Rules for Visiting Read online

  I read the site through from beginning to end, then went back to the beginning and read it again. My fascination rapidly became disappointment that I hadn’t known her. We grew up in different states, but from the posts I learned we’d arrived in New York City the same year, the same month. While I was surviving alone on ramen noodles and taking endless walks in Central Park because I couldn’t afford to do much else, she was apparently hosting notorious dinner parties, not because she was wealthy but because her life seemed charmed. But that’s not fair. Maybe it was charmed, but she also seemed to be kind and made things happen.

  I’ve lived in the same building for ten years and still don’t know the woman across the hall from me. Amber knew all her neighbors, and there was always some fun connection, like the guy downstairs, who was able to get her the orange paint she wanted for her living room because he was a set designer, or the woman upstairs who was teaching her how to sew. One year I tried to copy her—I made banana bread and gave my neighbors poinsettias at Christmas—but it didn’t have the same effect. No one created a friendly neighborhood as effortlessly as Amber. —Claire

  Amber was befriending the neighbors and painting her apartment fun colors while I was struggling to do my laundry. I’d missed out on something, and I wasn’t surprised. I have always assumed others have more and better friends. Amber was an extraordinary friend to many people and I wished I’d been one of them, even if it meant sharing now in the acute pain of the community she’d created.

  What was obvious in post after post was that Amber had a talent for friendship, which, I suddenly understood, was something one could be good at, like cooking or singing. You could be good at being a friend, and no sooner had I had the thought than I knew I was not. I had some friends, but did I have a community? No. Would a group of us someday rent a beach house together and have a weekend of frivolous yet somehow poignant fun? Never. Most of my friends do not know one another, and even if they did, I’m certain they would not consider me the center of anything.

  As I read over and over again the stories of Amber and her character, I tried to imagine myself writing something similar about one of my friends. Or one of them writing about me. I thought of my oldest friend, Lindy, a woman I’ve known since seventh grade. We’d played soccer together in high school, were both in the orchestra, and once had a ferocious argument about whether hot fudge or strawberry topping at Dairy Queen was healthier. We went to different universities, and while I eventually moved back to our hometown, she never did. I see her now and then when she comes back with her children to visit her parents, but we aren’t in touch regularly. I know her to be a kind and creative person who would probably be happy to hear from me if I picked up the phone and called her tomorrow. I consider her a friend based largely on our shared past, but do I really know her? Are we friends or just two people whose paths crossed in childhood, when bonds are more easily formed?

  I knew Amber for one day. Our publicists paired us for a book signing, so we met for coffee before the event. I haven’t found many lasting friends since junior high or high school, but I liked Amber right away. I had this feeling we might become friends, that we would become friends, if it was okay with her. I’m heartbroken that that possibility is gone. —Elizabeth

  Duck Woods

  I live with my father, Earl Attaway. He is eighty and I’m his oldest child. Some years ago, he lost his son, my younger brother, to the West Coast. That is how we say it, a typical locution of my family, meant to make light of the fact that my brother moved far away and never visits. Attaways excel at euphemism.

  My father built our house on Todd Lane the year he turned forty, the year I was born, his only act of practical construction in an otherwise wholly intellectual life. While the house was under construction, my parents lived next door, in the small bungalow now owned by our neighbors, the Fords. I prefer that house, but my father built a two-story brick Colonial for himself and my mother because that was a design admired when they were newlyweds and he wanted to build one. An academic, he wanted to lay bricks. He wanted to work with his hands. It is still the largest house in a neighborhood just now beginning to gentrify. Houses that have survived years of benign neglect are being freshly painted in historically appropriate colors. Yards that have never known anything other than a push mower now have professional plantings and crushed gravel paths.

  I’m a gardener, so theoretically it should make me happy to see all this interest people are taking in their yards. Except it doesn’t because they aren’t; hired landscapers do all the work. To have an interest in gardens without gardening is like having an interest in food without eating. Most of my neighbors just want their property to look nice, that’s all. They want perfect grass, and neat mulch skirts around their trees, and garden beds with color and texture but all of it easy to care for, which means the same four or five evergreen shrubs (genus Juniperus and Thuja, for the most part), mixed with a bit of azalea and hydrangea, maybe barberry and an ornamental grass, planted in repeat groupings. My boss, Blake O’Dell, calls it “LM,” for low maintenance. The other day I passed a house where an ambitious gardener had gone out on a limb and worked some deep red day lilies (Hemerocallis) into the design. It was a good idea, but my first thought was, Those will be gone as soon as the homeowners realize they should be deadheaded daily to maintain a tidy appearance.

  Our neighborhood is called Duck Woods, though I have never seen a duck and there are no woods. It’s triangular in shape, bounded by a railroad on one side, a fast road—by which I mean the speed limit is thirty-five but everyone does fifty—on another, and a river on the third. My father says the area was originally Duck’s Woods, named for an old family in town, and that may be true. No one ever remembers where to put an apostrophe so the s was probably lost over time. The whole area is two miles from the university and just rural enough for chickens, but not rural enough for bonfires; urban enough for sidewalks, but not urban enough for apartment buildings or semidetached houses; suburban enough for everyone to need a car, but not suburban enough for a homeowners’ association to arise and impose maintenance standards.

