Alternate Side

by Anna Quindlen

  The basic layout of the Fisk house was almost exactly like the Nolans’, which was almost exactly like the Lessmans’ and the Fenstermachers’ and the Rizzolis’: a kitchen and dining room on the lower level, a double living room above, and two or three bedrooms on each of the floors above that, although some of the bedrooms had been turned into dens or offices. The Fisks had done a gut renovation, so their rooms were high and white and unornamented; the Nolans had some period detail, walls of oak wainscoting, ornamented mantelpieces.

  “It is a big house for only two people,” Nora had said to Sherry. “When the twins are away there could be somebody on the top floor and I wouldn’t even know it.”

  “If I lived with her in a two-bedroom apartment, I might kill her,” Jack Fisk said. Nora laughed nervously. Jack rarely laughed at all.

  The Fisk house was bracketed by that of the Fenstermachers, who were perfect and hosted the holiday party every year, and a house that had been owned for ages by people who lived in London and rented it out. The renters never had enough stature on the block to gossip with their more durable neighbors, and Alma Fenstermacher never gossiped at all. But Nora suspected that while Charlie sometimes complained about TV noises rumbling through the common wall from the Rizzoli house next door, the occasional child screaming at a sibling or toy dog yipping at nothing, the Fisk neighbors heard more than that, and more often.

  Nora looked at her husband. He was not even admiring the rear of the young woman as she turned and went back the way she had come, hand in hand with the young man. Charlie was too mesmerized by his good fortune, staring through the narrow opening at his car in its space, a faint smile on his face. With his thin, sandy hair, round blue eyes, and pink cheeks, he looked like a small boy. He was one of those people whose baby pictures looked more or less like his driver’s license photo. He even looked boyish when he was unhappy, his full lower lip protruding a bit when he talked of someone at work who was being unfairly elevated, one of the guys he had come up with who had just gotten a big promotion.

  “Congrats, party people,” Nora heard from behind her, and she clenched her molars as she turned.

  “Major league congrats,” repeated George, the most irritating person on the block.

  Another of Nora and Charlie’s marital agreements was that social intercourse with George Smythe must be avoided at all cost, but this morning Charlie shook George’s hand warmly, as though they were concluding a particularly lucrative business deal. Nora supposed they were, since George seemed in some peculiar and unstated way to be the keeper of the parking lot as well as the majordomo of the block, slipping printed notices through their mail slots about everything from street trees to trash disposal. George-o-Grams, Rachel called them when they appeared on the floor of their foyer. Nora thought that Charlie didn’t mind George because he reminded him of the sort of guy who was the social chairman at a fraternity house. Nora couldn’t bear George for precisely the same reason.

  George sensed her dislike, and was galvanized by it. Soon after Charlie and Nora had moved to the block, when it became clear that she was unlikely to meet George’s practiced (and often early-morning) bonhomie with more of the same, George had fastened on her as his project, the way men fasten on a woman who will not sleep with them, or a client who proves elusive, or a marathon, or Everest.

  “Ms. Twinkletoes,” he would say as she sped by on her run to the park on Saturday mornings. “Madame Miler.” “The Harrier.”

  “Harrier,” he had said to his son, Jonathan, one morning years before, the boy curved into a question mark beneath the burden of his backpack. “There’s a word that might be on the SATs. You know what a harrier is, son?”

  Nora had never once heard Jonathan respond. George’s only child gave off an aura of unwashed T-shirt and contempt. His silence made no difference; George was the kind of man who could carry on both sides of a conversation. In fact he seemed to prefer it. Jonathan had left for college in Colorado three years ago and, as far as Nora knew, had never been seen on the block again.

  “Living the dream,” George said when someone asked him about Jonathan. “Mountain air, hiking. None of this Ivy League slog. He’s living the dream.”

  “He got rejected at most of the places he applied,” said Oliver.

  “He works in a pot dispensary,” Rachel said.

  “Cool job,” said Oliver.

  “We’re not sending you to MIT so you can wind up selling sinsemilla in Denver,” Nora said.

