The Good Neighbor

by Amy Sue Nathan

  “No!” Ethan crashed back on the booth, mouth open.

  “Yes!” I’d impressed my impressive big brother.

  “Well, why didn’t you tell me? We should celebrate! Do Mom and Dad know? Did you tell Eddie? Trish is going to have an absolute cow!”

  “No one knows.”

  “What do you mean no one knows? This is huge!”

  “I’m anonymous.”

  “Ooh!” Then he whispered, “I mean, ooh!”

  “It’s fun,” I said at a normal decibel level. Whispering garnered more attention than talking.

  “Philly over Forty, huh? What are you writing about exactly?”

  Ethan was anti-secret. He came out of the closet at twenty-one and had little tolerance for pretending. If he knew the truth, he would likely wince with disappointment.

  I bit into my bagel to muffle my response. “Being forty—almost—about dating mostly. All about dating over forty, about my relationships, that kind of thing.”

  “I’m not sure that handful—and I mean that figuratively—of guys you went out with right after Bruce left really qualify as relationships.”

  “That’s just a detail.”

  “Izzy!”

  I swallowed my bagel and smiled a deliberate smile. Extra-wide even for a Lane.

  Ethan took my hand and channeled our mother. “If I wanted the CliffsNotes, I would have bought them.”

  I told him everything.

  Everything.

  And what a relief that was.

  Ethan tapped on his phone, downloaded the Pop Philly mobile app, and subscribed to my posts. He scrolled through the pages, the comments, and stopped at the photo of the Phillies cap.

  “Is this actually you?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, that’s one thing. I will look at all of this at home, but I know one thing for sure. You’re going to get into trouble.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Nothing about it is fine. You’re writing about a boyfriend you don’t have and dates you haven’t gone on, and people think it’s real. You can’t tell your family. Not because you don’t want the public to know your identity, but because you can’t have the people who love you think you’re doing all these things. You’re giving dating advice. When was the last date you actually went on?”

  “Just because I’m not dating doesn’t mean I can’t give advice. I’m helping the kids at Liberty get into college and I haven’t done that since, when? Nineteen ninety-two?” I dipped a fry into my milk shake. “And speaking of relationships, our Rachel is talking to Jeremy Goldfarb online.”

  “Her high school boyfriend? Wow. What’d she do, look him up on Facebook?” Rerouting successful. “Hey, don’t change the subject. We’re talking about you. She is not my sister.”

  “That’s not very nice.”

  “You are a priority to me. Plus, she has Seth to take care of her. You have…”

  “No one. Thanks, Ethan. Thanks for your confidence and support.” I threw my napkin onto the table.

  “Let me support you by giving you some money so you don’t have to do this.”

  “I’m not taking money from you. I’m living in my parents’ house because I couldn’t afford to live anywhere else after my husband left me in our fixer-upper dream house. And if that’s not humiliating enough, he took off for California with his girlfriend a year after saying he wanted to ‘find himself’ and didn’t want a ‘serious relationship,’ leaving all his responsibilities for money and Noah behind. I’m not running away from this, E. Bruce is the one who runs. I’m the one who stays. I need to take care of us without your help. Without any help. It’s not that I want to—I need to. I need to do this, no matter what it takes.”

  That was it. I heard the words inside my head once and then again as they flew through the air toward my brother. I wanted to reach out and catch them, hold them, then stuff them into my pocket so I didn’t forget my momentary resolve. I didn’t want a handout or a loan or even a gift, although I would let Ethan pay for breakfast. I had never intended to be a divorced mom with one son living in the house where I grew up, hanging out with a beloved aging next-door neighbor on a street that wasn’t what we needed or remembered. Yet that’s exactly where I was. Whether proving I could take care of Noah and myself was for me or Bruce or Ethan or the world, or all of us, I didn’t know. And it didn’t matter.

  “I’m just worried this is going to jump up and bite you when everyone finds out.”

  “No one is going to find out, Ethan.”

  “These things have a way of coming out.”

  We snorted.

