On the far side of the lawn, Sade’s torso was framed in an upstairs window. With a bemused expression, she had been watching the freak show from a loftier vantage. When she saw him staring at her, the girl stiffened her jaw in a defiant gesture. Then she placed her powerful fingertips over her lips and flicked George a silent kiss. No one noticed. They were too engaged in fence diplomacy. It was at that moment that George understood – an epiphany of sorts - that he loved Sade Richardson. Totally. Completely. Utterly. The kiss at the reservoir was shockingly pleasant enough, but this long-distance, whimsical gesture struck him at a far deeper level. Some inchoate thread of intimacy which had been nurtured over the past few years burst into life – like forcing a dormant seed with warmth and light to germinate in the middle of a wintry deep freeze. And that, too, was so very E.M. Forster. He would have to tell her at the earliest convenience – not that Sade would give a hoot. She would roll her walnut-colored eyes and make a snotty remark, suggesting he was a total idiot. And then she would practice left-hand layups and fall away jump shots, dribble between her legs and life would pursue its lopsided, irregular course.
When his parents returned to the house, Mrs. Weiner announced, “Well, what do you think?”
George’s father shook his head emphatically. “Things went as well as could be expected. They know that we’re not hate mongers and that the fence benefits all concerned.”
“I wish you hadn’t quoted that Frost poem about mending walls,” his wife noted. “That was a bit melodramatic.”
Mr. Weiner made a face. “Look, we all got to live together in this goddamn community so you do whatever it takes.”
“There’s no reason for profanities,” Mrs. Weiner’s tone darkened noticeably. Everyone’s nerves were on edge. “It’s over and that’s all that matters. They agreed in principle that a fence is a good idea.”
Mr. Weiner put the coffee on to boil and got a cup down from the cabinet. “I’ll call the fence company in the morning.”
In the middle of the following week a truck towing a huge auger from the Providence Fence Company pulled up in front of the Weiner’s home. With a Stanley twenty-five foot tape measure and can of spray paint, the crew measured and marked the locations of each of seventeen posts. They fired up the noisy, gas-operated auger and drilled down two feet into the rocky soil. By the early afternoon the crew had packed up and left. George went out to inspect. The four-by-four posts stood perfectly plumb in a slurry of gravelly cement mix. The chalky gray liquid near the street had already begun to set up and cure. George bent down and scratched the rough surface with a fingernail. It was hard as rock.
The next day the workers returned to finish the job. The individual sections of stockade fence were fastened in place using an elaborate system of metal fasteners, nuts and bolts. Gradually the rows of wooden slats crept across the grassy lawn dividing the two properties, and by the late afternoon the beautiful cedar fence stretched to the far end of both yards. Each post was fitted with a decorative crown, a graceful, scalloped pattern defining each individual slatted row. Mr. Weiner was very pleased when he returned home from work. “Money well spent!” he announced with an exultant grin.
“Yes, it’s a lovely piece of workmanship,” his wife agreed.
The following week Sade’s Wildcats were playing the Donovan School. George walked a half mile to the middle school and sat in the bleachers next to a Cambodian woman, whose daughter was on the opposing team. By the end of the first quarter the Wildcats were winning fourteen to five, Sade having scored half the points and picking off almost a dozen rebounds. When the buzzer rang, the coach made substitutions and the score became more respectable. After the half, Sade went back in the game, scored a series of easy layups and the outcome was never in doubt from that point on.
George waited outside the gym and his friend, still wearing her uniform, emerged after a few minutes. Rather than go directly home, they stopped by the athletic field at the end of the street where a soccer match was underway. “There’s gonna be fireworks,” Sade announced, “and I’m not talking Fourth of July and the Eighteen-Twelve Overture.”
George had a vague intimation what was coming. Earlier at the basketball game, Mr. Richardson had walked by the bleachers where George was sitting next to the squat Asian woman. Noticing George, his face puckered in a brusque scowl and the black man glanced away. “My father’s angry as hell over the fence,” Sade continued. “He says your dad’s a hate monger worse than Billy Ray Hooper.” After saying this she draped an arm around his waist and leaned into the boy with her supple body.
