In The Neighborhood Read online

  I asked Deb if she’d be willing to talk with me, let me get to know her by hanging around on a typical day, and to write about it. I didn’t mention the sleeping over part; it would sound too weird coming right at the start. Deb seemed interested and said she’d talk it over with Dave, who was out of town on business, and call me back in a few days.

  A full week passed and I didn’t hear from her, so I called back. Deb asked if I could come over again—when Dave would be home—to meet with them both together.

  My son once described Dave O’Dell as looking like the actor Robert Redford, and later, when I mentioned it to Dave, he said he’d been told that before. He was a large man—6 foot 4 inches, 220 pounds—a full foot taller than his wife. Dave had a ruddy face, strong jaw, and hair so blond it was nearly luminous. The three of us—Dave, Deb, and I—sat around the kitchen table. I repeated my proposal and emphasized again, as I had earlier with Deb, that I’d already interviewed and spent considerable time with Lou Guzzetta. That seemed to reassure Dave, and prompted him to tell a story about his one encounter with Lou. “It was about a year after we’d moved in,” Dave began in his strong, deep voice, “and I’m washing windows on the front of the house. I’m up there on the ladder with my back to the street and I hear this big, booming voice behind me: ‘Please! You shouldn’t be doing that. You’re crazy!’ I look down and it’s this older guy. ‘You gotta let a professional do that,’ he says. ‘One slip, one fall, and your whole life is over!’ ”

  So did Dave still wash the windows himself?

  “Sure I do,” he said with a big laugh. “But now, every time I get on the ladder, I think, ‘Can I do this without Dr. Guzzetta seeing me?’ ”

  Over the course of several weeks, I talked with Deb and Dave together—even watched them one evening play in their weekly co-ed volleyball league—as well as separately. Deb agreed to let me spend all of an upcoming Monday with her, and then, on the Sunday afternoon before, she and Dave agreed that I could sleep over that night.

  A few hours later, I was sitting on a four-poster pine bed in an upstairs guest room in the O’Dells’ house. Deb had welcomed me in, showed me to the room, and invited me to get settled while she finished some laundry, and to come downstairs when I was ready. I hung a clean shirt in the closet, for the next day. There was a wetsuit hanging—must be what Dave wore, I guessed, when he went scuba diving in the Cayman Islands. The room was done up in early American style: blue- and-whitepinstriped wallpaper, yellow-and-blue curtains; a medallion on the side of the bed said the bed was a “reproduction certified by the Museum of American Folk Art.” Very classy; nothing like that in my house.

  Actually, I could hardly believe I was even in that house, let alone as an invited guest. To me, as a child, the people who then lived there—my family’s next-door neighbors—seemed unfriendly, even scary. They had a blind dog, a deaf housekeeper, and they might all have been mute, as far as I was concerned, because I can’t remember a single word any of them—parents or children—ever spoke to me. Retrieving a basketball from their front yard was only a little less frightening than running up to touch Boo Radley’s front porch.

  Years later, when I asked my dad what was going on between us and the Prewitts—I’m changing their name here—he gave a couple of different explanations. One was that when he built our house, to meet the town code, he had to raise the level of our backyard a few feet. “We had to bring all this dirt over to cover the basement,” he told me, “but it also covered their fence. Apparently, they had not conformed to the regulations. That was the first falling-out we had with them.” This part, evidently, was accurate because even today some sections of the metal fence that runs between my backyard and the O’Dells’ were less than two feet high—the rest was buried. But at other times my dad suggested that the Prewitts were just not thrilled to have us move in next to them. Whether this was true or not, I didn’t know. “She was a society matron,” my dad said, speaking of Mrs. Prewitt. “Every year over there, she’d have her Vassar Club luncheon.” My dad grew up poor and couldn’t afford to go to college. “They lived in a different world,” he continued. “We didn’t bother with them and they didn’t bother with us.”

  A twist to this story is that, after my parents and the Prewitts retired, they both, by chance, moved to the same apartment building. One day I went over to visit my parents, and when the lobby elevator door opened, there standing inside were my dad and Mr. Prewitt—he was steadying himself with a cane—both in their eighties, riding side by side in silence. Neighbors, one might say, to the end.

  And there I was, on a Sunday evening, a guest in the Prewitts’ former home, resting on a four-poster bed.

  Downstairs, I found Dave in the family room at the back of the house watching TV while he and Cayman played tug-of-war with a knotted rope toy. He wore jeans and a CAYMAN ISLANDS T-shirt. Soon Deb appeared holding a pile of folded laundry, which she was going to put away upstairs. A few minutes later, she returned in sweat clothes, ready for a workout in the basement gym.

  In the family room, Dave and I watched some more TV, mostly without talking. He sat in a big, leather easy chair. When Deb came up from the basement, we all watched a little of the eleven o’clock news, then climbed the winding staircase together—Deb, Dave, Cayman, and I. On the way up, Dave warned me about the alarm system.

  “Whatever you do,” he said in his deep voice, “don’t go downstairs in the morning until we turn the alarm off. It’s got a motion detector and it’s really loud; you don’t want to hear it.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Deb. “You don’t want to hear it. It’s ugly.”

