Living beside 'Lucretia McEvil'

By Sharon Weatherall

Growing up everyone has someone in their neighbourhood they never forget - for good or bad reasons.

Mine was the girl next door and for the sake of confidentiality (and because it fits so well) we'll just call her Lucretia 'McEvil'. That girl tormented me something terrible. Today it would be called bullying and it was no doubt because I was a skinny, fuzzy haired kid usually with some kind of sore on my face that I had picked into a big, red crater. I think I was in grade one when we finally relocated, but Lucretia left her mark on me during the first six years of my life.

Anyway it's a good thing we moved or else I may have turned out to be a child murderer or something– by that time I had already hit her over the head with a garden spade once and wouldn't have thought twice about doing it again if the situation arose.
 
Lucretia was one year older than me and an aggressive sort of kid that liked to push rules and people’s buttons to the max. She was one of three children, the middle one between two boys. She was doted on by her dad - a roly-poly guy that had a hard time getting in and out of his car, and her skinny little mom who thought everything Lucretia did was 'cute'.

I should mention that it was a fairly new neighbourhood with quite a few quaint older couples and not a huge number of kids  - all of which were different ages so you didn't get anyone close to hang out with.

Across the road to the left was 'Wanda' who was two years older than Lucretia and to the right was 'Little Lisa', who was a year younger than me and still too young to play with us for the most part. I can't remember exactly when Wanda moved into the neighbourhood but she pretty much took over Lucretia's spare time on weekends. During the school year their time together was hit and miss as Wanda had classmates she hung with and during those times Lucretia was often excluded  - I am sure once her friends met the feisty neighbourhood chum they wanted nothing to do with her.

So, while she actually preferred to hang with Wanda, sometimes Lucretia still got stuck with me. When that happened she would be in a vindictive mood and our play sessions ended in ghastly fights with me bawling and her snickering behind her hand. Even when she was in a decent mood Lucretia was the type of the kid that would pick boogers out of her nose and wipe them on you just to make you gag – a habit she got from her brothers no doubt, say nasty things to older neighbours and ring people’s doorbells then run away leaving me standing there. Lucretia did all kinds of little tricks that ended in my butt getting tanned while she was rarely sent to her room. For the most part my mom forbade me to play with her.

One day when I sitting in my sandbox in the backyard minding my own business, Lucretia called over the fence to see what I was doing? She invited me to come and play at her place - something that hardly ever happened after the best friend thing with Wanda commenced. But I agreed to go and off we went in through the back door and up the steps to her bedroom.

Her mom was in the kitchen smoking and having coffee with Lisa’s mom, because back then that's what moms did all day while dads were out working. My mom would join them sometimes when they were sitting outside but because she didn't smoke she usually steered clear of the indoor coffee sessions. Anyway they hardly noticed us walking by because Lecretia's mom was busy winding her long auburn hair into pin curls all over her head. She went around like that all the time - pin curls with a scarf wrapped around them and tied like Aunt Jemima at the front. Any other day I would have stopped to watch her, mesmerized by the way her nimble fingers wrapped up a foot long tress and nipped a bobby pin over it.  

On this occasion as I followed Lucretia I realized she was just being way to nice. When she shut the bedroom door behind us I started getting a bad feeling in my stomach and wondered if I should have stayed at home? We sat on the bed and right away she started telling me about a fight she had with Wanda. While I felt kind of important that she was confiding in me, I nervous at the same time. Her main focus was to try and get me to agree with the bad things she was saying about Wanda, but all the while she was glancing toward the closet door. I soon knew why - someone was in there laughing.

I jumped off the bed and ran over to open the closet, but Lucretia quickly pushed me away. We struggled and the door flew open spilling out a red faced laughing Wanda. The two of them grabbed hold of me and put me in the closet throwing themselves against the door to keep me in there. I was as humiliated as a five and half year old could be. She had tricked me again! They weren't fighting at all - the little witches had planned the whole thing. 

I was so upset. I just wanted to get out of there so I started crying, yelling and kicking the door. I finally escaped and squirmed free but Lucretia McEvil had already spread eagled herself in front of the bedroom door so I couldn’t possibly get it open. I started hollering at the top of my lungs. Wanda had her hand over my mouth and was trying to shush me when Lucretia's mom burst in to see what all the commotion was about. Of course Lucretia went flying and that took the focus off what was really going on. Her mom turned on me, saying I couldn't play without fighting. She would not listen to my side and called me a baby, sending me home and telling me to stay there. I left crying and got little sympathy from my own mom when I tried to tell her the same story. She said it was my own fault for going there in the first place. It seemed no one even cared about what those two conniving girls had just done to me.

