On a weekday evening late in January, Bill Fricke rang my doorbell, and as planned, we walked over to Patti’s house together. At my suggestion, he had brought two large, illustrated books on Oriental rugs. I had told Bill about Patti’s illness and about her interest in possibly buying a rug for her dining room. He said he’d be happy to help out in whatever way he could. Fortunately, Patti had felt well for several days in a row, and readily agreed to have Bill and I come by to talk about rugs.
In Patti’s kitchen, Bill, Patti’s mother, Elisa, and I stood around the table for a moment waiting for Patti. When she came in, she moved slowly and unsteadily, tightly gripping her walker. She wasn’t wearing a wig; her short, brown hair was brushed straight back. Her face was swollen and broad. She wore jeans and a bulky sweater that made her look stocky.
Before we sat down, I suggested Patti show Bill where the rug would go in the dining room. But instead, Patti showed us the living room. There was an old area rug in there, covered, as usual, with play tables, Christmas decorations, and toys. It seemed to me like an odd place for an expensive Oriental rug, but that’s where Patti said she wanted it. I guessed she had decided against furnishing the dining room after all.
Bill complimented Patti on the wood paneling and hardwood floors throughout the house.
At the kitchen table, I reminded Patti that Bill was a pathologist. When she was practicing radiology at the breast clinic, she told him, she had sent biopsies to his lab at the hospital.
“We do aspirate and core biopsies since about three years ago,” he said.
Later, when I told Bill that Patti had diagnosed her own breast cancer, he said her biopsy would likely have come through his office.
“Actually,” Bill told Patti, “your name came up at the lab just yesterday. I got something from the clinic and your name was on it.” Probably a patient, they supposed, that Patti had seen some years ago.
“Uh-huh,” she said.
Then Bill mentioned the names of three doctors who he knew worked at the breast clinic.
“Sure, uh-huh,” Patti said, nodding. The shop talk must have sounded far away to her.
Bill said, “Oh, well, let me tell you about rugs.” He wasn’t selling anything, he emphasized. He was there just to advise her, and if she got to the point where she wanted to go look at some rugs to buy, he’d be glad to go with her to a local dealer he knew who was honest and had good-quality rugs.
Opening one of the books, Bill said, “I used to buy these just to put on the floor, but now I see them as works of art.”
Bill explained the basics of Oriental rugs: different places they are made—Turkey, Azerbaijan, Samarkand; weft and weave; the “quality and aesthetics” of color and style; and how the number of knots per square inch and the tightness of the weave determine thickness, “just like with towels and sheets.”
As Bill talked, Patti thumbed—absentmindedly, I thought—through the rug book. Her mother listened silently from a seat nearby.
There was a sense of all of us trying to make this visit work.
When he was done, Bill mentioned again a local dealer he liked.
“Maybe if I found something at that place, you could come over and take a look?” Patti asked.
“I’d be delighted to,” said Bill.
We’d only been there maybe twenty-five minutes; it seemed too soon to go. But we didn’t want to tire Patti by staying too long, either. Elisa commented on the unusual weather: it was 50 degrees, remarkably mild for January.
“And how about these tragedies, how do you say it—tsunami?” asked Patti.
Weeks before, a tsunami tidal wave had devastated coastal areas of the Indian Ocean with a great loss of life.
“Yeah, and I guess there was an earthquake in California,” she added. “Did you see the news reports? There was going to be something on TV about how all these tragedies are linked.”
I had planned just to walk with Bill back to his house and then head home, but it was still early in the evening and so mild, and a lovely mist hung over the street which was so pleasant you could feel it on your cheek. Bill and I decided to take a longer walk around the neighborhood.
I asked him, as a doctor, what he made of Patti’s condition.
“She’s obviously Cushingoid,” he said. Cushing’s syndrome, he explained, resulted from the heavy use of steroids to keep brain swelling down. It caused “very fine, thin skin” as well as “trunkal obesity.” I didn’t like hearing Patti spoken of in clinical terms, but at the same time it was interesting to hear that the aspects of her condition I had observed over the past months fit into these neat categories that Bill, as a doctor, easily recognized.
