« July 12, 2005 | Main | July 14, 2005 »

July 13, 2005

it's me, Phillipe

All around us there is thunder. Towering brilliant white clouds hang on the horizon, the rest of the sky is dull gray. Moo and I are taking Jack for his evening walk, a little bit earlier than usual, in the hope of missing the woman we usually run into, the one who went to Hollywood to be an actress but is now a mom and the owner of two dogs and is living right here in our neighborhood. She's nice but she makes us nervous: she's tiny and jittery, like her dogs.

Moo and Jack and I take our usual route. I'm walking along not thinking anything in particular. There's G., trimming the bushes in front of her house with a pair of scissors, cigarette hanging from her mouth, cell phone at her ear.

"Mom," says Moo, and holds out his hand for a plastic bag. There's something about this spot on the road that makes Jack poop. I turn and hand Moo the bag and see, one house over, a woman looking at me through raised shutters. She is shaking her head disapprovingly, staring right at me; her mouth moves. She stares at me and I stare back. Her mouth keeps moving. Does she think I can hear her? She shakes her head, squints her eyes and talks on and I watch her, until Matt is finished putting the poop in the bag and I finally mouth back at her "I can't hear you." She gives me a disgusted look and the shutters drop closed.

What was that about? The woman, in late middle-age, made me think of that movie, "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane," where a crippled up Joan Crawford is held hostage by her psycho sister, Bette Davis. At one point Joan hauls her body out of its wheelchair and hangs on the barred window in the room where she's been locked in, calling in vain for someone to help her. Maybe what I thought was "pick up all that damn poop in the road" was "help me; Bette Davis is insane and I'm a prisoner."

"Did you see that?" I say to Moo as we continue our walk. "See what?" he says. "That woman, that woman in the window looking at me." "Mom," he says back. "I didn't see anybody."

Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)