Good Neighbors(57)

The Baskin-Robbins was crowded. Everybody was looking at them, even the people in uniform who worked there. This was bad. They weren’t allowed to fight, especially now that Julia was twelve years old. But the golden rule was Never in Public.

Larry scrambled to get up. He used Julia’s leg for support and Julia yelped. It looked like more tussling.

“Let go of each other! NOW!” Arlo shouted.

Still holding Julia’s leg, Larry froze, too scared to do anything else. Julia tried to shrink inside herself without actually moving her body or looking away or attracting attention.

Arlo rushed at them in two lanky strides, then jerked Larry up by the arm. He made this grunt that wasn’t pain, but probably sounded like it to strangers. Everybody in the shop got quiet. Somebody took out their phone and pointed. Larry’s pistachio ice cream dropped, and it slimed their clean floor.

Arlo’s voice went low and rasping. It carried the way lead singers’ voices fill any room, no matter the volume. “Why can’t either of you ever do as told?”

“Sorry,” Julia whispered.

“You know you can’t act like this. Not now! What the fuck are you thinking?”

“I’m so sorry,” Julia said. She could feel the people in the store watching. The green ice cream had smeared. Was all under Larry’s flip-flops, and on his toes, too.

Arlo ran his hands through his hair, hard, the skin of his forehead pulling back, making stark his receded salt-and-pepper hairline. His Wolf Man tattoo looked like it was scowling.

“I want more ice cream and Julia, too,” Larry said.

It was maybe the worst thing he could have said.

Arlo bent low, looked just to Larry now. “They blame me for what happened. If your mom’s in the loony bin and I’m in jail, do you have any idea what’s going to happen to you, you little freak?”

Larry started shaking. He didn’t cry. He just did that thing, and went far away. Julia started crying, though.

“Goddamn,” Arlo whispered as he backed away from his kids. Then, the worst thing. A thing she’d never seen before. He was wiping his eyes. Her super tough rock star dad was crying. His voice was scrapyard gravel. “Meet you outside,” he said. Then he left the store.

The people in the Baskin-Robbins were still staring, and Julia couldn’t tell what they were thinking. She just wished they’d stop looking. Larry was wiggling his ice cream–covered toes. “Come on,” she said.

He didn’t follow, so she took him really gently this time. They found Arlo in the Passat, engine turned. They both climbed into the back, not wanting to sit next to him. He didn’t look back at them. She couldn’t tell if it was because he was mad or because he’d been crying. When they got home, he went down to the basement. Julia was glad. Hoped he’d stay there. Except, he was the only grown-up left.

She took Larry by the hand and brought him to his room. He was still far away. The room looked even more perfect than usual. Clean and Spartan as a robot’s. His bed was far from the window now. They’d moved all their beds far from windows.

She made him wash his feet, brush his teeth, put on his pajamas, then pulled back his covers and had him climb into bed. She handed him the Robot Boy replacement doll she’d made for him: two dishrags rubber-banded together in a cruciform shape, with nuts and bolts glued down for face, hands, and feet.

“He wasn’t gonna get us more ice cream. It was a bad time to ask,” she said.

Larry just shrugged.

“Why did you hide in that truck? It makes us look bad. Like we planned to get her alone and hurt her,” she said, and part of her question was curiosity, but mostly she asked because she wanted to jolt him awake. Hurt him into it, like she was hurting, so she wouldn’t be so alone with these feelings in this house.

“I was scared to leave the park without you. But Shelly didn’t want me there.” He was shaking still, and now that he was under his sheets, he’d wormed his hands down his pants.

“Gross,” she said. “You’re so weird and gross. The whole block’s talking about us. They’re gonna take Daddy away, and it’s all your fault!”





Excerpt from Rhea Schroeder’s dissertation, seized from her home office on August 2, 2027

Consider the panopticon. When Foucault, the father of semiotics, originally imagined it, he’d intended the guard to stand center, watching a periphery of prisoners. The tool was effective for surveillance because none knew when they were being watched, but they knew that it would happen eventually. They couldn’t escape it. And so they behaved their best. But we can all agree that Foucault was drunk on his own ideas, responding not to real-world social surveillance, but to his own personal scars from having been raised by totalitarian parents.

Modern culture is an inverse panopticon. Not a drunk father, but a vigilant mother. The masses elect a single person to the hot seat for their five minutes of fame. We, the periphery, are the judges and jury. Because we’re separated (like prisoners, we can’t connect to each other through these impossible walls), we’ve no option but to connect via the sacrificial lamb we’ve placed dead center. Even when we privately dispute the censure or praise we heap upon them, publicly, we echo popular sentiment.

To avoid loneliness, we become a single, unthinking mass.

And yet, the mother and father both reveal their very limited ability to connect. The proverbial child cannot attach. We participate in this mass identity, but it does not serve us. Our language is reduced to a series of agreed-upon signs reflecting not nuance, but binaries: like/dislike; good/bad; yes/no. We are even more lonely for the failure of it…