Growing up in the suburban idylls of East Williston, life was pretty good. Mom and Dad were mostly normal, there was an endless round of parties and trips to the beach and the local pool (Christopher Morely Park, for those North Shore-ites here at CT), the neighbors were neighborly, and Wheatley Hills, the golf club, wasn’t too fusty for young people. (There was a sex toy in the caddy locker room closet. I’ll never know why.)
We had The Good*:
1) Vivian and Bob across the street. They were a little too young to hang out with my parents, and their kids were too young to hang out with me. But they were cool. When I was a teenager and Vivian saw me working outside in the garden, she’d whip up a pitcher of (very weak) margaritas and keep me company in exchange for a few German Iris rhizomes and instructions on their care. Bob helped me put our Christmas lights on the pesky roofline over the living room, because it was 1.5 stories above grade and he didn’t want to fish me out of the rhododendron bushes with a busted leg. Both of them gave MomCrocker a lecture on The Gay when the time was right. After about 5 years of sharing perennial flower divisions, Vivian walked over to my perennial bed, pointed to her own yard all blooming the same stuff at the same time, and said like Mae West: “This place looks familiar!”
2) The Marinas – especially George. There were PROBLEMS in that house, Mom always said, mainly because Mrs. Marina was boning the mailman. (This was how I learned that the word “pedestrian” can apply to human behavior as well as people who are just walking around.) But Mr. Marina – George – was a curmudgeon with a heart. He did not believe my sister’s assertion that I could read at the age of 4, and when I proved it to him by reading part of the New York Times, he insisted that I didn’t understand what I was reading. But I knew all about the space program because my Dad was working on it, and I sure knew who President Nixon was. After these hurdles had been leapt, George was my pal. “Read any good books lately?” he’d yell. When Dad told him that I accidentally picked up a copy of “Portnoy’s Complaint” from a table in the library, George howled his hooting laugh to the sky and patted me on the head.
3) Mrs. Barrett – She thought that if she could see you, you were receiving guests, and as it happened our fishbowl of a split level was pretty much right in front of her living room window, where she sat like “A Rose for Emily” without the bad smell that the townspeople wondered about. MomCrocker had stationed her writing desk in front of our living room’s big bay window because she liked the sun and the flowering trees in front of it. Mrs. Barrett would see her sit down to write checks or a note and come flying across the street in a cloud of Parliament Lights smoke to deliver news.
“Catherine was up late last night! I had to be in bed by 10 at her age!” Mom would then reply without looking up, “Term paper.”
Or “Is your husband out of town? He left in the morning with a suitcase.” “Business trip, Rita, he’s back tomorrow.” “Oh. So THAT’S why you ordered a pizza.”
But despite the nosiness, Rita Barrett was kind and thoughtful. During an ice storm that knocked out power for a few days in winter 1978, Rita remembered that we were the only family on the street without a fireplace. “Don’t light that goddamn pilot light on that furnace!” she yelled at my Dad, “You’ll be blown to smithereens or gassed in your sleep like our boys in VietNam!” We camped out in her living room and ate tons of soup and egg noodles with tuna and peas, and Jello molds with fruit that she chilled on her porch.
I won’t spend too much time on The Bad and The Ugly, because there wasn’t much. Alice next door would see a truck from Ethan Allen show up at someone’s house, and 2 weeks later, there it was at hers. There was the occasional ugly divorce – one notable one involved a Christian Scientist family whose son had a burst appendix. The kid’s dad bailed on the prayer cure, insisting on taking the poor kid to the hospital. And the mother stood in the driveway in her nightgown in the snow, throwing rocks from their rock garden at their departing station wagon and screaming like a lunatic. A neighbor led her away to a police car and no one ever saw her again.
So what’s up now in the neighborhood of my condo by the sea? A flood on the 4th floor that ruined 8 apartments and 3 rooms in mine. A nosy Board member, Burt The Condo Commando, peeping over terrace walls to see what’s up inside. The porter discussing who he thinks is a drunk based on what she puts in the recycling bin – with the doorman, in the lobby, where anyone can hear him gossip. (And, I know the lady and he’s wrong. I think it’s the cop in 118.) My neighbor Amy has been fined $100.00 because watching a neighbor’s dog in her apartment while the neighbor was away meant that she “had too many dogs”. (She told them to eff off.) The pool is Peyton Place, and the parking lot a venue for gossip. It’s so unpleasant with a few of these people that when I grocery shop, I leave the building wearing headphones and gym clothes so they think I’m on a mission to trim down and don’t have time to talk. There are nice people here, to be sure. But I think spacing of 1/4 acre – like good fences – makes better neighbors.
Got any fun neighbor stories?
*Names changed for obvious reasons. No WASPs were harmed in the writing of this post.