The Second House in Four Years

Tomorrow, I am going to a neighbor’s house to hang out.

Aside from my own, I’ve only ever been inside one other house in this neighborhood, and every minute of those ten minutes, I was praying to leave.

Easter last year, the wife next door asked if we wanted some of the Easter dinner leftovers. I had assumed Paul would decline, but instead, I found myself tasked with getting Tupperware from the kitchen. I brought three containers. Few enough not to seem greedy, and few enough not to commit to too much time in the house, but enough to seem earnest.

Luckily, the kitchen was near the door, so at the time, I considered myself lucky. She showed me items and asked if I wanted some. I said sure to everything, but knew deep down I didn’t want any of it. 

But what do you do in this situation? Say, no, I don’t want your baked beans that are a special recipe and have been a family favorite for decades, because if I know one thing about myself, it’s that I secretly prefer baked beans straight out of the can, bland, room temperature, and scooped out with chips. Potato or tortilla, depending on my mood. Sometimes I can get a little wild.

I saw sweet release in sight as she snapped a lid on the third container with macaroni and cheese inside. Which, perhaps this is bragging and not the right time to mention, but I make very, very, very good macaroni and cheese. I hand-shred extra sharp cheddar from a block. I freshly grate Parmesan off a fragrant, hard hunk. I slowly stir the bits of cheese into evaporated milk and macaroni over low heat and watch them melt into a beautiful, decadent blend. I didn’t want her mac and cheese. I wanted the third dish filled so I could leave.

But alas, friends, perhaps you see by the mass of words that follow this sentence that there is much more to this story. I was not free. Freedom remained elusive and cold, for she then pulled out paper plates and aluminum foil and insisted I take half of a chocolate cake, which she was already cutting and placing on a flimsy paper plate.

Then, after she had forced upon me a little bit of everything, she did the most dreaded thing one could do.

“Would you like a tour?”

“Oh no, no, Paul’s waiting for me and I probably need to get this in the fridge,” I said, gesturing to a mass of food I didn’t want.

“But this is the first time you’ve been to my house.”

Now, I will be honest, I have no idea what exactly that means. I guess somewhere deep in some Southern etiquette book, you are supposed to guide your first-time guest from room to room and show them everything, from the shitter to the bed you fuck in. Maybe I’d be more inclined if I wanted to be her friend, but I didn’t. Just to be clear, it wasn’t because she was elderly. I’ve had and will have senior citizen friends. It’s because she’s a proven, grade-A, top-tier bitch and gossip.

And so I finally was able to leave and carry the unwanted loot home, where I, not being one to completely close myself off, tried a bit of each and then tenderly tipped each container into the trash, disappointed that I suddenly had enough dirty dishes to run the dishwasher after only ten minutes.

But that was a year ago, and now, tomorrow, I am going to a different neighbor’s house. I actually think I could like her. She seems exactly as neurotic as me.

Her husband will be at “group,” which from context clues I have gathered is some version of AA or NA for people who want to not drink or use drugs but refuse AA or NA to do it. Whether “group” is some intellectualized or religiousized or medicalized version remains unknown to me. I’ve seen both. Get sober through science! Get sober through Jesus! Get sober through a pill! I don’t really have strong opinions. I just got sober the same way people have done it since the ’40's and wasn’t too worried about some fandangled new way. AA was just fine for me.

But enough of that! Get this, friends.

When she invited me, she said we could meet at her house or “go out for a charcuterie.” Can you imagine? Anyone who knows me — and of course this woman doesn’t know me — should know that I, of all people, will not be buying cold cuts, crackers, and cheese dried up on a wood board at a 10x markup, right now in Trump’s economy!

Yes, I was forged and quenched like a sword in practicality. Watch now as I, at the age of thirty-eight, mysteriously turn into my mother when I was a child. I am peering down at my own round, youthful, hopeful face, two Lunchables — the ’90s charcuterie predecessor — clutched in my two tiny hands. I can hear my mother’s voice and my voice mashed in garbled synchrony:

“For that price, I could buy a whole box of crackers, a whole pack of bologna, a whole thing of cheese singles.”

She wasn’t wrong.

Just as I wasn’t wrong to text back, “Your house is fine,” when in reality, I am choosing the lesser of two evils. Apparently there is something worse than a neighbor's house and it's spending $25 on $5 of meat cheese, and crackers.

I offer to bake cookies and bring them.

Because, again I am bragging, I am very good at making cookies. People rave about how soft and perfect they are. The trick, you see, is to pull them out of the oven before they seem done.  The key step, then, is to carefully remove them from the pan onto a cooling rack, let the room air circulate around the cookie so it cools slightly and the heat never tips too far.

That’s the main issue, people with hard cookies or overdone cookies — they wait for it to look like the perfect cookie in the oven, or leave them on the pan, forgetting the pan and the heat inside the dough will continue to bake.

I'm sorry. 

So what the fuck is the point of all this you may ask.

Jesus, I don’t know. It’s all kind of meaningless.

The distance between how I understand the world and how others do, how I find myself going to someone else’s house for the second time in two years four years of living in this neighborhood. It’s strange to be me, and probably ten times stranger for these people to meet me.