Bill also explained that the tumor in her head was “growing in an enclosed space” and that there was “only so much room for it to expand” before her functioning became impaired. He said it would likely become harder for her to get around. “It will be a gradual debilitation,” he said. “She may not be able to walk.”
I asked Bill if Patti, as a physician, understood all that.
“Sure,” he said, “but people have coping mechanisms. Why redo her house and why the interest in buying rugs? It’s part of the way we cope. You can’t sit around all day thinking in three months or six months you’re going to die. You have to look past that and keep yourself living and interested.”
Could Patti recover?
“No,” said Bill. “It’s a fatal illness. She’s going to die.”
I had considered the possibility of Patti not recovering, but still, to hear a doctor say it definitively—and I knew Bill was only trying to be honest—stunned me. We walked a few moments in silence.
“As you know,” Bill said, “I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in a god that has planned this or that, or anybody’s illness. It’s like the tsunami and the earthquake—it just happened and a hundred and fifty thousand people died. There’s no meaning to it; it just happened. All we can do is accept it and support each other.”
We had walked a long time together, but finally, back at Bill’s house, we said good night. The night was so pleasant, though—and after my conversation with Bill, I had a lot on my mind—so I continued walking. As I passed the other houses on my street, I found I was able to “read” the lights in many of my neighbors’ homes; I knew why particular lights were on, and what they meant. At the O’Dells’ house, the bright light visible through a basement window meant Deb was probably working out; a light in the second floor study left on past midnight possibly meant she was preparing for a business meeting the next morning. At Patti’s, a light at the far end of the house on the second floor usually meant someone—most likely her mother—was staying over to help and sleeping in the guest room. At Bill Fricke’s, a light in the corner window of the first floor perhaps meant Bill was reading medical journals; if the kitchen light was on much past 9 p.m., it probably meant Bill or Susan were fixing the kids’ lunches, or dinner for the next evening. And at Lou Guzzetta’s, I knew the dim light on the second floor was a nightlight and meant Lou was in bed, most likely asleep.
All these lights, and others, taken together formed a sort of constellation for me, a picture of my neighbors inside their homes, living their lives, side by side with mine. Picturing myself as one point of light within that constellation was comforting.
Comforting, too—in what I admit may seem a bizarre way—was the thought, as I walked home, that I was also linked with my neighbors by what went on under our street. Some months earlier, I’d learned by chance that engineers for the Town of Brighton used a robotic video camera to inspect the sanitary sewer under the street for cracks. They did this once every ten years, and by the courtesy of our town engineer, I was allowed to view the most recent archived films. On first impression, what I saw on the TV screen at Town Hall looked like a diagnostic video of the human heart. But instead of a cardiac artery, what I saw was the inside of an eight-inch iron pipe into which ran all the wastewater from the homes on Sandringham: water from s
inks, dishwashers, toilets, and baths. By gravity, it flowed down the street, joined with the main line to a treatment plant, and then into Lake Ontario, where two miles offshore it was discharged.
On the screen, I saw a churning, reddish-brown liquid; bubbles and bits of paper occasionally floated by. It was a brown soup of shampoo, dish detergent, food scraps, and everything washed off, excreted, and shed by the bodies of my neighbors and me, the ooze of our fleeting existences, the stuff of our middle-of-the-night fears, our own private River Styx. It was what we have most in common: our physical, mortal selves mixed together under the street, flowing by natural force toward the immense, cold lake. This dark mixing of our lives underground was matched, as I thought about it, with the more pleasing, physical world we all shared aboveground. It was something else we all had in common, I thought, this microenvironment of our street. Driving, we passed the same mix of lindens and Douglas firs, the same arrangement of Colonial, Tudor, French Chateau, and contemporary houses, the same harp-shaped streetlamps; walking, we walked on the same sidewalk, avoided the same uneven concrete slabs; in the moment before we turned the corner, our gaze fell on the same houses across the street. On a summer night, if our windows were open, we fell asleep to the same sound of crickets; in the morning, we awoke to the same bird-song and din of distant traffic. We all resided, as it were—to go back in time before developer Houston Barnard subdivided the tract—on the same farm; our soil was the same; our rainfall was the same; our sunlight, snow, and pollen index were the same. And we moved through this same physical miniworld, most of us, daily for years. Surely this shared physical environment, both below and above ground, bound us as neighbors.