  When Ethan came out, at least to our parents, me, and Eddie, he physically lined us up on the sofa and drew the curtains. In retrospect, I’m surprised he didn’t play mood music. Ethan liked theatrics. “I’m gay,” he said, “and there’s nothing you can do about it.” I was eleven, it was the eighties, and I had no solid idea of what gay meant except for “happy.” Ethan looked happy, which was all I had cared about. Therefore, in the infancy of AIDS awareness and gay rights, all I knew was that gay was okay with me. I didn’t realize how big of a deal it was that there was no pushback, or a faux shivah, from my parents. They said, “Okay, Ethan.” And that was that. It was much more of a shanda, an embarrassment, when Eddie brought Patty from Fishtown home for Passover later that year. No one in our family had ever dated a gentile, not to mention someone from what would be considered the wrong side of the tracks. Patty was a twofer. While my blog buddy, Holden, might have been mired in the revitalized hipster culture of Fishtown, in 1988 Patricia Kathleen Bernadette O’Brien was just a shiksa from a bad neighborhood.

  Of course, now Patty was Trish, and we loved her.

  I didn’t know it at Eddie and Trish’s wedding when I was fourteen, but it was then that my parents officially pinned their dream of a Jewish wedding and Jewish grandchildren on me. I still felt that prick. In more ways than one.

  “So, just let me clarify,” Ethan said. “Jade doesn’t know that you’re making this guy up.”

  “Right.”

  “And she needs you to write this blog for her site. It’s important to her.”

  “Right.”

  “How can Jade not know? She knows everything about you.”

  “She doesn’t know!”

  “She doesn’t want to meet this guy? What’s his name again?”

  “Mac.”

  “Mac what?”

  “Oh my God, E. Just Mac. Stop.”

  “And Rachel doesn’t know?”

  “No! No one knows. Not true. Mrs. Feldman knows. And she’s not going to tell anyone.” I waggled my finger.

  “This could go on forever, Iz. What are you going to do? Marry a make-believe groom? Have some invisible babies?”

  He grabbed my hand and the familiar touch felt like the hated childhood game of Chinese finger trap. I tugged and he held tighter, and the weight of elapsed dreams squeezed. Ethan released me and slid the plate of fries in front of us to my side of the table. He knew about my big-family, picnic-table dreams.

  “Can we change the subject? Show me new pictures of my niece.”

  Ethan slid his phone to me. He had adopted Maya six months before, and there she was in a hot-pink parka with white faux-fur trim, looking at me with gray-green eyes. Her hair was shorter than mine, black as ink against her pecan-colored skin. I loved Eddie and Trish’s kids, but Brooke and Matthew were adults at twenty and twenty-six. When Matthew was born, I was busy becoming a teenager. By the time Brooke was born, I was busy with college, dating, and my own ambitions. But Maya arrived at just the right time. For all of us.

  I returned the favor and shared the latest photos of Noah.

  “We have great kids,” Ethan said. “And we need to set good examples. I’m not sure this qualifies.”

  So much for changing the subject. The fries were cold but I ate them anyway.

  “You do not want to start your forties off on the wrong foot. Maybe you just need a plan
. How about getting out of this by your birthday? New decade. Clean slate. What do you say? Then we can really celebrate your birthday in style.”

  I scanned the calendar in my head. In about six weeks I’d be forty. Four zero. Surely Bruce would be back, and employed, and I could wean myself off Philly over Forty. By then I’d probably be tired of all the attention anyway. Doubt poked me but I ignored it.

  I didn’t have the heart or the stomach to tell Ethan how much different parts of P-O-F suited me, how getting lost in the ether of the Internet patched holes in my days and my heart. Comments popped up at all hours, from all over the country, reminding me how it felt to be listened to instead of talked at. As soon as a new post went live on the site, it was tweeted and Facebooked and Tumblred. My recent post about sex after divorce, with no mention of Mac, went viral with more views than anything else on Pop Philly ever. It was peculiar to be popular. Peculiar in a heart-pounding, ego-boosting, anonymous kind of way.

  But Ethan was right. Whatever I did affected Noah. He deserved to grow up in an honest home. I couldn’t let him grow up with me telling lies—online or to myself.

  I reached for my brother’s hands across the table and held them tight, but not too tight, over the empty french-fry plate.

