We said a cordial good-bye and resumed our walk. I wondered about the obstacles in bringing these two neighbors together. Previously, Lou had cared for his wife and for longtime friends. But to him, Patti was a stranger. Until their brief meeting that day, he had never seen her, didn’t even know her name. How much might Lou do for someone who was a neighbor, but only a neighbor? And would Patti, who clearly valued her self-reliance, accept help from someone to whom she had no connection other than a street address? And even if each of them was willing, exactly how could I make it happen?
AS I considered these questions, my own connections with neighbors I’d come to know continued to strengthen. In the months following my sleepovers, I had a variety of encounters. Two occurred during the winter months and stand out in my memory. One evening, an hour before guests were due at my house, I called the O’Dells to see if I could borrow salt to melt ice on my front walkway. “Oh, so you’re trying out the new system!” Deb exclaimed, referring to our earlier conversation about how unfortunate it was that none of the neighbors borrow things from each other. Deb found a bag of salt in her garage and invited me to take what I needed. Then, a couple of weeks later, I was driving my son, Ben, to school when my car became stuck in deep snow about halfway down the street. While I was trying to shovel it out, many cars pulled out of nearby driveways and passed by as people left for work, but only one person stopped to offer help: Susan Hyman—Bill Fricke’s wife. She was unable to push my car out of the snow with hers, but Susan did drive Ben to school for me while I kept shoveling.
MEANWHILE, I was spending more time with Patti, trying to be of what help I could. For a while, we had a standing date on Wednesdays for shopping. I reserved that day to drive her wherever she needed to go, and often we’d have lunch, too. One Wednesday, Patti had a series of errands to do. By midmorning, we were ready for a break. We stopped for a snack at a nearby café. Patti’s feet shuffled and her hands shook slightly as she carried her coffee to the table. I also noted her face was puffy and red, and her stomach protruded.
I could see that her energy and stamina were waning.
So, in the mundane setting of a supermarket café, while custodians wiped tables nearby and emptied trash bins, I asked Patti, “Has your attitude toward life changed at all as a result of being ill?”
“It has,” she said, putting down her coffee. She seemed to welcome the question. “Just the simple things are so much more important now, like seeing sunlight coming through clouds and I wonder if it is the last time I might see that—not that I think that so much right now, but when I first started chemo. And being with family. Like I say to my mom, ‘Let’s go out for dinner, ’ and she says, ‘Why?’ And I’m like, ‘Because it would just be good to all be together around the table.’ And I’m so glad I have the girls. What else would there be to live for?”
Being with Patti helped me treasure the time I had with my own children, as well as the new relationship I was enjoying with Marla.
OVER the next few weeks, Patti seemed to grow increasingly weak and confused. She moved slowly, missed appointments, got her dates confused. She was increasingly moody, too. My efforts to help her were sometimes met with an irritation I hadn’t seen in her before.
One day, while out walking, I saw her standing on her front lawn.
“I’m locked out of the house,” she said.
She said a friend had driven her to a doctor’s appointment and then dropped her off at home, but her house key didn’t work. Her former husband, with whom she remained on good terms, had a spare key and she’d already left a message at his office for him to bring it over.
She suggested we go to lunch while she waited.
In the car on the way to the restaurant, I had trouble thinking of what to say. Patti was hard to read. I wasn’t sure if she was just irritated about being locked out or maybe also dealing with some bad news from the doctor. I asked if she was tired.
“I am,” she said.
I took my eyes off the road for a couple of seconds to look at her, trying to gauge her mood. Depressed? Angry? Near tears? Just tired and annoyed?
“Don’t stare at me!” she snapped.
I apologized, and said I was only trying to read her mood.
“I’m in a bad mood,” she said.
We rode in silence.
THE opportunity to connect two neighbors finally came in the late summer.
“Hey, didn’t I tell you to get that mongrel dog out of the neighborhood?! We only allow purebreds here!” Lou Guzzetta was teasing me again as I walked Champ, but where was the shouting coming from? It was a warm Sunday afternoon. I was walking in front of Lou’s house, but I couldn’t see him.
