She rang the buzzer for the apartment number she had listed in her address book. A shy and small-framed woman answered the door, speaking Spanish. Eileen could see a crib in the living room behind her and a shirt spread out over an ironing board. She asked about the Orlandos, but the woman didn’t seem to know what she was talking about. Eileen excused herself and went back downstairs. The Orlandos’ name wasn’t anywhere on the lobby registry.
She went around the corner to the Palumbos’ house. Mr. Palumbo came to the door. In the eight years since she’d last seen him, he had aged considerably; he must have been pushing eighty by now.
“It’s me, Mr. Palumbo,” she said. “Eileen Leary. How are you doing?”
She couldn’t tell whether he didn’t recognize her or didn’t want to let on that he did. She’d never talked much to him, but he’d been her next-door neighbor for years, and she wanted that to count for something. When he extended his left hand, palm down, she took it gratefully in her own. The knuckles were like ball bearings, but the skin was smooth. He squeezed her hand tighter and started patting it with his other one. His hands felt like little furnaces.
He said his wife had died. Eileen offered condolences but couldn’t bring herself to tell him about Ed. He said his son had moved out of the apartment upstairs. “It’s hard to be a landlord at my age. My daughter wants me to sell the house and move out with her family in Hackettstown. I think about it, but what am I supposed to do out there, in the middle of nowhere? Watch the grass grow? The kid on the third floor, nice Colombian kid, he takes care of the handyman work. I go up there and play poker.” He laughed. “He takes all my money.”
She asked after the Orlandos. Mr. Palumbo started to speak about Donny and then disappeared inside for a long time. When he came back, he handed her a business card for an auto body shop in Garden City. He explained that Donny had opened it a few years back and now he had a few locations, with car washes.
“Very successful,” he said. “He got remarried too. Nice lady. He has two girls with her.”
She felt a joyful smile spread across her face. Beleaguered Donny of the inauspicious circumstances had made a miracle happen. Ed would have been so proud.
“Wonderful,” she said.
“I went out to see them. Beautiful neighborhood. Gary lives in a carriage house on the property. Brenda keeps the books for the shops. You should see Sharon. What a beauty. She could be a movie star.”
“My goodness,” she said. “And Lena?”
“She passed right after my wife.”
Mr. Palumbo crossed himself, so Eileen did too. When Mr. Palumbo asked about her family, she spoke vaguely, sparingly. She felt like a fool not admitting Ed was gone, but she couldn’t help herself. She needed this man to believe Ed was still alive.
They said their good-byes. As Eileen turned to leave the stoop, she heard the sound of something falling inside the apartment, and she had an eerie sensation that Mr. Palumbo had keeled over, dead. She knocked on his door again in a panic that surprised her. When Mr. Palumbo answered the door, she said the first thing that came to mind, which was that she wanted to wish him a happy Thanksgiving in case she didn’t see him before then. He looked a little bemused and thanked her for the wishes and she was left alone again. A sudden thunder overtook her heart and the tinny taste of fear stole into her mouth. She sat on his stoop to calm herself. She decided that she was afraid of getting left behind—but that was impossible; she had left before that could happen. Happy as she was for Donny, it unnerved her to learn that he hadn’t been living in the neighborhood all this time. She’d never imagined he would get his act together enough to make the radical moves he’d made. She had derived a certain comfort from thinking of him as living out the trajectory of his known life, keeping her past in place by staying put for her, even if he didn’t know he was doing it. It was much more frightening to think of the world in a state of permanent flux.
She hadn’t built a dynasty. She wasn’t even sure there would be a continuation of the line. Her son had gone back to Chicago to school, but she couldn’t help worrying about him, and in a more elemental way than she’d ever worried before. She’d begun to worry less about what sort of foundation he was laying for her future grandchildren—God willing, he would meet a nice girl and settle down and have kids—and more about his own future.
She wanted to rejoice with Donny, but she didn’t know how to begin to reach out to him after all this time and silence. She fingered the business card and then put it in her wallet. She thought, I hope you have a wonderful life. I hope you have a lovely big backyard. I hope you flip steaks and watch your daughters run around and think, I could die in peace.
