Unlikely Allies

The first time I ever heard my mother cuss was after Jonie Ann Woodworth, our neighbor to the right, offered to teach her how to make chocolate chip cookies.

Now, I was only ten years old then: old enough to know cuss words, young enough to not say them. So when my mother stomped into the house, the storm door slamming behind her, and siad, “Goddamn that woman, does she think I can’t make chocolate chip cookies?!”

My brother Ike was on the couch, reading one of the junior-high level English books he always griped about. He jerked his head up and asked, “What’s wrong, Mom?”

“That old withered witch, Jonie Ann, just told me she’d teach me to bake proper chocolate chip cookies.” She blazed into the kitchen and snapped a tea towel to attention. “She told me the ones I made for the church bake sale were too cakey. As if she’d know! This from the woman whose sweet tea comes from a tin can.”

My mother continued grumbling as she stormed around the kitchen, snatching up ingredients with fervor and slamming them on the counter. I looked up at Ike, who shrugged.

“I wouldn’t worry, Jess,” he assured me. “She’ll be fine.”

My mother had always had a long-standing feud with Jonie Ann. They’d hated each other from the moment Jonie Ann moved in, when she’d accidentally made a comment about my mother’s garden looking a bit brown, which prompted my mother to make a comment about her shoes looking a bit ragged. Evidently, their relationship never recovered.

It didn’t help that the Woodworth house was always a bit better looking than ours. Our backyard was always cluttered with the makings of myself and my brother: a football that ended up on the roof somehow, a baseball bat tossed haphazardly to the side, a bright pink bike with glittery ribbons on the handle lying in the grass. Meanwhile, the Woodworths had no children; instead, they had a carefully landscaped lawn dotted with pretty flowers and decorative paths. While we had a decade-old station wagon, the Woodworths proudly claimed ownership to a sleek, black convertible. Even Jonie Ann herself always seemed a bit more glamorous than my own mother. She was tall and slender, with long blonde waves that cascaded over her shoulders. Now, my mother was also blonde, but her hair was straight and a bit frizzy, so she kept it short in a bob. While Jonie Ann always talked about going into the city to get manicures, my mother painted her own nails in her bedroom. It seemed like Jonie Ann was always one step above our mother, laughing as she looked down.

This particular comment—what Ike would affectionately call “The Cookie Incident” over the years—was just the latest battle in their war. But it seemed, from there on out, that my mother’s anger went from an ember to a flame. Suddenly, every little thing was a personal slight against her and required retaliation.

Jonie Ann volunteered to clean up after the church sermon on Sundays? My mother would volunteer on Saturday nights to help set up. Jonie Ann bought balcony tickets to the symphony for herself and her husband? We were suddenly headed to the symphony on the same night, with tickets from the front row by the orchestra pit. Jonie Ann bought a new dress? My mother would stay up all night to make her own new dress.

And that wasn’t even mentioning the snarky back-and-forths. I vividly remembered the time, after Ike’s football practice, when we all piled out of the car. Jonie Ann waved at us and made her way to the short wooden fence that separated our front yards.

“Oh, Lord help me,” my mother muttered. She plastered on a smile. “Jonie Ann! Nice to see you.”

“Emily! What are you folks up to?” Jonie Ann brushed her hands on her dress. “Just coming back from practice, huh? I don’t know how you do it, Emily, keeping up without any time on your hands.”

“Oh, you know.” My mother waved her hand coyly. “You have to make time. What are you up to, Jonie Ann?”

“Just finished cleaning up the kitchen.” Jonie Ann gestured to the empty bucket that was on her porch. “It might sound a bit high maintenance, but I like to keep my floor so clean, you could eat off it!”

My mother’s lips curled up into a tight smile. “Why, Jonie Ann, I can’t believe you. That’s what we have a table for!”

Jonie Ann’s mouth snapped closed and she narrowed her eyes. My mother chuckled off her joke and called out, “Have a nice night, Jonie Ann!” as she led us inside.

Later that night, Ike, who’d gotten in the habit of keeping score, opened up his homework notebook and ticked off another point for our mother. “They’re about even,” he told me. “‘Course, Mom was down a few points last week, after Jonie said she looked sick when she just wasn’t wearing makeup.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, “but she got one back when she said that Jonie Ann must be needin’ glasses.”

“That was a good one.” Ike reached out and tugged my ponytail as he opened his math book. “Lemme finish these last few problems and I’ll help you study for the spelling test.”

The war didn’t end until the summer after I turned eleven. By that time, Jonie Ann was winning in Ike’s notebook, but it was a close race. But with the warm weather came gardening and lawn care and a lot of chances for the two of them to talk to each other.

It also brought a new neighbor.

The house on the left of ours had sat empty for almost two years, ever since the ancient Mrs. McClara decided to move in with her daughter’s family in California. But about a week after that summer break started, Ike called me over to the window. Pointing, he asked, “See that?”

“‘Course I see that, dork.” 

Ike smacked my arm and jerked his head. “New neighbors. Wonder what they’re like.”

