Window Pain

The intermittent squeal of the brakes on the mail truck is all I can hear as I lose focus peering through my bay window. Cardinal Lane is quiet this afternoon. This time last year, the noise of kids playing in the street, their watchful mothers yelping from their front doors, was bothersome to me. But my mind wanders back to those memories like a long lost, war-torn lover now. The loneliness of these days has been consuming my thoughts.

I hop off my mother’s cozy handmade cushions in a decisive moment. As I reach for my phone, my loneliness is compounded with the desire to reach for her hand. I stare at my face in the screen and wait impatiently for her face to look back at me. There she is, ahhh, my precious mother. Her advice is always golden, but her touch…. her touch can relieve all of my stress.

“Good Morning, Momma! It’s such a lovely day, are you busy?” My mother is never actually busy. She is a retired nurse who just never sits down. “Boredom is created when you stop thinking creatively” is her favorite response to a child’s pouting pleas for entertainment.

“No, Evette, Good Afternoon, I’m mixing up my hummingbird juice.” She is the envy of every gardener in her neighborhood. Children stop running when they pass her home. The butterflies swarm like little fairies and the bees will study you as if they are painting your portrait. It would be a magical place for children if my mother wouldn’t swat them away like pesky flies, “Git away, children, and do NOT step on my chrysanthemums.” I, on the other hand, have a rock garden with hardy cacti and aloe for my sunburns. Every now and then, I pick up a plant from my local nursery. “I’m sorry,” is what I say to the plants as I drive them home, “I will try my best, but you will probably die in my care, I’m so very sorry.” My mother was unusually bothered this morning. She complained about the store down the street not carrying her regular items. Apparently, her neighbor bragged about buying up all of their goods to stock up.

“This virus isn’t going to kill me, this LOCKDOWN is.”

“Oh mother, be patient, it is a small sacrifice to make in order to enjoy the rest of your life. Anyways, you could use a little break. Think of it as an extended spiritual retreat. Text me a list of the things you need, and I will order them online for you. They will show up in a few days at your doorstep.”

When I hung up, the wave of loneliness hit me again like a ton of bricks. I never see that coming. I went back to my bay window. I stood there looking at the same scene, trying to create something in my mind other than boredom.

~~~

John wasn’t a great guy by my mother’s standards. But he wasn’t boring. I woke the next morning to a loud thumping sound. It was rhythmic and made me want to jump out of bed and do the cha-cha. I sat up.

“JOHN!” I yelled loud enough for the neighbors to hear me. I ran downstairs in my underwear and pulled the front door wide open. “JOHN!” He wrapped his arms around my waist and spun me around him as I hugged his neck. He smelled of freshly sprayed cologne and he squeezed the loneliness out of me in one big burst. The neighbors were peering through their windows by now, but neither of us had any cares. He held me like a little girl, my legs around his waist. He pulled back and stared into my eyes.

“Wow, you have the most beautiful face.” He took a piece of my hair and tucked it behind my ear. He kissed my forehead. Then my nose. Then my lips. Oh! How his touch can cure my every illness! I met John while attending college. He never finished his business degree. Instead, he took a lucrative position at a financial firm through some friends of his professor. He has been very busy since then, and I don’t get to see him much. My mother tells me that I am wasting my time. But, this VERY moment, tells me that I’m not. He carried me to the couch, where I laid my head on his chest and we both vented about the recent events and all of the inconveniences we have been put through.

“I am moving back to California, Evette.” The words came out of his mouth and just sat in the air for a minute. I looked up at him, attempting to tie myself into his plans, or find some evidence that he was still planning a future with me. “Paul, at the firm, asked me to work remotely and even discussed opening another branch back in Sacramento after this whole virus thing blows over.” I sat patiently waiting for an invite. But my mind kept wandering to my mother and how I desperately did not want to be so far away from her right now. But we are on a lockdown, so I imagined a world in Sacramento for a moment. Making phone calls works the same, no matter where you are in the world, I guess. But, as I looked for more from John, the reality of the purpose of his visit began setting in. That darn loneliness bug crept up on me again. All of the sudden, the warmth of his belly became cold to me and I hopped up.

“John, what’s the plan then? With us, with me? I’ve missed you so much, and you have only come to tell me you might be gone for good?”

~~~

The next morning, John was busy making eggs and French toast as I wandered out of the bedroom. He has a way of making me comfortable and happy, even when the realities are anything but. His impending absence flashed into my mind as I stepped into the yummy smells of the kitchen.

