Neighbor Danger

Lori White

We’d lived on Furman Avenue for nearly a year before I met our neighbor, Moe, next door. I’d spied his old El Camino between the thick hedge that divides our houses, felt the rumble of its engine each morning at nine when he started it up and took off, not to return until evening. I’d catch a glimpse of him behind the wheel, his aviator glasses and narrow mustache. That was all I’d seen of him, and that was enough. 

I never wanted to live in this neighborhood. I missed our trailer by the lake where, from my desk, I could watch the deer and the hawks and the feral black cat drag squirrels and gophers into its den behind our wood pile. There were no blinds to close or lawns to water, no blue recycle cans, no gardeners every Wednesday to mow and blow. And no neighbors. Now, the most entertainment I got was obedient parents pushing their kids on tricycles and a man in a beige windbreaker walking his yellow Lab twice a day. And Moe next door. Moe and his El Camino. Moe who stopped leaving his house back in September. Now he sat in his garage and watched the same sidewalk I did. He waved when I pulled in the driveway, and I politely waved back on my way to more important business: dogs to let out, groceries to unload, dinner to cook. I’d been making up stories about my neighbor stranger and why he no longer drove the El Camino. With so little to feed on in our neighborhood, I was reluctant to relinquish those stories I dished up in my head. 

The truth is, I have a way with strangers, which is also to say I have very few friends. Strangers are temporary, disposable after they’ve answered a few of my questions, like the checker at the grocery store who just beat cancer or the tattooed girl at the AM/PM who’s two years sober and likes to call me Honey even though she’s easily twenty years younger than I am. I get enough answers to start a story in my head, without having to answer any questions in return. One friend of mine (I have a total of three, all a plane’s ride away) took me with her to the radiation clinic where she was being treated for breast cancer. She wanted me to get the story on the receptionist at the front desk, a puzzle she’d been trying to solve for weeks. By the time my friend was zapped and back in her street clothes, the receptionist was telling me the details of her ex-girlfriend’s affair.

But the problem with neighbor strangers is they’re too close, too permanent, too demanding, so I kept my distance, politely waved to Moe, and went about my life. Then one sunny October day, Moe was sitting in his garage when I came back from a walk, something I’d promised my therapist to do at least once a week. This time when he waved I went up his driveway to introduce myself. Maybe it was the endorphins, stirred from my walk, or maybe it was loneliness. Later on, he’d tell me he’d been waiting patiently, like a spider, to catch me in his web. A chilling simile but for one fact: I could easily outrun him. Pulmonary fibrosis had him leashed to the house on fifty feet of oxygen tubing.  

Someone had told us Moe was Jewish (short for Shlomo?), a widower whose wife (Esther?) had died one month after our escrow closed. It might have been the man we bought our house from who abandoned the mezuzahs nailed to the front and back doors. Maybe he, like I, refused to remove them, not because of Jewish tradition, but for fear of the bad luck that could ensue. 

As it turned out, Moe was a nickname some schoolmate had given him more than seventy years ago. He was Mexican, not Jewish, which was fortunate. I already had my hands full with one 85-year-old Jewish man: my father.

A few months ago, I went back to my therapist, the one who had taught me how to get along with my parents; now that my parents were aging, I needed her to teach me how to say goodbye to them. They’re in their 80s: my mother is slowly losing her mind and my father is slowly losing his life to prostate cancer. He’s got a few good years left, the oncologist assures us, and that’s enough for my father to carry on as usual. He still drives my mother to doctors’ appointments and the grocery store (and to Palm Springs and San Francisco); they still walk their precious dog and go out to dinner with their (shrinking) circle of friends. 

My father is still as handsome as he was forty years ago, though his blue eyes are more hooded, and his thick black hair is silver now. He’s still a whirlwind of nonstop motion. He needs to do things—take the Volvo in for service or dash off to Costco—though my mother can no longer keep up with him. He makes sure she eats her breakfast and takes her pills, then prods her to shower and dress. He hurries her along, reminding her of their agenda for the day. Sometimes he pushes too far and she turns on him, angry, and accuses him of controlling her. That’s when my father calls me. I’m the one (thanks to the therapist) who knows how to calm down my mother. 

I get dressed and drive the forty minutes to their house. I make some coffee and sit with my mother at the kitchen table to answer the same question on loop—How’s school?—three or four times until my father comes downstairs from his office and rescues me. Then the three of us go out to lunch. My father introduces me to our waiter, who already knows what my parents want. My mother looks at me searchingly when she can’t remember the drink she likes. Before I can answer, the waiter suggests an Arnold Palmer, and she shouts, That’s it!

In the afternoon, I sit with my mother—this time in the living room—and tell her about my classes a few more times while I spy my father through the windows as he dashes back and forth across the yard, checking the pool filter or the sprinklers, always busy, always moving, always doing, doing, doing. Not even prostate cancer can slow down this man.

