Our Neighbors Do Not Exist

There have been times in our homeowner lives that we have wished that our neighbors did not exist....but right now -- there ARE NO neighbors. It's wierd. Our neighbors do NOT live next door.

I mean we do have *some* neighbors. Bob and Edith are fine, great, except for their perpetual surgeries. Karen-who-can't-believe-that-a-man-with-a-ponytail-bought-the-house-next-door and her family who live behind us seem fine. We see them pull into and out of their driveway each day like the suburban clockwork we all long to be. The multi-generational family squeezed miraculously into John & Brenda's old house seems to be thriving...based on the number of cars stretching down the driveway, they're ALL in there.

But its Tim & Pam's house that's the curious one. We immediately liked Tim and Pam when we moved in six years ago. Tim was a Harley dude who just happened to have a job working for Lear. (Tim was not one of these executives in midlife crisis who bought a bike as a way to "consume" the lifestyle. Tim was the REAL DEAL.) Every year they brought up Loud Chistmas present toys that included big engines and blaring country or metal music for the kids, and Tim confided to me on the day I moved in:

"I just want you to know, you don't need to worry about the gunshots when you hear them. I'm just gettin' them damn groundhogs. I always check real careful to make sure that the kids aren't playin' outside or anything."

"Great(?)" I said. "It'll be good to not have to worry about the groundhogs..."

And it was. Great, I mean.

Tim and Pam were very much who they were. They liked to tinker with their bikes. Smoke and drink a beer on the back patio. Ride their bikes any weekend that they could and they were intrigued by the odd professor-types who lived next door and found it so difficult to actually keep their grass mowed.

But they had to move away. Like John and Brenda. The good news is that someone bought the house right away. Tim and Pam heard just before they went that a guy had bought it for his mom, so we kept our eye out for them. Wanted to be sure to bring over a casserole once we met them. You know, chat about the groundhogs. What have you. The stuff neighbors talk about.

The bad news? They never arrived. They occasionally appear to mow the lawn, but i never, even when the lawn is being mowed see them emerge *from* the house. *Or* go back into the house. The lights in their windows are only erratically on and there are never cars in their driveway. Our neighbors do not exist.

We first started hypothesizing about our neighbors back when we were in college. We invented a game -- i don't know why we called it "Ygotaling" (seriously -- what a name!) -- but we walked through suburban streets and sat on pristine sidewalks inventing dark disturbing lives for the people we glimpsed through the windows. We didn't have a clear sense of how stalker-like we were being until a nice suburban golf-shirted man suggested that he could call the police and tell them about the four college studetns sitting on his front sidewalk. And we thought we had been so polite when he asked us what we were doing.

Turns out that you have to have a mortgage in the neighborhood to play Ygotaling safely.

In our first apartment Janine who lived in the apartment two floors above us quickly demonstrated how some people's entire lives became braided with such voyeuristic hypothesizing. I was a librarian / pastor-at-a-little-church and therefore stayed home mostly during the days trying to write the Great American Novel. Whenever I came out to get the mail (at random times during the day) Janine would appear at the mailboxes. She had to have been listening at the door? Poised outside in the hallway? Lying on the floor of her apartment with surveillance equipment waiting for the sound of the opening door below?

She would greet me with news about each of the apartment dwellers around us, and the pump me for information. I tried not to get sucked in -- being a little freaked about the surveillance, but on the other hand, I reasoned, she was a single lady in her early sixties, who, as far as we could tell, never left her apartment, and spent a good deal of her days (given the sounds that we didn't have to listen for) on an exercise bike or a rowing machine (loud rythmic but ambiguous thumping); she was lonely and needed a hobby. I didn't mind being a celebrity to somebody.

So one day I got drawn into her escapades:

JANINE: So do you know what happened to Michelle's job?

ME: Michelle?

(Janine was the only name I knew of all of our neighbors. Everyone was vaguely polite in an absent and removed way; we could tell just from the looks on their faces that one should not offer nor inquire about names. And, being midwestern folks, fresh to the big city, we were extra aware of big - city norms.)

Janine pointed to the apartment behind ours.

ME: Oh. That's Michelle? I never knew that was her name.

(I wondered did Janine have relationships with everyone in the building? Were they all premised upon these same kinds of conversations?)

JANINE: That's what's on her box anyway.

I glanced at the box that she pointed at. MICHELLE - in block type sticker tape.

JANINE: Her car has been leaving later and coming back earlier. Last week it didn't leave at all.

ME: Really? No. I don't know her.

JANINE: Well I just didn't know if she got fired or if she's moving or getting a new job.

Well, Janine, I thought, I'm glad you've narrowed the possibilities a little.

But later, sitting on the rust-coloured velour sofa in our apartment, a little notebook in hand, trying, unsuccessfully, to write anything past the first chapter of (what might have qualified as the worst ever attempt at the) Great American Novel, I became deeply convicted about NOT knowing about Michelle's life. Or her job. Or her name, for that matter.

