Off the kitchen was the dining room, which remained empty except for an area rug and, against one wall, an end table and a wooden chair.
I heard Patti’s quiet voice at the top of the back stairway. “How come you’re not going downstairs?” she asked her daughter, laughing. Caitlin must have been shy about meeting me. “Okay,” said Patti. “I’ll go down first!”
Caitlin was on crutches, having recently hurt her leg skiing. Whether she had a sprain or a chipped bone, Patti wasn’t sure; they’d get an X-ray later in the week. Either way, Patti was confident her daughter would heal well. But she was concerned about plans to go to Arizona with both her daughters the following week for a school break. They were planning an active vacation: swimming, horseback riding, tennis, and riding dune buggies in the desert. Much of that would be difficult with Caitlin on crutches.
Caitlin sat at the kitchen table, dressed for school and waiting quietly while her mother heated frozen French toast.
I was surprised at how quiet and calm it all seemed, because Patti once described their morning get-off-to-school routine as “chaotic.” One recent morning, she told me, she had even found herself thinking, “Oh, my God. I’m so glad Peter isn’t here to see this!” But that morning, all was tranquil. Maybe it was because one daughter rather than two were home. Or more likely, it was because I was there and they were both on good behavior. I tried to lighten the mood.
“I feel like I should be serving you both breakfast, since I slept in the maid’s room,” I said. The joke, deservedly, fell flat.
I tried another conversation opener, mentioning to Caitlin, a sixth grader at the Brighton Middle School, that forty years ago I had attended the same school. This seemed to break the ice, and while she ate, Caitlin and I talked about life in middle school.
With her crutches, Caitlin couldn’t climb the steps onto the school bus, so after breakfast we all hustled into Patti’s SUV to drive to school—a five-minute ride. At the school parking lot, I carried Caitlin’s backpack and violin case, while Patti helped with the crutches.
AT a restaurant near the middle school, Patti and I each ordered bagels for breakfast. On the tables were tiny, painted ceramic flowerpots. “Oh, look,” I joked as we sat down. “They’re giving away flowerpots for Valentine’s Day.”
“That’s probably the only thing I’ll get for Valentine’s Day,” said Patti.
I’d momentarily forgotten she was still hurting from the breakup with her boyfriend. Two weeks ago, I made a similar gaffe when I asked what plans she had for her birthday. “Big birthday,” she replied. “Would you want to celebrate a birthday after your boyfriend dumps you?”
People all around us seemed to be having business conversations over breakfast.
“Mostly men here,” I observed.
“Actually, that’s why I come here!” she said, and then added, “Just kidding.”
Patti seemed tired, and I had to strain to hear her.
I said how nice it was that she had the time to take Caitlin to school in the morning and help her get to class. She said it wasn’t always so. “I didn’t have any time when I was working,” she said. “I’d be dropping two kids off at day care or schools, racing to the clinic, then having a hellacious schedule of patients.”
My comment seemed to have touched a nerve.
“One morning I had Caitlin in the car to drop off at school,” Patti continued, “and I whizzed right by the school forgetting to stop, and she said, ‘Mom, aren’t you going to drop me off?’ So I raced back and dropped her off and then at work I got a call—there wasn’t any school that day! I’m sure it was on the calendar, but it was the middle of the week. I was living a crazy life. I never want to do that again. Anybody who does that needs to see a psychologist.”
The clinic where Patti worked employed six other full- and part-time radiologists, all women. Patti typically worked nine or ten hours a day, saw about thirty of her own patients and helped review mammograms of fifty others. When her cancer was diagnosed, she went on leave, but later thought of returning. “I was just coming out of my chemo and I felt okay and wanted my job back,” she told me earlier. “I thought I could really help these women. Patients are totally confused, and most times doctors don’t have firsthand experience with an illness, but I did. I thought I could give them a sense of hope, understanding, and encouragement, show them how to go from one step to the next, even just to say, ‘You don’t have to commit yourself to a course of treatment right away, you can think things through.’”
Patti’s doctors thought full-time work might be too strenuous, but felt she could handle part-time. Patti called her boss. “She goes, ‘Why don’t you come in and we’ll have a meeting with the lawyers.’ ” But the meeting never took place. “She called me back and said it wouldn’t work. If I did anything wrong, patients would come down hard on me because they knew I’d been treated for cancer. They’d take advantage of me. She said I wouldn’t be able to walk the halls there without somebody accusing me of malpractice.”
Patti decided not to pursue it. “What I’d end up with wouldn’t be worth the emotional and financial drain,” she concluded, but the look in her eyes showed how bewildered and angry her boss’s decision had left her.
“Well, she wasn’t that swell when I worked there,” she added, reflecting on her boss.
The previous week Patti had received an offer to join a radiology practice part-time. I asked if she was considering it.
“No,” she said. “I’m burned out. I always thought medicine was to help people”—and here her quiet voice dropped even further to a conspiratorial whisper—“but it’s not. It’s all political. You don’t get to be your own boss. You don’t have time to observe the patients. You have to do what other people say, and even they’re not the ones in charge—it’s some businessman trying to get you to read films quickly. They just want you to read films until you fall out of the chair.”
