The Neighbors Are Watching

by Debra Ginsberg

  Dorothy had closed her eyes then, and Sam saw that the lids were red and rough from crying. “No,” she said. And then, “Please, Sam, please don’t—”

  “No, I won’t say anything to anyone, Dorothy, of course not. I promise you.”

  It felt so awkward, Sam recalled now, to reach over to Dorothy and touch her. She was holding Zoë in one arm and had to lean across the table to find Dorothy’s hands, which were both clenched in front of her, so that she could cover them with her own. Dorothy’s hands were cold and trembling. She didn’t give any indication that she felt Sam’s hand, didn’t move closer or pull back. Sam couldn’t help thinking how strange it was that she was trying to comfort someone who wouldn’t have even invited her in only a few weeks before. It was stranger still that she was able to feel not pity or even sympathy, but empathy for Dorothy. As she felt Dorothy’s skin under her own palm, Sam experienced a moment of true compassion and connection with the woman sitting across from her. The secret that Dorothy had revealed shed some light on her personality and perhaps explained why she seemed so buttoned up, but it didn’t change who she was. Sam doubted that she and Dorothy would ever read the same books, enjoy the same movies, or ever have one of those girls’ nights out that women seemed compelled to go on, no matter what dark skeletons either one of them pulled from their respective closets. And that Dorothy had been a junkie in her wild, misspent youth didn’t make the fact that she had grown up and married Dick Werner any easier to understand—or tolerate. It wasn’t that Dorothy underwent some sort of transformation in Sam’s eyes when she opened up those floodgates and let loose, but Sam felt her pain as acutely as if it had been her own. Maybe, Sam thought, that was because it was her pain too. The whole world was in pain and Sam felt it swirling around them, enveloping them—their connectedness a ribbon of sweetness in the sorrow.

  It had helped Dorothy to talk to Sam, a slight release of the pressure that had been building for thirty years. Dorothy told Sam that she had never told anyone a single word of the story she had just shared and Sam believed her. Even then, stripped bare and eyes watering, Sam could see the tautness still inside Dorothy—a tension that was threatening to break her. Telling Sam, who couldn’t figure whether she had just been in the right place at the right time for the confession or if Dorothy just sensed that she could trust her, had alleviated some of Dorothy’s stress. But when Sam left later that afternoon, she could tell that Dorothy was deeply troubled and perhaps even more paranoid than before. In the days since then Sam felt Dorothy’s silent despair like a vortex pulling at her from next door.

  Sam heard splashing and the hiss of steam. She looked at the stove and saw that the pasta water was boiling over. She’d drifted and let it go too long. She turned the stove off and drained the pasta. Without even sampling she could see that the shells were way overdone and that the penne was right on the edge. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes, what the hell? And where was Gloria? Sam looked at the clock again. Gloria had been gone over ten minutes and Sam was annoyed despite her resolve to put aside all of her complaints until after dinner. She poured a small amount of olive oil on the pasta and transferred it back to the pot, putting the lid on. The sauce was past ready so she turned the heat off there as well. She sat down at the table and folded her hands. I’m not going to get angry. I’m not.

  After another five minutes spent staring at the brown weave of the place mat in front of her, Sam reluctantly picked up her cell phone and dialed. So she was a nagging bitch, but it had been more than fifteen minutes and Gloria had promised, damn it. But before she could hit the send button, Sam snapped the phone shut and laid it down. She waited another minute and another after that. The air in the kitchen had cooled off, but the aroma of the tomato sauce hung like a scented cloud in the middle of the room. Sam picked up her phone a second time, hesitated again, and then dialed Gloria’s full phone number rather than the speed dial digit she’d been assigned, so as to take more time. It rang and rang—Sam lost count of how many times, so surprised was she that Gloria didn’t pick it up, even just to say, “Can’t talk, Sam, on my way.” Finally, it just went to voice mail and Sam heard Gloria’s curt voice instructing her to “speak after the beep and make it good.” Sam clicked her phone shut before the tone ended. There was no message. That was the message. Sam poured herself a glass of water and forced herself to drink it very slowly.