“But my parents went and spoke to him just the other week and your father agreed the fence was a good idea.”
“No, he only agreed that they had the legal right to put it up.”
“Did he tell my folks that?”
“No, of course not! My father’s nuts.” She said this with unassuming finality. He felt her grip tighten. He wanted to kiss her – to forget about cedar fencing, folksy Robert Frost poems about mending stone walls, racial reparations and all the other intrinsic stupidity that cluttered his thirteen year-old existence. But then, someone might see George Wiener kissing an attractive black girl and he would have to relocate to another part of the country, abandon scenic New England altogether. “We have nothing in common.”
“That’s true enough.” Sade didn’t bother to look at him. She was watching the soccer game. “But then you talk some moronic nonsense that I’m not even remotely interested in and then maybe a week and a half later, I get to thinking about E.M. Forster or whatever the hell his name is and it makes me feel as though the craziness in my own family is manageable which, of course, it isn’t.”
George wasn’t sure if he was more shocked by the fact that she bared her soul or that she remembered what he had said at the reservoir and actually got the name right. Only now did she turn and look him full in the face. “I’m warning you. My father’s gonna do something really stupid.”
“Like what?”
“Don’t know and don’t especially care.” She kissed him full on the lips, a leisurely, unhurried mind-bending kiss. Several of the soccer players scrimmaging off to the side of the field gawked at them queerly. “Let’s go home now before we start an ugly scene of our own.”
“How was the basketball game?” Mrs. Weiner asked.
“Good,” George responded absentmindedly. He went upstairs to his room and shut the door.
It was all about muddles. According to the world’s leading authority on the subject, E.M. Forster, everything that was wrong in society and between people had to do with muddles – states of confusion, bewildering ambiguity, emotional messiness, mystifying jumbles of chaos and perplexing disorder. A hopeless muddle was at the root of most problems, whether it be running a sturdy, hardwood fence across sixty feet of property or settling grievances that dated back to the Civil War. You couldn’t talk it through. Rational conversation offered no solution whatsoever and frequently only made things worse.
When things were going poorly, George felt his brains all in a muddle. Nothing made any sense; there was no sense of immediacy. There were days strung together, end-to-end in a dismal row, where George felt like he was a bit player, an ill-prepared character actor, in a tacky melodrama not of his choosing. But then Sade came to visit him at the secret cove and the muddle dissolved, evaporated, was blown to smithereens by her infuriating loveliness and utter disregard for what mattered to everyone else. Each fulfilled an unmet need. He was the gossamer glue that held her fractured, dysfunctional universe together; she was the Nubian princess who – abracadabra - could banish muddles. What was required was a kiss on the lips from a girl with hands so strong and malleable that she could palm a regulation-size basketball or, better yet, a mystical novel of love and last-minute redemption written by an introverted Englishman born well over a hundred years ago.
A week later, the Wieners discovered the
depth of Mr. Richardson’s paranoid rage. George’s mother was in the back yard hanging laundry. Mr. Weiner had fitted the pressure-treated T-shaped poles with an adjustable mechanical device. The far end of the cotton clothesline was fed through a small hole ringed with metal ball bearings. As the line began to stretch and sag from the weight of the wet clothing, a quick tug on the end of the rope would raise the line back to its original height. Mrs. Wiener had just fixed a pair of her husband’s Fruit of the Loom boxer underwear on the line with a pair of wooden clothespins, when she saw a huge, almond-colored missile sail up and over the fence, coming to rest with a frightening crash among the tiger lilies in her rock garden. The middle-aged woman’s legs turned to mush as she collapsed onto the grass in a terrified daze. Through a chink in the new fence she spotted Mr. Richardson wearing a lime green Izod sport shirt sauntering up the back stairs to his deck before disappearing into the house. The projectile, which he had launched like a shot putter whirling faster and faster in concentric circles, was a metal propane tank that he had borrowed from Mr. Wiener at the beginning of July.
