Enzo is carrying the last of the boxes into the house while I’m standing out on our sparse lawn, avoiding unpacking while fantasizing about how the lawn will look after my husband rejuvenates it. Enzo is a wizard when it comes to lawns—that’s sort of how we first met. This one almost looks like a lost cause with its brown patches and crumbly soil, but I know that a year from now, we will have the nicest lawn in the cul-de-sac.
I am lost in my fantasies when the door of the house directly next to ours—12 Locust Street—swings open. A woman with a butterscotch- colored layered bob emerges from the house wearing a fitted white blouse and red skirt with spiky high heels that look like they could be used to gouge out somebody’s eye. (Why does my mind always go there?)
Unlike the neighbor across the way, she seems friendly. She raises her hand in an enthusiastic greeting and crosses the short path of cobbled pavement separating our houses.
“Hello!” she gushes. “It is so good to finally meet our new neighbors!
I’m Suzette Lowell.”
As I reach out and take her manicured hand in mine, I’m rewarded with an impressively painful handshake for a woman. “Millie Accardi,” I say.
“Lovely to meet you, Millie,” she says. “You’re going to absolutely adore living here.”
“I already do,” I say honestly. “This house is amazing.”
“Oh, it really is.” Suzette bobs her head. “It was lying empty for a while because, you know, such a small house is a hard sell. But I just knew the right family would come along.”
Small? Is she insulting our beloved house? “Well, I love it.”
“Oh yes. It’s so cozy, isn’t it? And ” Her gaze rakes over our front steps, which have slightly crumbled, although Enzo swears he’ll fix them. It’s one of a long list of repairs we’ll need to make. “Rustic. So rustic.”
Okay, she’s definitely insulting the house.
But I don’t care. I still love the house. It doesn’t matter to me what some snooty neighbor thinks.
“So do you work, Millie?” Suzette asks, her blue-green eyes zeroing in on my face.
“I’m a social worker,” I say with a touch of pride. Even though I have been doing it for many years now, I still feel proud of my career. Yes, it can be exhausting, soul wrenching, and the pay is nothing to get excited about. But I still love it. “How about you?”
“I’m a real estate agent,” she says with an equal amount of pride. Ah, that explains the way she was insulting our house in real estate speak. “The market is jumping right now.”
Well, that’s true. It occurs to me now that Suzette was not involved in the sale of this house. If she’s a real estate agent, how come her neighbors didn’t want her to sell their house?
Enzo emerges from the truck, carrying more boxes, his T-shirt still clinging to his chest and his black hair damp. I remember filling one of those boxes with books and being worried that I had made it too heavy. And now he’s carrying not only that box, but he’s put another one on top of it. My back aches just watching him.
Suzette is watching him too. She follows his progress from the moving truck to our front door, a smile spreading across her lips. “Your moving guy is really hot,” she comments.
“Actually,” I say, “that’s my husband.”
Her jaw drops open. Looks like she thinks more of him than she does of the house. “Seriously?”
“Uh-huh.” Enzo has deposited the boxes in the living room, and he is coming out of the house for more. How does he have the energy? Before
he reaches the truck, I wave him over. “Enzo, come meet our new neighbor, Suzette.”
Suzette quickly tugs at her blouse and tucks a strand of butterscotch hair behind her ear. If she could, I’m pretty sure she would have given herself a quick once-over in a compact mirror and refreshed her lipstick. But there’s no time for that.
“Hello!” she gushes with an outstretched hand. “It’s so nice to meet you! Enzo, is it?”
He takes her hand and flashes her a broad smile that makes the lines around his eyes crinkle. “Yes, I am Enzo. And you are Suzette?”
She giggles and nods eagerly. Her reaction is a bit over the top, but to be fair, he is turning up the charm. My husband has lived in this country for twenty years, and when we talk at the dinner table, his accent is relatively mild. But when he’s trying to be charming, he turns up his accent so that he sounds like he’s right off the boat. Or as he would say, “right off boat.”
“You are absolutely going to love it here,” Suzette assures us. “It’s such a quiet little cul-de-sac.”
“We already love it,” I say.
“And your house is so cute,” she says, finding yet another creative way to point out that our house is substantially smaller than hers. “It will be perfect for you and your kids, especially with another little one on the way.”
When she says that, she looks pointedly at my abdomen, which definitely does not contain any little ones on the way. There have not been any little ones in there for nine years.
The worst part is that Enzo swivels his head to look at me, and for a second, there’s a glimmer of excitement on his face, even though he knows very well that I had my tubes tied during my emergency C- section with Nico. I look down at my belly, and I notice that my shirt does bulge in an unfortunate way. I’m dying a little bit inside.
“I’m not pregnant,” I say, for both the benefit of Suzette and apparently also my husband.
Suzette clasps a hand over her red lipstick. “Oh dear, I am so sorry! I just assumed ”
“It’s okay,” I say, cutting her off before she makes it worse. Honestly, I love my body. When I was in my twenties, I was a stick figure, but now I finally have some womanly curves to show off, and I daresay my husband seems to enjoy them as well.
That said, I’m throwing away this shirt.
“We have two children.” Enzo flings an arm around my shoulders, oblivious to Suzette’s insult. “Our son, Nico, and our daughter, Ada.”
Enzo couldn’t be more proud of our two children. He’s a great father, and he would have wanted another five of them if I hadn’t nearly died giving birth to our son. We would have loved to adopt or do foster care, but with my background, it was out of the question.
“Do you have children, Suzette?” I ask.
