Our Friend Daria: "The Invitation"

About a month or so later, I picked up the Lawndale Sun-Herald. The previous owner of our home subscribed to it and the shrink-wrapped fodder for recycling showed up faithfully in our driveway every day even though neither of us had interest in it. Bored from studying, I picked up the paper and walked to the dining room table.

As usual, the Sun-Herald's reporting was strong on what I call "local color" - it was fifteen pages of "happy news". Reading the Lawndale entry on city-data.com, many local Lawndale residents were unhappy with the media coverage. The paper was big on local boosterism, reactionary politics and high school football. It reminded me of my hometown's paper...too much.

A bored man, however, will find his diversions wherever he can. I quickly glanced through the first five pages without a single article catching my eye. I finally caught something interesting:

Party Out of Bounds in Crewe Neck Crashed by Police

The writer must have been an old B-52s fan. I knew Crewe Neck quite well because it wasn't far from where we lived. Every time I drove by Crewe Neck I would see this sign.

Crewe Neck Estates

New Homes Available
Luxury Lots
From $750,000

I figured that I would soon be reading a tale of decadence that would rival Berlin in the 1920s. The truth was much more pedestrian:

"Police were called at 10:20 pm to the Crewe Neck Estates on a complaint of public disturbance caused by a raucous party. Three local high school students were charged with disorderly conduct and failure to disperse. Several vehicles at the location were ticketed and the host was cited for violation of the Crewe Neck Estates noise ordinance."

"Security guard Rob Jesperen, who had left his gate station, was found by Lawndale police in attendance at the party. Jesperen claimed that two teenage girls had 'deceived' him into abandoning his post."

Ruth came to the kitchen to look for a snack. I reported my findings to her. "My quiz question: what is missing from this article?"

"Well, the who is missing. And the why. What are you reading?"

"The Lawndale Sun-Herald."

"Oh, it figures. How's Mallard Fillmore doing?"

"Ha ha. So what do you think the 'deceit' was? Blow job?"

"Probably free beer," said Ruth. "Those guys at the gate house don't get paid anything."

"You know," I said, "they bust the poor sap at the gate but I don't read the name of the 'host' or those kids anywhere in this article. I wonder why?"

"Well, it's Crewe Neck. Probably some politician or high school football player."

"Right." I folded the paper.

"Any coupons?" Ruth asked.

"No."

"Then put it in recycling," she said. Grumbling, I complied.

Our Friend Daria: "Esteemsters"

School had started. Whenever I took the subway, I would find myself surrounded by private and public school kids, all dressed alike in the standing-room only circumstances. Both cohorts were dressed identically. The difference was in the dress. Public school kids wore the same maroon-colored pullovers and private school kids wore blazers. You knew it was a Catholic school if all the girls were in skirts.

It didn't mean much to me, except for the fact that I'd have to slow down through school zones. Kids would be coming and going by foot on the little road to our house at approximately 7:30 am and 4 pm. Ruth and I lived a stone's throw away from Lawndale High School, so there was a lot of traffic.

As I was driving home on that first day of the fall semester, I passed Staring Girl. Staring Girl was walking with someone wearing a red jacket. The two chatted as they walked by.

I thought nothing of it. I assumed that the red jacketed girl was Staring Girl's sister. It wasn't worth sharing with Ruth, and Ruth wouldn't have shared it with me. We saw people walk down the street all the time.

(* * *)

That Friday would be Lawndale's version of Dragon Con. It was called "Alien-Con" for some reason - probably to drag in as many attendees as possible who weren't into comic books, collectibles, hard or soft science fiction, role playing games or other general weirdness. I learned from the website that even though there would be gaming tables and a "vendors area" that the speakers were all from UFOlogy. All unknown names.

I looked at the price for a one-day ticket. $10. Cheaper than Dragon Con. My friend Casey from Tennessee and his wife and their friends would be staying over for Labor Day to attend Atlanta's Dragon Con and I would sometimes go with them. A one-day ticket was fifty dollars. It was almost not worth it, but I liked seeing my friends and enjoying the things that they still enjoyed and that I used to enjoy.

Of course, I offered Ruth the chance to go. She skipped it. You couldn't have gotten Ruth into a comic-book convention under threat of death.

Really, Alien Con was nothing special. I simply saw it as a chance to do some shopping for items that I'd normally have to order online. I planned on skipping the speeches from the UFO observers. I had a lot of sympathy for them, and I thought it quite plausible to believe that intelligent life existed elsewhere. However, when the speakers opened their mouths, their credibility diminished with each word. At best they were eccentric; at worst they were downright half-crazy.

