We-Watch

WE-WATCH

“Can you believe this?” Kyle stood by the window with his phone in his hand, taking picture after picture of something his wife Miranda couldn’t see from her place at the kitchen table.

      “Believe what?” she asked.

      “This woman out there. She’s letting her dog poop all over our lawn.”

      “And…?” Miranda was reading the New York Times on her laptop and eating her breakfast. She spread some more jam on the piece of toast in her hand. She didn’t even look up.

      “And she’s not even picking it up!”

      Miranda sighed. Ever since Kyle had retired five years ago, it seemed his world had shrunk smaller and smaller, until now it was about the size of a walnut. “What are you, the local poop patrol?” she asked him around a big bite of toast. “Come on, have breakfast with me.”

      “Jesus, she’s looking around like she’s checking to see if anyone’s watching her,” Kyle continued.

     “Well, someone is.”

“She’s not going to pick it up. I can tell.”

Miranda put her hands over her ears and tried to ignore him.

“Damn,” Kyle went on. “That dog must be full of shit. It’s still at it.”

“Don’t you have better things to do than to watch someone’s dog poop?”

“Don’t you care that someone’s letting their dog shit all over our lawn?”

“Not as much as you do, apparently.”

Miranda returned her attention to her breakfast. Kyle stayed at the window, watching.

“I knew it!” he cried triumphantly. “She’s not going to pick it up!”

“Maybe she can’t pick it up,” Miranda offered. “Maybe she falls over if she bends down. Maybe she doesn’t have a bag with her.”

     “There’s nothing wrong with her. Look. She’s fit as a fiddle.”

Miranda got up and came over to the window in spite of herself. She saw a woman about Miranda’s own age, in her late sixties, with a good-sized dog on a leash. The woman did look pretty fit, steady on her feet and capable of controlling a big, strong dog. The dog was just coming out of its squat. “God, Kyle, give her a second. The dog isn’t even finished yet.” They both watched as the woman began rummaging in her pockets. “Look, she’s getting a bag out of her pocket.”

     “No, she’s not. She’s just putting on a show like she suddenly realized she doesn’t have one.”

     “I think she really doesn’t have one.”

“Well, then, she’s just irresponsible, isn’t she?” Kyle’s face was reddening with anger. “People shouldn’t go out of the house with their dogs if they’re not prepared to pick up their shit, should they? They should be prepared.”

      “Says the Boy Scout. Why don’t you go offer her a bag if you’re so concerned? There’s a bunch of them under the sink.”

      “You don’t get it, do you?”

      Miranda went back to the table. “There’s nothing to get. Come on, leave the window and come have breakfast with me. Enjoy life.” She picked up her unfinished toast, but she put it back down without taking a bite.

      “It’s disrespectful!” Kyle huffed.

      “I really don’t think it’s about you,” Miranda retorted.

      “Look, there she goes. She’s leaving now, just leaving that pile on our lawn for me to pick up.” Miranda said nothing. Kyle snapped a few more pictures and then came to the table. He sat down and began typing furiously. “There,” he said a few minutes later. “That’ll fix her.”

      “What will?”

      “I just posted her picture on We-Watch.”

      “You didn’t!”

      “Yes, I did. At least now she’ll know that people are watching her.”

      Miranda fiddled with her laptop. Sure enough, there on We-Watch was Kyle’s post, with a series of photos of the woman standing, the dog crouched, and the woman walking away. “You missed a picture of the poop itself,” she commented dryly. The post was long and venomous, delving into the evils of society at the hands of people who were too irresponsible to care about anyone but themselves. It was over the top. And even as she finished reading it, Miranda saw that people were already commenting on it.

      “Jesus, Kyle. Don’t you think you’re overreacting? You’re igniting a mob out there. Look. People are getting ready to draw and quarter this poor lady. You have to take this down.”

      “Why? People have to speak out. ‘See something, say something,’ right?”

      “What the hell? So there’s a little bit of poop out there. So what? I’ll pick it up. Leave it alone.”

Kyle snorted. “See, Miranda? That’s just like you.”

      Miranda felt her face stiffen. “What’s just like me?”

