Neighbors

My neighbor in Idaho was an eyeful. I watched her when I was feeling bored, hungry, or restless. I got to feeling like I knew her, even though we rarely spoke. We exchanged a hello now and then when she came or went as I was washing my truck or carrying my groceries—crisp celery, whole grain bread, ripe tomatoes, and canned tuna—into the house I rented next door.

In the summer, my neighbor would drag a wide, dingy camping chair into her front yard and lean back in it all day, with her long legs crossed at the ankles, dripping sweat. She liked red bikinis best, letting her large, bare tummy bake in the weak afternoon sun, her whole body glowing faintly red. She had long hair she’d tie up, let down, and tie up again, and I’d watch its color darkening over the course of the afternoon as the sweat slowly spread out from the roots. Once, I saw her rest a cool glass between her breasts. She tipped her head back in relief, pressing her eyelids together under shiny tortoiseshell sunglasses.

I wondered why she liked to be seen—if she was just that confident or if it was some kind of statement.

I wondered why my neighbor sat in the front yard instead of the fenced and shaded lawn behind her house, like most larger women would. I wondered why she liked to be seen—if she was just that confident or if it was some kind of statement. I wondered how she’d met her pretty wife and what it would be like to embrace her, the soft, damp rolls of fat between her shoulders and elbows molding to fit my own angular frame.

I watched my neighbor when I washed dishes at the kitchen sink, or when I stared over the television to catch her through the living room window. I sometimes peered through the low bushes that separated our lawns while I pretended to clip away rotting leaves. It made me feel good to see her, like binging a reality show, wondering why people let themselves be filmed and what they were like once the cameras were gone. Sometimes I spent most of the day watching her.

On summer evenings, my neighbor’s wife would call her name through the screened front door to say that supper was ready. “Miranda!” she would shout, and I could hear the tender way she shaped each syllable in her mouth. My neighbor would smile then, hauling herself up from the camping chair like a swell of water. She’d collect the book lying open, face-down in the grass at her heel, and sweep the sunglasses above her forehead before trudging inside. I would be holding my breath until I heard her broad toe push the door closed with a sharp slap.

One time, my neighbor left the door ajar, and I imagined myself putting down the last faintly moist dish, quietly slipping outside, and entering that little blue house with the red shutters. I imagined what I’d find inside: two women, sitting down to eat fried rainbow trout, baked potatoes heavy with butter and sour cream, and a two-tiered cake, fat with chocolate icing that my neighbor would drag a long index finger across and offer to the other woman. The sunglasses still resting on her head would reflect the other woman’s smile. If they didn’t see me, they would kiss.

If they didn’t see me, my neighbor would guide her pretty wife into their bedroom, or onto the couch in the living room, or lay her down on the dining table still covered with the remains of their meal. Delicate fish bones would splinter under their weight, while nearby, potato-crusted butter knives and a fork full of icing rolled off the table to stain the rug beneath.

During my last summer living in the house next to theirs, a little girl from down the road went missing.

During my last summer living in the house next to theirs, a little girl from down the road went missing. It was a holiday, and she was too warm from the sun and the crush of bodies lining Main Street where the annual parade marched. She walked her bicycle up our street and rested under the tree that towered over a corner of my neighbor’s front yard. The little girl was plump; her face was sweetly sunburned and sweaty. My neighbor hurried to bring her a cool washcloth and a glass of water. When she went inside to call the mother, the little girl vanished. She’d left her purple bike behind.

The little girl’s disappearance haunted us all through July. My neighbor didn’t lounge outside anymore, and people whispered about her in a feverish new way. When I went to buy cigarettes, I caught little snippets of conversation between the other shoppers and the cashier, a friend’s niece with long nails and dark eyelashes stiff around hard blue eyes. Someone said my neighbor must have eaten her, followed by a laugh that spread like a viral cough. The cashier tittered, holding up a thin hand over thin lips.

One time I saw her scrubbing the word “guilty” off the pale blue garage door, towing a pail of sudsy water that splashed filth along her slender calves.

I saw my neighbor less and less as the weeks went on. I didn’t see her on Sunday mornings getting into the old, crimson Cadillac, with her wife, dressed like a doll in pale lilac, sliding across the big front seat to press against her soft bulk. I didn’t see her on Tuesday evenings tending to the forsythia, standing on tiptoes in her weathered thongs and reaching the watering can high over branches that had shed their golden blossoms more than a month ago. I didn’t see her sitting in the window at dawn, stroking the cat with a coat like a cow’s. Instead, I saw my neighbor’s wife getting the groceries and checking the mail. One time I saw her scrubbing the word “guilty” off the pale blue garage door, towing a pail of sudsy water that splashed filth along her slender calves.