She rose and walked over to stand in front of her old house. The new owners had let the garden grow up over the garden box and had restained the doors, and new drapes hung in the window in a style she didn’t prefer, but it was unmistakably her house. She’d stood so many times where she now stood, appraising it, and a surge of affection shamed the memory of her desperation to escape it. She stepped onto the stoop.
The lights had come on in the streetlamps, but the evening hadn’t yet submitted to night. She wanted to be transported back to a time when this had been her life. The birds in the trees made their entreaties, cars flew down the street, and the smooth paint of the banister brought the skin of her palm to life. She closed her eyes and listened to the familiar sounds of a disappearing plane and a distant horn and breathed in that strangely appealing mix of car exhaust and leaves. She could have been arriving back after a long day at Lawrence, or following Ed and Connell up the stoop after Sunday dinner at Arturo’s. She could go inside and find Ed on the couch wearing the headphones. She would say to him, Listen as long as you want. Listen to all your records. I’ll be right here when you’re done. I’ll wait years if I have to. She would take his hand in her hands and kiss the back of it with enough tenderness to show him it wasn’t a gambit. Let’s just stay right here, she would say. Let’s stay here forever.
She didn’t know these people, but she was beginning to feel she couldn’t return home without seeing the house. She’d spent a lifetime running, and she was tired. There had to be some way to fit the past into the present, even if she’d turned her back on it.
She took the knocker in her hand and gave the door three quick, emphatic taps. A young man answered. It was hard to reconcile him with the boy—he must have been seven or eight then—she’d seen standing out front when his parents were leaving the open house. He was tall and broad, and his hair was neatly brushed. He had the bright, white smile of an elected official.
“Can I help you?”
It unsettled her to be greeted as a stranger at her own house. She had to squelch the pride that threatened to ruin this venture before it had even begun.
“My name is Eileen Leary,” she said. “I used to live here.”
She felt like one of those furtive talkers who went from door to door proselytizing for obscure faiths and doomed causes. She wouldn’t have been surprised or blamed him if he’d closed the door before she finished her halting appeal. But he invited her inside.
“I don’t want to be a bother,” she said as she crossed the threshold.
“Not at all,” he said. “Would you mind taking off your shoes?”
It was a custom she’d long thought of putting into practice in her own home, but she’d never found a way to introduce it. The vestibule tiles were cold on her stockinged feet, but the plush carpet sank pleasantly under her as she entered the living room. They kept a television where her armchair used to be. The set looked so inviting that she wondered why she and Ed had deprived this space of one for so long. She watched the father, Mr. Thomas as she remembered it, slap his elegant hands on his knees and stretch his long body as he rose from the couch.
The boy began to introduce her, but his father cut him off. “I know who you are,” he said affectionately. “Welcome back! Does it look the same to you? My wife is making dinner. Anabel! Come in here.”
The décor was so different that she had trouble gauging the depth and width of the room; it seemed that the space itself, which had given her so much trouble in her decorating efforts, being always a foot too wide or too narrow, had compliantly shifted its dimensions to fit the needs of the new owners, finding its natural harmony in the process, as if it had been waiting for them to arrive. When she looked into the dining room, though, and saw the old wall-sized mirror, she was seized by a pang so strong it made her stomach lurch. There was a greater profusion of things both big and small, the kind that would have nettled her in her own home but that here suggested a fruitful multiplication.
“I like what you’ve done with the place,” she said, and felt instantly foolish. It had been almost eight years. They hadn’t “done” anything with it; they’d simply made it their own, or what they’d done with it had been done so long ago that it was absurd to speak of it.
They stood around in one of those benignly awkward circles that obtained whenever men were responsible for making introductions. She saw the boy sneak a look at the television and felt her heart bloom with an instant affection, because it was what her son would have done in the same situation.
Casting about for something to say, she noticed, on an end table, a trophy capped with a winged figure arching her arms in triumph. “What’s this?” she asked brightly, picking it up. It was heavier than she expected, not like the flimsy trophies for dance recitals or participation in Little Leagues.
“He won it in debate,” the father said. She remembered that his first name was Thomas too. “The state championship. We’re very proud of him.”
“Don’t let him fool you into thinking I was the champion,” the boy said. “I came in second.”
“This year he will be,” the father said.