On the day I hit her in the head with the garden trowel, Lucretia had relentlessly antagonized me for an hour or more. It was a hot summer day and I was sitting beside our driveway which was located between our two houses extending from the street up to the back yard fence. There were narrow strips of grass bordering the driveway and it was shady. Minding my own business on my own side, I was picking 'pretty' stones out of our newly delivered gravel and setting them in little piles – crystalized quartz was commonly used when you could not afford asphalt.

In my eyes, these were precious gems worthy of collection. With a pail and small garden spade I was sorting vigorously when along comes Lucretia to sit herself down in the grass on her side. She begins to pick stones off the very edge of the driveway telling me they are hers, then running her fingers through the stones further in and sifting out the pretties to set in her lap. I am mortified and tell her that she should not be touching the stones that belonged to our family and not hers. She smiles smugly and we start arguing about property boundaries.

Lucretia says the stones are on her property now so they are no longer mine. I am seeing red, but get even more very upset when Lucretia throws one at me. I pick up the little trowel, cross the driveway and hit her smartly on the head before she even realizes what happened. She grabs her head and begins to scream bloody murder when she sees some blood on her hand from the place where the trowel had bonked her. You’d have thought someone cut her whole head off but still, when I see the blood my stomach does a flip-flop and I know I am in big trouble. Softening my voice, I try to coax her into stop crying by telling her she can now play with my stones.

But it’s too late. Lucretia's mom comes barrelling around the corner to see what has happened. At the sight of blood on her daughter’s hand, she starts screaming and yelling. She grabs my arm and begins shaking me so hard the spade falls from my hand to the ground. Then we hear my mom’s voice above me coming from the bathroom window and Lucretia’s mom yells  - "do you see what your daughter has done?"

My mother yells out the window for her to unhand me and start looking after her own little troublemaker. The two women holler back and forth at each other for several minutes while Lucretia continues to scream loudly alerting the entire neighbourhood that a catastrophe has happened. My mom says she has been standing at the window for the last half hour listening to what was going on and Lucretia "deserved what she got". I stopped crying and turned around in surprise. My mom was really defending me. Lucretia’s mom yanks up her howling daughter and goes off in a huff  - she didn't speak to my mom for some time after that.

In the house I got told it was wrong to hit Lucretia but my mom also sympathized with me for what had happened because in her opinion “that bratty kid deserved what she got this time”. But I was harshly advised to walk away next time which I knew was easier said than done.

Lucretia lived through the ordeal and didn't even need stitches. It actually turned out to be a very superficial cut – maybe she just had a soft head. Even though the moms weren’t speaking, it wasn’t long before she was back knocking at my door again with a new plan of action. This time my mom blamed me just as much for what we did even though I tried to tell her it wasn't my idea to run back in forth past the Portuguese neighbour’s house yelling gibberish, and bent over twisting our hands over our butts pretending there was poop coming out. No, I would have to say that didn’t go over well at all...... Neither did the time we went exploring in a new development behind our houses and one of us went to the bathroom in the bathtub and pushed it down the drain with an envelope of screw nails. The construction crew went door to door telling parents what some kids had done and they were not too happy. Unfortunately my mom had seen us climbing the fence earlier that week and yelled at us to stay away from the construction area. Too late the damage had already been done – when you gotta go, you gotta go.

Life next door to Lucretia was always like that – one bad idea after another and never a dull moment.

I ran into Lucretia many years later at an arena where our sons were playing in a hockey tournament against each other but she had no time to visit she was so busy screaming at her kid to get a goal or beat down the other players. Everyone in the arena was looking at her and I am sure the coaches weren't impressed. I was not surprised to see she hadn't changed a bit – she even looked the same!

Somehow her screeching voice brought back a flood of memories that made me hunch my shoulders, twist my head and back away saying “ya, well….see you later” but she didn’t even notice. It was like taking a step back in time. I scanned the crowd of course, to see if Wanda was anywhere around and realized Lucretia was on her own this time. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall during the years those two girls were playing together and wondered what kind of memories Wanda had? Maybe she was smart and moved out of town too.