I sensed in Deb a real attraction to the idea of making a connection with Lou, but also a wariness, like even if the connection were made, she wouldn’t quite know what to do with it, or have the time to pursue it.
“Getting back to Lou,” she said, “of course, what you’re getting in all the different houses on the street is just a snapshot in time. Things could look different a year or two from now.”
That sounded like an opening into what could be another topic, something I’d wanted to ask Deb about.
“Do you mean people could be doing different things in a year?” I asked.
“Right,” she said.
“Like their families could change?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Are you and Dave trying to have a family now?” I sensed, even as I said it, that without the sleepover we never would have achieved the intimacy that would allow me to ask the question.
“We’re in that mode,” she said. “We’ve been trying for about two years. Of course, you’ve seen our schedules. It’s not like we’re really focused on making this happen.”
“You mean with work and sports and everything?” I asked.
“Right. Anyway, it’d be impossible to do this if I had kids,” she said, motioning toward the stack of papers on her desk. “I just couldn’t do it. It’s bad enough with the dog.”
The previous week, I’d gone food shopping with Deb and watched as she pushed her cart rapidly through the store, tossing in packages of meat, declaring halfheartedly after each one, “That’s a meal.” She threw in a few other items, including frozen bagels, Doritos, and a twelve-pack of Mountain Dew, until the cart was half-full. We were in and out of the store in half an hour. “It’s scary to compare my shopping cart with Carol’s,” she’d said, referring to how long it takes her sister, who has two young children, to shop.
Earlier, I’d talked to Dave about his hopes for starting a family. “We have five bedrooms and we’d love to fill them,” said Dave, who is forty-two, ten years older than Deb. “I look at people who have children and I get envious. Friends from high school bring their kids to our cottage at the lake. Some of the kids are ten already. Some are teenagers. It amazes me. I always thought I’d be married young and be a young dad active with my kids.”
Back in the study, Deb’s cell phone rang.
“Hello, this is Deb.”
Later, Deb called her boss back, her third call to him in two hours.
“Hello!” she said. “Hey, the guy called me back on that contract. All righty. That’s it. I gotta get going to pick up lunch. I’ve got a meeting at the new office.”
DEB and I drove in her Saab to the downtown office she’d rented for her firm so she could meet over lunch with a prospective employee. Once there, Deb excused herself to a conference room, and I had a look around the office.
Deb had picked a first-class location. In a few more weeks, she would vacate her upstairs study on Sandringham and instead sit at a big desk in this penthouse suite, the downtown skyline behind her, managing perhaps half a dozen employees—many of them older than she. My young neighbor was an impressive businesswoman.
As we drove home, Deb told me she’d already decided against hiring the applicant she’d just met with—in Deb’s opinion, she didn’t have the social skills needed for the job.
BACK at the house, Deb changed into jeans and a sweater; there were no more business meetings scheduled that day. She then went straight to the study to prepare for a 2:30 conference call. I was impressed: she hadn’t taken a break since she started that morning at seven. Nearly two hours later, she was still in the study, juggling calls on both lines. Around five, she said she needed to take Cayman out for a walk and invited me to join her. “Do you like this purple sweater with the jeans?” she asked. “Doesn’t go, does it?” I told her the sweater looked fine, but she changed into a brown one anyway.
Deb walked with Cayman on a leash. As we passed Lou’s house, I saw a light in the kitchen and figured Lou was either preparing dinner or else still in the living room on the sofa with a tumbler of gin, watching the closing stock report.
As we walked, I pointed to houses on both sides of Sandringham and asked Deb if she knew the people who lived there. “No, no clue, nope,” she responded. She said she did recognize a few residents as members of her country club, but as for the rest she had no relationships with any of them “other than waving,” as she put it.
She seemed frustrated not to have made those connections.
Did she meet people while walking the dog?
“You can have a brief conversation with people,” she said, “but then you notice that it’s the same conversation ten times. And then there’s the thing where people introduce their dogs and not themselves! What’s with that? And the really irritating thing,” she continued, grimacing, “is that I’ve started doing it myself.”
She said that when she and Dave moved in, they had planned to invite the immediate neighbors over for a little party, but when they got to know the neighborhood better, they felt a party would be out of place. “Those kinds of things just aren’t done,” she said. “Dave and I haven’t been invited to a single party.”
That’s a failing of this neighborhood, I thought. It was nice of Deb and Dave even to consider having a party to meet the neighborhood, but in many neighborhoods, it works the other way: longtime neighbors throw a party to meet the new people.
Cayman stopped to sniff at a fire hydrant.
“Where I grew up,” continued Deb, “people borrowed stuff and helped each other. But here—the other night, I needed vanilla for cookies and I made Dave drive to the store in a snow-storm to get it.”
Why hadn’t she just asked her next-door neighbor—me—for vanilla?
“It just doesn’t seem like people do that here,” she said.
Deb said she used to ask neighbors to watch the house when she and Dave went out of town. “But then we realized they really didn’t care,” she said.
How could she tell?
“You could just tell,” she said. “That’s okay, though. I know people are busy. Dave and I sure are.” Now, when she and Dave go away—including nearly every summer weekend—Deb asks her sister, fifteen minutes away, to check on the house.