Then I spotted him. Lou was in his house shouting at me through the open window of the first-floor library, the little corner room on the front of the house where, on the morning after my sleepover, he’d lain on the couch and talked of his childhood, his marriage, and his career as a surgeon.
I approached him across the front lawn and then, when I reached the window, was surprised to see there was no screen; he’d rolled it up to wash the window.
“So how ya been, Lou?” I asked.
He said he felt fine.
Indeed, framed in his first-floor window, he looked well. He wore an old pullover shirt and khaki pants held up with suspenders. The only thing missing from the scene was his miniature schnauzer that always barked at passersby from the corner chair in the library.
“Hey, I’m going food shopping later,” I said, trying to be helpful. “Need anything?”
“I shop on Thursdays!” he retorted. “You know that.” I asked if he’d be closing his pool soon and if he would need a hand.
“Nah,” he said dismissively. “You’re an intellectual. I need someone physically strong.”
I had to laugh, remembering when at the Y Lou had urged me to do some arm curls so bullies on the beach wouldn’t kick sand in my face.
Why that seemed like the right moment, I’m not exactly sure. But there Lou was, standing in front of the open window, and there I was, standing just feet away on his front lawn, and there was nothing between us, no barriers—even the window screen had been rolled up. I took it as a good omen. It had taken some effort over two years to reach this point—connecting two neighbors who previously hadn’t known each other—but I decided to pop the question.
“Lou, you know Patti DiNitto can’t really drive anymore—” And that’s as far as I got because Lou immediately interrupted.
“I’ll drive her,” he said. “She would be doing me a favor. Understand? My life is zero. I have nothing to do. Tell her I will drive her and she will be doing me the favor. I’ll take her food shopping on Thursdays, to stores, whatever. Please tell her it would be a favor to me.”
Quickly, I suggested he call Patti—I’d call her first and ask if it’d be okay for me to give him her unlisted home number—but he said no, he didn’t want to push himself on her. “Tell her to call me,” he said.
THE following Wednesday morning, I left Patti at the entrance to a family restaurant in a nearby suburb and parked the car. Usually on Wednesdays, Patti and I had lunch and did errands, but that day I had suggested we go out for breakfast. I wanted her to call Lou in my presence and set up a date for them to get together, maybe for him to drive her shopping or to a doctor’s appointment.
I had told Patti that Lou would be delighted to help her by driving. She said she appreciated the offer, and was agreeable. But I also knew Patti was unlikely to pick up the phone and call Lou to ask for a ride. She’d only met him that one time on his driveway. Moreover, to Patti, Lou was a senior colleague, a doctor who’d been a successful general surgeon when she was still in medical school. It would have taken a huge leap both of personality and professional protocol for Patti to call Lou and ask him for a ride. Also, given the signs of confusion Patti had shown recently, even if she intended to call Lou, I was concerned she might forget to do so.
The only way to
be sure the Lou-Patti connection would be made, I reasoned, was to have Patti call Lou in my presence. Wednesday, however, presented a problem: that was one of Lou’s mornings at the Y, and sometimes afterward he went out for lunch or did errands. That’s why Patti would need to call Lou early in the morning and why, on that Wednesday, I had asked her for breakfast.
Inside the restaurant, Patti had already been seated at a table near a window. It was a wet day; rain pattered lightly against the glass. She had a good appetite, she said, and ordered eggs, potatoes, and hot turkey sausage. She looked well, too. Her hair had grown in some, her face was less swollen, and her voice was stronger.
When we had finished most of our breakfast, I handed Patti my cell phone.
“I’m pretty sure Lou will be home now,” I said. “But later this morning he’ll be leaving for his exercise class. This would be a good time to call.”
Patti stared blankly at the keypad on the cell phone, and when she moved to push Lou’s number, as I recited it, her finger shook slightly—not from nervousness but because, as I’d noticed earlier, she sometimes had a tremor. I took the phone, pushed Lou’s number, and handed it back to her.
