For a full year the building of their sprawling four-story house had been in progress on land that should have been ours. My father and Sherwood had tried to buy the ten acres, as a buffer, they said, between the farm and the village, but they’d waited too long to make the offer and lost the chance. When the hole for the doctor’s foundation was dug we looked on from our fence line. William’s mouth, which under usual circumstances was like a little bunched bud, had the further tightness of a person gathering spit. To have neighbors on our side of the road? Even if we were separated by eight acres of orchard and a row of scrubby pines we would see, in winter, the lights of their chateau. This outrage could not, must not happen—the river, the river would know to flood, the water climbing the hillside, or a meteor might fall into the hole, a tornado smash the building to pieces. Or a sweep of flame would run through the timbers and the stacks of sod waiting to be laid—the doctor paying for earth as if regular old ground wasn’t good enough for him.
But it wasn’t just that a family was moving in, that we were going to have something like next-door neighbors on good farmland. It was stranger than that. Our town, as it happened, was not famous for its races and creeds or lifestyles. There were no blacks, no Filipinos, no Native Americans, the arrival of the Hispanics and the Hmong migration a few years in the future. We did have the men who operated the bed-and-breakfast, two or three adopted Koreans, an occasional Japanese or Brazilian AFS student, and the gym teacher, Miss Manning, so aptly named. For well over a hundred years, then, the job of drawing the line in the sand had been left to the English and the Germans. However, now into our field of Caucasian Christians and Catholics were going to come Dr. and Mrs. Kraselnik, from Chicago. The husband’s people were originally from Poland, my father thought. “Ashkenazi Jews,” he said to my mother because he knew those kinds of things, the history and dispersal of populations. They were moving because the radiologist had a job in Milwaukee and because his wife wanted to own a horse and raise vegetables. Most of all, for her children’s sake, she needed to escape the tony Illinois North Shore where the high school students were crippled with sports injuries and also were under so much academic pressure they became drug addicts. That’s what my mother said.
I first learned about our new neighbor when I was in Volta, at the manor house kitchen table, doing an art project with Amanda. Sherwood and Dolly’s daughter was a round little ball of a girl with long black hair, a year younger than me, a girl who in a babyish way couldn’t say her r’s, saying vewwy instead of very, which the adults thought adorable especially in a person who was so intelligent. She was obsessed by topics such as the Suez Canal and Pompeii and predictably she went through a big hieroglyphics phase. Because she was my cousin I must automatically love her.
I was taking great care with my glitter art when Amanda told me, with a proprietary air, that the KWaselniks were moving in. Sometimes she irritated me more than anyone else I knew even though she was my playmate, and also loving her was mandatory. I didn’t look up. A delicate puff, a little blow to the paper, to scatter the excess glitter, the cat coming into focus. I then pointed out that the information about the foreigners was not news, first, and second the family was going to be living on our side of the road. While I didn’t want neighbors anywhere near the Lombard Orchard it seemed necessary in our conversation to make my rightful claim. “And it’s the KRaselniks,” I said in not at all a nice tone.
“They came ovuh to talk to Dad,” Amanda bragged, ignoring my correction. “We alweady know them.”
“They’ll be in Velta,” I said, letting loose the secret name, something I’d never done before, Mary Frances full of mystery, full of knowledge. “In Velta,” I repeated, tossing my head.
Adam came through the hall and went to the refrigerator, opening it and removing a package of ham. He was going into seventh grade, possibly smarter than Amanda, preoccupied with NASA, Stephen Hawking, and especially the particle accelerator in Batavia, Illinois.
“What’s Velta?” he said, rolling three thin pieces of ham into a cigar and sticking it between his fingers.
“We’re talking about the Kwaselniks,” Amanda said, as haughty as I’d been.
Dolly came up the back stairs just then carrying a basket of tomatoes. She had to be mindful to not activate a burglar alarm that Sherwood had made, one of my favorite things about the kitchen, the marble-type run that involved an egg beater, a cow bell, a wind chime, and a bicycle horn. It was a golf ball that got the whirring and tinkling and honking going.
“Don’t eat that ham,” she cried, Adam retreating with the booty down the hall.