  At the top of the stairs, we said good night. They turned left into the master bedroom, along with Cayman. I turned right into the guest room, then went to a bathroom down the hall to wash up.

  The bathroom was probably original with the house: the shower stall and tub were made of thick white marble. The wallpaper had a circus motif: pen and-ink drawings of acrobats, clowns, a circus train, and elephants marching in a row connected trunk to tail. I could imagine a child brushing his teeth there, losing himself in the intricacy of that circus design, and wondered if the wallpaper went all the way back to the Prewitts.

  I unpacked. If it hadn’t been so late, I might have called my parents, just for the fun of telling them I was sleeping overnight in a guest room in the Prewitts’ house.

  “DAVE? Dave?” I called in a stage whisper, leaning over the wooden banister. There was no response. It was quarter past six on Monday morning and I was on the upstairs landing of the O’Dells’ house. I got up at 5:30 because Dave told me he gets up at six and I wanted to be ready to see him when he came out of his bedroom. The problem was the door to Dave and Deb’s room was closed but I didn’t know if he was still in there or if, while I was shaving, he had already gone downstairs. But I couldn’t go down to check because if he hadn’t gone down yet, I’d trip the alarm. I imagined something like those deep blasts from fire trucks followed by Dave and Deb rushing from the bedroom in pajamas, with Cayman in pursuit barking and snapping at me.

  That would not be a good way to start the day.

  I heard a noise, but I couldn’t tell if it was coming from inside Deb and Dave’s room or from downstairs.

  “Dave?” I whispered again.

  There was nothing to do but wait.

  As I did, I found myself contrasting my experiences with the O’Dells and with Lou. For sure, they had welcomed me, but the bond I felt wasn’t as immediate as the one I’d had with Lou. And I didn’t sense that the O’Dells, at least at that point in their lives, needed a sense of community to the extent I did. After all, Deb and Dave were young and recently married, and led full, busy lives that were largely self-contained. Deb didn’t need the YMCA, as Lou did; she had her own workout room in the basement. Dave didn’t need neighbors to help him care for his property; healthy and vigorous, he could handle much of the home maintenance. Their family room was an entertainment center, complete with a large
TV. They didn’t need a neighborhood park; their backyard was large and beautifully landscaped. To look at their hectic schedules, it was a wonder they’d even been able to fit me in for the sleepover. Yet maybe the O’Dells were more typical than Lou of the way many people actually live as neighbors today.

  Finally, at 6:30 a.m., Dave strode out of the bedroom, his hair still wet from the shower. For his job as vice-president of sales and marketing for a Rochester firm that made PC-based cash registers, he wore a button-down shirt, khaki pants, and brown tassel loafers.

  “Good morning,” Dave said matter-of-factly, as if seeing me outside his bedroom door first thing in the morning were a regular occurrence. He hurried downstairs with the dog, calling over his shoulder, “I’ve gotta take Cayman out to the bathroom!” Half a minute later, he was back with the morning paper. He wiped his feet, wiped Cayman’s feet, and then filled Cayman’s food bowl. Dave was gentle and attentive with Cayman; it was easy to imagine he’d be good with kids.

  In the kitchen, Dave grabbed a doughnut and a can of Mountain Dew. He said it was his regular breakfast. He stuffed the soda in a pocket of his black leather jacket, wished me a good day, and left the house. As he backed quickly out of the driveway in his Ford SUV, I checked my watch: it’d been just seven minutes since he came out of the bedroom.

  I waited in the kitchen for Deb to come down. On the table stood a greeting card. The outside read: “For the Beautiful Woman Who Shares My Life.” It was a Valentine from Dave, still displayed nearly a month after the holiday. Deb and Dave would soon celebrate their fifth anniversary. They had met while both were working at Bausch & Lomb, the eye- care company headquartered in Rochester. Deb was in finance and Dave was in sales. Less than two years after they started dating, Dave proposed one summer evening on the upper deck of a Finger Lakes dinner-cruise ship.

  I heard Deb starting down the stairs.

  “Good morning!” she said brightly, stepping into the kitchen dressed in a cotton sweater and khakis.

  Deb prepared breakfast—toasted bagels with cream cheese, banana slices, and tea—and we watched the morning news on a countertop TV. We didn’t know each other well enough to express political views, so neither of us commented.

  The phone rang. “You’re up early,” said Deb. It was her sister, Carol. Deb asked, “Do you want to have dinner over here before paddle?” She meant before their paddle tennis match that evening. She and her sister played as partners in a women’s league and they had a game scheduled that evening at the Country Club of Rochester, which is just around the corner from Sandringham Road.

  While drinking tea, Deb reviewed papers for work. She was recently hired to set up and manage a local office for a Boston-based consulting firm, and she was expecting, sometime early this morning, a call from her boss. The downtown office Deb had rented for the firm wasn’t ready yet, so she still worked at home.