Fortunately, Patti’s disability insurance now gave her enough money not to work and still afford to keep her home. In all our time together, she never expressed concern about finances.
But professionally, she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. At times, she expressed a sense of being confined by career choices made long ago.
“I don’t ever want to work for someone else again,” she declared, but then noted how difficult it was, given the cost of equipment and training staff, to open one’s own radiology practice. “I could switch careers,” she added. “Maybe I’ll meet someone else in the book you’re writing who can give me an idea—anyone in the neighborhood switch careers?”
No one came to mind, I said.
Then Patti turned more somber.
“All my life I’ve done what I should—getting good grades, doing well in med school, working hard. I never rebelled as a teenager. I want to do something wild. I want to be bad.”
But what “wild” or “bad” would look like, she was unable to say. Once, she mentioned a friend who’d ridden a motorcycle across country. Another time, at a local botanical garden, as we sat on a bench amid exotic flowers in a tropical setting, Patti said to me, “I still want to do something bad.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like take off my clothes and run under the waterfall?” she teased.
“You go first,” I said.
Back at the restaurant, eyeing the flowerpot on the table, I asked Patti in a more serious tone if Valentine’s Day would, in fact, be difficult for her. She went cross-eyed. I laughed out loud—it was a funny look, and not what I would have expected from her. She blushed in embarrassment, but I think she enjoyed making me laugh.
I asked, “How did our fellow residents of Sandringham respond to your being ill?”
“Our street?” she asked, her eyes going wide. “No one talks to each other. I don’t know anybody.”
Patti said she knew one family on an adjacent street whose daughter went to kindergarten with Sarah, but as far as residents of Sandringham, she st
ill didn’t know anyone and hadn’t heard from anyone.
“Do you suppose people on Sandringham know about your illness?” I asked.
“Oh, I suppose so,” she said. “I think the word is probably around.”
As I’d learned, it was.
“So how does it feel,” I asked, “to be surrounded by people who know your difficult situation but who are not available to talk to, or to be of any help or comfort?”
Had I put it too harshly?
“When I got sick,” she said, “I knew there were people around, but . . .” then she stopped.
“At the beginning,” she started again, “it was okay with me. I didn’t want anyone to see what my life was—what a catastrophe it was—an ongoing catastrophe.”
Her eyes welled up.
“Because all the neighbors were strangers?” I offered.
She cried more and wiped her eyes with the napkin.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just hypersensitive after the chemo. I think it’s from all the tears I held back in college and med school and residency.”
She continued, “At some point, I just didn’t want them to help me.”
I thought Patti was going to say she didn’t want the neighbors’ help because she resented us being so unneighborly, but actually she was going down a different path.
“Even with my friends who did help,” she said, “I appreciated what they did, but I didn’t like people in my house watching me lie around on the couch. I wanted them to see me healthy. I don’t want people to feel sorry for me.”
I asked how her friends had reacted to her illness.
“You get all kinds,” she said. “Some feel sorry for you, some want to do a lot for you, and some are just nosy.”
Was I one of the nosy ones? I didn’t ask.
“And some people irritate me,” she continued. “‘ Oh, poor Patti,’” she said, mock-patting her own arm. “I don’t want to be ‘poor-Pattied.’ I really don’t like people helping me out. I’d rather fix it myself.”
But where did that leave the rest of us? What should neighbors do?
“Patti,” I asked. “Let’s say you live on a street where some people are casual acquaintances and others are just strangers. Yet all or most of them have heard about your divorce and illness. If they want to be good neighbors, what should they do?”
She thought for a long moment, then said, “I think just to call or e-mail some expression of caring. That would be enough.”
AFTER breakfast, Patti and I drove back to Sandringham. As she pulled into her driveway, I gestured toward a large house on an adjacent street. The people who lived there were known to entertain a lot, especially outdoors in the summer.
“Some parties they have, huh?” I said.
“Oh, yeah. The best was their big anniversary,” she said.
I remembered that party. Cars were lined up and down the street. Patti recalled all the details.
“People came in limos,” she said. “They had valet parking. Everyone was in tuxedos and long gowns. Tables were set in the back with white tablecloths. A band played quiet dinner music but then at ten o’clock”—and here she made a dancing motion in the car seat—“it was like ‘Devil in a Blue Dress’—really rockin’! The windows in my house were rattling, and I’m thinking ‘Hey, it would be nice to have been invited.’ ”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sometimes people do invite the immediate neighbors to outdoor parties.”
“But in formal gowns?” she asked.
She was right—a formal party is usually not for the neighbors. I was prepared to leave it there, but as we climbed out of the SUV, a question occurred.
“Hey, how did you know it was their anniversary party?”
“Oh, they told me,” Patti said. “I see them sometimes when they’re walking the dog in the morning and I’m out waiting with Caitlin for the bus.”
“Have they been over or anything since you’ve been ill?” I asked.
“No,” said Patti.
“Do you think they know?”