      “You never hold anyone accountable! You have to have standards! You have to enforce them! How would it have been if I hadn’t enforced standards all those years at the fabrication shop? Those frames don’t weld themselves perfectly every time, do they? No! Someone has to watch and make sure it’s done right. People can get hurt if it’s not done right. People can die!” Kyle’s breath was getting short and his words were coming out choppy.

    “But you’re not a quality control manager anymore, are you? You’ve been retired for years now. and our lawn isn’t a piece of critical infrastructure. No one is dying from a bit of poop on our grass. Calm down and delete that stupid post before someone gets hurt.”

Kyle puffed out his barrel chest. “That’s the problem with you. You’re permissive. You always look for an excuse for everybody to behave badly without any consequences.”

Miranda looked hurt. “That’s not true! I look for the good in people.”

“Oh, you sure do. You live in a pretend world. You look for good when you should be acknowledging the bad, and taking some action on it.”

“I look for the good because it’s usually there,” Miranda said coldly.

“Oh yeah? What’s good about this lady and her dog?”

Miranda opened her mouth to reply, but Kyle didn’t even pause for breath.

“What about that scammer who tried to rip you off when you were selling your car last year?”

“He didn’t succeed.”

“What about the kids?”

“The kids? What about the kids?”

Kyle threw up his hands in the air. “They’re halfway to being senior citizens and neither one of them has a real job yet!”

Miranda put both hands to her head. “How did we get from dog poop to the kids’ jobs? What are you really saying?”

“I’m saying that thanks to you and your indulging them, they’re not well established in life and they should be. I should have stepped in years ago!”

“Nothing stopped you,” Miranda said.

“You stopped me!” Kyle was shouting again. “You always said to let them be themselves, whatever that meant. And now here they are, an ‘artist’” – Kyle made air quotes – “and a socialist. I shudder to think what our grandkids have learned from them.”

Miranda was becoming angry herself, and she struggled to keep her voice low. “Jolene’s a very good artist. She makes good money, if that matters to you. And Barry’s not a socialist. He runs a non-profit, okay? Our kids are middle-aged adults living good lives. They’re raising great kids of their own. And they’re lucky enough to do what they love. You ought to respect them for it. What is going on with you?”

Kyle looked at her wide-eyed. When he spoke again, it was in a voice filled with wonder.

“I never saw it all before. You go through life doing your best, trying to protect your family and do everything right. And while you’re busy looking ahead, something over your shoulder goes haywire and nobody cares. And then before you know it, there you are, you’re closer and closer to the end of the road and you realize that none of it amounted to shit. Nobody cares! It was all for nothing! You might as well have done whatever you wanted all along! Go ahead, let your dog shit all over someone else’s yard! Nobody cares!”

Kyle stalked out of the room. Miranda sat very still at the breakfast table, overcome. What had just happened? How had an ordinary breakfast devolved into this? How little regard he seemed to have for her! Even for their children! She hadn’t known that he thought so little of their children’s life choices.

Had he always been like this? It was so hard to tell. She tried to remember back a year, two years, five years, ten. She still worked as a teaching assistant in a preschool. She wasn’t home most of the week to see how he acted during the day. By the time she got home, he was usually sitting in his armchair watching TV. His taste ran to nature shows and documentaries, benign things, nothing that would fire him up like this.

Miranda had already realized that as he aged, he’d become short tempered, easily frustrated, and impatient. Now she realized that she’d begun reacting to him with a tightness in her chest, a shortness of breath, a biting of her lip and a turning of her head. She was feeling all those things right now.

     She hadn’t mentioned it to Kyle, but Miranda recognized this woman and her dog. The woman started appearing most mornings about four months ago. The dog was a nice looking dog, a yellow Labrador retriever with a puppyish spring in its step. The woman was no one you’d notice in a crowd, just an older woman out on a morning walk. Sometimes Miranda would be outside weeding her flower beds when they passed by and she and the woman exchanged hellos. The woman seemed nice.

Kyle posting her picture on We-Watch with that poisonous message gave Miranda a creepy sense of dread. People were so quick to jump to indignation, so ready to assume the worst about each other. People had been assaulted for less, she knew. Maybe not yet in their neighborhood, but still…. She turned back to her laptop to see what was happening on the website. Comments were still coming in, most of them complaining about how the world was going to hell in a handbasket carried by people like this selfish dog-walking, lawn-wrecking woman. You’d think she had just robbed the corner convenience store and then graffitied its walls while she was at it. Miranda thought about posting her own response to try and inject some cooler reasoning into the thread.