  “I’ll figure this out by my birthday. You’ve got a deal.”

  Chapter 12

  Bombardment

  NOAH STOMPED TRACES OF snow from his sneakers, causing Mrs. Feldman’s dining room étagère to shake. I had forgotten how temperamental her Lladró collection was, how many times growing up I’d pushed the door shut a little too hard and then trembled as I heard the joggling of porcelain ballerinas and harlequins. I mouthed, Sorry.

  “I love that rattling, Elizabeth. It sounds like life to me.” Mrs. Feldman waved her hand as if swatting at bees. “It reminds me of when my boys were running in and out and through the house all day long. And when you were running in and out of this house.”

  She looked over my shoulder and glanced toward the floor, as if little girl me were standing there, ready to unpack her Calico Critters. Mrs. Feldman smiled and shook her head. That seemed to bring her back to the present. She tugged on Noah’s coat sleeve, more like a playmate than a surrogate grandmother, and he shimmied out of it, revealing a sweatshirt with a skull and crossbones, something I wouldn’t let him wear to school.

  “Did you eat your dinner, Mr. Pirate?”

  “Arrr.”

  “There are cookies and a juice box in the living room, and the TV is set to your favorite channel. Just use the clicker to turn it on.”

  Noah looked at me and I tipped my head.

  With the coats over the banister and the shoes tucked against the wall, Mrs. Feldman and I walked to the kitchen. Without a word I grabbed a Brillo pad from under the sink and started scrubbing a pot that was soaking. What had she been cooking? And for whom?

  “Did I miss a party?” I was only half kidding.

  “Just some prokas for the boys. I packed it up so they can freeze it. None of my daughters-in-law make it. Never have.” Mrs. Feldman shrugged, baffled by the aversion to stuffed cabbage.

  I rinsed the pot, then turned around. “I told Ethan about Mac.”

  “And?”

  I shook my head. “He wasn’t happy.”

  “Stop scrubbing and come sit.”

  I dried my hands on a dish towel one finger at a time. A buzzing lightness came over me. Where had my diner determination gone?

  “I’m not telling you what to do, Elizabeth. I just wonder how you’re writing about dating when those dates of yours were really nothing to write home about. That first fellow wanted you to bring Noah on your date.”

  “I forgot about that guy!” It was true. The assumption that I was a “package deal” with my five-year-old son was disconcerting. I wouldn’t become a package-anything until I knew someone was not an ax murderer/child molester/porn addict.

  “Don’t change the subject, Elizabeth. What’s the plan? You must have a plan.”

  Mrs. Feldman never struck me as a schemer. But she’d drawn up her will when Mr. Feldman died twenty years ago. That was a definite plan she wasn’t willing to alter. Her voice rose and her hands reached for mine. Hers were below-normal body temperature even though she kept the heat at a tropical seventy-six.

  “The plan is that I’ll write for Jade until Bruce is back and paying support again.”

  “And you don’t think if you told Jade that she’d still find a place for you?”

  “This is what she wants. She told me. She needs me to do this and do it this way.”

  “So she’s paying you to lie to her readers? That’s not good business for her or for you.”

  Cut to the chase, why don’t you? “She doesn’t know the truth and right now it’s better that way.”

  “Better for who? You or Jade?”

  “For both of us.” I had to believe that. “If you read the Web site, you’d see … I’m really steering away from out-and-out lies.” Mostly.

  “I did read it, Elizabeth. I may not have wanted that computer Ray offered to buy for me, but I do go on the Internet at the library. You tell very wonderful stories. But they’re stories. And saying you’re lying to protect someone else? That’s the classic liar’s creed. Just admit that you’re doing it to protect yourself.”

  “Jade will be hurt if I tell her the truth.”

  Mrs. Feldman placed her hands on her hips. “Really, Elizabeth. I expect more from you.”

  “Fine! I’m protecting myself, too.”

  Some lies were acceptable. I needed to believe that. Didn’t everyone have acceptable lies as part of their life? How many people were really fine when asked? How many people don’t mind doing what they’re asked? How many people don’t really look fat in jeans at least sometimes?

  “Do you want to be good at lying, Elizabeth? So good that it just becomes part of your life, part of your being? Elizabeth?”