“Yeah, I suppose they do,” she said.
MOST of the other mall shoppers were mothers with preschool children, and older couples. Later that morning as we made our way through the mall, Patti remarked what a luxury it was to be able to shop in the morning, and recalled again how harried she’d been while working at the clinic. Her boss, she said, would sometimes let the office assistants clothes-shop for the radiologists. “We’d give them our credit cards and tell them what we had seen or were looking for, for our kids, and they’d go out and get the stuff. She wanted us in the office doing mammograms.”
At GapKids, Patti was looking over summer dresses for her girls when she remembered that she left some clothes she needed to return in the SUV. I offered to get them, and she gave me her key chain. Walking toward the parking lot, I flipped through the plastic key tags attached to the chain: for the supermarket, the video store, and so on. The last was for Dick’s Sporting Goods. That tag suddenly seemed a powerful symbol to me, connecting Patti DiNitto to her former neighbor down the street—Dick’s was where Bob Wills purchased the gun he used to kill his wife.
Patti and Renan had never met, but I wondered if they had, if maybe they could have helped each other. Like Patti, Renan was a physician with two children, was isolated at home, and struggled with a difficult marriage. Perhaps the two, if they’d met, could have found a way to confide in and strengthen each other; maybe instead of Patti watching a TV news report of Renan’s death that night, Renan and her children could have taken shelter in Patti’s home, maybe in the very guest room where I had slept.
By 11:30, I noticed Patti’s left leg was dragging a bit and suggested we stop for an early lunch.
At a café, we pushed our trays through a cafeteria line, and then found an open table. On one side of the table was a bench and on the other side, a chair. I asked Patti which she would prefer, and she chose the bench.
“Scott always had to have the bench,” she said.
“Always?” I asked. “You’re not exaggerating?”
“Oh, no,” she said, “always.”
She described him as obsessive-compulsive.
We started eating our salads.
“At this point in my life,” said Patti, “I really don’t care if I get married or not, but for him to hightail it out of there without discussing things—I think he was having flashbacks from his marriage.”
It took me a moment to realize she was again discussing the breakup with Scott.
“I was totally shocked,” she continued. “We went out to dinner and at first I didn’t even know what he was talking about. I was totally confused. I mean, we’d gone out off and on for a year. It takes him that long to figure out I’m not the one? I feel like I stuck through the yucky part of his divorce, and then . . .”
“You were just the transition?” I offered.
“I guess so,” she said.
“I just couldn’t believe it. I’d gotten back from San Francisco on Wednesday, then Friday he hinted at it, then Tuesday night was the big blow-off—and that’s after I drove his daughter to school that day, and made them both dinner. At night I’m like, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ He’s like, ‘I got to lay down for a minute.’ Then he tells me he wants to spend more time with his kids or by himself with his dog—and eventually he’s going to want to start dating other women.”
“What did you say?” I asked.
“I was never really good at comebacks,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. What I say or do makes no difference.”
Patti became quiet and stared hard at me, as if making sure she could trust me.
Then she said, “He said to me, ‘I’ll miss you when you die.’ ”
She began to cry. I reached over and held her arm. She was wearing a thick, wool sweater. “I said to him, ‘What? Do you know something I don’t?’ It’s like he wasn’t going to see me anymore and he wanted to get that in. Isn’t that weird?”
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sp; I didn’t know what to say so I just held her arm tighter.
“I never used to think about dying before,” she said, “but since he brought it up—I just feel like my days are numbered. I know other people look at me and think, ‘Is she going to make it?’—but he called me his best friend.”
Patti cried a little more.
She continued, “I just kept looking at him. I stared at him for like a minute and then he goes, ‘Oh, maybe I’ll be hit by a car tomorrow, you know, we never know.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, like that makes it all better!’ ” Patti cried silently.
I felt I needed to do something. “Let’s talk about this,” I said, still holding her arm. “Your cancer is in remission, right?”
She nodded.
“You take whatever meds you’re supposed to?”
“Yeah.”
“You fly to California every month for this trial of what may be a groundbreaking vaccine?”
“Yeah.”
“So not only are you okay right now, you’re doing everything possible to keep yourself well in the future.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe his mother didn’t teach him about what to say and what not to say.”
That was charitable on Patti’s part, I thought. To divert her attention a little and give her a chance to recover, I told her about an incident that had happened to me. It was just a few weeks after Marie left, and I was at a local carnival on the afternoon of the Fourth of July. All the people around me seemed to be happy couples with their kids. Just then, a friend came up, slapped me on the shoulder, and congratulated me on becoming what he called “Brighton’s most eligible bachelor”—this, when at that moment I felt so terrible over the loss of my family.
“Why does this keep happening to me?” Patti pleaded.
I told Patti how much I admired all she had achieved: medical school, her practice, buying the house on her own, raising Caitlin and Sarah.
“Now it all seems for nothing,” she said, “and the house is too big. I thought by this time maybe I’d have someone else living in it with me, but even with the girls it seems big and empty, and looks like it’s going to stay that way.”
In The Neighborhood Page 14