“The thing is,” she said, “the people on this street, I don’t think they want to know you.”
DEB was on to something. As I later learned, this street might actually have been designed for people who don’t want to know each other. Sandringham Road—and the subdivision it is part of—was built in the 1920s by Houston Barnard, the highly successful engineer and developer.
Barnard, born in 1871, was named after his maternal grandfather, Isaac Houston, who ran a prosperous tavern and stagecoach stop between Rochester and Buffalo. Houston Barnard grew up in relative comfort, studied civil engineering, and by age twenty-one was chief engineer of a railway company. Later, through his own firm, he received contracts for some of the largest public works projects of the time: the first tunnel under the Hudson River, reclamation of Boston’s Back Bay, and reconstruction of sections of the Erie Canal. Barnard gained a listing in the social registry and joined Rochester’s most exclusive country club. During World War I, he donated his private yacht to the U.S. government for use as a cruiser. In a photo taken in his prime, Barnard, a man of ample girth in a white summer suit and horn-rim glasses, appears healthy, content, and confident.
Around 1918, Barnard began work on his “crown jewel,” the upscale neighborhood that would bear his name, and include my family’s home. On 116 acres of what had been mostly apple and pear orchards, he laid out three roads, each 30 feet wide. Speaking of similar suburban roads, Kenneth Jackson, in his book Crabgrass Frontier, explains, “The width of the street was not necessitated by heavy vehicular traffic but rather by the ideal of spaciousness itself.” Barnard provided sidewalks and street-lights, and planted each side of the street with an alternating pattern of European lindens and Douglas firs. And h
e wrote a code to ensure that only the finest homes would grace his streets: minimum frontage would be at least 75 feet, the main wall could be no nearer than 50 feet from the street, and no house could be nearer than 10 feet from the side lot line.
Of the three streets Barnard laid out, the middle one would be the most graceful. From its southern end, it would climb a moderate slope northward, curve gently to the right, and descend gradually to its eastern end point. Barnard called this half-mile-long, crescent-shaped street Cherry Road.
For a while, it all worked. European-trained architects designed some grand houses for wealthy clients, mostly Anglo-American, English, and French period homes in the popular Colonial, Tudor, and Chateauesque Revival styles. But sales were slower than expected. Barnard tried what today would be called rebranding, renaming the streets to give them a more distinguished tone. Orchard Road became Ambassador, Morris Road became Esplanade, and Cherry Road, that wide, central boulevard with the gentle northeasterly curve he renamed after the private country estate of the Queen of England: Sandringham.
Then the stock market crashed. By 1930, only ten homes had been built on Sandringham; twice that many lots remained vacant. A few more houses would go up between then and the post-World War II boom, but not enough to save Houston Barnard from bankruptcy. Soon after, he fell ill. In an attempt to regain his health, Barnard sailed to the Mediterranean, but in 1936, at age sixty-five, he died in Nice, France.
Houston Barnard’s wife had passed away before he did; there were no children. His body was returned to Rochester.
To my mind, from the way Barnard designed the neighborhood—wide streets, broad lots, deep setbacks—he didn’t expect neighbors to have much connection with each other. Indeed, most of the people who chose to live there probably didn’t need connections, either. As the advertisement said, this was meant to be a neighborhood of “high character,” meaning it was for people of wealth and social status.
Yet I wonder, if Houston Barnard had built Sandringham Road later in his life—not when he was at the top of his game, but when he was bankrupt, sick, and alone—if he might have designed the street differently. Maybe he would have planned for some common space, just half a lot reserved as a tiny park where he himself could have sat on a warm afternoon. There he might have met a neighbor to sit with and talk. Maybe after enough friendly chats, Barnard would have felt safe enough to tell his neighbor how he was feeling; how lonely he was since his wife died, perhaps that he regretted not having children, or how humiliated he felt to be bankrupt, and how it felt to be ill. Maybe he would have then gone home, relieved—at least for that one day—by having unburdened himself and fostered a momentary connection, however small.
“HELLO, this is Deb.” Just as Deb and I returned to the house at about six o’clock, her boss called. She would be going to Boston later that week for a business meeting, and he wanted her to stop in Albany on the way to meet with state officials.
Then Dave called to say he’d be home in half an hour and to start dinner without him.
Deb’s sister, Carol, with whom Deb would play as partners in a paddle tennis match after dinner, was already at the house. The three of us ate while watching the evening news.
When Dave arrived, after some roughhousing with Cayman and a kiss hello for both Deb and Carol, he said kindly, “Deborah, you’re going to be late.”
Deb and Carol and I put our coats on and headed toward the door.
“It’s the last match of the season, girls,” Dave reminded them. “I expect you to win it. Good luck!”
Deb and I rode together to the country club in her Saab; Carol, who would go home after the game, drove separately. But as soon as I closed the car door, even before we backed out of the driveway, Deb turned to me.
“If you must know,” she said, “this weekend I had a meltdown.”
I hadn’t asked about the weekend, so her confession took me by surprise.