She saw that the boy was uncomfortable with the attention, and she put the trophy down. She remembered they were Catholic. “Did you go to St. Joan of Arc?” she asked.
“I did,” the boy said. “From third grade on.”
“So did my son.” She guessed the boy was attending the same high school as Connell, which was a powerhouse in debate, but she didn’t want to embarrass him by asking, in case he hadn’t gotten in. “You have a sister, I remember. Is she here?”
“She’s at Yale,” Mr. Thomas said proudly. “We don’t see her often. Only holidays—and every other weekend, when she needs to do the laundry.” He chuckled at the absurdity of her coming all that way to wash her clothes, but Eileen also heard delight in the fact that his daughter, while being a high achiever on her way to a rewarding professional life, was still, in the end, his daughter.
Just as a heavy feeling was about to settle into Eileen at how long it had been since her son had washed his clothes in her machine at home, which she now ran only about once a week, Mrs. Thomas emerged from the kitchen and let out a surprised cry at seeing a stranger there. She must have been so absorbed in her cooking that she hadn’t heard the knock at the door. Eileen knew that feeling well—the exigencies of household duties, the making of a meal for a pair of mouths that showed their appreciation by the way they wolfed it down. It had always moved her to watch her husband and son eat.
“Hello,” the woman said, turning to her husband for an explanation.
“Anabel, this is Mrs. Leary.”
“Mrs. Leary?”
Of course it was the husband, and not the wife, who recognized her, because her perpetual industry allowed him a clear head, and she barely had a brain left at the end of a day of housework. Eileen felt herself straighten up in respectful solidarity.
“Mrs. Leary, from whom we bought the house,” he added.
Her hand went to her mouth to stifle the sound of her shock. “Oh! Welcome! What brings you here?”
“I was in the neighborhood.”
“Forgive me, I’m a mess.” She gestured to the apron tied around her waist, a prominent, fresh stain on its front. “Vijay, please take Mrs. Leary’s jacket.” So that was the boy’s name. It had taken the wife’s entrance for this crucial detail to emerge. Thomas Thomas could have been Ed standing there in a somehow still-charming dereliction of protocol. The boy came over and helped the jacket off Eileen’s shoulders one at a time. “May I show you around?” the woman asked. “I’m sure you’re curious to see the house.”
Eileen was curious. She was so refreshed to behold how accurate the woman—Anabel—had been in her perception, how sensitive to nuance, that she almost didn’t answer right away.
“I would love to see it,” she said. “My name is Eileen.”
Their shake was firm, appreciative—collegial. Anabel led her to the kitchen, which smelled like cardamom and curry. They had turned it into a galley kitchen. There was much more counter space now. They had granite slabs, not unlike the ones in her house. There was even a space to eat, with bar stools pushed under it, but she could tell they ate their meals in the dining room. The renovations were tastefully done, the sort she would have approved of had she and Ed committed the money to making them—had she not known in the back of her mind that she was thinking of some other house every time she looked at her own. Anabel gave her a quick tour. They had redone the bathroom: new tiles, a new clawfoot tub, a beautiful pedestal sink. They had converted one of the closets in the master bedroom into a little bathroom. She’d always wished for an extra bathroom on that floor, so she wouldn’t have to walk down to the basement when someone else was using it. New baseboard molding lined the house. Everywhere were elements obviously Indian—silk tapestries, carved wood figurines, an enameled brass vase—but there were also crosses on the walls, and a picture of the pope in the master bedroom. It took her a moment to register that this had once been her bedroom with Ed. Nothing in it looked the same. The bed seemed to radiate the life and energy of years of a couple sleeping side by side in it.
“How are your husband and son?”
She didn’t have it in her at that moment to deflect the question in an obfuscating ramble. “My husband died last March,” she said.
“Oh! I’m so sorry! Mrs. Leary!”
“Thank you,” she said. “And please call me Eileen.”
“It must be strange to be back here.”
“It’s nice, actually.”
“Please stay for dinner. We’re just about to eat.”
