The Arrival of The Inevitable: Someone New Across The Hall

Some time ago, about the time I discovered Lainie was moving out from across the hall and Chad was moving out upstairs, I made a resolution: I will not meet any more neighbors in The Old Dutch Village. It’s simply too time consuming. Even with Lainie gone (well, not gone, just not across the hall. We still talk and text just about daily and get together when work schedules permit) and Chad no longer emailing me writing samples to look at and driving me nuts with his parade of ridiculously young women traipsing through the stairwell at exactly the same moment I’m struggling with laundry baskets or groceries, there’s still The Probation Officer whose dog I walk every morning, The Odd Girl Downstairs who’s taken to showing up from seemingly nowhere every time I’m outside or in the foyer and asking, “Hey, how’s it going?”, the Social Worker going through a nasty divorce whose woes I volunteer to listen to just about every other evening, all the ladies in Book Club, Bill and our year-round a.m. banter as I leave for work and he walks back to his place from the exercise room, and at least a dozen other people I’ve met because you can’t help but meet people when you’re outside as often as Basil requires.

It was inevitable and it happened on Saturday, as I was leaving for work. I opened the door and immediately was nearly thrown back into my place by a large bookshelf on its way into Lainie’s old place. The new tenant had arrived, and from the initial looks of things, arrived with at least as much furniture as I had three years ago before I came to my senses and started giving away little things like ginormous china cabinets, antique cupboards, and ottomans I couldn’t place unless I suspended them from the ceiling. As it turned out there was a man behind the bookcase and he stepped around it long enough to apologize for taking up the hallway.

“Not a problem,” I said, somehow wedging myself past it and down the stairs. “Welcome to the building.”

“Oh, it’s not me,” he said, assuming I’d seen the new tenant when in fact I hadn’t yet, “it’s just her and the kids.”

‘Her’ appeared on the step a moment later, trailed by Bryan, the condo’s owner. He gave me a big smile and made a quick introduction. “Madeleine,” he said, “This is Reynelle. Reynelle, Madeleine’s the best neighbor we ever had!” From anyone else this would have sounded, well, cheesy. Coming from Bryan, it was probably heartfelt. As I remembered it, I was about the only person in the building they spoke to, and the only one they gave cookies to at the holidays.

“I’m happy to meet you,” she said. “I am SO lost! I don’t know where the store is, I don’t know where the school is, I don’t know where ANYTHING is….”

“She’s not from here,” Bryan explained, at which point she quickly interjected that she was from a very small town in the southern end of the state. “Don’t worry,” he added, reaching for his keys in a clear sign he needed to go soon, “Madeleine can help you out with anything you need.”

Except, I thought but didn’t say, anything personal. I just don’t want to get into another Best Neighbor Best Friend thing.

“Well anything,” I told her honestly, “that can be fixed with duct tape and a butter knife. And if my dog,” I added, gesturing over my shoulder to the faint sound of sporadic yips from Basil, who had clearly discerned some sort of gathering outside and her unjust absence from it, “is too loud, let me know. She’s generally not home if I’m not, but still.”

“No problem!” Reynelle said, “and if my boys are too loud, let me know.”

“You have kids?” I remembered Bryan mentioning something about that, having shown the place to someone with kids. It was unusual only because you just don’t see many kids in the Old Dutch Village. Very few, actually. The handful of bicycles around are ‘weekend bicycles’, basically left at Grandma’s or Grandpa’s house for weekend visits.

“A six year old,” she said, “and a two year old.” She rolled her eyes. That’s when I surveyed her a bit more closely, doing the math on Lainie’s boys, 11 and 13, and her own age of very early thirties. Reynelle did not, by any stretch of the imagination, and even with a plastic daisy haphazardly stuck into a brown ponytail trailing just past her shoulders, look to be in her thirties. She looked, I thought, at least my age. And she had a two year old, which meant (I quickly did some very ridiculously basic math, the only kind I’m good at) that at the point in life when most women have completely let go of whatever baby urges they’d ever had, knowing full well it might be possible but it would be exhausting, she was just getting started. Either that or she’d succumbed, as many do, to the notion that perhaps having another baby would save a marriage. From the looks of things, she was doing the whole parenting thing alone, which as I knew from objective observations wasn’t an easy thing at all. This made me feel a bit compassionate for her, dangerous because that meant I’d probably want to befriend her, and get to know her.

“I’m divorced,” she said, offering up, as women do, way too much information in the first two minutes of talking with another female. “Very friendly, though. He’s helping me move in.”

“Happens to the best of us,” I agreed. “I’m glad he’s helping you. My ex actually painted the whole place after I bought it,” I said. “That wasn’t a fun job.”

“It’s good to be friends.”

I nodded. “Brent and I are the kinds of friends who talk on the phone every once in a while, are around for emergencies and that’s really about it. It’s easier that way, all around.”

“No kids?”

“One,” I said, gesturing again, “and from the sounds of things, I’d better get back to her. Her name’s Basil and please, don’t hesitate to let me know if she bugs you.”

“Oh honey,” she said, with a broad not unpleasant smile and a twist of an accent I caught momentarily but couldn’t place, “with all the chaos in my life your dog could give birth to a litter of puppies on my doormat and I wouldn’t even notice.”

A sense of humor, too. I was relieved to have to get inside and get ready for work. Already I had compassion for her situation, appreciated her sense of humor, and even, in my own way, liked that she was the kind of person who obviously understood that when life gets chaotic the best you can do sometimes is throw a plastic flower into your ponytail and roll with it. As far as neighbors went, she might not be so bad.

I hoped I wouldn’t find out, though. One more person to visit with every time I step outside is going to immensely cut into any available time in my day. I needed to stick to my resolve against forming additional friendships….or maybe, I thought, when she gave me a smile and a wave, face the inevitable, get up earlier and stay up a bit later, to add more time to my day.