Beverly

If you are willing to listen, people will tell you the best stories. They are not stories, usually, but vignettes. I love to listen to these crazy things that people have that want to get out. My friends say I am a good listener.

When I was a kid, I lived a few houses down the street from a strange family. Very strange. There was a father, mother, and a daughter. The father was short and thick and dark and mean. He smoked and worked as a bus mechanic. His face and hands were heavily lined. All the kids were afraid of him because he would come out of his house and yell if you stepped onto his property. He was like a maniac. It was the best kept lawn in a neighborhood where people didn't seem to care about such things. We would play baseball in the street, and if the ball went into his yard, he would not give it back. We called it the Worsham Rule.

His wife was taller than he, stooped and gangly. She had a crazy warble to in her voice when she talked sort of like a yodel. She would yell at us too, but she would cry at the same time. "Oh, you wait until Claude comes home. You just wait and see," wailing all the while as if somebody had died just minutes before. When cars drove down the street, she would run out with a pencil and paper and write down their tag numbers.

The daughter was the real piece of work. Her name was Beverly. She had gone to school with us for a year or two, but she was too weird, I think, and they put her someplace else. Eventually, she didn't go to school at all. She stayed home with her mother. Mostly she stayed in the house, but sometimes I would come home and she would be standing in the front yard in a chiffon fairy dress singing to the trees, waving her arms about, just making up the words and tune as she went along.

When we got older and she began to develop, we saw her even less. One day, I saw her rubbing herself against a tree. She looked at me through semi-conscious eyes. I was scared and excited and stood there for a moment looking at her in a new way before I got along.

She got pregnant and her father died and things went very bad. She was arrested and was not supposed to come home, but she did. By that time she had four or five kids with different fathers and they all lived in that house that once had been so well kempt. The kids grew up hellions and my mother said that the police were always at the house. I had long since moved away, and only heard the stories through my mother. She said once that old lady Worsham told her in a secret, disgusting way that Beverly used to take the dog into the bathroom and lock the door for hours at a time. My mother never elaborated on that one.