It’s too hot for the mother’s usual front stoop parties where they blast oldies and sing Aretha at the top of their lungs. The air is wet and pressing. It’s too hot for Pops, the wheelchair old man with no legs and an oxygen tank, to roll over for a cigarette and some hollering and beer. It’s also too hot for the mother’s drunk-ass screaming sister and the boyfriend’s angry, dreadlocked twelve-year-old son to sneak back by our back stoop to light up. (Hi, I said when he was lurking there with his joint one day while I was pulling weeds in the backyard. He looked like a dog about to be run over again. Buster wagged his tail at him. Got a match, he said. Yeah, I said and went to get it.)

One day I came home and since it was summer Gabriella was out of school and maybe she went for a few days to a day camp. There was a small manila envelope in my mailbox that said “Cheer up! Have a good day! From Gabriella (the little girl next door).” I opened up the envelope and there was a smiling wooden clothespin with googly eyes glued to it and I panicked. I called my Mom and asked her what I should do. She said, Thank her. I said I’m afraid she wants something. Don’t scrutinize everything so much, Mom said.

I didn’t know what I wanted to give her. I couldn’t just knock on her door and thank her face to face. I wound up picking some flowers I had grown and leaving them with a note on her front step one morning before I left for work. I still don’t know if she got them.

About the middle of the summer I stopped seeing her on the side stoop so much. She got her bike and started riding. Her mother casually says to me one morning, Sorry if I was beating on your door and ringing your doorbell and screaming for help last night. My boyfriend had too much to drink and got a little crazy. I thought he was going to kill me. That’s why the police were here. I told him not to come around any more, but I don’t know.

Gabriella’s father drove down from Atlanta in a Mercedes SUV with his family straight out of a Tommy Hilfiger ad and picked Gabriella up and she was gone for two weeks. The mother stopped me on the sidewalk in front of our houses and said that Gabriella was excited because she was going to get to ride an airplane back but that she had been scared to leave because she thought something bad was going to happen to her mother. I told her mother to call on the phone if she needed anything because my doorbell doesn’t work. She said thanks but didn’t ask for my number. She said she didn’t think her boyfriend would be coming around anymore.

A couple of weeks ago Tucker hammered some rotten railings off the Gabriella side of the house. Our slumlord was about to kick us out and sell the place and all four of us were thinking about getting a low-income loan and pitching in $200 each for the mortgage so we wouldn’t have to move to a dangerous neighborhood. We were trying to fix up the place for the government inspectors.

One of the rotten railings had a message pencilled on it in a child’s round handwriting. You are not good neighbors, the railing said. You never say hello.

Remember when you loaned that little boy down the street from us a bike pump and he never brought the bike pump back and then one of his cousins got shot so you didn’t want to ask for it back even though you didn’t have the money for a new one? Maybe that’s how I feel.

Last night I cracked open the door because I heard slamming and cursing and someone yelling Is it going to be 911? I saw the mother’s brother shove her into the street. Gabriella was standing on the front sidewalk near them holding a portable phone with her finger pointed at the dial. She looked up over her shoulder at me.

I shut the door. Tucker said don’t call the police. He’ll know it was you. I said I can’t stand it, but I didn’t call. The brother left and the shouting stopped. I called the YWCA 24-hour crisis line and they said Does the woman want help? We can’t help people unless they want to be helped.

What about if there’s a kid? I said.

Do you have reason to believe the child is being physically harmed in some way?

Not physically, I said.

Well, then, no.

This morning the mother stopped me and said Gabriella was worried about me worrying. I said I never know if I should call the police. She said only call if her boyfriend is trying to hurt her. Then call. She kept apologizing.

I want to get rid of my chicken wire and put up this big fence between our houses. I think about it whenever I go outside. Yesterday I went to the Green Project salvage yard and picked out some metal grid. The week before I bought one of those cheap rolls of bamboo. Yesterday afternoon Tucker helped me put it up but none of it was tall enough and this morning when I went outside a breeze had knocked it down.

Cheryl