  I wished she’d stop using my name. The four syllables spun like the aura of a migraine. I had never minded that she called me Elizabeth, but now it sounded harsh and accusatory. Izzy, on the other hand, sounded fun.

  “I don’t know. I mean, no. I just have to do this for now. Until my birthday. And that’s the only plan I have.” I couldn’t think beyond tonight, getting Noah into bed, taking out my lists, writing my next post. Planning out my whole life had gotten me nowhere. “This keeps me busy when Noah is asleep, and I’m making up the money I’m not getting from Bruce. And I’m not lying about everything. My thoughts and feelings, those are real.” And those thoughts and feelings were helping people. Entertaining them. Encouraging them to move forward. Even when I couldn’t, and knew it.

  I fiddled with my fingers, fidgety from the pressure on my psyche. I had been trained to problem solve, although much of that involved filling out paperwork and following instructions. I rationalized everything away. What did Mrs. Feldman know about this kind of thing anyway? She’d spent her adult life on Good Street, smoking Virginia Slims until well after I left for college. She stayed married to the same man for decades. She wrangled children, arranged flowers, and organized just about everything and everyone. And now she was the maven of the over-eighty crowd at shul and the JCC. This was not a woman who knew of lies and secrets. Her life was like her front door—wide-open even when it should be locked.

  “This lying, it’s worth it for the money and attention?”

  “Yes, it is. For now.”

  “It’s never just for now. You need to stop. Jade is your best friend and she will understand if you tell her now. But if you wait, you will become a snowball.”

  “You mean that the lie will snowball?”

  “No, Elizabeth. I mean it just like I said it. You will become packed tight like a snowball, Elizabeth. Cold and hard. That’s what lies will do to you.”

  “Not always.” I almost called her Geraldine but it got stuck in my throat. “Anyway, it’s more complicated than that.”

  “It
always is.”

  Noah stood in the kitchen doorway with a stack of construction paper.

  “What did you make?” I said.

  “Pictures for Daddy.” He held up the pile for me to see.

  “Do you want to tell Mrs. Feldman what you’re doing this weekend?”

  “I’m having a sleepover with Cousin Maya. Can I go watch more TV?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But we’re leaving soon. It’s almost bedtime.”

  Noah walked away and I turned toward Mrs. Feldman.

  “I don’t know what I’ll do with a night to myself since presumably I have a boyfriend and will be out on the town.” Or swinging from an imaginary chandelier.

  “Well, don’t sit in front of your computer all night. Take advantage of the fact that Noah will be with Ethan and Maya.” Mrs. Feldman ran her right hand over her left, as if brushing something away. “Your brother, it’s quite something, the way he adopted Maya like that.”

  Like what? It was the first time since I’d moved home that Mrs. Feldman had mentioned Ethan’s adopting Maya. I’d told her all about it six months ago, but didn’t know if Mrs. Feldman struggled with the adoption itself, or if it was because Ethan was gay. Or because Maya wasn’t white. Or born Jewish. I wasn’t accustomed to Mrs. Feldman’s silence, or its implied disapproval of my brother.

  “Ethan is a great dad. He’s loving and kind and funny. And he is giving Maya amazing opportunities she wouldn’t have had if she stayed in foster care. Forget that, he loves her to pieces. It’s like they were made for each other. And believe me, he’d say she’s the one who’s giving everything to him.” I understood that completely.

  “Oh, Elizabeth, I didn’t mean anything bad. I mean that it’s not the way it used to be. Nowadays you don’t have to be married or part of a Norman Rockwell painting to be a family.” Her voice was monotone; she stared out the window, then looked up and down the street a few times. “I think it’s wonderful for them, really I do.”

  For once, I didn’t believe her.

  Chapter 13

  I Spy

  TWO WEEKS UNTIL VALENTINE’s Day and I had nothing. No ideas for how to blog about prix-fixe dinner reservations, itchy lace lingerie, heart-shaped boxes of mystery chocolates, or overpriced floral arrangements. I knew what the P-O-F readers wanted, and it tugged at my guiltstrings. They wanted hope. Because if it could happen for me, it could happen for them.