  Done with breakfast, she went upstairs to her second- floor study, a small room with desks on either end—one for her and one for Dave. I sat at Dave’s desk and swiveled around to watch Deb work. Her manicured nails clicked rapidly across the keyboard as she logged on to the desktop computer and filled in last week’s time sheet. Typically, Deb worked nine to ten hours a day, but often much longer when her boss visited in town or she had other meetings. “I love what I do,” she told me. There were days, she confessed, when if Dave wasn’t home, she might work all night. As it was, she often slept just six hours. “I can be up till midnight working on a business plan for a client,” she said, “then up at five thirty, and on the computer by six thirty or seven, e-mailing stuff for clients. Honestly, even walking the dog is frustrating sometimes because I have to stop working.”

  When away from work, Deb often got “itchy.” In the Cayman Islands, she said, “After five days, I’m ready to come home. I go nutty. Dave could stay longer. His parents stay a month and we get along great, but there’s nothing to do. His family competes to see who reads the most books.” On their last trip, Dave read three spy thrillers; Deb read half of a book on high-tech marketing.

  Just then, Cayman came into the study with the bristle end of my toothbrush sticking out of his mouth. I’d forgotten that earlier that morning I’d left it on top of my suitcase, intending to brush after breakfast. Good- naturedly, Deb asked if I would like to brush now.

  While she waited for her boss to call, Deb e- mailed clients and colleagues.

  Moments later, the phone rang.

  “Hello!” said Deb with a broad smile. It was her boss. She brought a large sheet of lined paper—her to-do list—to the top of a pile of memos, notes, and proposals.

  “I just got a call from that gene therapy guy,” Deb told her boss. “I submitted the proposal to him last Friday.”

  The “gene therapy guy” was a local cancer researcher. Deb’s firm provided business advice to start-up companies, most of them in biosciences and information technology, and this new local company would be a good client.

  “Do you want me to do anything there?” she asked her boss. “Sure, I’ll take the number if you have it.”

  Deb displayed an impressive self-confidence to let me listen in on her business calls. I was amazed how focused she could be with an observer in the room, especially one scratching notes in a reporter’s notebook.

  DEB O’Dell grew up in Fulton, New York, a small town north of Syracuse. Her father, though he never went to college, rose to become head of financial services for the town’s biggest employer, Nestlé Company. “So we always had chocolate in the house,” Deb recalled earlier. From an early age she knew she wanted a career in business. “When I was young,” she recalled, “Dad and I talked sports, and then as I got older, we talked business. He was my inspiration.”

  Deb remembered her small-town neighborhood fondly. “Growing up, we had great relationships with our neighbors,” she said, “people borrowing things, helping each other out.” Deb’s mother, a retired school teacher, still lived in Fulton. “Since Dad died,” Deb told me, “Mom’s one of three widows on the street, and they all look out for each other.” She said one of the other women lives right across the street and she and her mom have a system where when they wake up in the morning, they raise their window shades so they each know the other is okay. “And if someone comes to her house and Mom’s not sure who it is,” said Deb, “she’ll call the lady across the street to see if she can identify the person.”

  Deb’s father died when Deb was still in her twenties, but given her rapid rise after college as a business analyst, he at least lived to see the beginnings of his daughter’s successful career.

  ON the phone, Deb and her boss moved quickly from one business topic to another. In her right hand, she twirled a pink ballpoint pen between two manicured fingers. The effect was of a teenager wrapped around the phone, lost in the emotional intensity of the call.

  “Yup, yup . . . yup,” she said. “Okay. Yup . . . all right. I have a feeling this is going to be a big meeting, just a brain dump on these people.”

  “Okay, we’re going to continue later this afternoon, right? Great!”

  Deb hung up and straightened herself in the chair. “My to-do list is getting doubled after that call,” she said with mock complaint.

  After hardly a minute’s break, she called a prospect in Buffalo.

  Then her cell phone rang.

  “Hello, this is Deb.”

  AT 10:30, there was a momentary lull in Deb’s phone traffic.

  “You know,” I said, “with reasonable certainty, I think I can tell you where Lou Guzzetta is and what he’s doing at this exact moment.”

  I had remembered that 10:30 is when Lou took his morning nap. I was curious how Deb would respond, whether she’d find my reference to our neighbor to be of any interest.

  “Really?” she asked. “So what do you think he’s doing right now?”

  “Well, I think he’s in a cozy room—he calls it ‘the library’—at the front of his house,” I said, “lying on hi
s back on a black leather sofa, taking a nap. There’s a program of international news on the TV, but he’s not listening, and Heidi, his schnauzer, is sitting on a leather armchair in the corner.”

  “I know that dog,” said Deb. “I’ve seen him in the window barking when I walk by.”

  For a moment, I felt a calm overtake Deb’s study.

  “So how do you know all that about Lou?” she asked.

  I reminded her I’d spent a day with Lou inside his house, just as I’m doing now with her.

  After a pause, she said, “That’s so cool that you know that.”

  Then her cell phone rang.

  “Hello, this is Deb.”

  The call was brief. Afterward, I asked why she said it was cool to know that Lou was napping.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “As I walk by all these houses, I sometimes wonder what’s going on in them. I guess that he was taking a nap just shows all the things we have in common—I mean, everybody naps sometimes—but it also shows how different we are ’cause I would never nap at ten thirty in the morning.”