She shakes her head, a horrified look on her face. “Absolutely not. I’m not the maternal type. It’s just me and my husband, Jonathan. We are happily childfree.”
Excellent—she has a husband of her own. She can stay away from mine.
“But there is a little boy in the house across from yours,” she says. “He’s in third grade.”
“Nico is in third grade too,” Enzo says eagerly. “Maybe we can introduce them?”
When we moved, we had to pull the kids out of school right in the middle of the year. Trust me—the last thing you want to do is yank two grade-school-age kids out of their classes in the middle of March. I was racked with guilt, but we couldn’t afford to pay the mortgage and the rent until the end of the school year, so we didn’t have a choice.
Nico, who is outgoing like his father, didn’t seem bothered by it. For Nico, a whole room full of new kids to impress with his antics would be a fun adventure. Ada took the news calmly, but later I found her crying in her room at the thought of leaving her two best friends behind. I’m hoping by the fall, they will both be settled in and the trauma of moving in the middle of the school year will be a distant memory.
“You can try to introduce yourself to them.” Suzette shrugs. “But the woman who lives there, Janice, is not very friendly. She hardly ever comes out of the house except to bring her son to the bus stop. I mostly just see her in the window, staring out at the street. Such a busybody.”
“Oh,” I say, wondering how Janice can apparently never leave her house yet also be so nosy.
I look across the way at 13 Locust. The windows all look dark, despite the fact that it’s the middle of the day and the people who live there seem to be home.
“I hope you’re getting some good blinds for your windows,” she tells me. “Because she has a great view.”
Enzo and I simultaneously rotate our heads in the direction of our brand-new house, the realization suddenly dawning on us that not one of the windows in the entire house has blinds or curtains. How did we not realize that? Nobody told us we needed to buy blinds! Every home we ever lived in before now came with them already installed!
“I will buy blinds,” Enzo murmurs in my ear. “Thank you.”
Suzette looks amused by our cluelessness. “Your real estate agent didn’t remind you to buy blinds?”
“Guess not,” I mumble.
I suppose the implication is that Suzette would have reminded us if she had been our real estate agent. But it’s a bit late for that. For now, we are blind-less.
“I can recommend an excellent company that will install blinds for you,” she says. “They did our house last year. They put in these beautiful honeycomb blinds on the first and second floor and then these adorable shutters in the attic.”
I can’t even imagine what such a thing would cost. Far more than we have to spend, that’s for sure.
“No, thank you,” Enzo says. “I can do.” She winks at him. “Yes, I’ll bet you can.”
Seriously? I am getting a little sick of this woman hitting on my husband right in front of me. It’s not like other women don’t do the same, but for God’s sake, we’re neighbors. Can’t she be a little more subtle? Part of me is tempted to say something, but I’d rather not make an enemy five minutes after moving here.
“Also,” she says, “I wanted to invite your family over for dinner. The two of you, of course, and the children can come too.” She doesn’t look excited about the idea of our kids entering her home. And she doesn’t
even know about Nico’s propensity to break something expensive within five minutes of entering any room.
“Sure, that will be wonderful,” Enzo says.
“Fabulous!” She beams up at him. “How about tomorrow night? I’m sure your kitchen won’t be up and running by then, so this will take the stress off.”
Enzo looks at me with raised eyebrows. He has boundless energy for social events, but I’m the introverted one, so I appreciate that he defers to me before accepting. Truthfully, I loathe the idea of spending an evening with this woman. She seems a bit extra. But if we’re going to be living here, aren’t we obligated to be friends with the neighbors? Isn’t that what normal suburban families do? And maybe she won’t be so bad once I get to know her.
“Sure,” I say. “That will be really nice. We hardly know anyone in Long Island.”
Suzette throws her head back and laughs, revealing a row of pearly white teeth. “Oh, Millie ”
I glance over at Enzo, who shrugs. Neither of us seem to know what’s so funny. “What?”
“You don’t know how you sound,” she giggles. “Nobody says ‘in Long Island.’”
“They they don’t?”
“No!” She shakes her head like I’m just too much. “It’s ‘on Long Island.’ You’re not in an island—that sounds so ignorant. You’re on an island.”
Enzo is scratching at his dark hair. He has zero gray hair on his head, by the way. If not for my bottles of Clairol, I would be pretty much gray and have been ever since Nico was born. All Enzo’s got is a few gray strands in his beard when he grows it out. But when I pointed that out to him, he dug around on his scalp until he found a single gray hair to show off to me, as if that made it any better.
“So I don’t understand,” I say. “Does that mean people should say they live on Hawaii? Or on Staten Island?”
The smile drops off her face. “Well, Staten Island is an entirely different case.”
I try to catch Enzo’s eye, but he just seems amused by the whole thing. “Well, we are happy to be here on Long Island, Suzette. And we look forward to having dinner with you tomorrow night.”
“I can’t wait,” she says.
I have to force my own smile. “Should I bring anything?”
“Oh.” She taps her index finger against her chin. “Why don’t you bring dessert?”
Great. Now I have to figure out what on earth I’m going to bring for dessert that will live up to Suzette’s standards. I’m thinking a box of Oreos won’t cut it. “Sounds good!”
As Suzette walks down the path back to her own much larger house, her heels clicking on the pavement with each step, I feel a twinge of something in the pit of my stomach. I was so excited when we bought this house. We’ve been crammed into tiny apartments for so long, and I finally have my dream house.
But now, for the first time, I wonder if I have made a terrible mistake moving here.
