My mother remembers their arrival; she was on the local welcoming committee, which delivered gift baskets. Realtors do that now, I think, and nobody does it at all if you rent, but old habits still held sway back then. Mom, Judy Miller, and Lydia Caporale gave the Chandlers a week’s time to settle in, and then they all walked over and knocked on the door one morning, fresh pastries and coupon books in hand; I tagged along, as I always did.
I was two and a half, Mom tells me. Gage was my size, and only a few months younger. We spotted each other immediately through a forest of grown-up legs, and were inseparable for the next few years. He was my first best friend: there were other kids on the block, but we played together almost every day—first in parallel play, as two-year-olds do, and, over time, learning what interests we shared: windup motorcycles, climbing hills, digging with shovels. The last of these got us into trouble once: we’d wrangled a spade from a gardening closet, and dug in my backyard til we hit water. We must have gotten into some trouble, but I remember the incident of the big hole in the backyard as mainly a success: Gage got excited watching the water bleed in as we dug. It was contagious.
It was Gage who, when we were a year or two older, passed on the legend of the Mean Man to me. I suspect that the reach of this legend ended about three blocks away from Gage’s door, but it held the allure of ancient myth: when we’d walk past the Mean Man’s house, Gage would find some detail to indicate the threat that lay within. His gifts for locating new features in a relatively drab landscape were considerable.
The house itself was unremarkable—California ranch, like almost everything else on the block, slapped-on stucco in simple earth tones: sun-bleached yellow, mustard-brown. The lawn in front was also brown: creeping dichondra was popular on our street, and whoever lived in the Mean Man’s house had gone with the flow at some point, but hadn’t kept it up. The dead vines made a sort of fairy-tale carpet leading to his door.
We all knew about the White Witch from talk on the playground. But the White Witch was two towns over and a world away. The Mean Man, on the other hand, was practically right next door. If a threat could be conjured, then that threat would seem real. We avoided stepping on his dead lawn; if I was walking alone, I’d cross the street to avoid it.
Whatever specific acts of meanness were supposed to have earned him his reputation were shrouded in mystery; the meanness was a specific threat in itself, an energy that might land on you if you failed to take precautions. Don’t trick-or-treat at his house. Don’t dip your bike in and out of his driveway like you might with any other wide driveway on the street. Don’t try to read the bumper stickers on his car. I was a bookworm; telling me not to read something guaranteed that I’d read it: GET U.S. OUT OF U.N.! the sticker said. Gibberish; a profound mystery.
I was afraid of him. Everything about his address throbbed with menace. Every time Gage would reveal, or invent, some new detail—he yelled at me for stepping on his newspaper, it was right there in the middle of the sidewalk; a baseball rolled into his yard and he came out through his door in a robe, picked up the ball, and went right back inside with it—the tension between the Mean Man’s aura and the mundane nature of his malevolence would rise. Fear, at the right reach, is delicious. Once, through the front windows, I saw someone inside, possibly in a reclining chair, watching television. I averted my eyes and quickened my pace. I had this idea that Mean Men hate nothing more than finding that someone is staring at them.
Gage and I were fast friends, sometimes almost inseparable, and I luxuriated in his visions of shadowy threats never farther off than our voices could carry. If you let Gage set the terms of engagement, you could ride currents of myth all day, and dream terrifying dreams when you fell asleep. It was a fun way to be a kid on a sleepy street.
My parents divorced when I was five, and my mom remarried and we moved away, south of San Francisco; and that, until recently, was the end of those times for me.
2.
OUR HOUSE IN MILPITAS was a duplex. One of its rooms had an electric fireplace, with a plastic log that glowed orange when you flipped a wall switch. Inside the log was some rotating element to give the illusion of the movement of flame, but the entire apparatus was for mood: it didn’t generate any actual heat. On the day we moved in, I was thrilled by its novelty; I remember my mother and stepfather exchanging glances of pity over my excitement at this chintzy feature of the best place they’d been able to afford.
Gage’s letters arrived about once a month for the first year of my two-year tenure in Milpitas. It is a strange feature of the partial amnesia that blots out stray spans of time in my memory that I remember nothing about my sixth birthday except a card from Gage. I’d made new friends in town; there must have been a party, my mother was a natural at kids’ parties. But the whole day, in my memory now, exists only for the remembering of Gage’s reports from home.
He always talked about a time when we’d meet again, when we’d be able to compare notes on our lives: which TV shows were cool (the Planet of the Apes weekly series) and which weren’t, no matter who said otherwise (Emergency!); what candies were keepers (Fun Dip, also known as Lik-M-Aid; Wacky Wafers) and which ones you traded for the keepers because some people had bad taste (Jolly Ranchers, excepting, occasionally, the cinnamon and watermelon flavors). I would write back, hoping my life seemed more exotic than it was.
I lacked Gage’s gift for the through line, but I scored a few points here and there. The monster movie being filmed in town, about a creature who ate all the garbage cans (The Milpitas Monster); the 45 rpm record of its theme song that I played on my small stand-alone record player. My orders from the Scholastic Book Club, always aspiring a grade or two above my actual comprehension. The small black-and-white TV that my mother and stepfather allowed me to keep in my bedroom after they bought a color TV for the living room.
The TV was a big deal. I considered myself a book person, but every kid in the seventies knew all the action was on TV. I wrote Gage about the obscure pleasures of staying up late with the sound down low, discovering movies like The Crawling Eye and Twisted Brain; he told me about Ellery Queen Mysteries and Night Gallery. After a year, a month between letters became six weeks, and then eight. We kept our connection alive, but childhood is a busy place, and my new town had stories of its own to tell.
* * *
I MET DARLA when she was even newer to the block than me; she lived in the duplex opposite mine. Her father was in the military, or had been; I have only the vaguest visual memory of him, standing in front of their unit on a sunny day, his hair neatly cropped. Most of the grown-up men in my orbit looked like professors or hippies. For me, Darla’s dad stood out.
We walked to and from school together sometimes. She loved to tell stories, tall tales in which everybody or almost everybody died. I remember most vividly one in which a curse, or possibly a ghost, ended up causing a woman’s leg to swell to twenty or thirty times its natural size—a woman who’d heard one day of the curse, or the ghost, and said aloud to all who cared to hear that she didn’t believe in it.
The next morning, she was found dead, her gigantic leg having broken down the door to her house from the inside. That was all there was to it—the rumor of the hex, and its effect; Darla’s stories tended to orbit one or two gruesome details, and she insisted that this one was local, a woman who’d lived down the street.
“That’s not true,” I said on the morning she told me this tale. “That thing with her leg, that didn’t happen.”
“All my stories are true!” she said in response, making sure I saw the fierce determination in her eyes; this is among my most vivid recollections of Milpitas, of its sidewalks and rounded curbs in grey concrete, the secluded feel of its neighborhoods imparting just the right air for wondering whether a thing had happened this way, or that way, or some third way not yet imagined, or perhaps not at all.
* * *