As I continued home, I reflected that whatever two years ago I had felt missing in my neighborhood didn’t feel missing anymore.
LOOKING back, I should have seen it coming. Marla, the woman I’d been dating for more than two years—and who was considerably younger than me—was ready for a commitment. I wasn’t, and I had my reasons. For one, I hadn’t yet fully accepted the dissolution of our family, or cut all emotional ties with my former wife. And I wasn’t ready to sell my home. It wouldn’t be healthy for Marla and I to live in my former marital home, yet two of my three children were still living at home; I didn’t want to disrupt their lives more than they already had been.
On a Sunday evening late in March, Marla came over. She suggested we take a walk in the neighborhood and when we were halfway around the block, she let me have it: she was frustrated, angry—“I’m wasting my life with you!”—and broke off the relationship. She went home and I was left alone in the house—the kids were with their mother that night. I was devastated. I had no appetite so I skipped dinner and went to bed. Around 4:30 a.m., I awoke in a sweat, starkly aware of what I had lost and of how, once again, I was alone. To try to calm myself, I dressed and went out for a walk, and I walked the neighborhood continually for more than an hour, replaying the relationship in my mind.
I hadn’t been out in the neighborhood that early since the morning Brian Kenyon picked me up to ride with him as he delivered newspapers. Brian, I could see, had already made his rounds; at most of the homes I passed, blue plastic newspaper bags rested on the doorsteps. A mist hung over the street. As the sky lightened, birds sang. Their singing was loud, and sustained. Robins and mourning doves I could identify; I didn’t know the rest. Then a few joggers appeared. Renan and Bob Wills used to jog together; that’s one thing everyone in the neighborhood seemed to remember about them.
I felt more alone than at any time since the days immediately after my wife left. Circling the block in the early morning light, I worked myself into a pretty good panic over the prospect of being alone forever.
At 6:30 a.m., I wondered what I could do to make it to 7:30. Then I saw a light in Lou Guzzetta’s kitchen. Maybe he’d come out and walk his dog; I could walk with them—that would occupy twenty minutes or so.
I called Lou on my cell.
“Hi, Lou. It’s Peter.” I was about to say more, but didn’t have to.
“I saw you out walking,” said Lou. “You’re not usually up this early. What’s going on? Do you want to come in?”
I wanted very much to come in.
My face must have revealed fatigue and anxiety because as soon as Lou saw me, he asked what the matter was.
“Woman troubles . . . my friend said good-bye,” I mumbled. Previously, I’d told Lou about my relationship with Marla.
“You’re a mush-mush!” he scolded. “You let these women walk all over you. Show some backbone! Madone! She was no good. I say, ‘Good riddance—you dodged a bullet!’” Then he asked if I’d had anything to eat. I said I wasn’t hungry but he told me to have a seat.
I sat at the table in the little alcove in the front of Lou’s kitchen. Through the sheer cloth curtain that his wife, Edie, had made, I saw more joggers and a few cars pass. Lou’s dog came over and jumped on my leg. It felt good to pet her.
Lou put a plate of toast in front of me, along with jam and butter, and orange juice.
“It’s white bread,” he said. “I haven’t got that whole wheat, nine-grain ba-boom, ba-bah you eat . . .”
As I ate, I told Lou more about what had happened.
He listened, then said, “I’m not a counselor or trained professional. I don’t know what to tell you to do.” He said this in a tone that was quieter, calmer, and more soothing than any I’d heard him use before.
