Abby Walthausen
Judy Season
As soon as May grey and June gloom are over, when the clouds have passed and the grass needs watering, that’s when Judy season really starts. She is the most obtrusive weather, because she doesn’t happen far off in the sky. She stands there with a hose and she talks through the fence, through the open kitchen window. She is pervasive — indoors, out, at the supermarket register, the bus stop. We spot her, in her blouse and her bouffant, singing opera scales for the security at Walgreens. We find her in orange lipstick, quizzing the man who sits on the corner about how he spent a dollar she handed him the day before. Judy found a job for our basement neighbor, waiting tables at the local pizza place. Judy eats a salad there three times a week and stops by in between. Judy’s voice is high and carries, and avoiding it has given us some type of job as well.
The first incidence of Judy was a few years back. We had moved into our bungalow and were about to become three. Dressed in a hippy tent, a mumu, because our body had grown into a commune, we stood an extra foot away from the sink, overextended arms washing up the dishes — when talking, testifying, sounded through the window. We heard “dear lord, I do wish I could go to Africa, where all the decent blacks live.” The bit of us that’s new sent feelings up the back-of-throat, a sick and self protective reflex. Judy calls herself a Lone Star woman, and our big, hormonal mouth said “I wish I could go to Texas where all the quiet bigots are!” A gulp again because of acid returns and because the priorities came out wrong. But our big, hormonal mouth — doubling down and defending the nest — yelped in a weak voice, “don’t say that garbage in this window.”
“Free country,” said Judy, maybe straight into our private rooms, maybe to her companion, silent and stony, hard-of-hearing, more a sidekick than a man. Later we learned his name was Tom, but that was after we stopped seeing him around.
We kept our windows closed, but out in the neighborhood we had no such shield.
The next incidence of Judy, we were struggling with an orange half-peeled and a stroller half-folded. We had just boarded the local bus. We were older, out in the world together, and Judy noticed that we were sticky and between us had too few arms. She paused whatever she was telling to the bus driver and found a stack of napkins in her purse. Crying, mumbling, and a feint to ignore the napkins, but in the end we accepted them, without a way to deny the juice up to our elbows. We used them and then wrapped the peels up in them. And flopping at the hinges, Judy carried the stroller off the bus at our stop. This time it was embarrassing not to say thank you, with the driver and the audience of passengers around to hear.
“A handsome little man,” she says, now that she has us.
“What a good mommy, you look like you’re fifteen!” she exclaims. A compliment, an insult, or just an averaging of our ages? Compliments, like napkins in a pinch, force thanks yous.
The next incidence of Judy was in the lead-up to a termite tenting. We had to vacate for a week and she caught us on the way out, with our pantry packed in bankers boxes, on the sidewalk, a gallon of milk sitting on top. Baby carried a banana in each hand like two phones, or exercise weights, or a pair of bright defibrillators, while father made room in the car’s trunk.
“That Antonio — your landlord — he didn’t give me any warning!” Judy said.
Warning for what? That our circus tent would not disrupt her ritual of watering lawn? That our house would be curtained for a week against her gaze? Warning that she would be lonely? Tom was long gone by this point, he’d been in something like a hospice for a year or more, a stroke. “I can’t visit him because he cries and can’t talk back— the nurses tell me not to visit.” We think the nurses have a point.
With time our family conversation gets louder, more dynamic, more loose ends. This gives Judy a better opening to step in. Conversation with a three year old is always a free country, a free range affair. And three year olds are tall enough to open dormered windows, though we prefer to keep them closed.
Judy stands close, turns off the hose, encourages it. Baby lines toys up along the windowsill and the introductions are intricate and long. Judy gets a sense of all our routines and preoccupations. Even our absences come as no surprise. Now Judy knows our story and our whereabouts, when she can see us as well as when she can’t.
“And did your mom and dad drive you to Palm Springs?”
“Sorry there is only one steering wheel in our car!” It was true, and an answer that was worth weeks of laughs. Judy laughed and we laughed too and now we had a standoff softening into a bond.
There are hardly discrete incidences of Judy anymore. Now, four years after going to the hospital and coming back with a fuller car, a hydra of a family, Judy calls through the fence:
“I’m coming over.”
She walks around the building and through the front gate, offering a gift: two monster trucks one red, one blue. It is nice when someone remembers our family date. We must hug Judy now, because how to justify my desire not to, to shove her back through the fence, and grab the baby, and issue him all the warnings?
I even offer her tea — “What a decent invitation,” she says — but she declines and disappears to finish Tom’s grass. And with the gift of monstrous American trucks, the baby also disappears and plays peacefully through what is left of the afternoon.
Now what to do with all this peace?
Now, to notice all the dry rot in our quiet windows, the leafy tinderbox our side of the fence. Meddle more? I hear the soft rain of Judy next door, and it is four such seasons since this truce was conceived and started.
Abby Walthausen lives in Los Angeles where she guides a tour about twentieth century printmaker Paul Landacre, and is at work on a novel, ST. CYR.