A Journey of a Hundred Feet: Told in Triptych 

Krystal A. Sital

I.

Her red hair flickers like an open flame under the sun, the bright color in direct contrast to her age. We’ve just moved in and she’s my new neighbor who has crossed the hundred-foot distance over a busy three-lane county road to invite me into her home. It’s a road I’ve already vouched not to cross very often with a little child. But busy road aside, I’m excited to explore this new venture—our first house in the suburbs in this country—and though this woman isn’t who I’d fantasized as my first neighbor-friend, I follow her.

I step inside and see her husband on the split-level corridor above, shuffling by in a robe haphazardly tugged over his clothes. He gives me a curious look, pauses, then continues on his way. After all these years I get the sense that he’s used to his wife randomly pulling people into their immaculate home.

My husband and I aren’t there yet. We’re still exploring the topography of the first few years of our marriage. The language that exists between mature couples like them seems magical.

“Let me take her,” Martha says to me, beckoning to my one-year-old squirming in my arms.

It’s only the third time I’ve spoken to Martha, whose home is located across that deep divide—a county road where cars zip hazardously past over sixty miles an hour. I’ve already noticed how cars take the yellow light as a suggestion to go faster, often barreling through the light seconds after its turned red. We are one house away from the corner, at the crossroads of a dangerous intersection and I have no desire to cross the street, viewing houses like Martha’s as a part of their own neighborhood very separate from our own.

Pawel and I moved to the area less than a month ago; I’m eager to befriend our surrounding neighbors, to put down roots. Visions of us walking over with baked goods to introduce myself and our budding family play through my mind. Having apartment-hopped in the banal urbanity of Bayonne and Jersey City for the last decade and a half, the tucked away suburbs extends an invitation of communal delight.

The suburbs are unchartered territory for us—Pawel a farm boy hailing from southern Poland and me an island girl from Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean. To two people from humble and modest backgrounds, the affluent suburbs of New Jersey was a place of mystical charm and lure, but also one of stability and security—two things we sorely lacked growing up.

But I’m narrow minded in the company I desire in these moments. I want to forge youthful friendships. I dream of creating a new life with other families that mirror our own.

Martha wags her arthritic fingers invitingly and I hand her over.

Martha holds my daughter awkwardly, as though she hasn’t held a baby in some time and I learn that, in fact, she hasn’t. I’m twenty-six years old and discover her children are all older than me; Martha and her husband have a handful of grandchildren clustered around age ten.

I wonder what this woman and I could have in common. I look at her curiously, her smile as bright as her red hair, her mossy green eyes sparkling like a river in a forest. I struggle to imagine her as a young woman with small children of her own clinging to her and pulling her in all directions. I can’t yet see the broad scope of life having not yet settled into motherhood. My life perspectives are shifting, but with only a one-year-old, there’s so much life before me still. In time, I’ll learn to quickly do the math and draw the connections, considering that so many of us women are in the same place but at different moments in time. It’s how we reach across that temporal divide to help one another that’s important. Martha is trying to teach me that here, but I can’t see it behind my desperation to find families with the screams of young children that echo my own. I think she can’t possibly understand me now, for we are in completely different places in life.

We walk on her gleaming red mahogany floors. As she shows me around her house, I absorb just how old Martha looks. Her shoulders and back curve to the earth, the skin on her long arms slack and wrinkled. My daughter almost slips from her hold, and I whisk her back into the safety of my arms before continuing the tour.

Curiosity drives her husband to join us. Though also stooped, he’s taller than my five-foot-nine-inch frame, so I must look up at him. Sandwiched between them, we parade through their home from the bottom floor to the top.

They’re from Germany and proud of it—Martha and her husband whose name refuses to stick in my memory. Flags and memorabilia from their country are plastered throughout their home. They even have a full bar that Martha’s husband designed and built himself. It spans an entire wall of their ground floor and beyond that, through glass doors to their patio. The inside and outside are so seamlessly connected, I stand back in awe.

“It’s right next to the door,” he says, “like a biergarten.”

We laugh easily together. It’s impressive, this kind of space one lovingly entertains in and polishes. He’s in place, ready to pour me a fine German beer of which he has many, but I decline.

I can already tell Martha likes to tell stories and I love to listen—her voice like warm milk swirled with honey pours right into me. I’m gulping her in and can’t get enough. I see the home I want to create for our family right here. One filled with a soft, unspoken understanding of love.

But I must go.

I’m tired, and their eagerness scares me. I’m embarrassed because I yearn for a vision of suburban life that’s not them—the elusive white picket fence, toys strewn across a pristine lawn, children running to and from houses, parents gathering in each other’s backyards. And because they don’t fit this mold I’ve created, I shy away from their invitation to friendship.

As I retreat to my side of the street, I nestle my nose into the sweet tufts of my daughter’s hair and turn back to wave to the nice German couple who are still beaming at us from their doorway. There is such hope and happiness on their faces.

II.

Our second child comes and grows into a toddler, the spirit of our children running like an electric current through our home.

