Concurrence

I have had a cartoon looping inside my head for the past week: the tops of all the houses have been severed, sliced off — and, like a human drone, I am able to see inside each one. It is, I suppose, a fantasy revealing an overabundance of curiosity. But then again, I am a therapist, endlessly fascinated by the stories of people’s lives. Perhaps this proclivity toward observation (bordering on prying) developed while growing up in New York, where I watched people, so many people, day in and day out from the windows of our apartment overlooking 82nd Street in Manhattan.

There was an especially large brownstone next door to where we lived; actually it could have been mistaken for a miniature embassy. It housed unwed mothers, pregnant girls and young women who had been sent to New York to have their babies and give them up for adoption. My mother told me that all the residents were from the Midwest. Unsure how she could have known this, I believed it nonetheless. At 14, I had never been west of Pocono Pines, Pennsylvania, so my imagination went wild as I spied on these pregnant women through our apartment windows. I figured they were from small towns where people parked their cars on the diagonal, where big red barns with large silos flanked acres of cornfields, where high school kids made out (and obviously more) under the bleachers next to the football field. Unwanted pregnancies in these little towns must have been fodder for hushed gossip and shameful disgrace.

I kept a watchful eye on them — especially the ones who looked closer to my age. From time to time, they would leave in groups. I assumed they were being taken to an obstetrician’s office en masse or to a tour of Wall Street or the United Nations. I felt sorry for them, imagining that they had been forsaken by their families. They must have missed their friends, the dirt roads, their cows and home-cooked meals. At the very same time, I, their next-door neighbor, wanted nothing more than to live far away from my home, the city, my family. I did not want to be pregnant, but the Midwest sounded intriguing. I wished that there had been an exchange program.

There was a room in our apartment that was hardly ever used. It was on the far side of a small balconied terrace outside the dining room. My father used it for an office, but in truth, he was almost never in there. On one wall, there were tall metal filing cabinets filled with his patient files. Bookshelves lined two other walls, filled with books about cardiology and internal medicine. Once I did find a book sandwiched in between the medical ones titled Lolita. I read a few pages toward the end of the book and realized it was not about medicine.

There was a huge picture window on the north wall of that room. It looked out onto the backs of all the buildings on 81st Street, much like the window in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Rear Window. We lived on the top three floors of a six-story brownstone owned by the playwright Lillian Hellman. She lived on the two floors below and then there was a caretaker’s apartment on the main floor in the back. Their place had direct access to a postage stamp-sized garden patio behind the building. Many brownstones on both 81st and 82nd streets had tiny main-level terraces hidden from the street. From the vantage point of the picture window five stories above street level, I was in heaven. I could look down and see all the patios or I could look straight across and see into the windows of apartments facing ours.

There was always something interesting to watch. Many windows had no shades, no obstacles getting in the way of observation. I kept track of a nudist couple who sat on a sofa at night reading the paper, unclothed other than an occasional throw blanket. They sometimes danced naked and I could barely watch. I had never seen a man unclothed and it was almost, but not quite, too much to take in. There was a woman in another apartment who had an easel set up and she would paint almost every afternoon. I never saw what she was painting, but I loved watching her concentration. In another apartment, there was an old man who always sat in the same chair, no matter when I spied on him. He looked forlorn, forgotten. Did he have children or grandchildren? Was his wife dead? What had he done for work? Is this what old age is like? I imagined that his loneliness would be the cause of his death. Once, in the summer, I looked down onto the back terrace of a brownstone and saw small children playing in a sandbox. I wondered if my unwed pregnant neighbors ever watched this and if so, did it make them feel sad.

Once my father caught me in this room looking out the window and was furious that I was there, as though I had trespassed on private property. So for the remainder of my adolescence, I got really good at being stealthy, finding safe times to continue my surveillance of the world surrounding our apartment. What compelled me was this: people living their lives concurrently and in close proximity to one another, not knowing who they were next to, not knowing what emotions were being felt or expressed just feet from their walls, ceilings or floors. The unwed mothers were unaware, I felt sure, of the nudists. The nudists never considered that someone was watching them from a brownstone across the way. Lillian Hellman was a floor below my perch writing a play perhaps about the wily nature of children, not knowing her upstairs neighbor was living out the play before she could get pen to paper.

This fascination with the synchronicity of human everything has had a grip on me my entire life. On a cold day in January 1979, 42 weeks pregnant with my first child, I thankfully went into labor. My husband helped me into the back seat of our car where I partially reclined for the 15-minute trip to the hospital. We were barely three minutes from the house when suddenly my husband groaned dammit under his breath. He said there was a funeral procession going in the opposite direction, and a policeman on a motorcycle was stopping traffic on our side of the road. I peeked out the window and sure enough, dozens of cars all with little pirate-like flags affixed to their hoods were passing. In between contractions, I said loudly: ONE IN, ONE OUT! Even through the discomfort (read pain) of labor, I was comforted knowing that at the same moment I was bringing a child into the world, there was a person wrapping it up. While I have forgotten many moments of what turned out to be an extraordinarily long labor, I have never forgotten the two processions going in opposite directions at precisely the same time.

