Some Kind of Neighbors

The Rands were our closest neighbors -- closest physically. The house I grew up in was separated from their house by a 10-foot-wide walkway divided by a privacy fence. We rarely saw the Rands and never spoke with them. Mr. Rand was almost non-existent. I think he drove a Lincoln Continental and was impeccably dressed in well-tailored suits. Mrs. Rand wore elegant dresses and jewelry as if she were an advertisement for Saks. There was a single child, a daughter, who was considerably older than me. Early on, I'd seen a school bus drop her off from Catholic school, filled with girls in white blouses and pleated blue-gray plaid skirts. Then the daughter must have gone away to college because I didn't see the school bus anymore. Mrs. Rand was the only one that seemed to live in the house most of the time.

On the other side of the Rand's house was a field where my friends and I would play baseball. Like most kids aged 7-10, we shouted and made noise, and occasionally the ball would roll onto Mrs. Rand's lawn and one of us would have to retrieve it. Her house had an enclosed patio, and one time someone hit a ground ball hard and fast, and the ball smacked the aluminum siding of this enclosed patio. I ran to fetch the ball and as I neared the patio, Mrs. Rand stepped out and glared at me. She was likely in her 40s, and austere looking, with a considerable amount of makeup. I was terrified of her. She didn't say a word, but still glaring at me, she picked up the ball and carried it inside her house. End of game. Some of the kids hollered at Mrs. Rand once she was inside. We considered getting another ball but also decided on playing somewhere else.

The Rand house was quiet and dark nearly all the time. However, on a few summer nights, when the windows were open and I could see the pale bluish light from their black-and-white television, I heard some ugly fights between Mrs. Rand and her daughter. I assumed the daughter was home from college but I didn't see her around that often . . . A raging battle with vicious arguing and screaming about things I didn't understand. Tears, brittle objects being thrown, crashing. No one argued in my family, and though there were verbally and physically abusive parents in my neighborhood, the recipients of that abuse were often my friends or other kids my age who were too young and small to talk back to their parents. This was different. The daughter was lashing out at her mother with greater vehemence and anger than the other way around, and she seemed so unhappy. I also felt that, no matter how wicked Mrs. Rand may have appeared by taking our baseball, she didn't deserve that much hatred from her child.

I could not understand the Rand family. The didn't even seem like a family, not in the conventional sense that I was used to, like other families in my neighborhood with Mom and Dad and kids, and maybe a grandparent or two. Even if some of your neighbors weren't particularly social, they still waved in greeting to you, and most of them could manage a smile. But not the Rands. My parents tried explaining to me that the Rands had likely been city dwellers previously and did not necessarily interact with their neighbors because some city neighborhoods were more anonymous and impersonal, which paradoxically soon became true of most second-generation suburbs where the homes were more spread out. It seemed as though my block and neighborhood, and the larger part of Wayward, was typical of the working class city or factory town neighborhoods, once removed, where you did interact with your neighbors because almost everyone was doing the same thing: the men went off to work each day at the mill, or factory, or defense plant; the kids walked to school and played in the park after school; the mothers were home and often talking with one another. Today that would be called the same demographic. But the Rands were more in step with the future, because few, if any neighborhoods are as homogeneous anymore as mine was in the 50s and 60s. Most neighborhoods these days are more diverse, and your neighbors may be of an entirely different profession and leading an entirely lifestyle than you.

The Rands moved when I was almost out of high school. I think Mrs. Rand may have moved back to the city. It wasn't clear if her husband or daughter were in the picture anymore. By then a new house had been built on the empty lot or field where we had tried playing baseball. The new family that moved in couldn't have been more different from the Rands: Proles with five kids and a loudmouthed grandma who was always shouting and swearing at the kids. I soon missed all the years it had been mostly quiet on that side of my house where my bedroom was, and I began to think maybe the Rands had not been so bad as neighbors after all, because they kept to themselves and you hardly knew they were there . . . Be careful what you wish for . . .

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