What if she were just as lonely and new here as we were? What if she were getting eaten alive by some job she couldn't have predicted before she moved here from remote Iowa?

I looked out the screendoor at her car. It was still there.

I walked by it slowly "on my way to walk down to the office" and then again "as I went out to run" and again as I got in the huge black van I drove to pick Lynn up from her stable office job. Sure enough. There was a book on Michelle's back seat, you had to look closely to see it. It took all three passes to recognize the cover, but I knew that book well, What Color Is Your Parachute?. Poor Michelle!

That night I announced to Lynn that we should make cookies for her. Salvation on a bakers plate, offered to all the most desolate. Maybe, I thought out loud to Lynn, we could start a ministry to lonely apartment dwellers. We would start up an association for everyone in the hallway who wanted to join. Except the people across the hall who played that achingly loud metal music at inappropriate times, and thought that they had to yell when they had a fight. Maybe we would exclude them.

We made the cookies that evening and walked them over to her place. She wasn't in. Even though her car was there. I knocked again in the morning. Still nothing. Was she dead inside? How long til we went to the police?

On Friday we bumped into her as we all carried groceries in at the same time (a ritual of much awkwardness and frustration while living in an apartment). She had, indeed just come in from -- Iowa! (Did I have the gift of prophecy or what?) Iowa, that is, where she had a sales call as part of the new job she had taken at a different firm. Her old job had been fine. No, she hadn't lost it, she was just happy to find something better.

We ate the cookies that weekend alone in our apartment as we rented a movie to watch on our VCR.

So you can imagine my surprise when, two nights ago, I glanced down at the living room window next door and ! their Christmas Tree lights were on! I hadn't seen these lights all during Christmas. And it was almost exactly a month later? Are the lights over there on a timer? To try to convince us that people live there? Timers that go off at the wrong time are a sure signal that something shady is afoot.

When we bought our first house, Pat, our next door neighbor met us in the driveway as we moved our hodgepodge of borrowed and inherited furniture into the little bungalow. How nice, I thought, as she came out. Here's the part where our neighbors announce when our housewarming fete will take place. Where they give us a short history of the neighborhood association, share a few anecdotes about the old neighbors -- their foibles and strengths -- all laid out as clever, but polite hints about the priorities of neighborliness here on Bourdon Street.

"Hi, I'm Pat." She said. "Don't mind me. I'm terribly depressed, my daughter just committed suicide, and I just got out of rehab."

Seriously. That was her greeting. So much for a plate of cookies. On the other hand, she turned back toward us on her way back into the house --

"I have a tanning bed in here. Come over anytime to use it."

Well that explains the leathery skin.

The downside to having a neighbor like Pat is that our speculative fiction could barely keep up with the realities that she willingly unfolded for us in our shared driveway whenever we happened to be out at the same time. First, her nephew came to live with you. His name was Jim or Bob or Tom or Tim. We could never remember which three letters. Pat mumbled the name when she introduced him, and he seemed affable about any name you called him. No one else in the family will have him, she explained, as he smiled and listened. He's too much of a drunk. She looked over at him and he shrugged in a pleasantly detached manner. He's a good drunk, though, she assured us.

We finally had opportunity to flex our speculative fiction muscles though when Pat stopped appearing outside at all for almost a month in the summertime. Her gargantuan and ancient Lincoln Continental sat silent in her garage. The only movement in the house was JimBobTimTom (as we grew fond of privately calling him) coming and going by foot to and from the house with large budled up paper bags, and, if we happened to be up in the middle of the night -- 2 or 3 a.m., there was an ominous purple glow that eminated from the back bedroom. The tanning bed was fired up and full bore in the middle of the night.

We decided that probably, JimBobTimTom had killed Pat, affably smiling the whole time, as he was wont to do, and then was slowly removing her remains in paper bags that could be emptied down the street in local dumpsters or in the vast piles of lumber in the paper mill eight blocks away.

Turns out that Pat was on a long drunk, which, after a nice stint at another rehab center, rendered her as happy and energetic as we had ever seen her. She hired all the local affable drunks to come and earn their whiskey money fixing up her already well manicured lawn and front porch. The end result? Several concrete geese kept strict watch over the front lawn changing clothes every time a new holiday season arrived.

So when I saw the eerie lights of the Christmas tree next door two nights ago, I was reminded of everything sinister that a nice suburban property could hide. Who knows what's going on next door? Drug running? Money Laundering? Budding Terrorists? That's the problem with living in this century -- the dangerous ominous neighbors live closer and closer. It makes it hard to get a good nights sleep --with such ominous sinister Christmas Lights shining in the window.

Who is my neighbor anyway? Now I get what they were talking about. Surely these strangers next to me are not supposed to be my neighbors. Anyway, they probably don't exist at all...