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My shoulders tense. There will doubtless be more kid yelling and probably some hammering. I shudder. I can’t do it. I can’t spend all day listening to them crash around their yard.
It’s been a while since I visited my parents. Today feels like a good day for a trip to Richmond. My grading is caught up, and I can think through my lecture notes while I drive. I’ll text my parents that I’m coming, get in a morning run, take a shower, and then hit the road and leave the girls next door to their noise.
Two hours later, I’ve logged several more miles on my running shoes, and the neighbors still aren’t out and about yet when I get back to my house. At least, they’re not in the yard. I frown. I don’t know much about raising kids, but the child doesn’t seem old enough to be sleeping in this late.
Whatever. It’s not my problem, and I’m getting out of here before they get to work outside on the painted Christmas cutouts. They’re cornier in the daylight than I had even imagined. A grinning cartoon Santa Claus. And his reindeer. They’re not cute in the best of times, but to have all of them in one looooong row? The plaid bows painted on their harnesses make it worse, somehow. Menacing in a way that I can’t explain. The white dots in their irises come off as demented instead of sparkling.
I shower quickly and choose a pair of khakis and a striped Oxford shirt my mom will like, and I’m in the car and on my way before I have to deal with the neighbors.
The two-hour drive to Richmond proves sufficient for planning my lectures. When I arrive at my parents’ place, my dad orders me to join him for golf. Having expected this, I change into my golf shoes and fetch my clubs from their garage. This is a pastime only he and I share, not one I do with others, so it only makes sense to leave my clubs here.
We return home after eighteen holes, both in good spirits, my dad because he won, and me because I won’t have to listen to him vent about losing. It’s always worth fudging my numbers so he comes out with a better score. It means we both walk into the house smiling, and my mom returns it. She and my dad set to work preparing dinner. Even though I know what she’ll say, I try to help.
“Sit, Henry,” she says, shooing me toward a kitchen chair. “How are things going at Jefferson?”
It’s a familiar routine. We’ll talk about my classes. My dad will offer some advice on teaching from his years of experience as an economics professor, and my mom will eventually work her way around to asking me how the house is. I’ll try to brace for the question but be deeply uncomfortable anyway when she asks.
I will wish that I could tell her honestly that I enjoy it, but I don’t; I’m an interloper. That feeling won’t change. So I’ll lie, and she’ll accept it because it’s the answer she wants, and none of us will talk about why the house went to me or why I never wanted it.
I hope that part of the conversation comes sooner than later. It’s always a relief when it’s out of the way and we can move on to more pleasant topics, like politics and international wars.
We cap off the evening with the new Ken Burns documentary, and when it ends, I stand and stretch. “Thank you for dinner and the entertainment. I’d better head back.”
“Very well, son,” my dad says as he always does. “Good visit.”
I hug each of them and head out to my car.
The drive home passes quickly as I listen to AnthroPod, a cultural anthropology podcast. It’s about two hours and nine minutes from my parents’ house to mine, and two hours, eight minutes, and thirty seconds of them are pleasant—right until I turn into my driveway and stop, staring at the neighbors’ house in horror.
Flabbergasted horror.
Stunned, flabbergasted horror.
You would think that any change to the house could only be an improvement.
You would be wrong. So very wrong.
Before, the house was only an eyesore during the day. At night, one could assume it was as tidy and well-kept as all the other houses on Orchard.
But now . . . now it is lit up like the Las Vegas Strip, a place I’ve had the good fortune to never see in person, until my new neighbor decided to spend a Saturday recreating it on her front lawn.
The cutouts—while garish—had at least previously lain flat. Now they’re upright with floodlights staked in front of each one to make sure no one can miss their cartoon brightness. The menacing reindeer, red-cheeked Santa, bright presents spilling from his bag in colors that I feel sure never existed before this painting, more panels with elves in aggressively colored outfits and striped stockings . . . and there’s more.
More panels with more illustrations than my mind can process. More lights shining on them. More Christmas lights, period. They wind around her front posts, illuminating her windows and ramshackle shutters—or lack of them. They march along her front eaves to puddle in a senseless pile where they ran out of house to hang on.
There’s strong evidence that the kid did some if not all of the decorating. Lights hang on the painted cutouts with no rhyme or reason, here wrapped around grinning Santa’s neck as if he enjoys strangulation, there wrapped round and round a snowman with no regard for the laws of science and nature—he would melt, damn it. The lights wouldmelthim.
It’s beyond garish. It’s a travesty.
And it’s all far too early. There’s almost two weeks to go until Thanksgiving, and even then, people of refined taste don’t begin the Christmas season before the start of December.
I’m half-tempted to march up to her disgraceful porch and tell her all this myself, but I remember the slight narrowing of her eyes as she’d delivered her—admittedly tasty—soup last night, and I’d mentioned waiting to calibrate her display.
If this horror show is a reaction to my hint, how would she react to an outright criticism? My car would no doubt sport a new coat of bright pink paint come morning. The woman might be unhinged.
I run an eye over the vomitous display. “Might be” is generous. She’s as unhinged as her shutters.
A civil conversation is out of the question, obviously. It’s all well and good for her to offer an apology and soup, but if the tiniest suggestions upset her apple cart, it’s better to take a different tack. There’s not a beef and barley stew on earth good enough to put up with these current crimes against taste.
