Grover’s Neighborhood

It seems that in American neighborhoods, the farther up the socio-economic ladder we travel, the more disconnected we become from our fellow man. Lower-income apartment dwellers share hallways, stairwells, and often laundry rooms with their neighbors. They pound on the ceiling if the teenager upstairs is playing his music too loud; it’s easy to tell through the air duct that it’s spaghetti and meatballs night at the Lombardis’ downstairs. The middle class is typified by rows of neat little houses, which often have a wall in common; though slightly more private, it’s easy to lean over the backyard fence to borrow a cup of sugar. In the upper-middle class, where I currently reside, it’s possible to go about your business and completely ignore the neighbors around you, separated by ample sideyards with artful landscaping, and entering the house in and out of the garage door.  At the top of the ladder, members of the upper class sequester their properties using iron gates with electronic keypads for entry. Presumably no one ever comes calling, which is probably the goal.

 

Fitting neatly into this pattern, never have my husband and I been as involved in the day-to-day lives of our neighbors as when we were newly-married and living paycheck-to-paycheck in Charleston, West Virginia. We lived in one of two upstairs apartments in an older, 4-unit building on Venable Avenue. Although we never got to know too well the tenants of the other three units (our building was somewhat transient), we got to know intimately–arguably a bit too intimately–the owners of the houses on either side of us and directly across the street.

 

On one side, a stone’s throw from our bedroom window, lived a 65-year-old man with the wonderful and typical West Virginia name of Grover Meadows. Like many West Virginians of his generation, Grover had been living for years on a generous workman’s comp settlement which enabled him to spend his days boating, fishing, gardening, and tooling around in his RV. We had only lived in our apartment for about a week when we discovered that Grover had serious boundary issues, long before the days when Dr. Phil was around to set him straight. We’d be fading off to sleep at night, with our bedroom window open since we had no air conditioning. “Paul and Betsy (BAY-yet-see)!” Grover would bellow from down below in perfect West Virginglish. We would eye each other and silently consider if we could get away with ignoring his overtures, but would usually conclude that Grover surely knew we were home from our cars out front. “Uh, yes, Grover?” Paul, head still on pillow, would shout back. I would reflexively fasten the top button of my nightie. “Want some tomaytas? I got some really nice tomaytas! Homegrown!” “Uh, gee, Grover, that’s awfully nice. Could this possibly wait til morning?” “Aw, sure thing,” he would say, retreating back through his screen door and switching on Walker, Texas Ranger.

 
Before I had a job, sometimes I would receive a call in the middle of the day. “Do you know who this (THE-yis) is?” “Yes, particularly since you’re calling from your front porch and my window is open,” I would answer.  What would follow was often some story concerning King Tut, his tiny white fur-ball of a dog, who was Grover’s constant companion and source of amusement. Or a story about some adventure that “me and Juanita” had had. Juanita was our across-the-street neighbor, a widow about Grover’s age, who kept him company on his RV excursions, but whose grown son had strictly forbidden her to marry Grover. Occasionally we would see Juanita scurrying across Venable Avenue in the early morning hours, clad in her housecoat and hairnet.

 
This was all a fairly tidy setup until Faruq (Fa-RUKE) and Parveen moved into the small brick house on other side of us. Faruq was a physics professor at nearby West Virginia Institute of Technology, which is actually not an oxymoron, but it ain’t Princeton either. WV Tech, as it is called, frequently hired professors like Faruq from Pakistan and India, whose opportunities were limited in their own countries, but who you can imagine didn’t fit in very well in Appalachia. Grover and Faruq quickly sized each other up. Grover told me at every opportunity that Faruq was one of those “damn Arabs who beats his wife.” Faruq had equal contempt for Grover and his hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and for West Virginians in general. He was quick to make friends with Paul, whom he deemed his intellectual equal. When Faruq learned that Paul was a columnist for the newspaper, he would lecture him that more international news should be included in the newspaper. “It’s pathetic! The people here just don’t know!” Faruq would chide, in heavily-accented but correct English. “You have to educate the Yahoos!”

 

Blessedly, I finally found full-time employment, which caused me to miss some of the daytime goings-on on Venable Avenue. A few months passed, when one Sunday morning Faruq hailed us departing for church. “Did you hear what happened?” he asked.  “My wife married the village (willage) idiot!” It seemed that Parveen had fled Faruq’s authoritarian rule and taken up with Grover, who was waiting with open arms. Faruq seemed faintly amused by this chain of events–he was clearly not devastated to have Parveen off his meal ticket. For his part, Grover was thrilled to have reeled in a woman 30 years his junior, even if she was an Arab. Left out in the cold was poor Juanita, who was given both the shaft and the consolation prize of Tut, since Parveen was highly allergic to her betrothed’s noble canine. We bought our first house and moved shortly thereafter.

 

Fifteen years later and three houses larger, there’s not nearly so much color in my neighborhood. We’re a pretty homogeneous group, ethnically and economically.  There are interesting stories and characters out there, but I have to work a little harder, or at least get out of bed, to discover them. And while it’s difficult to imagine returning to the forced companionship of Venable Avenue, I hope my children will one day venture out of air-conditioned suburban comfort to have similar experiences.  My life is richer for having had them.

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