The Mental Triangle

I don't know when my house was built, or the one next door for that matter. But somebody messed up. From my dining room window I can see straight across my driveway into the living room next door, which none of the families who've lived there over the years ever seems to realize. All they see in my window are my curtains unless they're open, which they seldom are. I prefer a peek through.I could write a book about the people who've lived next door. I've been here 60-odd years, started here, came back and stayed. The street never changes, a dead end appropriately, 11 houses, five on my side, six on the other, lower in the middle in front of the Johnsons’ where rainwater and melted snow don't drain, never have. Sometimes you have to drive over the edge of the Johnsons’ lawn to get around the puddle.Taller trees now, more shade. More wires, better porch furniture. And of course the cars change, only way to tell in old photos what year you're in. Used to be a milkman, used to be a paper boy. A packy and penny candy up the corner. People used to be home during the day, outside more. No more kickball in the street, no more dropping in, doors always locked. What does it matter? This time next week I'll be in geezer-town. No window to speak of.I didn't pay much attention to those early families. I had small kids too and no time to be peeking through curtains. Couldn't help but notice things of course, out on the sidewalk. That little girl with the Madame Alexander doll who only spoke through the doll in a fancy lady's voice. You never saw the girl without the doll, like a ventriloquist and her dummy. Flotilla was her name or something like that. The girl, not the doll.In the late fifties, those nice Harvard grad students lived next door. One of them went on to write books, brilliant but not widely read. They had parties. Never raucous, mostly they just sat and stared. Every once in a while one might crawl across the room, or conduct whatever music was playing on the hifi. Not much to see and I couldn't hear. Jazz and acid I learned later from my babysitter. Mind expansion in its purest form, tabs pinched from the lab. Comfortable couches, soft music, people you like and nowhere to go, beats a straight chair and two-way mirror in the lab. It disturbed me that their kids were asleep upstairs. What if the house caught fire while they were tripping?Everyone's phone was in the kitchen on the wall. Rotary dial, long cord so you could talk and cook. Party lines. You weren't supposed to listen but everybody did and you assumed a neighbor was listening to you. Back yards adjoined so when a phone rang in one house everyone froze, lawnmower paused, sheet half hung until one of the teens, who all knew exactly which house was ringing, ran home and motion resumed.A normal neighborhood, despite being in what we called the Mental Triangle. Three institutions within walking distance, equidistant. Behind us, through the woods behind the chain-link fence, a place for boys the schools couldn't handle, labeled with a very offensive term we don't use anymore, thank god. Most of those poor kids were just unruly, maybe dyslexic, treated horribly. The place closed; only creepy energy and the good sledding hill remain. Down by the park, the expensively landscaped private hospital is still treating sons and daughters of the rich and famous for drugs or bad grades. Private rooms and shock treatments. Some sort of badge for teens in the sixties though only in retrospect, I imagine. The third hospital, up the road, was the big state depository where they put everyone who didn't fit or function in society but probably shouldn't go to jail, not that there was much difference. Condos now. I wonder about the vibes in there. Turns out mental triangle actually refers to some triangular configuration of nerves connecting our brain and body. Metaphor?Like any neighborhood, we had our share of weirdos. The kid whose parents were scientists, always something off about him, hung his dog by its collar over the porch railing. Everybody saw. Nobody knew who to call. He's adopted, the grownups said, didn't know what they were getting. Kids on their devices now, cruelty in there too.Sometimes bad things happened. Whispered. You never said the word sexual out loud. Attacked, you said. A descriptive word, certainly. Vicious, violent, sudden. Most girls never told a soul until they were grown up, in a women's group surrounded by other women and similar stories. One in four girls, apparently, has been attacked by a man or older boy. So, six girls in Mrs. Gavin's fifth grade. Three Brownies in Troop 27. Two of the Advanced Beginners in swim class. One of Mr. Stuart's four daughters.The police hadn't been trained yet. If ever a girl did tell, she was ok if she looked ok. The boy was warned. I saw that next door once. His parents shook hands with the cop.Not that boys were immune. We mothers didn't learn until later that Mr. Johnson down the street sat in his underwear in his cellar and showed off his gun collection, letting the neighborhood boys handle the guns and god only knows what else. If he'd been next door to me sitting in his briefs with a gun on his lap, I'd have called the cops. Now they teach kids to tell.A neighborhood is like a roundabout; people come and go. Those earlier neighbors would come to my funeral, not sure about these today. Bird feeder outside your window, apparently, in geezerville. Can't compare. The people buying my house want to put a screen porch off the dining room. I'm sure they have no idea how much that will improve their view.