Chapter 3 - The Fence
Then came Saturday, the eleventh of October.
It was cold and bright — a genuinely good day — and Teddy grabbed his soccer ball and went out the back door around eleven in the morning.
He was gone less than a minute.
He came back through that door with the ball crushed against his chest in both arms, and his face was wet.
"What happened?" I asked him.
He pointed at the fence.
"The lady next door yelled at me again. And then she started coming at me. Like she was going to hit me."
Something moved through me right then that I had never felt before in my life, and haven't felt since. I've been angry plenty of times. This wasn't anger. This was older than anger, and much simpler, and I understood — standing there in my own kitchen — exactly what people mean when they say they saw red.
And before I could take a single step, my eight-year-old looked up at me and asked, in this small, careful, testing voice:
"Mom... are we allowed to laugh outside anymore?"
I threw the back door open so hard it slammed against the wall.
She was still there. Right at the fence, four feet from where my son had been standing. Seventy-one years old, gray cardigan, one hand stretched out over the top rail.
I made it about halfway across that grass with every sentence I'd ever wanted to say to anyone loaded up and ready to fire, and I looked her dead in the eye, and I opened my mouth.
And Marguerite Voss shouted at me first.
She genuinely shouted. Full volume, in a quiet backyard, eleven in the morning:
"I'M SORRY. I'M DEAF IN THIS EAR."
She jabbed one finger at the right side of her head.
"I CAN'T HEAR HOW LOUD I'M BEING. I'VE BEEN TRYING TO GIVE YOU THIS SINCE JULY."
She shoved her hand further over the fence, and there was a thick manila envelope in it, damp along the edges, because it had been raining on and off for a week straight.
I stood on my own lawn with my mouth hanging open.
"THE BOY RUNS AWAY EVERY SINGLE TIME," she went on, still shouting, because she genuinely cannot stop herself. "I THOUGHT HE JUST DIDN'T LIKE ME."
Marguerite Voss is seventy-one. She's lived at 12 Thistlewood Lane since 1994.
She has profound hearing loss on her right side, moderate on the left. She has hearing aids she wears about half the time, and she has absolutely no idea how loud her own voice is — a fact every single person she's ever met has told her, apparently without it sticking.
She stands at that fence in the afternoons because it's the sunniest corner of her yard, because her chair is out there, and because for six months there had been children living next door to her.
She told me later, sitting at my own kitchen table: "I liked the noise. I could actually hear it."
I want to sit in that sentence for a second, the way I had to.
For six months, I had watched a seventy-one-year-old woman stand at a fence, and decided, all on my own, that she was some kind of threat. I had reorganized my children's entire summer around avoiding her. And she was standing there because it was the only sound in her entire week she could actually hear.
She'd called out to Teddy four or five times since June. Waved at him. Said hello. Asked him the score once, just being friendly.
She has no idea how she sounds to anyone else.
He's eight years old. A loud old woman shouting across a fence in a voice she can't control, during a summer where his own mother had gone tense and quiet for reasons she never explained — of course that registered as danger. Of course it did.
So he ran, every time. She thought he was shy at first. Then she assumed somebody had told him not to talk to her.
May you like
And on the eleventh of October, she'd finally had enough of trying to catch me at the mailbox, so she walked straight toward the fence with that envelope held out.
That's the whole thing. That's the "coming at him."