  After another ten minutes, Sam was seized with that familiar mother’s panic—what if she got into an accident and is lying dead in the street?—the irrational fears of death and destruction that couldn’t be palliated with logic or reason. But no, she would have heard sirens. Or something. Maybe she stopped to talk to somebody at the store, Sam thought. Which would be fucking inconsiderate, but a better option than sprawled headless and bloody on the windshield of her car. Sam dialed Gloria again and again it went to voice mail. This time, Sam almost beat the tone when she said, “Gloria, what the fuck? You said five minutes and it’s been a half hour. You could at least call me.”

  There was nothing for it now, Sam thought as she hung up. Dinner was ruined.

  After fifteen more minutes, Sam got up and closed the garage door that Gloria had left open. It was dark, and she felt exposed with the door open like that—a big empty space just asking for trouble. She went to the fridge and took out one of Gloria’s beers and popped the top, took a long drink, and fought the urge throw it back up.

  It was only after another hour and the second beer, almost two hours since Gloria had gone out, that Sam threw the food away. She dumped the pasta in the sink and tossed the sauce in after it, turning on the garbage disposal and listening to the growl and grind of mechanical mastication. It was impossible to name the emotion coursing through her blood, pounding at her head, making her throat tight and sore. It was beyond anger or frustration or even sadness. Sam was somewhere in the middle of ashamed and humiliated and she was not nearly drunk enough.

  Ninety minutes later, after several pony glasses of a bad cut-rate port she’d found at the back of the highest cabinet in the kitchen, Sam stumbled out of the kitchen into the darkness of the living room and fell onto the couch. Fuck the dirty pots and pans and sink. Fuck everything because she was never going to eat another fucking thing ever again anyway. Feeling stifled, Sam opened the sliding glass back door to get a little air and almost fell through the screen door in the process. Her stomach lurched. A puff of wind blew in, bringing with it the sound of a baby crying. It must be Zoë, Sam thought, and started to weep, big fat splashing tears that seemed to have no end. She fell down on the couch and cried until she passed out.

  Hours later, in the blackest part of night, Sam’s nausea woke her up and she raced to the bathroom just in time to hurl the contents of her stomach into the toilet. But in all the time she spent throwing up—and it was much longer than she ever remembered doing when she was in high school and college and drinking to excess—Sam didn’t even consider how sick she felt or how miserable she was going to be if it ever decided to be morning again. What she thought, over and over again, was that the old saw was really true, it really happened and wasn’t just a saying. People really went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back. It was almost funny.

  Gloria came home at 5:01 AM. Sam knew this because she opened her eyes and looked into the red glow of their bedside clock as Gloria ascended the stairs. Sam was under the covers and shivering a little, her back to the bedroom door when Gloria came in and stood at the edge of the bed for a long time unmoving. Sam could hear her breathing. Then, very quietly, Gloria sat down on the bed. Sam shut her eyes tightly and didn’t move. She could smell alcohol fumes radiating off Gloria despite those that were surely coming from her own pores. She’d had more than a few, had Gloria. Sam didn’t want whatever was coming next, but she couldn’t stop it.

  Gloria reached over, put her hand on Sam’s hip. “Sam?” She could sense that Sam was awake. She knew. Sam didn’t answer. The hand stayed there, a light
pressure through the blanket and sheets, for several minutes—so long that Sam thought Gloria had passed out sitting up. But then she leaned over and lay down, spooning Sam’s body with her own. Gloria brought her arm around, held Sam tightly, pushed her face into Sam’s hair. She breathed in and out, in and out.

  “Sam.”

  “What are we going to do, Gloria?” Sam asked without turning around, without moving a single muscle in her body. “Please, just tell me.”

