Competence

""Well, that little experiment is over," my mother said. "You tried it, it didnt work out, so what do you say we just move on." She was dressed in her roll-up-the-shirtsleeves outfit: the faded turquiose skirt, a cotten head scarf, and one of the sporty blouses my father had bought her in the hopes she might take up golf. "We'll start with the kitchen," she said. "thats always the best way, isnt it."
I was moving again. this time because of the neighbors.
"Oh, no," my mother said. "They're not to blame. Lets be honest now." She liked to take my problems back to the source, which was usually me. Like, for instance, when i got food poisoning it wasnt the cheif's fualt. "You're the one who wanted to go Oriental. You're the one who ordered the lomain."
"Lo mein. It's two words."
"Oh, he speaks Chinese now! Tell me, Charlie Chan, whats the word for for six straight hours of vomiting and diarrhea?"
What she meant was that i'd tried to save money. The cheap Chinese restraunt, the seventy-five-dollar-a-month apartment: "Cut corners ans it will always come back to bite you in the ass." That was one of her favorite sayings. But if you didnt have money how could you not cut corners?
"And whose fualt is it that you dont have any money? i'm not the one who turned up my nose at a full-time job. im not the one who spends his entire paycheck down at the hobby shop."
"I understand that."
"Well, good," she said, and then we began to wrap the breakables. 
In my version of the story, the problem began with the child next door, a thied-grader who, according to my mother, was bad news right from the start. "Put it together," she'd said when I first called to tell her about it. "Take a step back. Think."
What was there to think about? she was a nine year old girl.
"Oh, their the worst," my mother said. "whats her name? Brandii? Well thats cheap, isnt it."
" I'm sorry," I said, "but arent I talking to someone who named her daughter Tiffany?"
"My hands were tied!"he shouted. "The damned Greeks had me against a wall and you know it."
"Whatever you say."
"So this girl," my mother continued-and i knew what she would ask before she even said it. "What does her father do?"
I told her there was no father, at least not one that I knew about, and then I waited as she lit a fresh cigarette. "Lets see," she said. "Nine-year-old girl named after an alcoholic beverage. Single mother in a neighborhood the police wont even go to. What else do you have for me?" She spoke as if i'd formed theese people out of clay, as if it were my fault that the girl was nine years old and her mother couldnt keep a husband. "I dont suppose this woman has a job, does she?"
"Shes a bartender."
"Oh, thats splendid, my mother said. "Go on."
The mother worked nights and left her daughter alone from four in the afternoon to two or three in the morning. Both were blond, their hair almost white, with invisable eyebrows and eyelashes. The mother darkened hers with with pencil, but the girl appeared to have none at all. Her face was like the weather in one of those places with no disconcernable seasons. Every now and then, the circles beneath her eyes would shade to purple. She might show up with a fat lip or a scratch on her neck but her features betrayed nothing.
you had to feel sorry for a girl like that. No father, no eyebrows. and that mother. Our apartments shared a common wall, and every night i'd hear the woman stomping home from work. Most often she was with someone, but whether alone or with company she'd find some excuse to bully her daughter out of bed. Brandii had left a donut on the TV or Brandii had forgotten to drain her bathwater. They're important lessons to learn, but theres something to be said for leading by example. I never went into their apartment, but what i saw from the door was pretty rough-not simply messy or chaotic, but hopeless, the lair of a depressed person.