Lou often would answer his phone in a big voice, as if he were a TV announcer. He’d say something like, “Hello! This is Louis! And how may I help you?” I was only going to hear one side of this conversation, however.
“Hi, Lou!” said Patti. “It’s Patti DiNitto.”
A pause.
“Okay. Okay. Yeah—works both ways,” she said.
“Well, I’m just sitting here at a restaurant with Peter . . .”
“Yeah, well, I don’t know yet.”
I bet Lou asked her if I was treating.
“Well, look,” she said, “I was just wondering if you might be able to do me a favor by helping me out with a ride sometime, ’cause I can’t drive right now, I guess Peter mentioned that.”
After a short silence, I could see Patti relax, and smile. “Thursday, yeah,” she continued. “I have to do a little bit of shopping.”
“Yeah, that’s good. Yup. What time would you come and get me?”
Here Patti laughed. Whatever he was saying, Lou was charming her.
“Okay, I don’t know, like eleven o’clock?”
“Okay, that sounds good.”
Patti looked at me. “Do you want to talk to Lou?”
I said I didn’t need to.
Here she laughed again. I don’t know what Lou said that was so funny, but it was probably at my expense.
“Yeah, I know. He’s writing right now.”
Patti listened a moment, then laughed again.
“Okay, thanks. See you then. Bye.”
Patti handed me back the phone.
“Lou and I have a date for next Thursday,” she said, smiling broadly.
LATER, Lou told me it had been a productive day. He and Patti had done a little grocery shopping and then stopped, at Patti’s request, at Starbucks. “She knew just what she wanted,” said Lou, rolling his eyes—he hadn’t grown up with four-dollar coffee: “A mocha ba- boom, ba-bah,” he bellowed, and then, imitating Patti’s high, soft voice, “but not too much mocha.” All in all, he told me, it had been “a wonderful day. What can I say? A very, very wonderful day. It was terrific. I had a great time!”
Lou had been a great help, Patti reported. “It was nice—he even spoke a little Italian with my mother. And I got caught up on all my errands.” Then she had a story to tell: She’d asked Lou if he could drive her the next Monday morning to a pedicure appointment, but he said he couldn’t because that was one of the mornings he goes to the Y. Patti said, “So Lou says, ‘Change the appointment to another day and I’ll take you.’ But I said, ‘It’s hard to change these appointments,’ and he goes”—and here she dropped her voice to imitate Lou, booming—“ ‘ Change the appointment! They’ll always give you another one,’ and I said, ‘How do you know? Have you ever had a pedicure?!’ ”
Lou helped Patti out on my occasions. He not only drove her wherever she needed to go, he watched out for her safety and became her advocate. Picking her up one day at her house, he spotted something I had missed: over the back stairway that led from the kitchen to the second floor—the one Patti typically used—there was no light. “She comes down those steep stairs and it’s dark,” he told me. “I told her she needs a light there and it should be on all the time. As it is now, those stairs are just waiting for a fall.” Within a week, Patti’s brother had installed a light. And later, listening to Patti’s accounts of trying to reach her oncologist by phone, Lou realized she sometimes waited up to two days to have a call returned. Intervening with the medical office, he found a direct number for her doctor that Patti could use. Another time, at an appointment with her eye doctor, Lou was annoyed that Patti had to wait forty-five minutes. “I got home,” he told me, “and called the ophthalmologist. ‘This is Dr. Guzzetta. I was with Patti DiNitto and she’s got a lot of problems. It’s okay for her to wait fifteen minutes, but not forty-five minutes.’ They said, ‘Okay, okay, we’ll take care of it.’ Later,” Lou continued, “Patti called to thank me, but I put a stop to that. I said, ‘Now, look. Stop thanking me. You are doing me the favor because if I’m not with you, what am I doing? Sitting on my you-know-what in my house, doing nothing. You’re making my life for me, don’t you understand?’”
Throughout that fall and winter, Lou and I took turns driving Patti to doctors’ appointments, shopping, and errands. (In fact, Patti’s family and close friends provided most of her rides; Lou and I played a supporting role.)
