Sometimes I’ll spend ten minutes hiding in my house waiting for my neighbors to leave just to avoid saying “hi.” Longer if I have to. I’ll be late. I’ll miss my appointment. I’ll do whatever it is I have to do in order to avoid seeing them. I can wait any of them out. On the rare occasion when I do see them and they say “I haven’t seen you in a while,” I always think you’re only seeing me now because I miscalculated somehow. Was careless. Didn’t pull into the garage fast enough. I’ve moved without telling my neighbors. Not even putting a FOR SALE sign on the front lawn in order to avoid the inevitable questions. One managed to find out and asked for my email address so we could stay in touch. Who does that? We didn’t socialize all the years I lived next door to you, we’re certainly not going to do it now.
It’s not that I’m unpleasant and don’t say “hi” or answer the door on Halloween. (I do. And give good candy. But that’s the one day of the year. Other than that, a ringing doorbell only means “hide!”) Befriending a neighbor can only end badly. It is the residential equivalent of striking up a friendship with the person on the adjacent barstool. Complete happenstance has thrown you together. In the latter case alcohol impedes your good sense, enabling you to treat the idiot on the stool next to you like a long-lost twin. In the clear light of day, you wouldn’t hold an elevator door open for this person. At least in that case you have booze as an excuse for your bad judgment, and chances are you will never see your new best friend again. It is only the one hellish night. But talk to your neighbor once and it’s like feeding a raccoon. It keeps coming around. The person living next door to you is as random as the person stopped next to you at a red light. You wouldn’t roll down your window and strike up a conversation with them would you? Besides, what are the odds that you will have anything in common other than your street name? Not good. I barely have enough in common with the person I live with.
I’m not a bad neighbor. I just take very much to heart the credo “good fences make good neighbors.” Also fast-closing garage doors and big hats and sunglasses. Occasionally, in a moment of weakness, I’ll find myself collecting the mail and feeling chatty and might see a neighbor and not bolt immediately back into the house. Say “good morning” even, comment on the weather. This empowers the neighbor to dig deeper. “Did you try the new Italian restaurant that just opened?” “I’ve been meaning to,” I’ll reply. “Let me know how you like it!” “I will! Have a great day!”
Now I’ve really done it. I will pay dearly for this mistake. I will have to avoid this person forever. Now we have unfinished business between us. They are waiting for my take on the new Italian restaurant. This will endlessly haunt me. I will grow to hate both the neighbor and the Italian restaurant. The possibility of “Hey, did you ever try that new place?” every time I set foot outside my house is almost too much to bear. And the more time that goes by somehow only makes it worse. Perhaps it would be easier to just go to the restaurant and report back and get on with my life. “It was great! Our new favorite spot!” “Now you have to try that sushi bar!” See? That’s how that ends up. No, best just to stay inside. Peering from behind closed curtains until the coast is clear.
I have moved again recently and am determined not to make the same errors of the past. A momentary poor decision can lead to years of awkwardness. If you have been warm and friendly and exchanged numbers with someone in case of an emergency. Been “neighborly” as soon as you moved in, introduced yourself, most people will think this means you are the type of neighbor who will attend barbecues and help organize block parties. Not the type of neighbor who will wait in their running car on the corner for as long as it takes for you to load your kids into the SUV and head out before they’ll drive up to their house.
(I will have a fifteen-minute conversation, one time, with my new next-door neighbor the first week I move in—getting the lay of the land in one fell swoop, “What are they like, who lives there, when’s trash day, do they ticket here?”—and then successfully avoid them for the next ten years. Serial killers are less withholding. I still haven’t ever seen the people who live on the other side of me, and if I play my cards right I never will. One time, when I am out of town, my husband, Brad, accepts a dinner invitation from the people next door. We end up having to sell the house.)
Now in theory what could be more American than making friends with your neighbor. Watching out for each other. “That car has been in front of Carla and Ed’s for a while. Do we know if they have company?” “Let me go and check it out.” That sort of thing. And this would be nice if life were a movie. But it’s not. Neighbors are unavoidably annoying. Always leaving the house at the wrong time, always home when you are, always wanting to talk when you don’t. “I’m literally so late, nice to see you!” as I drive over their feet and race to nothing. Each day exiting my house like it’s a bank I just robbed. Shouting to my husband “Go, go, go!” before I’ve even closed the car door as we tear down the driveway.
When I was a kid, though, growing up in Queens, things were different. We moved into our house on Twenty-Fourth Street in 1970. It’s October and I’m three years old and I sit in the backseat in a huge wooly sweater of my mother’s because all of my things are packed away. My sister and I are excited about our new house. Most of my actual memories start from this day. A few cloudy ones exist before it, but here, from this day forward, is when they become clearer. Like someone has adjusted a knob on a television set.