These are our end-game years, the time with my parents I’m supposed to cherish, when we open up and share stories about ourselves before we run out of time. Only now my mother can’t remember those stories, and my father refuses to stay still long enough to tell them.

That October day when I introduced myself in Moe’s garage, I stood while he sat in a barber’s chair from the shop he had to close in September after 58 years of business. This was why the El Camino sat in his driveway every day—mystery solved. His health had made it impossible for him to put in a full day of cutting hair. He offered me the wooden stool he had his feet propped up on, but I declined. Accepting a seat at this point would have been too much of a commitment. 

He asked if I worked, since I seemed to be home most of the time. I told him I was an adjunct English teacher at the community college. This led to questions about my background: high school, college, jobs, and graduate school at mid-life. I slipped in a few details about my partner to test the waters, saying she’s a firefighter with the Forest Service, where she’s worked over twenty years. He nodded, impressed, then asked me how I felt about Obama, the candidate he’d voted for in the last two elections: message received. 

Eventually, Moe steered the conversation to food. He wanted to know if I liked beef stew, and I said yes, unaware of the trap I’d stepped into. A few days later I was in his kitchen, browning short ribs and cutting carrots according to his specifications while he sat at the table, rising occasionally to look into the pot and deliver his critique. Next came meatloaf and macaroni salad, followed by barbecued chicken wings and a selection of smoked fish from Whole Foods I’d arranged on a platter with capers and red onion and three kinds of crackers. His daughter in Sacramento called to thank me for all my help. There was a tightness in her voice, suspicion, perhaps, or guilt, that a perfect stranger would be doing so much for her father. I assured her Moe was no trouble, that I was going to the grocery store anyway. I had a gift for putting people at ease. By the end of our conversation, she said she was nominating me for sainthood—Saint Lori, the Jewish patron saint of packing twelve pounds on her father. 

Each week, Moe pondered his cravings, his appetite stoked by TV commercials for Applebee’s and Pizza Hut that aired between episodes of Storage Wars and The People’s Court. On Friday, I’d pick up his list and head to the grocery store, then to Trader Joe’s, then to the butcher on Main for a pound of thick slab bacon.

In exchange, Moe scoured his house for gifts he thought I’d like. When I showed up with his groceries, he’d have something waiting for me on the kitchen table—a cigar box or a 70’s trucker belt he’d found years ago at The Bargain Box. Once he dug up a sweatshirt (tags still attached) from Cal, my alma mater. He liked to lead with this detail about my education when he told his customers about me (he was still cutting hair out in the garage, a few heads a week), his Jewish-lesbian-English professor neighbor who was hunting down kielbasa and a special brand of sauerkraut (Krüegermann’s) he’d seen on a rerun of Huell Howser’s show, California Gold. 

His customers parked their Mercedes or Lexus in front of Moe’s house and took a seat in the barber’s chair while Moe scooted around on his stool, clipping and snipping. Moe had moved the El Camino up the driveway so I’d have a clear view of the garage from my office window. Of course, this meant he had a clear view of me as well. He’d spot me at my desk and call me to come over so he could introduce me. I knew he wanted to show me off, but I’d decline, say I was busy grading papers. This was the last boundary I could protect, the line between the stories Moe told me about his customers and the actual men sitting in his chair, the ones with unhappy marriages and disappointing children: daughters who didn’t come home for Thanksgiving or sons who’d gotten caught up in drugs or get-rich schemes. These men told their secrets to their barber, the man who, later that afternoon, after I poured him a few drinks, told those secrets to me. 

Only now do I realize the system I’d designed: I’d been investing in a new source for my imagination, shopping for him and cooking for him and driving him to the dentist and the doctor, in exchange for stories about strangers I didn’t actually have to meet. 

I honed my talent with strangers by studying my father, though our styles differ. My father likes to call the strangers in his life by their first name: Sylvia at the grocery store, Jesús at the cleaners, Pej at the watch repair shop (a regular stop we all must make), and Bud at the strawberry stand on Wooley Road. When he can’t remember a name, he goes with Amigo! which seems to work just as well. And these strangers also know my father by name. I’ve tested this on several occasions, at his behest—Tell them you’re Ron White’s daughter! When I say this to, for example, Yesenia at Manhattan Bagel, she asks how my dad is doing—What a great guy!—then tosses in a couple pumpernickel for him, free of charge. 