She knew what to say when politeness was extended in the due course of decency: I have to get going or I really can’t stay, whatever made it easier for everyone to save face and return to their regular lives. But she didn’t want to say any of that right now. She was so very tired. She wanted to stay there with these people in the attractive home they’d made of what she’d left behind. Something about these environs struck her as oppressively and irreducibly different, and yet she could imagine never leaving them. She didn’t look forward to returning to her empty house, with the wind screaming, the branches shushing against the siding, and the fear of someone creeping in through the window troubling her sleep. So much life filled this home that there was no way to feel dread in it, but then she’d seen that there was no way to feel dread in anyone’s home but one’s own. Something was sacred in being a guest.
She was led to the dining room table and directed to sit. Thomas and Vijay shut the television off and made their way to the table with murmuring contentedness in their voices.
“Do you like Indian food?” Thomas asked, breaking the spell as Anabel slipped into the kitchen. Eileen froze in terror. She’d sat already, had begun to arrange her napkin in her lap, so there was no way out. The last thing she wanted was to act discourteously to these people, but the truth was that she hated Indian food, hated the very sight of it—its little lakes of earth-toned sauces, its hillocks of meat in blasted landscapes of mud. She had smelled the spices but thought of them as an inevitable detail—a tribal marker, not part of the daily routine. She had somehow failed to consider that the Thomases actually made Indian food at home. Wasn’t the way forward to assimilate? She didn’t know how to read these people who blended in but didn’t, who were like her but weren’t, whose kids got where her own kid got, or even beyond, but started somewhere else entirely.
How could she say she hated their food? She would have to explain everything—how she’d come to feel about the neighborhood, about her life, about the world as she’d wanted it to be: simple, predictable, familiar. It wasn’t about their food. It was the smell, the spices, the strangely proliferating condiments, the mystery of its preparation. It was the fact that she’d had no choice about it. So many Indians were there all of a sudden and so many of her friends were gone. At some point all the restaurants in the neighborhood had become Indian restaurants. Then the last of her friends had left, and the Indian restaurants had remained and seemed to multiply. She couldn’t stand the sight of the stuff, and now she was about to be served it.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never had it.”
And that, finally, was the truth. For all her revulsion, for all the times she’d insisted she couldn’t take a single bite without gagging, she’d never actually tasted it. It had been easier to say she had, because there had been less to explain. It had been easier to say, “I don’t like it,” instead of, “I’m too angry to try it.” But you couldn’t lie to yourself forever.
Her throat was constricted and dry. She took a long drink of water, almost the entire glass.
“You’re in for a treat,” Thomas said upon the entrance of his wife bearing platters. He listed names of dishes; Eileen was too keyed up to register them. He spooned out a plate for her as Vijay passed her a bowl filled with bread that resembled thin, soft mattresses. After she had her plate, the others filled theirs in turn, and the scent wafting up at her was not as offensive as she’d imagined it would be; there was a sweet pungency to it. The mound on her plate was the color of Mars. There was no turning back.
Thomas said the name of the dish again, and she speared some on her fork. As she bit into it, she registered that it was chicken, and also that there was tomato in the sauce, and cream of some sort, as well as some indeterminate spices. There was something complex and contradictory about it, a mildness and a stoutness that competed for primacy, and on top of these a pleasing fullness in the mouth, the medley of textures bolstered by stray grains of rice. She was aware of how she had no competing memory with which to dull the vibrancy of this experience. If to taste forgotten foods was to reanimate the past, then a different kind of reminder, a reminder of future possibility, waited in unfamiliar flavors. She was making a new memory. She was eating Indian food. She’d never thought she’d live to see the day.
“It’s good,” she said, trying to be measured, until she couldn’t hold back. “It’s really very good.” She placed her fork on her plate, straightened up in surprise, and saw them looking at her warmly. It was only then that she registered that they were sitting in the same arrangement she and Ed and Connell had sat in in that room—the father nestled into the table’s head, his back to the window, the boy with his back to the mirror, the wife across from him, ready to shuttle dishes. Eileen was in the seat that had often gone empty at her own table. She’d looked at it in the middle of meals and thought how nice it would be to have someone drop in unannounced and bring the world to her. She’d never imagined the scene from the visitor’s vantage point, how complete a picture of life it might have presented, how much it might have looked as if everything that mattered in the world was there already.
“I didn’t know what I was missing,” she said, and because there was no way to say what she was thinking without telling her whole story, she picked up her fork, took another bite, and hoped they’d see something more than mere politeness in the smile that was spreading across her face.