Life with the Neighbors IV

Part 3 is here with links to Parts 1 and 2

 

So we left off here:

Having no choice, though, off we went to Tennessee and ultimately on to Texas.  The real estate agency found renters for my house, but they were only short-term renters, as it turned out.  Shortly after they arrived, they left again and I asked my wonderful friend Carol to help me out and take over finding new renters for us.  She did a magnificent job and found us some renters.  Unbeknownst to any of us, though, these renters were more suited to live beside Wanda and Darryl than most people. 

The first set of renters to live in our house were building a home of their own across the main road and in an older neighborhood that bordered a sort of swampy body of water they called a lake.  This first set of renters were brought in for just a few short months, unbeknownst to me.  While they told the real estate agency the truth, the agency decided not to let us in on the tiny detail that they only planned to stay in our house 3 or 4 months, while their house was being built.  I can remember having one communication with the wife, and it consisted of her informing me that my house did not meet her standard, unlike the custom home she was having built across the way.  Having later walked by her fabulous new custom home not far from the swamp lake on my daily walks after we moved back to Florida, I always wanted to knock on her door and ask how she enjoyed the view of the gigantic power lines in the backyard of her clearly superior custom home.  But, I never did since I always had the children with me and I knew some of her neighbors.  It was enough to just walk past and think about such encounters.  It almost always is enough, isn’t it?  Plus, now that I live in the South I can add “Bless her heart” to the scenario and that just adds the right amount of salt and pepper. 

So those renters were gone very soon after they arrived.  I was less than happy with the real estate agency, and that’s when I asked my friend Carol to take over for them.  I knew she would do a much better job than the real estate people and I hated the idea of giving them one more penny.  Sure enough, it didn’t take long at all for Carol to find a nice family, check their references, collect their money and their signatures on a lease, and make all the arrangements.  On paper, they were very nice people.

On paper. 

In real life, they were, well.  Let’s just say they were uniquely suited to live beside Wanda and Darryl.  Sure enough, Wanda and the wife became fast friends.  Why, when the wife got a job on a boat that ran day cruises on a large lake the next county over, whom do you suppose she chose to go with her on her days off for assignations in the galley with some sweaty unsavory coworker?  Wanda, of course.  Apparently Wanda served as her cover and off they would go, parting ways for 30 minutes or so and then hightailing it back over the bridge and into Volusia County.  Just a nice wholesome afternoon before it was time to pick up the children from the bus stop.  Yay.  I have to say, they did mostly pay the rent on time, though. 

While they were living the blissful marital life in our home, we were first in Tennessee and then ultimately in Texas, just south of Dallas.  Yes, my husband was in the Navy and Dallas is in the middle of a big old windy state and far from any large body of water, but he was an Air Traffic Controller, having just graduated second in his class in Memphis, and he was attached to a Naval Air Station in Grand Prairie, which was neither a prairie nor grand, by the way.  We found a 1960s or 1970s-era home in Duncanville, Texas with four bedrooms, three baths and an office, and we settled in for a while.  I found a cool job working for these weird people who pretended to run a much larger operation than they in fact had.  They also pretended about other things.  For example, the head of the company was named Jim.  Jim was married to someone who lived in Oklahoma and they had two teenage  sons.  Then the second in command was named Karen.  Karen and Jim lived together, and I’m pretty sure they knew each other Biblically, and they often arrived together in the same tricked-out Cadillac sedan, but I was not supposed to know or acknowledge that they were shacked up or that Karen completely inexplicably worshipped everything about Jim.  Unfortunately for Karen and Jim, the other person who worked there, Susan Parker, immediately filled me in on whatever details were not already obvious.  Let’s just say Susan had long before lost all respect for these people but they paid her well enough that she stuck around.  Susan Parker is one of the best characters I’ve ever run across.  I wish she didn’t have such a common name so that I could look her up, but chances are she finally broke down and married some equally crazy character and changed her name anyway.  By far the best part of that job was Susan.  The minute Jim and Karen would leave, Susan would bop out of her office and tell me stories about her life, or life at that office, or about Jim and Karen. And even if they were not funny stories, by the time Susan got her mitts on them, they were funny enough to make me cry.  One time we flew to DC for a 10-day convention that we were hosting at the Hilton.  We got off the plane and into two big vans, Jim and Karen and Jim’s sons in one and Susan and I in another.  Jim told Susan to follow him, and she did.  Until he got off at an exit. She just sailed on by and cackled like a maniac.  Good times.  Then I told her I wanted to have a room next to hers at the Hilton and she gave me the look.  The look of dysfunction and fear.  “Uh uh,” she said.  “Karen won’t like that.  She is very possessive of me.  She won’t let us be on the same floor, even.  Watch.”  Sure enough, by the time we met back up with Jim and Karen at the Hilton and were checking in, the charming front desk manager asked if I had a preference for my room and I asked him to please put me next to Susan.  Karen got up on her tippy toes (she was a petite woman) and peered over the desk at the manager, saying, “Susan needs her rest.  She can’t be bothered while she is having her down time.”  Then Jim must have needed his shoes tied or something because she was called away for some urgent, Jim-related duty, and I gave the desk manager my best “But I’m not from here and I don’t know what to do” look. He didn’t say another word about it but after it was all sorted out,  Susan and I had rooms just a few doors away. 