The shopping, however, was surprisingly good. I found some old tabletop wargames from a company called Avalon Hill. I loved these games but the games were now out of stock and Avalon Hill has gone bust. There was no sense in pushing paper chits across a printed map when you could just fire up your PC and shoot Nazis.

My goal was to find a nuclear war game called 1979. I had heard it was a great game and if there was some rotting copy somewhere, I wanted to have it as my own.

The games were stacked up in three shelves, forming an incomplete square with one side missing. The shelves were eight feet high and the games were stacked so tightly that no one would ever know you were inside this square unless they were looking from the missing side. It was like being inside a fort.

I continued to look. Was "1979" listed numerically or was it listed by number, like Nineteen Seventy-Nine? Could I find it in the "N"s? The games appeared to be shelved alphabetically, but the take-it-down-put-it-back system had jumbled the order. I called it "semi-betical order".

As I looked, someone entered my fort. I turned around. It was Staring Girl. She wore a green jacket and a black pleated skirt, with boots that almost came up to her knees. The only acknowledgment I got from her was a brief moment of paralysis on her part. Then, she began to search the games. She didn't seem to be looking for anything specific.

Having failed in my quest to find a nuclear war board game that was thirty years old, I began looking elsewhere. I found myself at the graphic novels section. These were shelved on low, four-foot-high shelves, which meant two things. I could stoop, or I could sit on the floor. Given my size and my hip bursitis, I decided the latter was better. The hard, concrete floor wasn't doing my feet any good.

Within five minutes, Staring Girl was back. She had made a bee line to the low shelf, and squatted down behind the barrier. This time, there was no acknowledgment that I was there, not even a brief interruption in her search. She looked at the graphic novels on the shelf with disinterest - they were old 1960s DC comic graphic novels.

This had been my second encounter with Staring Girl in the last ten minutes. This time, I got up almost immediately - not easy for me. I didn't know what was going on, but I found Staring Girl to be rather creepy. I felt like I was being stalked.

This time, I decided to leave the vendors area. The vendors area was being held in ballroom of Lawndale's biggest hotel, and there was a small reception area between where the vendors area began and where the lobby ended. Feeling tired, I sat down and tried to finish reading Journey to the End of the Night.

I had been there for ten minutes, and of course...Staring Girl was back. She walked through the area and looked out into the lobby. Sighing, she sat down in the reception area as well, violating my inner space.

I felt that I at least had to acknowledge her presence, if only to see what she wanted. "Hello," I said.

She had a quick answer. "Mommy taught me not to talk to strangers." Great. I had given off the vibe of the creepy older guy hitting on the younger girl.

The snotty response was too pissy for my tastes. "We're hardly strangers. You've been following me around all day."

"When?" she said, as a challenge.

"Near the games. And the graphic novels. And now, out here."

Staring Girl sighed. "Oh. Yeah. Sorry about that. Actually, I'm trying to hide from someone."

I looked around as people entered and exited the vendor's room about us. "Then this probably isn't the best place."

"Well," Starting Girl said, "I'm looking for someone, too. She's supposed to be here. I told her to meet me at the vendor's room. She has black hair and is wearing a red jacket."

"Oh. That's the girl you were walking home from school with."

"Huh?"

"There's a family that moved in a few blocks away called the Morgendorffers. My wife and I live just a couple of blocks away. You walked past our house on the way to Lawndale High."

"Right. We were going to hook up at Alien Con."

"Are you all right?" I said. "I mean you're trying to avoid someone."

"That's my family," she said.

"What are they here, then?"

"They’re here to improve my self-esteem."

"At $10 a pop?"

"No price is too dear for esteem," Staring Girl answered.

"Well, I'm James. My wife is Ruth. I'm sorry, but I don't know your name." Staring Girl answered that her name was Esmerelda.

"Well, Esmerelda, I'll try to help you out. If I see her at the convention, I'll tell you you were looking for her."

"Thanks." Esmerelda wasn't strong on conversation. I decided to look at the comic books. I'd get more conversation out of a Rob Liefield cover than I'd get out of Esmerelda.

(* * *)

I never saw Staring Girl or her red-jacketed friend. After looking at the vendor's area and checking out some of the exhibits, I went back home and reported to Ruth.

"Sorry the con sucked," Ruth said.

"Well, you know, a town like Lawndale - did you think the con was going to be any good? Now, if it were a high school football convention, it would be packed."

"That reminds me," said Ruth, "I can get Lawndale Leprechauns tickets for five dollars from the Death Star, cheap. Do you want to go?"