These strangers—the ones who serve my father—are eager to talk. He begins slowly with polite bits about the traffic or the weather or the skyrocketing gas prices. Only later, once he knows them well enough, does my father disarm them with more serious questions, the ones about the grandson in the army or the daughter with the good-for-nothing husband who got a job on an oil rig and took off for Texas. If I’m with my father, say, at the bank, he introduces me—This is Lori, my youngest—and they are quick to tell me how lucky I am to have a guy like Ron for a father. I say I know, maybe pat him on the back (good ole Dad!), then watch as my father leans in, his voice lower, to inquire about a mother in hospice or a son-in-law recovering from a heart attack. I nod along with the story, pretending I understand how difficult it must be to live with such pain. On our way to the car, my father fills me in on the rest of the story—the mother drank her life away and the workaholic son-in-law missed quality time with his wife and kids—as though shaping some cautionary tale for me to heed.       

Apart from school, I rarely left the house unless I was on an errand for Moe or off to my parents’ house to settle some spat. My therapist was concerned about my isolation. She suggested ways for me to connect with the community. I could join a book club or take up a new sport—paddle boarding or Pilates. She said I needed to get out in the world and make new friends, but I don’t think Moe was what she had in mind. 

Every afternoon, I went next door to check on him. We sat in his front room with its view of the neighborhood. A worn leather sofa and matching ottoman was his command central with enough space for his telephone and a stack of newspapers and magazines. I sat in an old desk chair he’d wheeled in for guests. 

At five o’clock, I lowered the blinds and made him a drink. Once I was settled, he started on the list of stories from that day: shows he’d seen, friends he’d called, or songs he’d been thinking about and could I please make a CD for him on my computer? He went through an opera phase, followed by 50s rock and roll, and Motown. During the day he’d come up with different money-making schemes, and then at night, over a cocktail, he’d run them past me. He took out ads in the Pennysaver for his extra oxygen machine and his wife’s imitation oak jewelry chest. The junk scattered in the backyard or buried in the garage—a ceramic Purex jug or an ancient water pump—became precious antiques based on an episode of American Pickers. There were some rumblings about whether I could set up a Craigslist account for him, but I squashed that idea fast. 

I never told my father about Moe. I was worried he’d be jealous, and I’d feel guilty. I did feel guilty. I’d been paying too much attention to a perfect stranger: a cardinal sin. My father had taught me that friends are temporary, but family is forever. Only my family isn’t forever, at least not anymore. I could see the end of forever now, and my father refused to slow down.

Moe and my father were both born in June 1930, three days apart. If they had met, I imagine they’d swap jokes about me, little barbs at my expense. My father would have plenty to say about my wardrobe. He liked to roll his eyes and crack jokes about the paint-splattered pants or patched jeans that I had, no doubt, paid too much for (and he would be right). I let him have his fun. Had my father approved of my clothing, or worse, said nothing, the relationship we’d constructed over fifty years would have crumbled. 

Only once, after the funeral for a close family friend, did my father’s criticism go too far. At lunch following the service, he leaned across the table and asked me how it was possible a woman my age didn’t know how to dress properly for grief. That afternoon, I folded my jacket, sweater, and slacks—all in tweedy shades of maroon and honey brown—and carried them outside to the trash.   

It was early January, a new year. After three months as his cook, chauffeur, personal shopper, and healthcare advocate, Moe and I were officially going steady. He moved on from stories about strangers to stories about himself: his infidelities during his marriage and his regrets after his wife died. He spared no details—though there were moments when I wished he would. He had a penchant for blondes, women he met through his customers at the shop or at hair conventions in LA. One time his daughter, around eight or nine years old at the time, wanted to go to a convention with him. Moe talked a vendor into watching her so he could sneak in a quickie upstairs in the hotel. When I asked if he thought his daughter knew what was happening, he said he didn’t know. They never talked about things like that. 

Moe and I were sitting in the lobby of his doctor’s office building, making up stories about the people going in and out of the elevators. The doctor’s waiting room made him claustrophobic, so the receptionist agreed to come get us when they were ready. Moe fished around inside the fanny pack that held the extra batteries for the oxygen machine and pulled out a silver signet ring. He’d bought it seventy years ago with the money he’d earned selling newspapers and had it engraved with his initials. 

Accepting the ring could have consequences from Moe’s daughter. But the real risk was the responsibility I felt for Moe, who now had me on a leash shorter than his fifty feet of oxygen tubing.

I convince my father to let me go to my parents’ doctors’ appointments. I need to hear for myself what the doctors have to say. My father gives the same report after every appointment: Everything’s fine, we’re going to live forever. He’s gotten good at ignoring the seriousness of my mother’s dementia. I’ve joined my father in this fragile world he’s constructed, even though I know its ending will not turn out well for any of us. I hide the keys when my mother insists on taking the car to town. I whisper the names of old friends we see in the grocery store. And when she forgets I’m her daughter, I fetch a photo album from the living room to ignite her memory, then hold her while she cries. 