When I was done, Lou said, “You look like shit—pardon my French. Have you slept at all?” I said I’d slept a few hours.
“You need to rest,” he said, and excused himself from the kitchen for a moment. He came back with a bottle of Tylenol PM. “For pain and sleep,” he read from the label. “That would seem to cover it.” He told me to take two.
“Are you alone in the house?” he asked. I said I was. “That’s tough—the being alone.”
“Maybe I could lie down?” I asked.
“Of course, anywhere you like,” he said. “Living room? Library? Upstairs?”
He said if I wanted, I could stay all day. “I’ll be here. I’m not going anywhere. What else have I got to do?”
I thanked him.
“No, don’t thank me!” he said. “You’ll be doing me a favor. I’m all alone here. Just the dog and the fish.”
At the top of the stairs I turned left toward the corner room that had once been shared by two of Lou’s daughters. The night I’d slept over, it had been my room.
It looked exactly the same: twin beds, shag carpet, and on matching dressers, model boats and planes that Lou had made.
In that quiet moment I was able to think about what had happened that morning. I’d been bereft, fatigued, and a little panicky, and in that moment of need, I’d seen a light in my neighbor’s house. Since that first sleepover, Lou and I had come to know each other well enough for me to call him, and for him to invite me in, and for me to accept the invitation.
I didn’t know it that first morning, but for the next week or two—as I absorbed the shock of the breakup—Lou and I would share breakfast at his house almost daily. He was a good listener. He didn’t try to tell me what to do, although I got plenty of pep talks. “Be strong. Don’t be a mush-mush!” he’d say again and again. In turn, I taught him a few things. One morning, Lou bought—“in my honor,” as he said—bagels, lox, and cream cheese, but admitted he didn’t know how to serve them. “Do you eat it all together or do you eat the lox separately?” he asked. I showed him how to put a “schmear” of cream cheese on a bagel and top it with lox. Another morning, I brought pancakes, and another day, granola and soymilk—which, to my surprise, he liked. One morning, Lou and I both put on aprons and washed the dog in the kitchen sink. Just knowing every day that when I awoke there’d be someone nearby to have breakfast with was helpful; often, it was enough to get me through the day.
As I lay in that twin bed upstairs at Lou’s house, I understood that the community of neighbors I’d set ou
t to find, I had found. There were Lou and Deb and Patti and Bill. There was Jamie, who, with her marriage collapsing, was going through her own troubles. There were Brian and Ralph, bringing us the newspaper in the morning and the mail in the afternoon, and there was Grace, still walking through the neighborhood after all those years.
That it would end up being me who would find shelter at a neighbor’s house is something that had never occurred to me when I started my journey, yet there it was. I was grateful to Lou for the breakfast he provided me that morning, for the bed he allowed me to rest in, and—in a larger sense—for the sustenance he provided. That neighborly support, I now understood, is available to all of us.
I was still resting when Lou knocked and came in. His face was soft—even tender—in a way I hadn’t seen before. He held a blanket—it was cold in the room; being so early, the house hadn’t warmed yet.
“Dad’s got an extra blanket for you,” he said.
Lou covered me gently, then left the room and closed the door.
Epilogue
FOLLOWING that morning when Lou took me in, we saw each other often—sometimes daily. We would walk our dogs together; sometimes we would just sit and chat. The back pain Lou suffered gradually worsened. At times, he needed to take four or five pain pills just to get through the day. But he still met his buddies at the Y three mornings a week, still went grocery shopping on Thursdays, and still fixed himself a drink every afternoon around three.
Patti DiNitto didn’t do so well. As her disease progressed, she never got the chance to furnish her dining room; instead, in a sad irony, she ended up living in it. When Patti’s health deteriorated to the point that she could no longer climb stairs, or even walk unaided, her brother, Joe, set up a hospital bed for her in that room.
In The Neighborhood Page 21