Hello, Neighbor

"I don't want to freak you out," Tiffany said one evening recently. "But in one of the apartments across from us, whoever's inside is always looking out toward our place and painting."

"What?" I cried. "That freaks me out!"

The back of our apartment building looks out onto the back of four other apartment buildings. From our kitchen and living room windows, we can see into 26 other people's kitchen, living room and bedroom windows, if their shades aren't drawn. And, if our shades aren't drawn, they can see into ours.

Then I thought about what she said.

"Painting?"

"Yes," she said. "There's an easel."

"Oh, well, I don't think we sit still long enough for anyone to paint us," I said. "If he has binoculars or a camera I might be worried. Is it a he?"

"I can't tell," she said.

"Maybe we should get our binoculars out and stare across at him or her so he or she knows that we know he or she is looking at us," I considered.

But we decided the person was most likely doing a still life of the back of our building, however unlikely it seemed. Anyway, what could we do? There were people behind us, and, unless we wanted to live in the dark, they could see into our apartment and we could see into theirs. Sometimes when we're eating breakfast, the boy in the apartment diagonal from ours is strumming his guitar in his boxers on his futon. The woman in the apartment way way across the four backyards--none of which we have access to--has laundry hanging up to dry in her place all the time. Like every day. She makes me feel like we are very dirty. Or else she has 16 people living with her, which would not be unusual for the neighborhood.

The man who freaks me out the most is obsessed with rain. He has long scraggly brown hair and a shaggy brown beard and, every time it rains, he sticks his entire upper half out his window and smiles, turning his palms up to feel the drops. Then, he eases his body back into his apartment and cranks his window shut. Twenty minutes later, he's at it again. I actually start to get mad at him until I realize that every time I see him looking at the rain, I'm also looking at the rain, so perhaps he thinks I'm the freaky looking blond girl who stares at the rain.

(Yes, it's been raining a lot here.)

Both my mom and Tiffany's mom love our windows to the world, however weird our world might be. We normally pull the shades shut at dusk, otherwise we feel like fish in a bowl, but when either one of our moms visit, they beg us to leave them up, just a few minutes longer.

"You know, we have a movie to watch," we say.

"Shhh," they say, "I'm watching someone pick out a book from a shelf in his tighty-whiteys."