What the Dead Know by Barbara Butcher

Author:Barbara Butcher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2023-06-20T00:00:00+00:00

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I was born in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. It’s a trendy neighborhood now, populated by young professional families and an endless parade of $1,300 Bugaboo strollers. Back then, it was working-class Irish and Italians—cops, firemen, and storekeepers. This was the early ’50s, a time when children played on sidewalks, when their mothers would sit on the heavy stone stoops, smoking and gossiping.

I can still picture the way these very young women would pose, crossing their legs and hiking their skirts just so. It was kind of cool, but odd, too, because they had all adopted the same posture of casual elegance—left arm folded across the chest, supporting the right elbow so that the hand holding the cigarette could gesture stylishly, drawing a trail of smoke. It was as if they had made a pact, some silent agreement as to how they all should be.

And the way they talked: nothing was off-limits.

Well, of course Alice has a bad back, look at the size of him.

Look at her, she thinks who she is with those cheap shoes.

Twenty-two hours in labor. As far as I’m concerned, he can sleep on the couch from now on.

I was happy in that loud, scruffy neighborhood. But things were changing. An unease had crept into the women’s voices, a fear I didn’t understand. I remember looking out our window into the playground of PS 321, asking my mother when I would start school. “You’re not going here, for Chrissakes,” she said. “It’s all going bad.”

So my parents left the city for a house in the suburbs, scraping together the first payment from my father’s forty-five-dollar-a-week salary as a New York City cop. I was five when we moved into the not-quite-finished housing development in Massapequa Park, Long Island. Our new neighborhood had no history. It had been an ocean, then a desert, then the remnants of glacier runoff, then a housing development. In seventh grade, I learned that the Massapeag Indians had walked through the area on the way to something better.

That new neighborhood was to be our “something better,” but it terrified me. There was something vast and empty about our street, as if the long rows of houses had been dropped onto a huge sandy plain. Our little Cape Cod was the same dull white as all the others, except for the decorative window shutters whose color repeated over and over again. There were no street signs or house numbers, just one straggly sapling planted in front of each home. I had never seen that much sky before, clear blue and endless. I hugged the front steps in terror, a baby agoraphobe, afraid to disappear into the sameness.

My mother didn’t understand that if I let go of the door and stepped away from the house, I would get lost forever. How could I find my way home again when there were four houses on the block with black shutters like ours? How could I play in a backyard where there were

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