A new couple has moved into the apartment next door to mine in this ancient Victorian. They are using the same bed as the previous couple, Nicole and Peter, whose dramatic lovemaking I would hear quite clearly as their headboard pounded my living-room wall. Sometimes I would hear Nicole moaning and feel comforted, although it was always hard to face them in the lobby afterward.
My daughter, Rose, and I have lived in this house for five years. We are the tenured residents and we have our routines. Rose falls asleep to her AM station on the clock radio I gave her for her thirteenth birthday. She loves the song “Five Hundred Miles.” My bedroom shares a wall with the neighbors’ bathroom. They have a shower; we don’t. Our faucet handle falls off when the bath is running, and we have an infestation of carpenter ants and ladybugs. Rose is almost six feet tall and will need a new bed soon. She likes the fan kept on in her room all night, even in winter. I stay up until dawn making lists. And listening.
The new neighbors — newlyweds — moved in without any furniture, boxes, or luggage. Both of them are smokers with loud barroom voices and heavy footsteps. The woman is blond, maybe twenty-three; the man wears an old army jacket and his age and hair color are indeterminable. When he says hello he talks much too loud, as if there are other people around only he can see.
Yesterday evening, as I was watching the waxwings come in to feed, I saw the man in the back yard with a metal detector, waving it back and forth like a scythe. He had a cigarette dangling from his lips and was completely ignoring his wife, who was twirling by herself in a sun dress that exposed her white back and long thighs. I predict that they will fight passionately until the lines of their marriage are sufficiently drawn for them to survive the future together.
Our neighbors always move out after about six months for a better standard of living. When Nicole and Peter left I found a snotty handwritten note in my mailbox concerning my attitude toward Bunny, our calico Manx, whom I don’t really care for. The note ended, “Have fun in Chin’s slums.” Mrs. Chin is our landlady; she lets me pay the rent late and rarely does any maintenance on this house or the thirty others she owns in town.
We are quite poor. We have no savings and my checking account is one big overdraft. Sometimes for dinner I make popcorn laced with brewer’s yeast and soy sauce; I swear it tastes like steak. I think of coffee as food. I spent my last two dollars on espresso.
I hope I don’t smell the cigarette smoke from next door. I hope they make love a lot and that their fights don’t involve hitting each other. The new woman is quite striking. The man — like most men — intimidates me, with his metal detector and violent voice. Both of them stomp loudly across the old wood floors.
I ran into Nicole recently at the co-op and was visibly cool. She was surprised to see me. She probably had no idea how small this town is; how snotty notes concerning the treatment of cats eventually come around and face you in aisles of instant split-pea soup and organic menstrual sponges. I wanted to tell her that despite the ants and ladybugs I am not raising my daughter in a slum; that home is what you make it; that humility comes with age, and wisdom sometimes never arrives. I wanted to tell her that their lovemaking sessions were shorter than average. Instead, I said nothing, saving my soliloquy for the drive home, alone.
I want to take Bunny for a long ride in the country, dump her in a wheat field, and drive off in a cloud of gravel, but I’m afraid to even pick her up.
If I ever have a girlfriend again, it will be one of those idealistic twenty-year-olds at the co-op who never shave or wear undergarments, who tie their long hair in scarves and talk to everyone as if they were old lovers. I look at them and think, in this order: big hair, breasts, arms, bracelets, ankles, smiles, Sufi dancing, gardens, tea, children, breasts, Central America, new age, space, heartbreak.
The new neighbors have lived here a week now, and I don’t think they’ve made love yet.
If I volunteered my time at the co-op, I could meet someone and get the 18 percent member’s discount.
This summer while we were camping, I asked Rose if she knew how scared I get sometimes. She shrugged and said she hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary.
This essay originally appeared in Northern Lights.
— Ed.