  “Okay, Mom, but how come you even know what sinsemilla is?”

  Charlie waggled his eyebrows and grinned. “Don’t encourage them,” Nora said when the twins went upstairs.

  “Relax, Bun,” Charlie said. “You’re always so uptight about stuff like that.” They had quarreled about whether the twins should be given wine at dinner now that they were away at college and doubtless drinking, but not yet of drinking age. It was notable because they rarely quarreled anymore. Their marriage had become like the AA prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.” Or at least to move into a zone in which I so don’t care anymore and scarcely notice. Nora had thought this was their problem alone until she realized that it was what had happened to almost everyone she knew who was still married, even some of those who were on their second husbands. At her women’s lunches they talked about the most intimate things, about errant chin hairs and persistent bladder infections and who had a short haircut because she just couldn’t be bothered and who had a short haircut because she’d just finished chemo. But while they were willing to talk about marriage generally, they tended not to talk about their own husbands specifically. Marriage vows, Nora had long felt, constituted a loyalty oath.

  “As long as he doesn’t set anything on fire, I’m satisfied,” Elena had said one day, and all the other women chuckled drily, since Elena’s husband had in fact once set their screened porch in the country on fire when he brought the barbecue grill inside during a thunderstorm. There had been a prolonged fight with the insurance company, which didn’t consider saving the spareribs enough of a reason to use hot charcoal in a confined space. The dispute was ongoing, Elena said, because Henry enjoyed telling people about it, mainly other guys who cheered him on.

  “So, Miss Fleet Feet, how do you feel about the parking situation?” George said now, one hand on Charlie’s shoulder. “Nothing says you’ve arrived on the block like a space in the lot.” George had a space, the Fisks had a space, the Fentermachers had a space, the Lessmans had a space, and the Rizzolis had a space, although the Rizzolis’ had been handed down to their elder son and his wife, who lived in their triplex and rented out the bottom floors. The senior Rizzolis now lived in their house in Naples. Florida, not Italy. “I’m too old for the city now, Nora,” Mike Rizzoli said when he and his wife came by to visit. “It’s a young person’s game, all the nuttiness.”

  One of the men who lived in the SRO that backed onto the parking lot came down the street with a battered wheeled suitcase. “We’re all dying we’re all dying we’re all dying inside,” he said as he went past, smelling of old sweat and fried food. Homer woofed slightly, at the suitcase, not the man. Nora had never figured out exactly why Homer distrusted things with wheels. He reacted suspiciously to both strollers and bicycles.

  “I hear they’re going to convert the SRO to condos,” George said as the man disappeared down the block.

  Nora felt forced into the conversation despite her better judgment. That’s how George got to her, by saying things she knew to be untrue: the mayor is not going to run for reelection, the Fenstermachers are selling their house, small dogs are more intelligent than large ones. “It’s never going to happen,” Nora said. “So many single-room-occupancy buildings were converted in the eighties and there were so few beds left for homeless men that the city put a moratorium on all conversions. All the SROs have to stay SROs.” And Nora preferred
the SRO residents to George anyway. Before they had made an offer for the house, she had visited the precinct, worried by the presence of a building full of ramshackle men. “That place?” the desk sergeant said. “They’re basically down-on-their-luck guys working minimum wage and some old men on disability. There’s a few schizos, but they’re not dangerous. You know the type, the guys who talk to themselves about Jesus and the president and whatever. You’ll be fine.” Then he asked how much they were paying for the house. Even the police, who all lived on Long Island or in Orange County, were mesmerized by the absurdity of Manhattan real estate values.