“You aren’t allowed to go.” He knows I’m only half serious. John is too ambitious for me to get in the way of that. It is the part of him that is the most attractive and the most hurtful. I’ve grown accustom to random calls from him after weeks of silence. “He is a busy man,” I tell myself. But I often wonder who is keeping him busy. I have always been the girl that he invited to all the big events. He would send me the invite and a time to be ready. I always felt like Cinderella when he would pull up in his limo full of “the boys at the firm” and their dates. But I always wondered if “the boys” had met any other women that he fancied.

“I don’t really WANT to go, if you wanna know the real truth.” John took me by the waist and dipped me low to the ground as if we were at a ballroom dance. “But, with this lockdown happening, there is nothing to stay here for at the moment.” My puppy dog eyes were perfection. “You know I’m referring to my work, not my pleasure, dear," he said as he spun me around into the barstool chair. Mmmm, he made the best eggs.

~~~

Three months later, I received a text message from John. He had found another girl in Sacramento. She was his childhood friend, no less. He would need to cut ties with me romantically, but he wanted to remain friends. He will see me when this lockdown mess is over and hopes that I will move on and find someone who will treat me like the princess that I am.

As I sat on my mom’s cushions by the bay window, I thought of all my past loves. John was by far the most exciting, but he was not my only heartbreak. The loneliness set in again. How in the world was I so sad about a man that I barely saw? And now, how would I ever meet a man, let alone a new friend at all, during this self-imprisoning lockdown? Just then, an ambulance pulled up across the street. The elderly woman who lived there was brought out on a stretcher and they pulled off. I have lived on Cardinal Lane for three years, and I have never thought to get any of my neighbor’s phone numbers. As I pondered the fate of this frail old woman, a luxurious car pulled into her driveway. A sharp-dressed man stepped out, went to his trunk and pulled out some very expensive luggage and proceeded to enter the house. Now, I was really beating myself up for not getting her number. That night I finished a whole bottle of Jetbird. As the merlot warmed me up, it didn’t make the loneliness go away. Reading the label, I was whisked away to the Northern Californian vineyards. They are so much closer to my lovely John than I am.

I woke up to someone tapping on my bay window. I had fallen asleep on my mom’s cushions, the bottle of merlot lying on my chest, and my wine glass precariously placed on its side by the windowsill. As I cleared my gaze, I saw a familiar figure. It was HIM! The man who arrived after the ambulance took my neighbor away.

“I’m sorry to wake you, I have just been watching you from my mother’s bay window, and well…. I was beginning to think you weren’t actually breathing.” His relieved chuckle was muffled through the window.

“Oh, my goodness, no, I mean, YES, I am breathing. I am fine.” I laughed it off, but I wasn’t quite fully awake or happy. So, I just waved as he wandered back over to his yard.

~~~

I, like all my neighbors, have become a professional at peeking through my blinds undetected. And I noticed that the sharp-dressed man had begun to break down into an emotional mess, just like me. I saw him crying in the garage one day while talking on the phone. My nosiness forced me outside my front door. As I pretended to tend to the dead plants on my front stoop, I stressed my ears to hear of the fate of my elderly neighbor. Our eyes caught each other. Oops. I felt intrusive and just went back inside.

Later that evening, my doorbell rang. If I had been expecting someone or a package, I would have run to the door as if it were Santa Claus knocking on Christmas Day. But I wasn’t, so I lurked at the door, peering through my peephole and out of the window adjacent to the door. Nobody. I opened the door out of confusion and at my feet there was a single bottle of Bright Cellar Jetbird with a note attached.

“My mother passed yesterday, I’m not sure if you knew her very well. She contracted the virus from someone that she plays Bingo with. Please be careful. Call me if you need someone to talk to. I know I do.” He signed the note, “David” and wrote his number below his name. I walked to my kitchen and opened the bottle of merlot. I poured a glass and walked over to my bay window. As I peered across the quiet street, the streetlights slowly illuminating as the sun went down behind the nicely packed row of houses, a light could be seen across the way in my neighbor’s bay window. There he was with his own bottle of Bright Cellar Jetbird, his glass freshly poured.

“David?” I said, after dialing the number on his note and hearing his voice on the other end. “I’m your neighbor, Evette.”

“Nice to meet you, Evette,” he said, as he lifted his glass of merlot and we toasted through our bay windows.