Sure. I loved baseball at the time. I mentioned Staring Girl to Ruth and recounted our conversation.

"She sounds weird," Ruth said.

"Yes. Definitely. I think the room with the bars was a good choice."

Our Friend Daria: "Prequel"

I would like to say that my wife and I lived "inside the perimeter" and that the housing market was doing quite well. My wife enjoyed reading the circulars sent by a popular real estate agent. "See how well these houses sold!" Our house, near to those recently sold, certainly had to be worth a lot of money.

I didn't much look forward to living in Lawndale, but my wife was desperate to get out of her telecommunications job in Nashville. At the time, I was a telephone nurse. I pretty much hated the job, hated everything about it, dreaded waking up to do it. My time off would be haunted by a clock which counted down to the time when I had to go back to work again.

In order for my wife to break free of Nashville, she had to promise me that I could go back to school and change careers. We signed the dirty deal, and we were off to Lawndale.

To be blunt, I never liked the inhabitants of Lawndale that much. It was a white-bread middle class community. If some sort of Marxist wanted to condemn the petty-mindedness of the bourgeoisie she couldn't have chosen a better example than Lawndale. Everyone here was keeping up with the Joneses, and Holden Caulfield would have screamed "phony" from the top of the tallest tree until his whiny little lungs caught pneumonia. My wife told some riotous stories about the bozos at her new job, or "bog" as she called it.

There was a media, of sorts. The big three television channels (not four or five, mind you) had Lawndale stations. There were sports - single A-baseball - but the big thing in town was high school football, particularly some charter school called Lawndale High School. (I made a note that it was not the public school, Carter County High.) "No one at the Death Star sends their kids to Carter County if they can afford it," Ruth said. Whenever there was a high school football game, everything in town would turn blue and gold, and every little shop changed color.

There were a couple of big malls. The only interesting place in town was an area called Dega Street, which seemed to be a holdover from the years before 1980s conservatism. "It smells like Otto's jacket," was what Ruth said when we drove by. There were head shops and a bunch of shifty (but interesting) people hanging around. Ruth had visited the thrift shops, but she said that she really didn't find much there. I think her high school days were over.

Oh well. I had the internet and books. I was fine.

However, a problem happened with our change of address. We were getting mail for someone called Helen Morgendorffer. Occasionally, we would get Jake Morgendorffer's mail. We contacted the post office, and stated, "Hey! We keep getting someone else's mail." They swore they would get around to it, sooner or later, but nothing came of it.

When we got our most recent real estate circular, Ruth noted that some nice two-story mini-mansion had just been sold, and we drove by to take a look. There was an SUV parked in the formerly empty driveway, and Ruth noted that whoever it was must have moved in at least a couple of weeks earlier. I happened to notice the name on the mailbox: "MORGENDORFFER".

"And the mystery...is solved," I said.

"I want to go in and let them know that we have their mail," Ruth said.

"You do that." I wasn't the most social person.

So I sat from the car and watched Ruth chat with someone from the Morgendorffer's front door. It was an adult woman that I assumed was Helen Morgendorffer. They chatted for about five minutes while I sat in the car and listened to music. When some Santana song assaulted my years, I got bored and started looking out of the car window.

I looked up. There was that strange half-barred window. We never knew how the window got that way; it had been that way before the Morgendorffers showed up. Now, there was a face looking down from it. Some girl wearing glasses – she was probably a daughter of one of the Morgendorffers.

I broke eye contact to mind my own business. After a safe interval, I looked back up. She was still looking at me. I grumbled.

Finally, Ruth stopped her socializing. "What did you think of the Morgendorffers?"

Ruth dished. "She's a lawyer. He's a consultant. He seemed really nice. I think you'd like him."

"Do tell." I thought not. I never liked it when Ruth tried to set me up on play dates.

"They have two daughters. Both of them are going to start at Lawndale High School. School starts on Monday."

"I'm sure they're screaming with glee. Did you meet either of those girls?"

"No."

"Well, there was one looking up at me from that weird window. You know the one."

"Yeah, I asked her about it. She said the previous owners had a schizophrenic aunt that had tried to escape out the window a few years back. They had the room padded and put bars on the windows. Helen said they were going to renovate the room, but they're feeling the budget crunch."

"I think they moved the weird daughter in there," I said. I told the story of Staring Girl.

"Well, you know, kids are weird. Let me tell you about teaching high school sometime."

"Maybe you could go teach Staring Girl at Lawndale High School."

"Ain't enough money in the world," Ruth said.