Good Neighbors

by Joanne Serling

laughed lightly. Lorraine so clueless about how the real world worked. Lorraine living her whole life in Fair Lawn within ten miles of her extended family. Everybody getting together for holidays and birthdays. Everyone arriving on time, speaking civilly to one another, agreeing to play by the same rule book. Difficult topics weren’t mentioned. Like the fact that Lorraine’s aunt was a compulsive shopper or that Lorraine had a new boyfriend before her divorce was even final. Everything papered over with money and good manners and plans for next time. It would have been laughable and pathetic if I weren’t so jealous.

Which seemed like an odd and risky way to live your life. To believe that things either worked out with your kids or they didn’t. That there was very little you could do to influence them. Even though I secretly suspected Jay was right, their basic temperament was out of your control, which frightened me.

There was only so much you could control. So much you could plan for. The rest, most of it good, some of it awful, was up to chance. You had to assume that something horrible was going to happen to you someday—likely soon, definitely not never—and that when it did, you would have the brains and the fortitude to survive it.

life and was forever trying to guard against it. The unfairness of the world. The way the people who were supposed to protect you and love you could let you down.

After a while, Penny sighed and said in a low, serious voice, “You know how most people are afraid of being unhappy?” I nodded, even though she couldn’t see me. My every moment of every day filled with plans and goals and chores so that I wouldn’t have to feel the thing she was conjuring: sadness and dread. Loneliness and loss.

Sweatshirts were stuffed into backpacks along with homework and lunches. Oh, how I hated the homework. The lunch packing. The daily routine of it. It was so much worse to be the parent than the kid.

Between the boys, who hated long car trips. And of course, between Penny and my mother and me. Over all of the usual stuff, and things I hadn’t even dreamed up yet. But still. I wanted to go. To ensure the boys had some sense of their family. To ensure that I didn’t lose them completely.

She had, no doubt, thought our little sideswipes and innuendos would go on forever. Not just this afternoon but long into the future, as we pretended to be friends and eventually were again.