rules of engagement

I was just returning home from a run last week when I passed my neighbors outside setting up a garage sale. A laughing young woman with a baby called out, “Come buy our stuff!” She was doing the swaying baby jiggle, shifting her weight from one leg to the other, and she spoke in rhythm to the bounce.

I pointed to my house and said, “I’ll come back when I don’t smell so terrible!”

The young man said, “We have a baby! They don’t smell so good, either.”

“That’s their specialty!”

That particular house has been bought and sold many times, so it’s hard to keep track, but I am fairly certain that this lovely couple is not the same one whose fights would spill out into the driveway. The fighting was always robust, but one summer it reached a fevered pitch.

The saddest thing to me was that the fighters had so few basic tools in their communications toolbox, civility being the most fundamental.

One day we could hear the shouting from inside, windows closed. I casually mentioned to the boys, “You realize, right, that there are two things to keep in mind when you’re fighting? It’s a good idea to never use fuckin’ anything to describe your partner, to their face. And if you must use fuck, or any variation of fuck, use it in your ‘I-statements.’ For instance, ‘I’m so fuckin’ mad right now I can’t talk to you reasonably.’ But never, ‘You’re such a fuckin’ bitch,’ or ‘You fuckin’ moron.’”

*big eyes*

Mom said fuck.

It was hard for me to get over how unnecessary the abuse was. No one, it seems, had taught them how to use their words.

Every family has its own culture, and some families are more comfortable with shouting than others. We are not shouters, so the boys had never heard this level of verbal violence. I felt that if we didn’t acknowledged what was going on over there—because the line between mere venting and actual abuse had been crossed—we would be, somehow, weirdly, complicit, at best, or victimized, at worst.

I hope that, wherever they are, that couple is getting some help.

I didn’t make it back to chat with new owners, or buy their stuff, but that friendly exchange amused me because it was set against the backdrop of the place I’ve always called, in my head, the Shouting House.

Every few years there is a lull in the happier hollering, the sound of children playing. My children roamed the ‘hood in a pack, with the neighbor kids. Then they got big, went to college, and it was quiet for a while. Now there’s a new herd. On my way to work recently, I saw an enormous rhododendron shaking, the dead blossoms rustling and falling to the ground. A child came tearing around the corner and shouted at the shrubbery, “FOUND YOU!”

And there’s a baby in the Shouting House—I’ll have to come up with a new name for it. The house next door to that one was Audrey and Bud’s. They bought it in 1950, new, and raised two boys there. We bought ours in 1992, and also raised two boys. Woody and Fern’s house, on the corner, is for sale now, and they were also the original owners. Imagining our little postwar cracker boxes as homes somehow redeems their plain, thoughtless design. I have been here long enough to begin to see the neighborhood differently, to see this cycle, protecting and then launching our children into the world, hopefully as productive, happy, and whole adults. I am relieved that I don’t feel anxious passing the Shouting House anymore. And, maybe I’ve read too much Marie Kondo, but I like to think the house itself is happy to have a new family to shelter.