I learned a lot during that trip.  First, I learned that if you walk down the street in a bad part of DC with a brawny but clueless teenage boy from Oklahoma, you have to be prepared to take immediate charge of the situation to help improve your chances of survival. I knew we were in trouble after the first young lady passed us and opened her sweater to reveal herself in all of her saggy glory,  Jim’s son was struck completely dumb.  Well, dumber.  After that, I had to bark orders at him.  We had about a two-block walk from our rented minivan to the drugstore where we had to fetch something, no doubt for Jim, and there was a lot of humanity in our path.  He was at least a head taller than me and I think they sent him with me to provide some protection.  It didn’t work out that way.  As he stopped in his tracks at the sound of a not-distant-enough gunshot, “harmless homeless” guys lined up along the path following our progress with not-so-hidden interest, I knew it was time to take charge without regard to the niceties of life and the fact that he was the kid of my boss.  “Keep walking, don’t look down, don’t make eye contact and DO NOT STOP.  DO NOT LOOK AROUND NO MATTER WHAT YOU HEAR.”  I used my best mom voice and thank goodness, he responded to it.  We survived downtown DC and after that when I needed to go somewhere after dark I either braved it on my own or went with Susan, who would have been able to charm anybody in her path. 

I also had complete access to the innards of the Washington Hilton and Towers, which happens to be the site of the 1981 assassination attempt against President Reagan.  I’ve been all through the back warrens and paths where they shuttle the Presidents and other VIPs in and out.  That was quite an interesting experience. 

Anyway, as much as I loved that job, and I truly did, one night I suspected something was a bit off.  I was working late with Susan and we decided the best thing to do was to go buy a pregnancy test.  Even though it was nighttime, I went ahead and took the test, which turned immediately positive, almost before I was done taking it.  I was quite shocked but not as shocked as Susan, who grabbed the other test (it was a two-pack) and declared the test must be flawed so she would take the second test as a control.  Her result was negative.  And that’s how I knew I was going to have an Emily and a Paige.  Well, not at that moment since we didn’t find out there were two of them until a month or two later, but  that was the beginning.  Me and Susan and EPT, working late at the office in the shadow of Texas Stadium in Irving, Texas.  Jim and Karen must have gone to their time share at Lake Tahoe or something, because Susan had several days to tell me that I needed to find another job and leave Karen’s employ as quickly as possible.  Since she was a VP of the company and had been there for at least 6 or 7 years, I decided to listen to her.  She said that Karen would make my life miserable and it would not be worth staying. 

So I left and went to work at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.  That’s how I ended up working in the office of one of the surgeons who had tried to treat JFK when he was brought into Parkland Memorial almost 30 years before.  That was also an interesting job during an interesting time.  Maybe I’ll tell you about it some day.  Unfortunately, I was put on bed rest very shortly after I started working there, and I never did go back after Paige and Emily were born.  I always regretted that, because it was a neat place to work and the people there were very kind to me. 

But soon after we knew we were expecting twins, my husband hurt his back while lifting weights in the gym at work and unfortunately the Navy decided they could not keep him any longer, since when you are an Air Traffic Controller you can’t even take an aspirin. That meant we had a decision to make:  Stay in Texas with limited job prospects, a high rent and a good strong recession going, or go back to Florida, our house with its cheap mortgage and 3 bedrooms.  Since the lease was up with our renters, we decided we should take our chances and our babies back to Florida.  Back to live next door once again to Wanda and Darryl. 

We put my mom on a plane, I think, back to visit relatives and avoid all of the chaos. Then we drove our vehicles across Louisiana and Alabama and Mississippi and back into Florida, ultimately making it back to our home after being pawed at and gawked at and surrounded like circus freaks all along Interstate 10 because we had two babies with us.  Our renters had moved out a month or two before, and we naively expected to find things much as we left them.

Unfortunately, things were not quite as we left them.  Things were not left in a condition that was possible to move babies into.  The house didn’t look like an episode of Hoarders or anything—but it was pretty dirty and gross.  I can remember Carol coming over, wonderful steadfast friend that she is, and cleaning one of the bathrooms.  I remember her calling out “It looks like someone had diarrhea out the back of this toilet and never bothered to clean it up.”  I think that captures it more accurately than anything other than photos.  Aren’t you glad I have no photos to share with you?

Guess who was nowhere to be seen when we returned? Oddly enough, Wanda decided to make herself scarce.  For about a week.

And that’s where I will leave you again.  I hope to be back before 2 more months elapse.  We will soon be getting into the meat of the story.  I leave you in mid 1992.  It only takes us until November 1st of 1994 for the police to get involved again and for things to take a turn from the annoying and slightly maddening to the truly scary and extraordinarily absurd….

Comments

[Carol]

Ah, Seanna, those were the days. I remember scrubbing the ceiling of that bathroom (along with every other square inch) and finally declaring it reclaimed territory for your beautiful daughters! LOL, I was heavily into disinfectants, even then. Carry on!

[B]

So, how did you go from the hospital job to going back to FL? Seems like much could have elapsed between the two things!

[paige]

ha, beth. always so curious. and thank GOODNESS FOR CAROL!