  George ignored her comment. “That’ll make a huge difference, if they get those guys out,” he said. “They really dirty up the lot.” Nora knew this was not the case, but she wasn’t going to engage with George again if she could help it. The men in the SRO did not so much throw trash into the lot as leave things on their windowsills that fell down into it. It was just like college, old-fashioned outdoor refrigeration. Nora herself had once had a string bag that she hung from a nail outside her dorm window, full of containers of yogurt and the odd banana. In winter the sills on the back side of the SRO, which looked down on the parked cars, were dotted with pints of milk, tubs of pudding, packages of hot dogs, just as her dorm sills had been. Sometimes a high wind ripped through all their yards and down to the river, and the food on the sills fell to the ground below. Nora had once seen an enormous rat run across the entrance to the lot with a plastic envelope of what appeared to be salami in its mouth. At least she thought the rat was enormous. They all seemed enormous to her, even when, after having been lured by the poison in the bait traps, they lay curled into stiff, furry commas on the sidewalk.

  Nora looked down the street, which was no cleaner than the parking lot. The gutter was edged with leavings: the pointillistic wisps from a home paper shredder, the poop from someone who wouldn’t pick up after his dog, a tangle of some unidentifiable vegetable matter, brown and sad as a corsage three days after the prom. It was much grubbier on the West Side than the East Side. It was why Charlie had wanted to move to the East Side before they moved into their house. Now they got a lot of mileage out of living on a dead-end block, which had mollified Charlie somewhat.

  “Let’s go to the park and get this dog some exercise,” said Nora, who wanted to get away from George. Rachel had said once that George reminded her of the kid who glommed on to you at a new school until you started making real friends and found out why the kid had been available for glomming. Nora had been amazed at her daughter’s powers of perception, although when she said that to Rachel, she replied dismissively, “Oh, duh, Mommy.” George was exactly that kid, circling the cafeteria of life, looking for the yet-unmoored, blind to his own unpopularity.

  “I don’t know why you dislike him so much,” Charlie said when they got far enough away.

  “Because he’s a self-important jerk,” Nora said. “Homer! Drop it!” Homer dropped the twist of waxed paper with a pizza crust inside and sighed. It was his cross to bear, obedience, and a diet of kibble.

  Behind them they heard shouting, and turned to look as George sprinted from his front stoop to the entrance to the parking lot, where a white panel van was backing in.

  “Ricky! Amigo! What did I tell you the last time?” he yelled.

  “Amigo? Really? Every time he tries to speak Spanish to Ricky, I can see by the look on Ricky’s face that he can’t understand a word George says. That’s leaving aside the fact that Ricky’s English is as good as his. Amigo? Oh, my God.”

  “Come on, smile, Bun,” Charlie said, putting his arm around her shoulder. “We got a space! Wait till I tell the kids!”

  Under NO CIRCUMSTANCES is Ricky permitted to park his van in the lot. He has been REPEATEDLY told this. Any suggestion that he has permission from Mr. Stoller to do so is INCORRECT.

  Inform me IMMEDIATELY if you see him parked there or at the entrance to the lot.

  George

  During the week between the end of their summer internships and their return to college, Rachel and Oliver came home, to see their friends from high school and to spend money, she on clothing, he on computer gear. Nora was both delighted to have her children around and a little weary of being awakened in the middle of the night by footfalls on the stairs. She sometimes thought that if she had envisioned the twins as young adults she would have put the master bedroom on the top floor and Oliver and Rachel below rather than the other way around. But when she felt mildly disgruntled as someone stomped by her bedroom door at 3 A.M., she would consider the future, with Rachel living in her own place somewhere, with Oliver living in his own place somewhere else, with she and Charlie living in a quiet house, just the two of them. Some of their friends had started to complain about college graduates who circled around and, because of high rents and low-paying jobs, wound up back in their childhood bedrooms. Nora always thought she wouldn’t mind that one bit.

  When the twins came home the house was always full of people, although none of them stayed long, except for one or two of the girls, who would tumble into Rachel’s bed at night and appear again in the late morning, tousled, in boxer shorts and T-shirts. The others just passed through: Hello, Nick; Hello, Bronson; Hello, Grace; Hello, Elise. Charlie’s mantra was “What is her name again?” He was even flummoxed sometimes by Rachel’s two oldest friends; their names were Bethany and Elizabeth, and Charlie still sometimes confused the two. Luckily the girls thought this was hilarious, except for Rachel when she was in a mood, when she would say what kind of father can’t be bothered to figure out his daughter’s best friends’ names. Then she would flounce, although the more time she spent at college, the more she had traded flouncing for tromping.

