My first visitor was a very short woman named Glynnis, who woke me from my nap to ask if I wanted to join the chapter of the American Association of University Women which was meeting at her house.

“We usually have a quick meeting on the second Tuesday of the month, and then we have different activities afterward. This month we have a speaker who’s written a cookbook on the native food of Portugal,” she began. “I’d like you to drop by for some coffee this Tuesday if you’re interested. It will be a good chance to meet some of the women. You’re not by any chance Portuguese, are you?”

This first invitation put me in the miserable position of telling a potato-shaped girl in a tasteless white leather jumper that I hadn’t yet finished college. When she heard this, she wrinkled her upturned nose in what I think was the beginning of a smile, but instead caused her two cheek dimples to deepen. I could see my living room rise and fall in her square glasses, and her black fuzzy caterpillar brows crawled closer together as she blinked. Then she left, with hardly a glance around my newly decorated yellow living room, which I had set up as my major selling point for acceptance here.

Now, I certainly do plan to finish college someday, because I know that you go through life at the emotional level of whatever grade of school you last attended, joining the same groups, doing the same kinds of activities, again and again. And what’s equally interesting is this—I’ve noticed that people will wear a variant of the style of clothing they wore in their last year of school for the rest of their lives, because that was when they felt the best about themselves. It’s strange but true, and you don’t have to be terribly perceptive to notice it. For example, Jack still wears khaki pants and loafers without socks, because he graduated from college in 1965; Glynnis’s white leather jumper, on the other hand, was a variation of the Villager tweeds she had worn when she graduated from a New England girls’ college in 1963. Her efficiency and assurance in walking up to the house of a total stranger on a rainy, blowy, private morning in April was obvious after graduating cum laude with a researching degree in Library Science. And my response—to retreat like a rumpled question mark into the kitchen for tea, wearing my dirty brown bathrobe and plaid babushka—was the direct result of getting only as far as my first semester of night school at an inner-city college in a disintegrating oil town on the Delaware River. And, like a disoriented freshman, thinking everybody cared.

It’s always the same after first grade: In every group there is always the smartest one and the prettiest one, the popular one and the bad one, and I wondered who would hold these positions in this neighborhood. After Glynnis left, I filled the teapot and came back to the living room that she hadn’t been interested in, and looked it over once more for possible flaws. I moved a little cup of strawflowers over to the table by the window, and as I did, I saw Glynnis stop short at her mailbox as a long Mercedes whizzed by the curb. It was going awfully fast on this carefully sleepy street and the wind that curled up behind it blew some of the mail out of Glynnis’s hand onto the lawn. She turned her whole body sharply, like a fist, to stare at the car before she bent to pick up her mail. I moved three books over to the table next to the flowers so that the arrangement would look a little more intellectual, and waited to see if the car would come back up the street. The teapot whistled first, and I went in and made tea, checking my Salada fortune: “Life is what happens while you’re making other plans.” If there is reincarnation, I know Shakespeare is now writing for Salada. I brought my tea into the living room and sat in one chair and then another, checking on the look of the room from each one. If someone ever came over for coffee, I’d have her sit facing the fireplace. Just for insurance, I pulled the footstool over a little closer so she wouldn’t have to lean so far to reach for the sugar. As far as I could see, my room looked inviting … I had everything set just so … now all I needed was a friend.

Unlike Glynnis, I personally would never miss the chance to look around someone else’s living room for ideas, and I’ve even collected for the Mother’s March of Dimes and gone Trick or Treating with the kids last year just to look in the entry foyers, halls, and living rooms of the other houses in the neighborhood. I know that Glynnis, for example, has gray wall-to-wall carpeting with a blue Chinese rug on top of it, and a small collection of Delft on the mantel that she gathered herself from her year abroad, and she easily gets three times the mail that I do.

Sherry, our prettiest neighbor, is in the Junior League and always wears good jewelry. She has a house cleaner than the Avon Lady’s, with a brilliant dewy kitchen floor that glows with an inner light. She has living-room curtains that match her Queen Anne fireplace chairs and two shy daughters that her decorator once said look like fine Madame Alexander dolls. I can see through the trees at the back of our property into her back yard, and on Wednesdays I’ve often talked across the line to Rosa, her cleaning lady, as she struggles to hang up Sherry’s Princess Grace queen-sized sheets without letting them drag on the ground. When she bent into the laundry basket, I was close enough to see her bikini underpants through her beige stretch slacks, and they were decorated with a tiny black hand cupping each cheek. I once read somewhere, probably on a Salada tea bag, that a true sign of maturity is when you really know how to do something perfectly, yet you keep your mouth shut and let the other person learn for herself. One windy day before she was fired for ruining the laundry, Rosa paused over a slapping sheet, took a clothespin out of her mouth, and turned it slowly, as if it were a corncob pipe, before telling me, “Be careful. That big old house at the end of your street is up for sale.” The big house is right next door to the Avon Lady and it has giant double front doors of paneled wood that are polished to a coffin sheen, lit at night with twin carriage lanterns. Rosa thinks everything important depends on what type of person owns the biggest house in a town.

