The Neighbor Who Became Something Else

I did not expect to become friends with Harriet.

She was in her late sixties and I was in my early thirties. She lived in the unit across the hall. We nodded for about six months, the way you nod at neighbors, politely, without stopping. She had gray hair cut very short and walked a small dog named Walter and left the New York Times outside her door every morning.

Then there was a burst pipe in February and we both ended up in the hallway at two in the morning, wrapped in coats over pajamas, watching someone figure out where the water shutoff was. We stood there for an hour and started talking the way you only talk when you are too tired to be guarded and the situation is too absurd to take seriously.

She had been an architect. She had designed buildings I had walked past for years without knowing. She had grown up in Jamaica and moved here at twenty-two and never quite stopped finding the winters startling. She had been married and then not. She had one daughter who lived in Berlin and called on Sundays.

After the pipe was fixed we went back to our apartments and I did not sleep and I thought: that is a person I want to know.

We started having coffee. Not every week, but regularly. She would knock when she had too much of something from the farmer's market. I would knock when I had made too much soup. We talked about her buildings and my work and Walter's increasing stubbornness and the building's other residents and the neighborhood and politics and her daughter and my family and all the things that accumulate between two people who are not quite sure how to categorize each other but keep showing up anyway.

She moved to be closer to her daughter the summer I had been living there for three years.

I wanted to give her something for the going.

She had once pointed to the view from her window, the specific angle she had lived with for eleven years, the building across the street with the water tower on top, and said: I am going to miss that particular thing. Nothing in Berlin will look like that.

I had a friend who was a watercolorist. I described the view. They painted it small, on good paper, the way it looked on a winter afternoon when the light was coming from the left.

I gave it to her on her last day.

She held it and looked at it for a long time.

Then she said: this is the window.

I said: the way it looked in January. Your favorite month.

She laughed. She had a very good laugh.

She said: you paid more attention than I realized.

I said: I think that is what you taught me.

She sent me a photo from Berlin three months later. The painting on her wall, next to a window with a completely different view. The two windows, side by side, in a way.

I did not expect to become friends with Harriet. But there she is, on my wall too, in a different way.