  My father knows everyone on Todd Lane. He often leaves flowers on doorsteps and treasures the thank-you notes he gets in return. He uses plastic milk jugs for vases, pulling them from the bins at the recycling center. There’s been a story in the paper about it. He cuts off the tops of the jugs, fills them with water and flowers from our weed-choked garden, and sets out, sloshing water everywhere, down his beige pants, onto his white tennis shoes. I asked him once why he couldn’t use jam jars or something smaller. His answer:

  “If you had children, May, you’d know folks don’t want glass on the doorstep. A child could knock it over and get hurt.”

  I know our street in a different way. I know that sometimes it takes the UPS truck half an hour just to go from one end of the street to the other because Todd Lane is full of people in what is called the “purchasing stage” of life: young couples with kids or kids on the way. The boxes range from Pottery Barn to Walmart, but inside the stuff is all the same.

  Duck Woods is a perfect study in the intimacy of half-acre lots, and it isn’t all shared jokes and borrowed baking ingredients. There’s the house that overdecorates for Halloween and the house that overdecorates for Christmas. There’s the house that keeps chickens and the house that keeps a dog outside too much. Across the way and two houses toward the bridge, there’s a woman who has given a section of her yard to a refugee who grows his family’s vegetables there. Meanwhile, across the way and three houses down, there’s a woman who desires a garden worthy of the Anneville spring tour, and is thus waging a desperate effort to conceal the telephone pole in the middle of her backyard—placed there for a through road that was never built—behind a ring of Hicks yews (Taxus x media “Hicksii”), which will grow only to a height of about ten feet, and therefore hide the pole only for those with the vantage point of a hedgehog. Four doors down from her is
a family slowly converting their entire yard into a paved play space for their children. Whether this is to save on landscaping costs or a hope that their son will someday play in the NBA, it’s hard to tell, but the sound of a basketball bouncing on an inexpertly laid court fills the neighborhood most evenings. The wife is skilled at container gardening and says she feels blessed not to have any trees in her yard. She serves as the head of a group that wants to cut down an old oak near a playground on campus. The oak is healthy, but the long perpendicular limbs extending over the play equipment worry her. Arborists have attested to the strength of the wood, other parents have signed a petition saying they enjoy the shade, but she believes it is better to be safe than sorry. The UPS truck stops at her house more than any other, by which I mean it’s a short step from ordering everything online to wanting to butcher an old tree for no good reason.

  Three houses on our side toward the bridge is a woman who keeps five cats indoors and feeds the birds outdoors. I never walk by without seeing three or more of those cats staring morosely out the window, which does not make me sad because my heart is firmly on the side of the birds. I keep Hester inside, too. I do wonder what her house smells like, though. Two doors from us in the other direction is a young family with plastic play equipment always strewn about their lawn, never picked up, the pinks and purples now sun faded. At some point they spray-painted their camellia bushes silver; a project for the children or an attempt at gardening, I don’t know. The house on the corner has wind chimes that sound like dishes being washed, and the other corner house has a private yoga studio in the back that violates the zoning code for this neighborhood, but the only person who might care about that is the woman striving for the garden tour, and since the yoga instructor also has a beautiful bed of roses on her front lawn, she has never said a thing.

  The variety of human creativity expressed in landscaping isn’t always a pleasure, but it is a wonder.

  I try to be a good neighbor. I have never left a pumpkin out past Thanksgiving or Christmas lights up past the first of the year. The backyard is overgrown, true, but I keep the front under control. I rake the leaves and shovel the walk and throw down salt to melt the ice. I know my father tends to keep the neighbors talking for long periods of time and most of his conversations find their way back to World War II or growing tomatoes. He tires people with stories about who used to live in their houses forty, fifty years ago. Everyone seems interested at first, but how many times can you pretend to be impressed by the fact that Mrs. Profitt raised nine children in the two-bedroom bungalow you consider a starter home and plan to live in only until you have another child and move across town to the bigger houses and better schools?

  I suppose people like my father out of some sense that it is right to honor the past. No one says “Negro” anymore, but no one tries to grow a ripe tomato from seed by the Fourth of July anymore either. His age earns him the right to startle people with his vocabulary and hobbies while their babies nap or idle in strollers or tear about the lawn. Like an old cat who drools, he is forgiven. He is ending his life on this street; they are starting theirs. If they notice this framing, they think it poignant. Not for one second do they think they might end their lives here, too, in such modest surroundings, on such a narrow road, on the wrong side of the railroad tracks from the university.

  Fifteen years ago my father converted our basement into a walk-out apartment and gave the rest of the house to me. I suggested swapping. It was clear by then I was back to stay, but I wanted the basement, he could have the house. He refused. So I moved into the room that had been my brother’s. My old room was not an option.

