I had tickets to the opera on Wednesday, but Noodles had thrown up a boot, and then his parents—the backup childcare—threw up some boots of their own. So, instead of watching Bear Mountain undulate past the train window on my way to watch The Hours at Lincoln Center, I was at home in Troy.
My friend S also had big plans. She was going to finish the Miranda July in the manner in which July intended—alone at her cabin in Vermont. Except her husband was sick too. And also one of her children.
It was an “early release” day for school, which means noon in our town. So by midday, I had a sick husband and two children pinging around the house while I tried to work.
S was also housebound, presiding over one sick child and one well. Thank god something else happened.
There had been a fire truck on our street earlier that morning, and police cars blocking each end, but those had left. At 2 o’clock, however, the police were back.
I went out to my pathway project in the front yard to surreptitiously weed. I squatted over the tufts of Scotch moss, pulling out creepers and peering up the road to where four police cars and one university safety car were parked outside the ugly frat. An additional policeman got out in front of my house, so I padded after him. There were a couple of cops fingering through the bushes at the base of the frat house, a monstrous cinderblock building with a field of untended dandelions out front that the kids like to run through kicking the stalks so that a cloud of floof rises up.
One officer was on the roof. I walked towards the elderly homeowner next door who was peering over her fence at the goings-on, but she retreated when I got close. “Your hose is always on,” I wanted to also say to her. It dribbles down the driveway, wasting water.
I turned back to the frat, really the saddest frat in Troy thanks to the midcentury architecture. “What’s going on? I asked one of the policemen who was standing around in his utility belt doing not much. It looked like they were hunting for Easter eggs. He turned to me and said, “We’re uh … looking into a burglar alarm.” It read as a lie. “Ah,” I said, and padded back to my house.
“The cop told me it was ‘uh, a burglar alarm,’” I told Noodles, all fired up, “do you think he’s lying?”
“The police always lie,” he said, a phone in each hand, overseeing important work.
I texted S about it.
“I have to know what’s going on. I’m going to text my friend with a police scanner,” she replied from her Colonial.
“GOOD,” I said in my Victorian.
Another police car drove up, pulling in around back of the frat.
“What’s going ON,” I asked Noodles, who seemed shrunken after two days of sickness.
“I don’t know, but they have a K9 there now,” he said down the stairs. “You can see it from the top floor.”
I clambered up to the top of our stairs where there is a small east-facing window that overlooks the back of the frat. There, I could see more cop cars and a police officer laboriously pulling a utility axe out of his trunk. It was lime-green and black. It’s funny that the militarization of police departments has also meant that they get wood-chopping gear that looks like it was manufactured by Nerf.
“There is an AXE now,” I told S.
“I’m seeing what Reddit has to say,” she wrote back. “We should get ourselves a scanner.”
“Shields!” I said aloud, taking a bad photo of a man holding a black rectangle. “Shields!”
The police bumbled around outside one of the back doors with these shields, then walked in single-file. Not like a SWAT situation, but more leisurely, punters climbing up into the bleachers with their beers. I got a photo of them going in the door, rectangles first.
I stood at the top of the stairs, knowing my children were two floors down staring emptily at their screens. I waited quite a while, looking at Reddit for an answer to S’s post.
“I’m so cranky,” I said.
“C is weeping a lot today,” she wrote.
There was a reply on Reddit: “You’ve explained the what of what’s going on, but the question is why.” It was written in pure Detective. Who on this street was standing by a window, peering out with anticipation like me? I gave the answer an upvote and moved to the front windows to count cop cars. Seven. Eight!
“Drugs?” I asked Noodles when he came up the stairs to check on me. “A hostage situation?!”
“Maybe,” he said, but he had lost interest. He walked back down to the second floor.
“Very cranky might have an edible,” wrote S.
In the beginning of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, which took me two goes to get into, what’s wrong with me, Virginia (Woolf) has waded into the river with her pockets full of rocks and been swept into the piling of a bridge. Things go on above her:
A small boy, no older than three, crossing the bridge with his mother, stops at the rail, crouches, and pushed the stick he’s been carrying between the slats of the railing so it will fall into the water. His mother urges him along but he insists on staying awhile, watching the stick as the current takes it.
Virginia’s body, “pressed sideways to the piling, absorbs it all: the truck and the soldiers, the mother and the boy.” She feels everything.
I had left my perch at the top of the house and was on ground-level fetching the baseball kit and drink bottles when an update came through. “Some intel from my frat neighbors friend” came the wire:
“The building is unoccupied but a window was found opened. They’re sweeping it for four squatters is what he told me.”
“Squatters,” said S. “It’s never as dramatic as what is in my head.”
“Ohhh, because it’s summer and the students went home,” I wrote, a bit disappointed.
I stuffed the bags into the car, and flapped around Scout and Japhy as they spun like tops in the foyer over their shoes. “We have to go we have to go,” I said.
Noodles dropped Scout and I at an airport hotel for a “junior achievers” event, though we weren’t aware of any specific achievement. The hotel was built as a fake village inside a hangar, an atrium with a pond of giant catfish at the center. Scout was rehearsing her lines: she had to read out a sponsorship blurb for a bank.
Down in Manhattan my friends updated me on the opera: “We impersonated you and got the tickets, now we’re in a holding pen watching it on a screen!” they said. The opera didn’t just let you flounce in whenever. “It’s very quiet. You’d think the opera would be louder.”
“M says her ear is clogged,” said S. “But I don’t think she’s sick. What’s your theory on Kate Middleton?”
“Is there new information?”
“No, just why we haven’t seen her”
“It seems like maybe the one good thing about cancer is she can just chill for once”
Japhy and Noodles got to baseball and found the field deserted in the drizzle. I looked at the baseball schedule app, and the game had disappeared from the lineup.
I was sitting on patio furniture in the false garden. “Remember that character in Workin’ Moms who fantasizes about getting into a car crash that puts her in a ‘mild coma?’” I said to S.
“God that sounds lovely,” she said.
The children announced the sponsors in front of a banquet hall of corporate executives and account managers. The adults all hooted at the children reading out their marketing copy. Scout nailed it. “Ementee Bank,” she started, launching into a corporate mission statement. “Ementee Bank,” she said in conclusion, carrying a foam board with the logo over her head.
“I really want this swimsuit but it’s $$,” I wrote, sending a screencap as I leaned against the wall at the back.
The reply came quickly: “GET IT.”
Notes:
Out the window
Goodies
🐛 I ALWAYS want to know what is going on at home. Thanks to the amazing
of for getting me onto Anwen Crawford, who wrote this stunner which is about cricket, but also not about cricket.🐛 A great bday post from
at .🐛 My friend P got me onto Jack White’s IG. I don’t know what’s happening but it’s great. I think about the below ALL THE TIME.
I had to google "threw up a boot", had never heard it before. LOVED workin moms. This was an excellent piece of local colour, loved it