I Will Try Harder Tomorrow ~ fiction by Thomas Van Street

Day 1:

I’ve been secretly studying my neighbors, especially the elderly couple across the street. According to middle class standards, the couple lives in squalor. Their ranch-style home is overgrown with wild grass and weeds. The Salvadoran kiddos next door sneak over and hunt on their lawn for snakes and cats to keep as pets. The house is in serious disrepair. It is not powered by electricity, which exposes the occupants to extreme hot and cold and wind and rain—a condition further amplified by the caved-in back half of the roof. It is the only house on the street in this condition.

The couple appears infrequently. Today the adult male wheeled an empty shopping cart down their deeply rutted driveway. His wild gray hair was elevated as if electrified and he had a long wet spot like the outline of Argentina on the front of his trousers. The adult female trailed behind him insulting him in a way that suggested she despised him and desperately wanted him to wait for her at the same time. Their near-identical facial features indicate that they are kin, probably siblings, and not bound by affinity. I dove out of sight when it appeared that the woman discovered my observation point.

Day 2:

I’ll call the adult male Apollo. The adult female will be Alexandra. She walks with a dramatic, leg-swinging limp as if she might benefit from a hip replacement. The sky is gray today.

Day 3:

Alexandra yelled at me this morning when she caught me following them down the street as they pushed their cart in the rain. She bent at the waist and stabbed her finger my way. “What are you looking at Fathead?” she shouted. I stood perfectly still with my arms at my sides and averted my eyes. Apollo did the same as if modeling my posture. Alexandra excoriated him for dawdling and attempted to run him over with the shopping cart. I stood there and watched them complete the block and then they turned into the 7-11 parking lot at the intersection.

Day 4:

Received a text from my wife today. She and the baby have been visiting her father in Chicago for over a month now. I am starting to think they aren’t coming home.

Day 5:

Alexandra is sitting on their front stoop crying, stomping one canvas sneaker on the concrete. Apollo is bent over her, working on her, trying to remove a foreign object from her eye. “Hold still,” he is telling her. “Do it right, you have to do it right, get it out, it’s destroying me!” she tells him. Apollo scoops the irritant out with his thick finger and shows it to her. She hugs his arm.

Day 6:

Sat a lawn chair in my driveway and graded papers in the sun. The humidity held the powerful smell of some kind of fruit tree in the air. Do we have fruit trees in our neighborhood? I don’t know much about anything that grows. We are not far from the Long Island Sound. I know this because we had dead seagulls on our block during the whole West Nile Virus affair. A young couple (two men) traveled past my house pushing an unconscious toddler in a stroller. I waved. They waved. They stopped and considered Alexandra and Apollo’s house, whispering, and gesturing. We all could hear a commotion from within the collapsing home. Alexandra hollering about something. One of the men shook his head and then shrugged at me. Mild disapproval. He doesn’t know them like I do. I went inside to fix a drink. I think I might start smoking cigarettes again, but I can hold on for now. One day at a time, as they say.

Day 9:

I haven’t seen them for several days now. No word from my wife either. She texted me a thumbs up when I wrote that I missed them. Attended a Zoom meeting this morning and then fell asleep on the couch after lunch. When I woke up it was dark outside and completely black in my family room. I will try harder tomorrow.

Day 10:

Apollo is standing in my driveway, peeping in my window, stealthily watching my television set with me. Is this new behavior? I pretend I don’t notice him when I cross the room to put a cup in the sink. His breath fogs the glass. I go to the bathroom at the south end of the house where I can lean my head out a window and unobtrusively observe his manner. Apollo talks to himself and slaps a bug on his neck. He reaches a hand into his pocket, pulls out some coins, shakes them, examines them, puts them back. He keeps looking back at his home across the way like he is worried he is running out of time. I hear Alexandra faintly calling for him and he turns toward me at the window. He salutes and then hurries away.

Day 11:

Trouble sleeping last night. Stayed in bed until noon. I go back to the south bathroom, my observation site. Apollo is back. This time Alexandra is with him. They are holding hands and swinging them like children. Alexandra holds my wife’s flowered beach bag in her other hand (it went missing last spring). They are peering in the window—waiting patiently. It looks like they are waiting for me. I hope they are waiting for me.

Thomas Van Street and his friends published a hand-written literary magazine called Broken Face in the 1990s. They ran about three issues and secretly made copies on a Xerox machine in the offices of a defense contractor. There may be a few copies in storage up in the attic, but he is scared to go up there to look. Van Street currently teaches university courses on crime and deviance.