Weeping hysterically, Mrs. Wiener abandoned the laundry basket full of damp clothes, staggered into the house and called her husband. “It would appear,” she spoke in a faltering falsetto, “our neighbor would prefer reparations.”
Following the propane tank incident, Mr. Wiener went to an attorney and got a restraining order against his neighbor. The legal document stated in terse, no-nonsense language that Mr. Richardson and his wife were not to speak to the Wieners except through proper legal representation; Mr. Richardson could not ‘throw, drop, hurl or otherwise jettison any miscellaneous belongings’ onto their neighbors’ property under threat of civil litigation; and the parents were to ‘cease and desist’ from making any obscene, inflammatory or threatening gestures when entertaining on their deck. Other than the bizarre incident with the propane tank and a few withering stares, Melvin Richardson had done nothing of the sort, but lawyer threw the last statement in – like a warning shot over the bow - for good measure.
Saturday night Sade shuffled into the bathroom where her mother was blow drying her hair. She had overhead heard her parents talking earlier in the afternoon about the letter from the lawyer, which was delivered certified mail. “Is Daddy going to jail?”
Mrs. Richardson pulled a wide-toothed comb through her damp hair, waving the dryer over the limp strands. “No. He’ll just keep a low profile, be on extra-good behavior and things will blow over.”
“What he did was stupid as hell.” Sade lowered the toilet seat and sat down on the terrycloth lid cover.
“Yes, well your father has a penchant for making dramatic statements without considering the consequences.” She repositioned the hair dryer on the opposite side of her head and began to comb out the snarls and tangles. “That’s why he needs the two of us.”
“For what?”
“To keep him on the straight and narrow,” her mother replied with a undertone of gravitas tinged with humor. “To make him realize when he’s done something really wacky and needs to go into the witness protection program.”
Sade had no idea what her mother was talking about except that, since the bizarre incident with the propane tank, her father had been uncharacteristically meek and obliging. Unfortunately, the eerie calm wouldn’t last. Once the crisis had blown over, Mr. Richardson would begin bellyaching about some newly-imagined fault or injustice. “I kissed that Wiener boy.”
The girl’s mother shut the dryer off and stared at her daughter in disbelief. “You what?”
“He’s very weird,” Sade ignored the original question. “Always talking about books. Books, books, books. He thinks the solutions to all the world’s problems can be found in some musty old text written a hundred thousand years ago.”
Mrs. Richardson turned the dryer back on full speed and directed the nozzle at the nape of her neck. The hairs floated lazily on the upstream of warm air. “You and I need to have a little talk.”
“About what?” The girl thought a moment. “Oh, yeah, that.”
“I don’t suppose there’s anything in George’s moldy books about dealing with irascible, short-tempered black men.”
Sade smiled at her mother’s backside. “Not likely.”
Someone had turned the television on and Sade could hear the theme song from Hannah Montana drifting down the hallway. “I appreciate your telling me about the kiss,” there was a note of urgency in the woman’s voice. “I hope you will have the good sense not to share that last bit of romantic gossip with your father.”
Sade headed for the open door. “Not in this lifetime.”
“You can’t go over the Richardsons’ house anymore,” Mr. Weiner announced in a peremptory tone. They were sitting down to a supper of meatloaf, mashed potatoes and butternut squash. “The man tried to kill your mother.”
George cut a piece of meat with his fork and swirled it in the brown gravy. “Mr. Richardson is a paranoid jerk. He doesn’t just hate white people, he hates everybody.”
Sade told George that her father referred to Jamaicans as ‘Jewmaicans’, because, once they arrived from the island with their immigrant-status green card, they started saving up to buy rental property which they promptly let to poor, native-born Afro-Americans. He didn’t especially like Haitians either. The women were all goody-two-shoes, religious fanatics who mixed traditional Catholicism with voodoo and animism. Their religious mumbo gumbo was enough to make a respectable, college-educated black person throw up! That’s what Sade told him. Not that George had any intention of sharing any of this with his parents. “I love Sade Richardson pure and simple. Nobody can keep us apart.” George said this with grim determination. “This isn’t Romeo and Juliette,” he muttered under his breath.