Our new neighbor, Irene, comes out to greet us on the first day. While the moving truck is still unloading boxes. She will become a second mother to me. Irene lives in the split-level ranch right next door to our Cape Cod. Most of the houses on the block are either one or the other. Irene and Nick have six children. The youngest, Carol Ann, my sister’s age. Nick works in the newspaper business, and we get free papers from that day forward. The Daily News or the Post always on our front stoop. Irene’s house is spotless. And in summer their central air-conditioning stays on from June through September. As chilly as a movie theater. My mother and Irene strike up a quick, easy friendship. Irene is older and was the de facto matriarch of the block. Irene and Nick had lived there first. Everyone knew them. It was like we were famous by association.
The two women walk together each night after dinner several times around Bowne Park. We go on a cruise to Bermuda together (the summer Son of Sam is terrorizing New York), have the keys to each other’s houses, visit briefly on holidays before we go to family. Irene comes with my mother, and together they walk me to my first day of school at St. Mel’s. I sob for both of them when they leave me. When my mother begins working full-time in Manhattan, it is Irene who watches out for us. Who we check in with daily. I still know her phone number by heart. This is when all of New York City was a 212 area code and the first two digits were referred to with letters, not numbers. When the phone rings I pick it up. “Hi, Irene. Mom, it’s Irene!” My mother and Irene calling each other nightly for anything. At any time. “I’m going walking with Irene,” she would say hanging up.
I used to fantasize about being adopted by Irene and Nick if my parents died. Or even if they didn’t. In their cool, tidy house, plastic on the sofa and the chairs. Four older brothers, always looking out for me. It was clear I wasn’t like the other kids in the neighborhood. I didn’t play in the street. Didn’t throw a ball. Didn’t share the language of other boys. But Irene’s four sons, all teens and young adults by the time we move there, watched out for me. Accepted me like I was one of theirs. An understanding of sorts invisibly occurs between our families over time. They heard our fights and we heard theirs. We did not discuss these. These were houses close together. You learned how to live like that. Keeping each other’s secrets.
Every day I came home from school, there was Irene, sitting on her porch. I would sit next to her and we would talk. Greeting the other neighbors as they passed. Often I didn’t go inside. A lot of our time was spent on porches or standing in front of each other’s houses. When my cousin Eddie and I fall through the ice at Bowne Park, it is Irene’s house we go to soaking wet, where she gives us hot chocolates. When I don’t feel well, when something is broken, when I have a question, when we are out of anything, it is Irene I go to. She is always there. Day after day, year after year. It is impossible to see our house and not to see it alongside Irene’s house. They are entwined in my mind. I will dream sometimes, even today, that someone is chasing me and I run to Irene’s house for safety.
After I move away to Los Angeles, the first question I ask my mother is “How’s Irene doing?” She fills me in. She and Irene still taking their nightly walks around Bowne Park. The park that they will walk along together for forty years. So much of their lives overlapping.
When Irene knows I’m coming to visit she is waiting on the porch. I am eight, I am ten, I am twelve again. Sitting with her. We don’t have to say much. My mother coming over. Sometimes Carol Ann, too. Or my sister, Maria. All of us chatting. Talking about the other neighbors. Who’s moved, who’s still there. Remember this? Remember that? It’s very easy. It feels like something that I haven’t felt since. I don’t know how to name it.
I can still see Irene in their den. Watching episodes of The Odd Couple or Mary Tyler Moore. The den where they kept the fish tank with Jeffrey’s snake that Carol Ann and I would feed. Where they put their Christmas tree. The den that led to the garage, which was always stacked with bundles of newspapers. It wasn’t a big room, especially for such a large family. But it’s where Irene would sit at the end of each day. When the kids were out, busy with their own lives, she would sit in her chair and watch TV. I could see the glow from inside our house. And knowing that she was in there, watching, made everything seem okay.
While I’m living in LA, I get a call from Carol Ann that Irene has cancer. We cry over the phone together. Toward the end, I fly home to see her. I sit with her as she lies in bed. I tell her what she means to me. We hold hands. We say the things that had always been unsaid.
My mother spends the last weeks of Irene’s life visiting her bedside. My mother, always smiling, chatting, never afraid to be present for what is needed. Keeping her spirits up. Sitting with her. She is there with her almost at the very end. Beside her. Her best friend. She walks alone now, or with my father.
I visit my parents, and now they are the ones who have lived there the longest. My mother inheriting the mantle from Irene. Talking to all the neighbors. Introducing herself to the new ones. But it’s not like it was. I know nothing is, but this really isn’t. Irene hasn’t lived next door to my parents in ages but I still can’t help myself from looking for the glow of her television every time I’m home.
When I’m in my twenties, after I have come out to my parents, I wonder if my mother has told Irene yet. I feel it’s important that she hears it from me. I tell her myself, one afternoon sitting on the porch together, and she tells me she knew. That she always knew. She doesn’t have to say much more than that because I know how she feels about me. Our bond having formed gradually over many years. Or maybe it was on that first day. When I stepped out of the car in my mother’s wooly sweater and she came over and said “hello.”