Just then, Kyle came back as though nothing had happened. He said, “Here, what do you think of this?” and thrust a piece of paper towards her.

Miranda looked. On it was a message in all capital letters: “DON’T BE LIKE HER”, and below that a copy of the photo he’d taken this morning, the one of the dog in full crouch with the woman standing by.

     “What is this for?”

“It’s a sign. I’m going to make a sign for the front lawn. What do you think?”

Miranda lost it. “What do I think? What do I think?” Her own face colored up as she turned full face to Kyle. “Here’s what I think! I think you’re a mean, petty, unkind, intolerant clod!”

Kyle recoiled from her outburst, and his slight backwards motion inflamed Miranda, She took a step forward. “You think I’m too nice? For seeing the best in people? Well, you’re not nice enough! You’re intolerant and vindictive. Why do you think the kids both took such different paths? They didn’t want to be like you!”

Kyle stood there, speechless.

“Do you really think so little of me? Of the kids? Do you really think we’re such complete fuck-ups? Do you even love me?”

Kyle’s mouth opened but no words came out.

“Yeah. I see it now,” Miranda went on. “Jesus. I feel blindsided. Or no, not blindsided. The opposite. I feel like—like a blindfold has come off and I finally see the real you. And I don’t like what I see. I don’t even know you anymore.” She paused for breath. The shock on Kyle’s face registered in a split second, and it almost stopped her, but not quite. “You want to know what I think? I think I don’t even want to know you anymore!”    

      Kyle took the sign back. “Yeah, well that makes two of us,” he muttered. “Forget I asked.”

      Miranda started to cry. She left the room. Kyle smoothed the sign where Miranda had clutched it into a handful of crumples, and sat at the table. He felt bombarded. He had no idea what had gotten into her all of a sudden. What was wrong with a little accountability, anyway? Why couldn’t she support him for once? She was always taking issue with him, refusing to see things from his point of view, as if what he thought was intrinsically off base. Was it too much to ask that she see things his way once in a while? Why did he have to put up with dog shit on his lawn? When did he get to be right for change?

      Miranda came back into the room with a large tote bag over one shoulder and her purse over the other, a tissue in her hand and her eyes red. Kyle was about to say something when he saw motion on the street and turned back to the window.

      “Now what?” Miranda asked. “Is someone leaving a pizza box on our lawn? You’d better make another sign.” She picked up her laptop from the table and stuffed it into the tote bag.

      “It’s her again,” he said.

Miranda put her bags down and joined Kyle at the window. Sure enough, the woman and her dog came back the opposite way they’d been going before. The woman carried something bright green in her hand. When they got in front of Kyle and Miranda’s house, she stopped and gestured to her dog. The dog plunked its behind down to the ground and looked up at her expectantly. She gave it a treat from her pocket and rubbed its ears. She fiddled with the green object, and Kyle and Miranda could see that it was a plastic bag, the kind the city put out at the parks for dog walkers to clean up after their animals. The woman slipped one hand into the bag and bent down. Then she stood up, tied the bag closed, and spoke to the dog again, who eagerly trotted ahead on the leash. The two of them walked off out of sight.

      Miranda picked up her bags.

      “Where are you going?” Kyle asked her.

      “I’m going to Jolene’s for a few days. I need some space.”

      “Now hold on, Miranda. Just hold on a minute. Don’t overreact. I’ll take it down, okay? That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

      Miranda let out a sigh of fatigue. “Take it down, don’t take it down…. Don’t you see it, Kyle? Those words we said? It’s like they’re still bouncing around in here, like they could bounce their way back into our mouths and be unsaid, and we could go back to how we were.”

      Miranda put her bags back down and went to Kyle. She touched a finger to her lips, then to his, and then laid her palm against his cheek. Kyle didn’t move. She dropped her hand to her side, turned and picked up her bags again. At the door she turned and looked back at him still standing by the window, his mouth slightly open.

“They can’t, you know,” she said, and left, closing the door softly behind her.