“Try telling that to the guy who lives on the other side of that fence,” Mr. Wiener shot back in a surly voice.
George toyed with his squash. His mother had basted the top with a glaze of brown sugar and honey before placing it in the oven. George laid his fork down next the plate and rose from the table. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Mr. Wiener’s voice sounded mildly hysterical, childish.
“To have a little chat with the guy who lives on the other side of the cedar fence.”
George walked briskly out the door into the fading light, crossed over to the Richardson’s property and rang the bell. “Sade’s not here.” The wife answered the door. “She’s at basketball practice.”
“I need to speak to your husband.”
The woman stared at him uncertainly. Perhaps she sensed something irreverent in his tone. Mr. Richardson inched up behind his wife with his moody mug pressed close to the screen door. “You don’t get along with my folks,” George said, “but that has nothing to do with me.” He turned and pointed at the basketball net at the far end of the driveway. “The next time I see Sade outside shooting hoops, I’m coming over to visit. If you don’t like it call the police.”
“You got some god-awful nerve!” The man made a motion toward the screen door but his wife blocked his way.
George pointed a second time at the transparent backboard and cotton net. “I’m in love with your daughter,” he added in a sarcastic, baiting tone, “and in another eight or ten years I could end up being your son-in-law, so we got to get beyond this childish bickering.” Mr. Richardson’s mouth fell open. Suddenly, he didn’t look angry anymore. The expression on his face was one of utter bewilderment. He was, quite possibly for the first time in his adult life, at a loss for words.
“Yes, George, that sounds fair enough,” Mrs. Richardson said quickly although it was unclear what, if anything, she was referring to as she slammed the front door shut.
The youth went home and picked up where he had left off with the butternut squash. Mr. Wiener and his wife had finished their own dinner and placed the dirty plates on the counter next to the sink.
They sat drinking Bigelow tea while their son ate his meatloaf, mashed potatoes and butternut squash flavored with brown sugar and honey. There was no mention of the Richardson’s feud, airborne propane tanks, restraining orders or a thirteen year-old Jewish boy’s romantic predilections.
Toward the end of the E. M. Forster novel, one of the main characters, Mr. Emerson, described life as resembling a public performance on a violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along. Standing there on the Richardsons’ front stoop with the parents staring out at him from behind the screen door, George Wiener had flailed away on his flimsy violin for all it was worth and improvised some amazing melodies. From George’s vantage point, the strangest thing about the confrontation was how he maintained himself totally in the here-and-now. At no point did the youth lose nerve and slip slide into that benumbed state where he was mechanically going through the motions. He had never felt more alive, in control of his adolescent destiny as when he was reading Attila the Hun – a.k.a. Melvin Richardson - the riot act.
Later that night Mrs. Wiener entered her son’s bedroom and stood stiffly by the night table. “You never mentioned what happened over at the Richardsons’.”
In the darkness, George lay back under the covers and considered the question. “The man is still fighting the Civil War.” He didn’t quite know what else to say about his abortive confrontation with Sade’s misanthropic father. “What he did last week was an act of both historical and hysterical protest, but I don’t think he will be hurling any more propane tanks over the fence.”
“Well that’s a relief!” Mrs. Wiener turned around and abruptly left the room. George listened but didn’t hear his mother’s footfalls descending the stairs. Rather, she lingered on the upstairs landing, mulling something over in her mind. Finally she trudged back into the room. “Do you remember the Disney movie Bambi?”
“Vaguely.”
“In the early spring, all the animals became twitterpated, intoxicated with love. They chose a soul mate, a life partner, and went romping through the fields and meadows.” Mrs. Wiener sat down on the edge of the bed. “Puppy love – that’s what you’re feeling right now for the Richardson girl.”