“I fell apart,” she said. “It was a crazy, busy week. My to-do list was long. I was sick and didn’t feel well enough to go out at night. I can get frustrated when things get too overwhelming. I started getting upset and asking Dave, ‘Why am I doing this job? Why this, why that?’ Eventually, I was raging, frustrated with everything, even Cayman. I yelled, ‘I don’t feel well! Why do I have to play with the dog?’ and then the dog swings this knotted rope and it hits me in the neck—I mean really hard. It left a mark, and that kind of got me out of the rage.”
I asked how Dave responded to her “meltdown.”
“He’s helpful by not overreacting,” she said.
I wasn’t sure what had triggered Deb’s confession; maybe it was the intimacy created by us being together all day, or just by getting into the car together. I was glad she felt close enough to confide in me, though, and I wondered, as we drove, if I had not met Deb and we’d not gotten to know each other so quickly because of the sleepover, to whom she might have unloaded. Maybe even for a generally happy, busy, and successful young person, it’s nice to have a neighbor nearby to vent to once in a while.
IT was fifteen degrees with a steady, light snow when Deb and I arrived at the country club for paddle tennis. The game, which is also called “platform tennis,” is played much like regular tennis but on a smaller court, with shorter rackets and a rubber ball. When one of the women on the opposing team called to say she would be late, Deb asked if I would like to play. I’d never played paddle tennis, but it looked like fun and I could use the exercise; I’d been sitting much of the day.
“Sure, I’ll play,” I said, putting down my notebook and pen.
My teammate, a woman about Deb’s age, and I won the first two games, but in the end Deb and Carol beat us six games to three. Then the missing player showed up.
After a quick warm-up for the new player, the competition began. At the net, Deb assumed an aggressive stance: knees flexed, two hands holding the racket straight out in front of her, ready to block any return. Waiting for the serve, she squatted to stretch, rose at the hips, then straightened her back. She flipped her paddle over, crouched, swayed left and then right, exhaled visible breath into the night air. Then she attacked the ball.
Her return lifted the ball over the server’s head and to the far side of the court, just inside the double foul line.
Compared to the other women on the court, Deb was quicker and more intense. The others also crouched to receive a serve, but their crouching was studied; hers was instinctive. She dominated the game. The others played; Deb competed.
As I watched Deb on the court, I understood that at that point in her life, her business and social calendars were happily full. Even though she remembered warmly the close, small-town neighborhood she grew up in, her need for connections with neighbors now was only modest. Maybe later, when life settled down, there’d be more time for neighborly connections.
In the meantime, as Deb moved crosscourt for a killer overhead shot, I hoped the next time she needed vanilla, she would think to come over and borrow some.
5
No Bed, No Breakfast
WHEN Lou Guzzetta approached me on the sidewalk, I was surprised and concerned to see a cast on his right arm. He was walking Heidi—holding her leash in his left hand—and I was walking my dog, Champ. Before I could ask Lou about the cast, though, he razzed me. “Get that mongrel out of the neighborhood!” he shouted. We’d adopted Champ, as Lou well knew, from the animal shelter, and he was an unusual mix of black Lab and dachshund—he had the large head and tail of a Lab but stood only eleven inches high. “This neighborhood is for purebreds! Does that dog have papers and a proper pedigree?”
The thing about Champ was, even though he was small, he had a strong personality; among neighborhood dogs, he was the alpha male. If he were a person, he might have been a surgeon. Lou seemed to understand this, and though he teased me about Champ, I think he respected him.
I asked Lou about his arm. He said he had been in Virginia the previous weekend visiting his daughter when
he tripped at night on a curb. “I fell straight out on the pavement,” he said. The fall broke two bones in his right hand and wrist and, as he put it, “took the skin of both legs from the knees to the ankles.” I asked Lou if there was anything he needed help with around the house, but he said he was handling things okay and expected to get the cast off soon. He said he missed his exercise class at the Y. “Without me, those guys are all desperate,” he said, referring to his buddies there. “I get calls, ‘When are you coming back?’ ‘Hey, everything’s dead here without you.’ ”
It worried me that Lou had fallen. I thought he was lucky that all he broke was his hand and wrist. What if he’d broken a hip? Who would take care of him?
FOLLOWING my sleepovers at Lou’s and at the O’Dells’, I decided that—for variety’s sake—I would like to try sleeping over at a household with children. In the directory put out by the neighborhood association, some families listed their children’s ages, so I could tell who had children living at home. I began approaching each one, but soon discovered I was striking out. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised, but Lou and Dave and Deb had welcomed me so warmly, and the sleepovers had gone so well, that when the other neighbors said no, the rejections stung.
The first couple I tried—they had three children at home—were a forty-five-year-old research scientist and her husband, an architect. She was rumored to be nearing an important breakthrough in biomedicine. I called ahead and on a Sunday afternoon walked over to their home to explain what I wanted to do. They said no, explaining that her work was too sensitive to risk being revealed prematurely in a book. I offered to omit any mention of the specifics of her work, but they still said no. “Maybe when I retire,” she said, “if you’re still working on the book, we can talk again.”
In The Neighborhood Page 10