When the door was clean, my neighbor’s wife called to her, asking her to come out and see. She was still holding the pail of dirty water, and sweat beaded along her hairline like a crown of tears that twinkled in the mild daylight. She called my neighbor once, twice, three times, a little tenderness leaking out of the word as she repeated it. My neighbor stayed in the house. Her wife looked briefly up at the pale blue sky, then dumped the bucket of filthy water into the soil beneath one barren forsythia before going inside.

In early August, the little girl’s daddy was arrested in Nevada. He’d come back to town to collect on an old debt and heard about the big woman who sunned herself in a red bikini. When he’d driven by to get a glimpse of my neighbor, he spotted his daughter in the yard. He’d shuffled her inside the car filled with empty cans rattling like rib bones and asked her where she wanted to go. A few weeks later, police in Reno got a call about a little girl abandoned in a grimy motel room. They busted the little girl’s daddy at a local dive and brought the daughter back home to her mama—a pinched woman with shoulders that melted down her body like a pat of hot butter.

People in town gossiped about what had happened to the little girl. They blamed her mother for marrying a scoundrel and then kicking him out so he could get up to more trouble. They blamed my neighbor for taking her eye off the girl and for attracting the father with her indecent summer habit. As time went by, though, there were other things to worry about. Two boys drowned in the Snake River. The mill announced another round of layoffs. Everyone moved on, except for my neighbor.

After the little girl came home, I had hoped my neighbor might take to her lawn again, but the camping chair stayed under the house’s wide eaves, the Cadillac stayed in the garage, the little wife didn’t wear lilac anymore, and they never went back to church. I missed her while she was locked inside—the color her peripheral presence gave to my days, and the intimate way I knew her old routines. Maybe she was waiting for someone to tell her it was safe to come out, but no one ever did.

In late September, a woman in a blue suit pulled her sleek sedan into my neighbor’s driveway. She removed a broad sign from the trunk, picking her way across the scrubby lawn in high blue heels to plant it in the grass. The sign read For Sale in red lettering above a picture of her own wan and smiling face.

By the third week of October, there were men hauling carefully taped and labeled boxes—Kitchen, Living Room, Office—out through the front door and loading them into a long moving truck parked on the street. My neighbor’s wife followed at their heels, urging them to be careful, reminding them that the things inside were fragile. I watched my neighbor’s life trickle out of her house until nothing remained but the glowing wooden floors and white walls stippled with nail holes where colorful art had once hung.

It took thirty days to close on the house, and I got the keys just before the holidays. When I let myself in for the first time, I hunted for clues to the life my neighbor had lived there before me, for anything that would show me what she was like in private.

I inspected the dust and cat hairs that had accumulated in the corners of the living room. I ran a finger along the highest shelf of a barren old built-in bookcase and found a battered Christmas card signed “with love, Aunt Lou.” In a bedroom closet, I stooped to pluck a pillowcase with red roses embroidered on its corners from the floor. I went into the bathroom, counted the penny tiles, and found a sliver of soap in a ceramic shell jutting from the bashful pink tub. I opened the medicine cabinet, then closed it again and watched myself in its milky mirror. In the back of the kitchen pantry, I spotted a sleeve of plastic party cups sprouting dust. Under the fridge, a handwritten recipe for banana bread. I opened the oven and inhaled. In a sticky drawer nearby, I saw a slightly bent Polaroid of my neighbor and her wife in wedding dresses, smiling.

In the garage, I found an oil stain on the concrete and the wide, dingy camping chair slumped against a wall. I dragged it into the living room and sat to watch the sunset over my new front lawn.

I thought of my neighbor while arranging my things where hers had once been. My blue couch fit snugly under the wide living room windows, and my reading chair looked good in a corner by the fireplace. My dishes stacked neatly in the kitchen cupboards, and all my clothes fit on a single rack in the closet. I put the pillowcase with the roses on my own pillow and admired the way the red petals looked against my plaid bedspread.

I baked the banana bread, and it was delicious.

I felt like I had moved not just into my neighbor’s house but into her life. The intimacy I’d felt watching her intensified as I moved through the rooms and breathed the air that had belonged to her. I almost expected to hear the Cadillac in the driveway, her heavy footsteps trudging toward the door, her key in the lock. Sometimes before I sat down to supper, I would whisper “Miranda,” just to see if she would come when I conjured her.

But this town is left with only the ghost of her. Or maybe it’s us who are haunting her.