Next door, not Nextdoor
In October, three months into my Santa Monica move, I sat on the top of the two stairs leading to my apartment, drinking coffee and sunshine. I hadn’t met my next door neighbor yet, but had been told by the leasing agent she was a massage therapist who worked out of her home, as a selling point to me.
On my move-in day, my neighbor’s Turkish housemate offered to join the crew—my childhood friend, her husband, and our two strong sons—carrying heavy things. His kindness and strength made me feel better about my neighbor’s safety.
I’d briefly seen her wearing head-to-toe sun protection, but her visor made it hard to chat. Now she would have to pass me on the steps to reach her home. Bahala in action.
I introduced myself and we laughed that we hadn't yet crossed paths. The When Harry Met Sally-esque stories of people who had lived near each other for years without meeting until, one day, they did, make a strange kind of sense. Even someone like me who craves community is my own silo standing tall amongst other silos, each of us brimming with hidden nourishment that could feed so many.
Leonora has been living in the unit next door for twenty years. Originally from New York, she came out to LA after a horrible string of losses: one of her sisters, two benevolent uncle-types, and her beloved mother who’d adopted her,
Oh, and she was an executive assistant, hadn’t ever been a massage therapist. Now it’s a joke that never stops being absurd and therefore bonding.
I told her my mom was coming to live with me and my son, which got us talking mothers. She adored and missed hers, Maia Wojciechowska, author of over twenty books and winner of the Newbury Award for Shadow of a Bull in 1965.
“Her Wikipedia page has errors,” Leonora said. “I can lend you her autobiography and you’ll get the real deal.” She laughed. “Or, at least the story told by the person who lived it.” Wojciechowska says as much in the book’s foreword: Going over your past publicly is…like making a movie. The hardest decision is what you leave out and…retain, often at the risk of making yourself ridiculous. Is any of it true anymore?
I promised: “I’ll race through it and return it to you.” She pressed her first edition (1972) into my hands, Till the Break of Day: Memories 1939-1942. Thick yellow pages, crumbling cover featuring photos of her mother as a girl surrounded by her ancestors.
The history of the publisher, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich could be an entire separate piece; suffice to say here that the timing of Willam Jovanovich in the name was, I believe, essential to the book’s publication.
After devouring the book, I know my neighbor and the person she loved best. Her mom wrote: The past, like the movies, has its own truth. Her daughter and I live in the place best known for making movies. A shared stoop, however briefly, flooded with furrawn, the kind of talk that brings strangers to sudden intimacy.