  Because no one used the doorbell anymore, preferring to text one another OMG I’m outside let me in instead, there was no telling who was down in the kitchen while Nora and Charlie were asleep two floors up and the faint smell of smoke, cigarette or pot, drifted up from the backyard to their bedroom window. When they awoke, the counter was usually littered with the remains of food eaten long after they had retired, and the garbage can was full of takeout containers.

  “Who drinks beer with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?” Charlie muttered to himself.

  Dad so weird park lot wtf, Rachel texted Nora in the middle of the night, when the twins and all their friends were wide awake. It was as though they lived in different time zones, as though the parents were in China to their children’s America. Nora couldn’t get used to the notion that when she was asleep, her children were awake, and vice versa. “Mom, please,” Rachel had said. “Don’t text me at eight in the morning. Just…no.”

  “You don’t have to read it then.”

  “My phone is under my pillow. It wakes me up.”

  “I will never understand why you sleep with the phone under your pillow.”

  “Never mind. Just. Never mind. If I block you, you’ll know why.”

  “I thought people only blocked stalkers.”

  “You are my stalker,” Rachel said, going upstairs with her phone in hand.

  “You walked right into that one, Bun,” Charlie said.

  “Can I text you at eight?” Nora asked Oliver.

  “I guess?” he said.

  Oliver’s internship had been with the Massachusetts River Consortium. He was testing the Charles River for contaminants. Rachel had been on the Cape, working for The Nature Conservancy. Neither had ever shown much interest in wildlife before, except for the early years, when Rachel had begged for a puppy and Ollie had kept a tortoise under his bed who ate whatever lettuce in the fridge was too limp to serve and who was so sedentary that Nora would regularly check that he was still alive.

  Go, dad! Oliver had texted when Charlie sent a photo of his car in the lot.

  Car pic omg wtf ice, Rachel texted Nora.

  “Ice?” Nora said to Oliver
.

  “I can’t even,” Oliver said. “Get with the program, lady.”

  Nora was not surprised that Charlie had texted the twins pictures of his car in its new space. Nothing had pleased him so much since Parents’ Weekend at the twins’ respective colleges, where he had participated in a rugby game with Rachel (Williams) and a sculling competition with Oliver (MIT). Nora knew only in the vaguest way that her husband had had a spate of recent disappointments at work: a former classmate who had promised to send something his way and hadn’t, a headhunter who had come after him hard for a big job and then disappeared. “Nora,” he called her on those nights, instead of “Bunny” or “Bun,” the term of endearment he had come up with so many years ago and had become the substitute for her actual name. They were more commonplace now, those evenings when he arrived home with a face like a fist and went straight for the vodka.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.”

  “How was your day?”

  “Fine.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be okay?”

  Rachel, too, was dolorous about the impending end of her college years. “So, so tired of being asked what comes next,” she’d said between gritted teeth when she and her mother had run into Sherry Fisk on the block. There was so much Nora could have said, knowing that when Rachel graduated what came next would be so fluid and various: maybe this job, maybe that guy, maybe one city or another. Nora remembered drawing in the sand of her future with a stick. What she couldn’t recall was when the sand had become cement, the who-I-want-to-be turned for once and for all into who-I-am. She remembered a lunch the year before, when Suzanne had seemed unusually glum. “I don’t know—sometimes I feel as though I should reinvent myself,” Suzanne said, poking at her asparagus. “I mean, how many sideboards can you have distressed, and then distressed again because the client didn’t think they looked distressed enough?” She sighed and added, “Don’t you ever wonder how we all wound up here?” And before Nora could say, Yes, I do, I think about it all the time, I’m so relieved I’m not the only one, Elena said drily, “What is this, existential Thursday?” Leaving the restaurant, Elena turned to Nora and Jenny and mouthed the word “Menopause,” and Nora had almost hated her at that moment, even though she and Elena had known each other since a childbirth class more than twenty years before and had been having lunch together almost that long.