Rosa was hired next by the Avon Lady, who looks like Doris Day with snow-white hair. She is president of the Neighborhood Alliance for Sports and Safety, and has a smooth slate foyer that she waxes. Through shuttered saloon doors I once saw her mahogany dining-room table, and it was completely covered with her tennis trophies. The next-to-the-last time I ever wore the babushka was the day the Avon Lady came. I was trying to be dressed by ten o’clock or so, which was when Glynnis had first shown up and which was, I assumed, the beginning of proper visiting hours. But some days were harder than others. On that particular day I was planning to look as groomed as a secretary in the morning for Jack when he came home from work, so I’d rearranged my nap and Toby’s bath and took my shower while he had his morning nap. Then, I put on the scarf after I’d washed and set my hair so that he wouldn’t spit his milk onto the rollers. He used to have a sort of projectile form of colic, and the Avon Lady rang the doorbell just as he’d finished a long, warm breast of milk.

She was wearing a white pique dress with rose scallops at the neckline, like Tricia Nixon, and the bodice stood away from her body as if it were lined with shirt cardboard. Toby was beginning to doze and burp quiet dabs of oatmeal down my shoulder when she finally finished her presentation and tilted her wooden case closed with a smart rap that woke him up again. She turned the invoice warily toward us with a long, clean fingernail, and after I signed it, she wiped her pen off carefully before putting it back into her bag. Somehow she convinced me to buy four kinds of soap and perfume, and some sachet that came in a container shaped like a bunch of grapes, even though our payment booklet for the new furniture was as thick and dense as a slice of white bread.

A few months later, she left a big flowered bag of perfume in my mailbox and I found it stuffed in the back when I went out in the rain for the mail. A large ambulance, framed by a fine steady mist, was coming back up the street from the direction of the new house.

“Someone down the end of the street must have a serious problem,” Glynnis said from under her neon green slicker. The ambulance had been coming back and forth once every week, swiftly and silently, like the messages that were being circulated about it.

I took my Avon bag back into the house and put on some water for tea and looked around my kitchen with a stranger’s eye to criticize the things a neighbor would see if one ever came into my house as far as the kitchen. A little spaghetti sauce had dribbled down the front of the stove and the cabinet doors were still only half painted. The begonias on the windowsill were dried out and dead, even though all the rain they would ever need was sliding, dribbling down the glass just inches in front of them. They were a species of Begoniaceae tantalus from my gardening neighbor, who lives on the other side of me. She has a harelip and a constant cold. She is secretary of the League of Women Voters, and she told me the begonias needed more water. This was on the day she brought over a sickly little plant and asked me to put it on a corner of my porch that gets a special slant of sun in the late afternoon, and then she asked if I would please bring it back if it started to revive.

So I watered it and looked in my gardening encyclopedia for a clue to what it was, so we’d have something in common to talk about when she wanted it back. All I could be sure was that it wasn’t something whose name began with A because so far I only had received volume one of The Wonderful World of Plants. This plant was covered with a dusty web of hairs or strings, and some of them were growing down the side of the pot, with an occasional bug or brown bead of growth on one of the strings. I turned it every day and I also brought all the begonias into my kitchen and put them at the window where I spend most of my time.

The gardening neighbor spends most of her time in the greenhouse she built herself off of her kitchen window, where she eats endless green beans and reads garden catalogs and mystery novels. One day I carried over to her all the gory murder mysteries that the original owners of my house, a widow and her sister, had left behind in the basement. That was when she told me that a new, very mysterious woman was moving into the big house down the street.

“I think they’re very eccentric,” she said. “The wife is supposed to be an artist or something, and he’s a doctor. Rosa thinks they’re loaded. They’ve even had the house fumigated and it’s almost brand-new.” Her hair was pulled behind her ears, which were covered with fine, dark hairs, like a kiwi.

She took a long bean string out of her teeth, laid it across the page she was reading, closed the book, and leaned forward. “I hear they’re from California, which is too bad.” I watched her stained, stubby fingers as she untied the pile of murder mysteries I’d brought her, and I realized that this opportunity might be the closest I could get to having a real friend in this neighborhood. You needed someone to talk to here, I was beginning to realize. People walked their babies in pairs, or played tennis in doubles, or shopped in car pools. She was separating the books into piles. “I think there’s going to be something pretty fishy about the new couple. Don’t ask me why—it’s just a hunch, but I can feel it in my bones,” she said. “Here—these I’ve already read.” She began binding up half the pile to give back. “The one about the Moors murders is great! Gives details. I need your finger—” While I held down the knot she was tying tightly around and under my index finger, she said, “Frankly, I never trust anyone under thirty, and I haven’t been wrong so far.” I thought it best not to tell her I was twenty-three, and didn’t. The knot squeezed smoothly off my fingertip. The leaves of the Wandering Jew in the basket above her head waved gently in the soft breeze from the greenhouse fan, and I realized she could see through the Dieffenbachia along the wall into my own empty window to the brown begonias dying there. And she could probably see me in there, too.