We watched out the window as the new neighbors moved in. They looked pretty normal: a man and woman who were a little older than our own mother. I was disappointed that there weren’t any other kids my age; summer got boring when all you had to hang out with was your obnoxious older brother.

My mother introduced herself to the new neighbors, the Archers, and came back with a stormy face. “My God,” she exclaimed, “that woman thinks she knows everything, doesn’t she?”

It was over the next two weeks that we realized that our new neighbor, Helen Archer, was a much, much bigger enemy.

Suddenly, the pithy back-and-forth between my mother and Jonie Ann turned into conspiratorial whispers. While swinging in the backyard, I could hear them talking across the fence.

“She thinks just because her son is a doctor,” my mother said primly, “that means she can tell me how to raise my son. You know she told me that Ike is going to grow up soft because he reads those comic books? Pfft.”

Jonie Ann clipped a blanket onto her clothes line. “You know, she’s always trying to gossip with me. She asked me the other day why Margaret Harris doesn’t wear her wedding ring. Well, you know, I just told her that the woman’s hands swelled after her pregnancy. She doesn’t need to know about the affair.”

“The audacity!” My mother put her hand to her chest, as if I hadn’t heard her talking to my teacher Ms. Ellis about the night that Margaret supposedly spent with the man who owned the restaurant on Route 22. “Honestly, I don’t know why anyone even talks to her. She’s insufferable.”

Ike and I weren’t fond of Helen, either. She fussed at us for everything from our hairstyles to our voices. We were too loud, we were dirty, we were too rough. I wasn’t ladylike, Ike was too old to be playing with me. Anything and everything seemed to annoy her.

We mostly ignored her. That was, until the day of The Bike Ride.

It was a Thursday, hot and humid, so Ike and I decided to go race our bikes down the road. Ike always won, but I was starting to gain on him when suddenly, without any warning, Helen stepped in front of my bike.

I managed to go around her, but she grabbed onto the handlebars and pulled me down, onto the ground. I slammed my knee and scraped up my arm as I fell, while Helen stared down at me coldly.

“Where is your helmet?” she demanded. “This sort of thing is dangerous for a little girl! You can’t go riding around without a helmet.”

Ike had hopped off his bike and ran over to me. I stood up on shaky legs, rubbing my bleeding arm, while Helen grabbed my other arm.

“You should go home,” she continued sternly, “where little girls belong. Honestly, if I was your mother, I’d beat you black and blue!”

Ike was there, shoving Helen away from me, standing between us. “Hey! Leave my sister alone!”

“And you!” Helen turned her ire to my brother, who looked madder than a bull in a ballroom. “Why are you encouraging her? That’s hardly an appropriate game for a girl to play, and it’s not safe without the proper safety gear.”

Ike squared his shoulders, glaring at Helen. “Go away,” he snarled. “Go away, or I’m gonna tell my dad you hurt my sister.”

A bluff, we both knew, but Helen hadn’t been here very long. She certainly didn’t know that our father had been dead for two years.

“Ha! I haven’t seen a man about that house since I got here.” Helen looked down at us haughtily. “Maybe that’s why you two have no manners! No fathers means bad kids.”

I was pretty certain, right then, that Ike was going to get in some real trouble, because he looked mad enough to hit Helen. I imagined he would get a good swing at her face and knock her into the road. Before he could respond, though, Helen gave a God-Almighty shriek as a stream of water hit her.

Jonie Ann was standing there, her garden hose in her hand. She let the spray hit Helen for a few more seconds before turning it off. “Come on, you two,” she said grimly, taking my hand and squeezing Ike’s shoulder. “Helen, I think you oughta go back home, before Emily shows up and gives you a first-hand taste of a mother’s wrath.”

Helen sputtered water out of her lips, her dark curls plastered to her face. As Jonie Ann led us away, Helen got one last dig in.

“How would you know anything about mothers?!” Her voice carried across the neighborhood, making Jonie Ann’s hand grip mine tighter. “Didn’t your baby die?”

Ike tried to turn around, ready to really hit her, but Jonie Ann spun him back around. “Don’t, Ike. Let’s just get inside.”

She took us back to her house, a beautiful and elegant place that was practically sterile with its cleanliness. She directed me to a chair and pulled out a first aid kit. She cleaned up my arm and put some bandages on it, then frowned at my knee. It was bruised pretty badly, so Jonie Ann got some frozen peas and put them over it. Somewhere in the middle of the whole thing, Ike brought over a handkerchief and that’s when I realized Jonie Ann was crying.

She kept us on her couch until our mother came home, exhausted from working at the library. Ike told our mother what happened. I thought she was mad the time I painted a mustache on the principal’s new portrait in the front office last year, but she looked ready to rampage across the country at this. She asked Jonie Ann to watch us for a little while and then stormed over to the house on the left. Ike and I heard her banging on the Archer’s door through the window.

I never did find out what my mother said to Helen that night. All I know is, Helen would turn away from Ike and I when she saw us. If she saw Jonie Ann, she would turn a strange shade of red and mutter things under her breath. Of course, it probably didn’t help that Jonie Ann would always shout across our front lawn, “Helen! Would you like me to water your plants for you?”

After that, my mother and Jonie Ann became fast friends.