My intention today was to write about my wish to peer inside all the houses on a block at the exact same time. While a person in one house might be doing the laundry, the couple across the street could be deciding to separate. And next to that house, there might be kids loudly refusing to get out of bed and the mother could be yelling at the father to stop screaming at the kids. And in the house down from them might be a lonely woman who just yesterday put her husband into a memory care facility; staring at her coffee cup, she might be feeling so much guilt and relief all at once that she is thinking about returning to bed. And so on …

As I sat down midmorning in my quiet office to write something along these lines, I noticed flashing lights go past my window. A fire truck (without sirens blaring) was barreling down my street followed by an ambulance. I stood up to see if they were about to stop at any of the houses on my block. Sure enough, they pulled over and parked efficiently and quickly two doors down from me at Marilyn Thompson’s house. Marilyn, like me, is in her 70s and lives alone. I stood at the window watching at least four EMS people, masked and uniformed in black, enter Marilyn’s house. I felt scared for her, praying she had not had a stroke or heart attack. My phone started pinging: texts from other neighbors were flying like arrows:

What’s happening to Marilyn?
Why is a fire truck in front of her house?
I saw her yesterday and she was fine …
Should someone go over there?
Is anyone calling Marilyn’s children?

They had each been engaged in washing the breakfast dishes or making plans for a summer vacation or on hold with their internet provider, listening to an enraging loop of terrible music. My intention was to write about a fictional street — a tale about the symphony of life that happens all the time, with the musicians unaware of the melody being played around them.

And there it was, just like that. I was home, feeling at peace doing what I enjoy most, and just two doors down, Marilyn was having a serious cardiac event. This was not a fictional street. This was my street. I learned later that she had gotten up as usual that morning feeling fine. She made her coffee, opened her front door to get the paper and settled into her morning routine. In her sunroom, she turned on her favorite morning news program, relaxed into her comfortable chair and started reading the paper. And then, boom. She lost consciousness. Marilyn had been an ER nurse before she retired, so when she came to, she ran through the frightening possibilities of what could be happening to her. She managed to get to her phone to call 911; at the exact same time, I was getting my desk organized, opening my computer, filling my water bottle, beginning to focus on the subject at hand. Marilyn’s heart rate had plummeted to 20 beats per minute and she was taken by ambulance to the hospital to get a pacemaker put into her chest. Watching her being transported by gurney from her front door to the ambulance was so upsetting that I could not concentrate enough to write anything.

The subject of my mental fantasy (of lopped-off roofs and of knowing the simultaneous activity on a block) came to life the very morning I was going to write about it. Perhaps a neighbor down the street got distracted from her morning exercise routine by the ambulance and fire truck. In another house, someone might have been talking on the phone to a hospice nurse taking care of a relative across town. And the people on the corner could have been on their way out of the house to go to their granddaughter’s school to watch her in a play. Across the street from them, a man was shoveling snow because maybe he was tired of his wife’s hounding him. Everyone on this block, no doubt, stopped what they were doing when it was clear that something serious was happening down the street. I thought of the line in Ludwig Bemelmans’ book Madeline: “In the middle of the night, Miss Clavel turned on the light and said, Something is not right!”

We are all on different arcs of the same moment all over the world. At this very second while I am here writing, people are lying in bunkers in Ukraine or fleeing into Poland in the middle of the night fearing for their lives. Yesterday, I went into my local birdseed store and as I was paying for a month’s worth of birdseed, the owner and I got into a conversation about the tragedy of the war in Ukraine and the broken state of the world. As I left his store, I said: Cities are being decimated, people are being killed, children and mothers are cramming into train cars and buses to escape the war, and I am buying birdseed.

Later tonight, while I make dinner, someone will be in surgery getting a new heart. And the nurses who were on duty last night prepping this patient, will be at home sleeping. And at the moment the patient’s old tired heart is being removed, someone will be at the Perkins next door to the hospital ordering a couple of eggs, over easy. I know none of this is a new revelation. But it is an awareness that is never far from my mind. I imagine it is my way of staying connected to humankind. Being a child in Manhattan was difficult. Despite the crowds of people almost everywhere and the fascinating heterogeneous cultural center that New York is, what I remember is deep loneliness. I felt it within myself and I saw it in the faces of the people I watched. Maybe this lifelong curiosity about what other people are doing simultaneously is a way to hedge against feeling alone. We are all together, separately trying to make sense of — to negotiate a way through and to survive the best we can — this life that is at once joyful and cruel, unjust and painful, and always as compelling as it is difficult. So my drone fantasy is not just one of snooping, but also a way to commiserate invisibly, to acknowledge secretly that life is an arduous assignment we are all completing concurrently.