  Gloria breathed in and out, her body warm and firm against Sam’s. “I’m sorry, Sam,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  She’s sorry, Sam thought, and wished she knew for whom.

  chapter 19

  Allison took the freshly baked crescent rolls out of the oven and set them on a cooling rack. They smelled delicious even though they had come out of a cardboard tube and were loaded with preservatives. She felt vaguely guilty about serving something so artificial, but she wasn’t trying to fool anyone and nobody was going to believe that she’d stood in her kitchen and prepared perfectly shaped, risen, and browned dinner rolls anyway. She’d bought cookies as well and good-quality coffee for the occasion. She put the rolls on a serving platter and the cookies on a plate and took both into the dining room where she’d already laid the table with a serviceable but attractive yellow tablecloth, napkins, and small paper plates. She needed to put cups out—paper or ceramic?—spoons, creamer, and sugar. Suddenly the rolls and cookies looked lost and half-finished on the table, as if something central was missing. Still, food was really beside the point. It wasn’t a party. Far from it. But Allison didn’t know how to classify what it was, either. There weren’t any truly accurate names for this kind of gathering.

  Was it a neighborhood meeting?

  Close enough.

  Back in the kitchen Allison checked the clock and decided it was time to turn on the coffee. She then put water in the kettle and turned the burner on. It was going to have to be decaffeinated tea for her. She was already feeling jittery flips in her stomach and didn’t want to take the chance of being kept awake and buzzed later. Sleep was elusive and hard-won for Allison these days—a punishment perhaps for the months she’d spent in bed—and she had to be careful not to tip herself into insomnia. She still had sleeping pills, of course, a few different kinds in sample packs the doctor had given her, but they were all becoming ineffective and Allison was scared that she’d end up taking too many. She wasn’t stupid—she knew how easy it was to build up a tolerance and then just go overboard. She didn’t want to die—just sleep.

  Truth be told, she also wanted a drink. The craving was so strong it made her eyes water, but satisfying it was completely out of the question. Allison was straining, exerting willpower she didn’t know she possessed to avoid any and all alcohol. Although she was succeeding in overcoming the urge, it was only by a hair.

  Allison had spent more than three months in a booze-soaked haze and in the last three sober weeks she had relived every minute of them. One would have thought that some of that extended lost weekend would be gone, washed away or drowned in all the wine and vodka she’d consumed, but no. Blackouts were terrible things and people always lived to regret them, but in a way they were merciful, Allison thought. Given the choice, she would have turned July through October into one long black hole that she could never again see into. It would have been an indescribable relief. But if anything Allison was experiencing a reverse blackout. The long days and endless trailing nights of those months stretched out for Allison like a badly painted canvas. Without the dulling benefit of a single drink since that horrible day when the county had gone up in flames, Allison had been forced to look at and remember every detail. It was torturous but also necessary. In playing back the film of her life since the summer Allison realized that she’d become—in a matter of minutes it seemed—a spiteful drunk whom everyone hated and, let’s face it, blamed. It was funny, she thought, how quickly you could go from being the injured party to being the perpetrator.

  Still, the instant sobriety she had tumbled into had shown Allison that from the day of Diana’s arrival onward, she had only made life more difficult for herself. It was impossible to generate sympathy when you were so obviously drunk off your ass. At all hours of the day. Every day of the week. It was too late to undo any of that now and useless to fixate or wallow in shame over her actions. But she could manage the here and now and reshape the twisted opinions of her that people now had. All of this required not drinking. And not drinking required Allison to fake a level of equanimity that she did not have. But she believed in the “fake it until you make it” philosophy, which was exactly what she was doing and why she was hosting this nonparty to begin with. It was why she’d come home in the first place.

  When she got to her mother’s house in Pasadena late that Monday afternoon of the fires, Allison fully expected to stay there indefinitely. It had been a brutal drive, hot and gritty, the freeway jam-packed and choked with smoke blowing in from every direction. The tension and growing panic of all the drivers combined to create a giant hovering cloud of impending disaster. The usually two-hour trip took Allison four and a half hours, and her already-fried nerves were completely shorted out by the time she got there. To make matters worse, she was technically still drunk from the night before despite the coffee she’d consumed that morning. It was nothing short of a divine piece of luck that she hadn’t been stopped by the CHP at any point on that harrowing drive because she probably couldn’t have passed a field sobriety test. Not to mention that she’d left her house looking like a cross between a bag lady and a mental patient on a weekend pass. Not sexy, not together, but an accurate representation of what she was at that point—a mad housewife. The cops would have seen that instantly.