I try to keep one foot in reality. I enroll in classes for families of the cognitively impaired that teach me to agree with my mother’s version of the world no matter how crazy it may get. I ask my father to go with me, but he has better things to do. He reassures me that my mother’s memory loss is just age-related, a phrase he’s picked up from a New York Times article or a segment on PBS NewsHour. For now, he has his own way of managing the slow erosion his cancer and her dementia has on our family by pretending nothing at all has changed. 

The other neighbor strangers on our block were getting too friendly. As I unloaded Moe’s groceries and a pizza from Tony’s, the man in the beige windbreaker walked his yellow Lab up the driveway to ask if I needed any help, and mothers on their front lawns stopped playing with their kids to wave as Moe and I drove by on our way to the bank. 

Then one evening, Moe’s daughter called to say she’d found live-in help for her dad, someone who would shop and cook and clean. As she rambled on about how thankful she was to have had Saint Lori in her father’s life, I straightened Moe’s ring on my middle finger. Its heavy signet listed to the left and rubbed against the diamond horseshoe ring my father had given me for my eighteenth birthday. 

I still had another old man to cook for in exchange for stories, a stranger I’d known my entire life—if only I could get him to sit still long enough to tell those stories to me. 

Released from his charge, my visits with Moe dwindled to once or twice a week. He had full-time help now to cook for him and pour his drinks, someone new to give instructions to after each meal for what to do differently next time. When we were alone, Moe complained about the new caregiver, how she couldn’t boil an egg right and didn’t understand that meat needed browning before braising. Then he’d take a sip from his drink and turn his attention to me and what I had planned for dinner that night. 

In late March, Moe’s desire for food disappeared, and a hospice team moved in. He told me there was no reason left to keep living when the only thing he’d lived for was gone. A hospital bed replaced the sofa in the front room, and the blinds remained open, day and night. I wanted to tell the nurses he liked them closed in the evening, but stopped myself, unsure whether the correction was for my sake more than his. 

By April, the jacaranda tree in Moe’s backyard was in full bloom, fuller than it had ever been. Saturday night was Passover. My father’s plan this year was to make it easy on all of us and go to a community Seder hosted by the new temple in our little town. We checked in and took our places at a table, my mother sitting between my father and me. The rabbi retold the traditional story of the holiday: the Israelites’ exodus from the land of Egypt, when Moses parts the Red Sea for our people, then closes its waters behind them, swallowing the Pharaoh and his army. 

We read the Haggadah, answering in unison to the rabbi’s calls, my mother’s voice trailing just behind the rest of the congregation. She giggled at this, and my father shushed her. I had to pull her hand back from the table’s plate of matzo and hold it in my lap until the rabbi finished the blessing over the bread. 

Dinner was about to be served when Moe called me. I told my father I’d be right back and went outside. “Where are you?” he asked softly. 

When I said I was at Passover with my parents, he apologized and said not to worry, it was nothing. I told him I’d come over in the morning, or tonight if it wasn’t too late. When I returned to the table, my mother was complaining to a woman at our table that the lamb was too tough to eat. My father asked if everything was okay and I nodded. 

Family is forever. 

It was already seven-thirty. We still had to finish the service before dessert was served. 

The light was on in the front room of Moe’s house when I got home. I stood at the end of his driveway, watching the nurse bend over his bed to adjust the covers. It was after ten. I’d go over in the morning after the nurses changed shifts at seven. 

Instead, his night nurse came to our door at six the next morning to tell me Moe had passed. She wanted me to know that he’d called me the night before so he could say goodbye. 

After the semester ends, I move in with my parents for the summer to help out with my mom. I decide to tackle the cakes my grandmother had made for my father when he was a kid. She’d scrawled the recipes on index cards for my mother years ago. The cards are oil-stained and yellowed now, but I can still make out her ragged handwriting. I start with her signature recipe, the tall, yeasty, chocolate coffee cake, its proofing and baking times my biggest challenges.  

The next morning, my father takes off for the grocery store with my list and doesn’t return until the afternoon. I busy my mother with lunch. I let her tackle the salad until she chops the lettuce so finely it nearly disintegrates and I have to take over. My father comes home before five, in time for drinks while I start making dinner. 

My first coffee cake is a success. I take a picture of my parents beside my towering triumph, both of them smiling blankly at the camera as though unsure of the occasion. I carry the cake to the breakfast table and cut the first piece for my father. He praises the cake’s airiness and its ratio of cocoa to walnuts. Then, he pokes at the crust with his fork and says it could have used a little longer in the oven. I don’t ask him if he knew this from watching his mother; if she had waited until the cake was so brown it nearly burned. 

Instead, I’ve decided to focus on the present, our day-to-day life together. Some stories aren’t meant to be told, except by strangers, like Moe and his customers, who can tell the truth about their lives without repercussion. The rest are left to our imagination, to wonder what was and what will be, when there are no days left to ask.