And once a week or so, Patti would call in midafternoon to say she’d been delayed at an appointment and could I pick up Sarah after school when the bus dropped her off at the house.
One day, when I met her at the bus stop, Sarah wore a pink coat and carried a purple lunch box. She was in first grade.
“Who’s your teacher this year?” I asked as I slowly walked with her the three doors to my house. She had a tiny voice, just like her mother’s, and had to say her teacher’s name three times before I heard it.
Taking a pen from her coat pocket, Sarah announced she could write her own name. I handed her a sheet of white paper from my notebook. Stopping for a moment to steady the paper on top of her lunch box, she carefully printed in a mix of capital and small letters: “SarAH.”
“I can write curvy, too,” she said.
I had not realized how much I missed having little girls; mine had somehow grown up.
Often my daughter, Val, was home from high school or my son Ben from middle school, and we would all fix Sarah hot chocolate or sometimes strawberries and whipped cream as an after-school snack. Sometimes, once Patti returned home, Ben would walk little Sarah home—continuing into the next generation the connection that Patti and I had made.
AS Patti’s illness progressed, I sometimes thought of her as “Renan Wills in slow motion”—a woman in crisis mostly isolated from her neighbors. It would be redemptive, I felt, if many of the neighbors could come to know Patti and give her and her family support. But I began to fear there might not be enough time for that. I needed to speed things up. If I could just connect Patti with the small group of neighbors to whom I, myself, had recently connected, at least it would be something.
MONTHS earlier, in casual conversation with Deb O’Dell, I’d asked if she knew the woman who lived two doors down from her. “Don’t know her name or anything about her,” replied Deb. Now, in mid-December, I stopped at Deb’s and told her about Patti’s situation.
“That must be scary to be there all day by herself,” said Deb. She asked if there was any way she could help. Recalling that in high school Deb had been Athlete of the Year and was still active in sports, I mentioned that Patti’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Caitlin, was also athletic. “I know she’s a skier,” I told Deb. “Patti obviously can’t take her skiing, though. Would you want to do that sometime?”
Deb said she didn’t ski, but said her
country club flooded an area around the paddle tennis courts in winter to make a skating rink. “Maybe Patti’s daughter would like to go with me,” she suggested. “I’ve got extra skates.”
The next time I saw Patti and Caitlin, I mentioned Deb’s offer. They both were open to it. It was December and cold, but not freezing cold; it would probably be at least another month before the skating rink opened. At any rate, I’d first need to arrange for Patti and Deb to meet. Patti, however, was going to Florida to spend the Christmas break with her sisters. We agreed that in January, after the holidays, I’d bring Deb over to meet Patti, and then we’d arrange a date for Deb to take Caitlin skating.
As so often is the case, things didn’t go quite as planned.
Over New Year’s, Patti was hospitalized for nine days. The first time I visited her back home, she had a wheeled walker next to her bed. “I walk like a duck,” she said. “They told me to practice with the walker.” After that, it was difficult to predict on which days Patti would feel well enough, or be clear-headed enough, for company. There was a Wednesday afternoon in late January when Patti was feeling well and said she’d be glad to have Deb O’Dell come over, but when I called Deb, she was preparing for an out-of-town business meeting the next morning and wouldn’t be able to get together until the weekend. On the next Sunday, Deb and I had arranged to visit Patti at 4 p.m., but as I was putting on my coat, Patti called to say she was too tired. I asked if we could try again the next day, and she said maybe. But the next day, when I called to ask if it would be okay to visit with Deb, she said, “I’m just feeling very tired. Maybe in a couple of weeks.”
PATTI had never gotten around to furnishing her dining room. Located just off the kitchen on the back of the house, it was empty but for a carpet, which I think was the carpet that had come with the house when she bought it. Once, I asked if she might consider an Oriental rug for that room, and she said that sounded like a good idea, but she didn’t know much about Oriental rugs. Neither did I. But I knew someone who did.
In The Neighborhood Page 20