I can’t tell you how upset it gets me when a plant I’ve tried to grow starts to die. I consider it a sign of my personal worthlessness—that not even a measly begonia will succeed for me. These in particular were especially demanding, which is why I put them near the sink. I trimmed them, and thinned them, and finally put them into deep saucers to hold extra water, but still they lost limbs each day like lepers. Then I did a terrible thing to them that still worries me: Once I saw them wilting, looking ugly, slipping, I stopped trying to keep them alive. I stopped watering them, but meanwhile, pretended to be concerned, and so they had no choice then but to die, because I had determined to kill them off once they showed weakness. I thus eliminated the element of suspense and gave myself at least the power of death over them. This worries me, of course, and that’s because I am a mother.

Nurturing is my business. I brought my tea to the table in the corner of my kitchen and sat down in my chair, which allows me to have my back against the wall so that I can see out of two different windows, and three if I bend around. I am like a giant eye when I’m sitting there in my chair. I can see what is going on on two different streets outside, for a total of six houses, as well as who is coming up on my back porch. I can see Toby crawling around the corner after his nap, Debbie at the bus stop, and anyone else coming into the kitchen, pet or person, including my aunt, who strolls in each morning just as I settle down with my second cup of tea. She berates me for my laziness. She knows I keep the same sheets on the bed for months, and then vacuum the grit off them, rather than change them. She knows I eat most of the hot dog and give Toby the roll for lunch, and that I have never washed my hairbrush since I moved away from her. And she doesn’t approve. My worst grades in school were always in self-control, and ironically, that’s the one quality you need if you’re going to stay home for a living.

The only other place to sit in the kitchen is by the phone. Now, if the phone rings, it is important always to sound busy. If I’ve been taking a nap, I will still climb out of bed and go into the kitchen to talk on the phone there, so that I can wake up a little on the way, rather than just reach across the bed for the phone. It is very important never to admit that you were taking a nap. Before I was married, Art, my boss, used to call home to his wife at different times of the day to catch her, and then when he hung up, he’d always take the shredded end of the cigar out of his mouth and say, “Damn! All she ever does is sleep.” Everyone in the office would look up and there she’d be in the middle of us, stretching and yawning under the fluorescent lights, a creature from another world with pillow creases scarring her cheeks like a Yoruba maiden. When I finally met her at a party, even though her hair was neat and shiny and her eyes were clear, I looked at her with the cynical reserve I feel for alcoholics in new suits. With no warning at all, I expected her to reel over to the couch and sleep it off.

You see, the big problem with staying home is the lush, sensual thickness of the job, which can be more dangerous to the alert than a dreamy lotus field stretching into the haze. I think my problem with being frigid began after Debbie was a baby and only got worse when Toby was born. I can physically love these babies so much more than I can love Jack—they are softer, rubbed with oils; they always smile when I come to pick them up and cling like monkeys to my neck, full of Johnson & Johnson’s finest perfumes. So whenever you answer the phone at home, you must lie convincingly about what it is you’ve been doing. I’ve learned through experience that you can sleep only if you’re coming down with something; eat only if you’re tasting dinner; read, only rarely, by first mentioning that you’ve already done three loads of wash and are merely waiting for the rinse cycle; masturbate, never.

Now, after the orientation period of that first summer, it was obvious that the women in this neighborhood were all of life’s seniors and graduate students, and I felt left out, bruised, called upon only to perform errands and baby-sit scraggly plants. I was grateful when September finally came to begin shutting me in for the winter. On this particular morning Debbie, who still seemed like a piece of me, was waiting at the bus stop for her kindergarten bus and I was therefore more concerned at the window than ever, watching her. I had been in the neighborhood for five months now and still hadn’t made a single friend, so the phone never rang and my day was very quiet, but it was the quiet of neglect, of the world keeping away. It was going to be a cold rainy September, the Farmer’s Almanac predicted, perfect for sleeping, and all the windows were already closed, trapping the weather outside. Every sound was muffled. It’s funny, but when the leaves fall and the windows close, you can see so much farther. I can add three or four more houses to my line of vision, but it seems a little unreal because I hear less. Then just the opposite thing happens in the spring, when the leaves block the view and through the open windows you can hear voices, preternaturally near, but unseen. This effect is what makes Zhivago foolhardy and desperate as he runs over the dreaming snow and keeps Ramar wily and cautious as he creeps through the whispering underbrush.

The rain was falling lightly and the closed screen behind the window was full of raindrops, making a Mondrian pattern of rainbow squares that reflected my face again and again, as if I were looking into a giant faceted bee’s eye. While my tea was cooling, I tilted back in my chair past the dead begonias, and moved the green gingham curtain aside a little so I could see more clearly up to the end of the street, where the bus would enter the neighborhood. A brown spider that was hidden in a fold in the curtain was shaken loose and dropped down in front of me onto the pane of glass and then pulled itself back up to its web in the corner. The web vibrated, the spider curled up tight, and I sipped my tea, waiting, when suddenly I saw in the drops what looked like a hundred women walk up to Debbie at the bus stop. I blinked away the bee vision and saw the real Maggie for the first time, framed by the wooden spokes of the window, and I knew then and there that I would have just one last chance to make a friend in this neighborhood. 🏠

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next *☞ Chapter Four 🏠