  El Puerto

  One of my friends in Anneville owns Santos’s Garage. Leo Santos respects the care I give my car, a blue Taurus I call Bonnie, and I admire his work, as well as the large banner over the door that announces A WOMEN-FRIENDLY BUSINESS. Leo also owns the Mexican restaurant, El Puerto, at the end of the Wayside strip mall. His parents came to this country when he was six. His father opened the garage and it was his mother’s idea, after observing how women were treated at other garages, to put up the sign. Santos’s did so well, Leo moved his parents to a house just outside of town when they were ready to retire and still had money left over to buy a struggling burrito place and turn it into El Puerto, a nice taqueria.

  Leo is kind and honest and his hours are reliable, unlike Mrs. Kim, the owner of Kim’s Convenience at the other end of Wayside. She repeatedly closes early and will not open the door, even if you point out the time. When some kids spray-painted “In” in front of “Convenience” last summer, I wasn’t as sorry as I should have been.

  Leo says the formula for getting through the week in a small town in a modest job is rhythm and routine, and I think he’s onto something. My routine includes a burrito twice a week at El Puerto, once on Monday after work by myself, and again on Thursday with my father after he gets home. He’s an emeritus professor now, but the university gives him a little closet of an office he still goes to on Thursdays. Leo calls my father “the English professor” and my father calls Leo nothing after I told him “the Mexican mechanic” wasn’t appropriate.

  “It’s a joke.”

  “But Leo is Mexican.”

  “Just ‘the mechanic,’ then?” my father asked.

  “But he’s also a cook,” I said.

  I’m fond of Mexican food and El Puerto is within walking distance of my house. It’s nice to know I can enjoy a beer or two with my dinner and not have to worry about driving home. The restaurant looks out over the Wayside parking lot, which isn’t a great location, though a parking lot view is common in Anneville, as everywhere. We build them for maximum capacity, so most of the time these seas of asphalt, useful to no living organism, just bake in the sun. Actually, parking lots are useful to reporters, who seem to have no trouble finding in them people to interview. Approach the same person at home in their yard, and they’d probably run you off. Get someone standing next to their SUV at Costco, and they’ll make pronouncements about anything.

  Leo and I are the same age and, like me, he cares about what things are called. He dislikes the term “strip mall,” for example. He prefers “shopping center,” and he’s not wrong. Many residential developments give themselves beautiful names not based on reality; why shouldn’t strip malls do the same? In Anneville we have The Cliffs (there are no cliffs in town), Citrus Grove (wrong climate; we are USDA Plant Hardiness Zone 7), and a retirement complex called Sunrise View, though the majority of its windows face west. I was encouraged when a new development called Stonegate Apartments was announced.

  “Now, that’s achievable,” I told Leo.

  “But people want aspirational,” he said.

  As American strip malls go, Wayside is not bad. It’s old-fashioned in the sense that the signs are all different colors and typefaces rather than coordinated. Parking lots are sometimes landscaped with small trees—crepe myrtle (Lagerstroemia) is popular—and I will always park near one when I can, like a rabbit aiming for a copse in a cleared field. But the Wayside lot doesn’t have any. The land behind it, however, descends into a hollow, a lovely partially wooded dell, where the air is always cooler and flocks of birds fill the trees. I often hear starlings chattering away in there. On the far side of the hollow the land rises to the edge of Duck Woods. Years ago someone must have scattered a wildflower seed mix in the meadow because there are some nonnative species that thrive until the city mows in the fall. The whole dell, meadow plus the wooded area, isn’t much larger than a football field.

  In May, a crew with construction equipment spent a day breaking up a sizable portion of the parking lot in front of El Puerto. People made political jokes—“Building your own wall? El pequeño muro?”—but I thought it must be a water or gas main problem. Then a banner went up that said OUTDOOR DINING COMING SOON!

  I recognized Leo’s work. Later I learned he’d gotten permission to extend his
dining area outside by giving up the parking spaces in front of the restaurant and paying a small municipal fee. His vision was to create the feel of sidewalk dining, which existed elsewhere in town, mainly on campus, where the fancier restaurants are. He did most of the work himself and within a few weeks the area in front of El Puerto had a low wooden deck with tables hugging the restaurant and a high counter with stools facing the parking lot. He installed some lights around the area and bought red table umbrellas and votive candles. He has a good sense of design and the result was nice, surprisingly elegant for a strip mall. He named it “El Puerto Promenade,” and when he opened with a free taco night, the line stretched all the way across the parking lot.

  The Taurus

  There’s a place in Anneville, the light at the corner of University and Main, where I can put Bonnie in neutral, take my foot off the brake, and she won’t move forward or backward, not one inch, because it is absolutely flat. I pointed this out to my father on our way to El Puerto on the last Thursday in May. I’d picked him up at his office because his car was in Leo’s garage. He seemed interested in my observation, but then behind us someone’s tires squealed and he said something odd.

  “Never has a country so in love with the automobile driven it so poorly.”

  I braced myself. My father has a way of making the universal feel personal. “What do you mean?”

  “We no longer really walk anywhere or sail.” He cleared his throat, and I wondered if he’d been planning this speech. “The spirit of flying is dead, space exploration is a joke. Our affair with the car, however, continues. The names alone express all our hope for adventure and riches. Look at that.”

  We were behind an Expedition. In front of us, one lane over, was a Sable.