You get to know all the old people. This is what no one tells you when you decide to work from home, but it’s true. One generation’s “off-peak hours” is another’s “hours.” There they are, walking their rickety dogs at ten, doing their laundry at noon, checking their mail at three, asking you if you know how to operate a VCR machine at six.
You can be ill at ease with this, seeing it as a premature separation from your rightful generation, or you can embrace it. Marilyn helped me embrace it. She complained about the slow elevator and taught me how to trick the dryer into running an extra load, free. She was always late for the opera. She was feisty—a word my peers employ when describing people who curse after the age of eighty. And then one day, according to an index card taped to the lobby wall, she was dead.
Blue ink announced that the family would be sitting shiva in her apartment. It listed the hours, the days, and finally, in block letters: ALL FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS WELCOME. I did a double take. Was Marilyn not selling me on the wonders of dryer sheets a mere two days ago?
My first thought: I should go. For one thing, I am Jewish and have been to plenty of shivas before, so that would take some of the awkwardness out of it. My second thought: I should definitely not go. I had lived in the building for only seven months. I barely knew this person.
Part of what’s interesting about living in New York is how much business you can choose to have with people who are absolutely none of your business. There’s something incongruous about how careful we are to set up boundaries, how ardent we are about maintaining them, and how quick we are to take a wrecking ball to them when it suits us. We train one another to disengage at the daily level, to greet with silent nods, to ignore music coming through the walls or tearful phone calls on the street. Yet when we want to feel we’re doing the right thing, we come swooping in with eye contact and directions.
It’s not that I had ignored Marilyn. I liked Marilyn. But I wasn’t about to invite her to dinner or ask her if she had grandkids or engage her a moment longer than I had to. I work from home, after all. I need my space. Now tragedy had struck and I was going to, what—buy a fruit plate and go sit down with a stranger’s family?
In the end, I made my decision the way I make all decisions I’ve brutalized with analysis—by giving up and awaiting logistical intervention. On the second night of the shiva, a friend requested that we move our drinks date to a dinner date, thus giving me a clear window of time to brush my hair and walk upstairs.
When I opened the door, I was so distracted by the fact that Marilyn’s apartment could eat my apartment for breakfast, I nearly forgot why I had come. I made my way down a long hallway, through the mourners eating pastrami, and found a woman directly related to Marilyn.
“Was it sudden?” I asked after introducing myself.
“Oh no,” said the woman. “It was pneumonia. It had been going on for months.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “I just can’t believe it.”
Had I not seen her, just last week, lecturing a new tenant about cigarette butts?
“Aren’t you sweet to come?” the woman said, grabbing my arm and insisting I squeeze in on the sofa. “But he lived a long life.”
“Who he?”
“Our father.”
“Who art in heaven?”
“My father.”
“Marilyn’s husband?”
The woman cocked her head and blinked at me. Now the whole family was listening.
“I’m Marilyn,” she said, putting her hand to her chest. “My father died. We’re sitting shiva for him.”
Lenore. Lenore is the name of the feisty lady who helped me with the dryer. Ageism is a horrible thing that can appear in many guises. But unlike the more sinister sister isms, one of the symptoms is not thinking that all old people look alike. And yet, here we were.
This is the danger of deciding, too late, to be a good neighbor, to care because you think you should. Extricating myself from the situation required a social deftness that I did not possess. I stayed for eleven minutes. As I left, Marilyn offered me food, which I was too embarrassed to accept. I had dinner plans and also a hunch that she thought I had secretly come for the food. We chatted about the building and the upcoming election and she couldn’t have been nicer, suggesting that maybe we were meant to be friends as well as neighbors.
“Well, I’ll never forget your name,” I said, apologizing again, hugging her and slinking back down the stairs.
At the mailboxes the next afternoon, I ran into Lenore. Because I was checking my mail in the middle of the day. Because I have become one of them. But I still have my boundaries. So when Lenore exclaimed, “Look at all this junk mail, it’s enough to kill me!” I only nodded. I did not tell her that I thought it had, in fact, killed her. When it comes to death, it’s better to live and let live.