  She’d called her mother from the road and had anticipated that she would be greeted with instant and unreserved love, support, and a safe haven when she got there, but that was not at all what she got when she knocked hard against her mother’s cheerful yellow door.

  “What’s going on, Allie?” her mother said, first thing. “What is all of this about?”

  “I have nowhere else to go, Mom.” It was meant to sound plaintive, but even Allison could tell it was just coming off as surly.

  “Where’s Joe?” was the next question, one that Allison was never able to answer to her mother’s satisfaction. She had always believed that her mother was unequivocally on her side and would defend her to the death if necessary, so it was an unpleasant shock when her mother seemed to take the opposite approach when Allison showed up at her house.

  “What is this really about?” her mother asked. “It’s been months since that girl came to live with you, and you haven’t moved beyond the fact that he didn’t tell you he had a daughter. It’s self-indulgent, Allie. Move on or move out.”

  “I can’t believe you aren’t behind me on this.”

  “But I am. You’re feeling so sorry for yourself you can’t even see how much behind you I am.” And then she dealt an even worse blow. “I love you, but I can’t let you stay here forever, Allie.”

  “How long is forever, Mom?”

  Allison retired to the pink and sea foam green bedroom in which she’d spent much of her childhood, lay on the same bed where she’d dreamed of so many happy endings, and pressed her fingers into her eyes to keep from seeing all the ugly images that kept playing behind her closed lids. It was a long, bad night—the first in more than she could count without a drink to dull the edges—and made somehow inexplicably worse by the fact that Joe had left only one message on her cell phone. She didn’t want to talk to him—she’d left him, after all, and was debating making that a permanent state. He’d lied to her, betrayed her, and was possibly cheating on her. And yet. Lying there in the dark, hungry and hollow in every way, Allison felt bereft and completely alone.

  Why wouldn’t he call? She was his wife.

  The calls came later, of course—angry and increasingly desperate messages piling up on her phone. Whe
re is Diana? What happened between the two of you? Why did you leave the baby by herself? Diana is missing. When are you coming home? Diana is missing and the police need to talk to you. What is going on, Allison? Call me. Allison, you have to call me.

  But those messages didn’t change Allison’s mind, nor did the terse conversations she had with Joe when she finally called him back. She might not have come home—she might have tried to persuade her mother to let her stay—at least through the holidays. What changed her mind—what compelled Allison to get into her car and go home—was the message from Joe telling her that Yvonne had come to stay at their house.

  Allison startled at the sound of the kettle. She turned off the gas and in the absence of whistling heard Zoë crying in what Allison now perversely thought of as Diana’s bedroom. When Diana had actually been living here and up through the moment that Yvonne had left a week ago, Allison had thought of it only as the guest bedroom. Allison waited a moment to see if Joe was going to go check on the baby but realized he was probably upstairs and out of earshot, so she quickly washed and dried her hands at the kitchen sink and hurried into the bedroom.

  The room was dark but for the tiny glow of a fairy princess nightlight near Zoë’s little basket, which was sitting on Diana’s made-up bed. Allison couldn’t call it Yvonne’s bed even though she’d been its most recent inhabitant. While she had been staying at the house, Yvonne had gotten up with Zoë, but now that she’d gone back to Las Vegas (temporarily, Allison reminded herself), Allison and Joe had moved the crib upstairs into their bedroom and had been taking turns getting up and feeding her. For Allison, this was perhaps the strangest twist in a life that hadn’t seemed her own since that hot July day when she’d come home to find Diana standing in her driveway. That she and Joe were even sharing the same bed was peculiar enough, but that they were jointly caring for Zoë—that they were capable of it—was still stunning to her.