Lately, our daughters fight over a miniature doll as small as my pinkie finger. The doll has a painted-on green bodice and a white fabric tulle skirt. They take her everywhere with them, and I wonder at the beauty and reverence of the gift.

Martha often crosses the divide, and I emulate her to uphold the connection she pioneered. She was the one who tucked the doll into their hands at one of her many garage sales. She is often the one who maintains the friendship between our two families. I learn from watching her, understanding that to declutter our home, we must one day do exactly as they do.

I eventually accept her gifts without feeling guilty about having nothing to give in return. I’m realizing for the first time that Martha is teaching me about life and has been doing so from the moment we first met.

In the time we’ve spent here, fixing, and maintaining our own space, me relying on Martha and her husband as a compass, no other neighbors venture forth to befriend us despite my efforts. To our right is a grumpy old man who never wants to engage in conversation. I learn over time that the man who lived in our house before us was one of his best friends and understand it’s easier for him if we don’t connect. To our right is an older couple whose children are in college. They work odd hours and are never at home. Behind us is a young couple with two little children and while I’m exuberant in my efforts to extend friendship, nothing comes of it. I knock on all the doors in our vicinity on our side of the street. Most of our neighbors are older and stay to themselves. All of my baked good’s attempts fail. They never reciprocate and never cross any boundaries to cultivate a harmonious neighborhood life.

Idyllic fantasies of what our life would be like here, dissolves. Children traipsing through our backyard and tumbling into our house for snacks and games, evaporate.

But not Martha and her husband. They were the friendship I’d been chasing all along.

Some years, I mark the passing of time only by these two. As birds string musical notes round the corners of our homes with their songs, Martha and her husband bustle around their house with their windbreakers, shears, shovels, and hoes. Like a baker, she kneads the earth with her gloved hands, rocking back and forth for days on end while her husband reaches above her to clip and shape the hedges. They’re preparing for life to return after our long and brutal New Jersey winters.

In the summer, sweat drips off her husband’s bare back as he pushes a lawn mower up and down their yard, the curve of his torso deepening with time. Martha is there with him, bringing him a drink during her own gardening break. I can’t help but marvel at these two as I watch them through my living room window.

After watching them the first season, my husband and I—fueled by our shared immigration stories—feel inspired to imitate their hardworking spirits. We start our own garden, assembling plants sloppily, learning with each passing year how to raise beds and organize them more naturally to deter pests. We purchase a lawnmower of our own and attempt to maintain our lawn. Halfway done with the front lawn, I give up. My husband takes over but he soon learns that the mower is too small and we’re both tired and frustrated from clearing out the shorn grass to continue. We eventually park the mower in the garage where we’ll donate it to a local lawn company who does the job we can’t. Not with two young children, work, and pets. Possibly not ever. Martha and her husband become more of a wonder to us.

Their garage is often open in the fall. As I pull into my driveway one day, I’m amazed at the cumulative organization of the sum of two lives. Every tool has its place, every box is labeled, and their assortment of equipment is astounding.

By contrast, we can’t seem to get our car in the garage, the clutter often spilling over to the side of our house. I can’t help but ponder if we too can ever be that way.

Snowfall in the suburbs sometimes comes fierce, leaving behind poetic blankets of snow. Martha and her husband get the timing right by salting their driveway and walkways a day before, signaling to me that we should start too. And when they don’t, they’re outside in snowsuits, moving in perfect synchronicity—she handles the snowblower, and he shovels. As the years progress, their arms and legs slow, but their work never stops. They salt again in the middle of the storm, and by the next morning, while everyone’s driveways are buried, theirs is pristine.

They are the oldest people on our block. How many winters have they weathered in the storms of their lives? How will Pawel and I get there too? Will our relationship emerge from the storms to come?

One day as the girls play on the couch next to me, I see Martha crossing that divide again, and I know she’s coming straight to me. It’s been a couple seasons since we’ve sat down to chat, but it comes easily. In comfort, we move from inside my house to outside, standing in the driveway now oblivious to the white noise of cars that speed past. It’s a crisp spring morning, the kind that feels newly kissed after torrential rains the night before; everything brighter and more alive. The feel of the goldenrod sun on my arms is warm and pleasant. As we talk and laugh, our heads dance in unison like flowers in the wind.

We don’t connect often enough, and I openly carry the guilt for that, consumed by two little ones. I could try harder, but I am exhausted—new mom exhaustion—and so I tell myself she can wait. We will get better acquainted when my children are older, and I have the time and the energy to talk regularly.

“I was born in Germany, and he was, too. But we met here,” she says.

When they met here in New Jersey, they were both already in their mid-twenties, working different jobs and met purely by happenstance.

But she doesn’t say it in that business-like way some older couples do. It rises like energy from her solar plexus, and the emotions roll off her and cover me. Martha talks about their story with love and beauty, her eyes swimming in a sea of memories. She takes me with her, and for a while on that busy street we disappear together—me and Martha.

“You know,” she says. “We didn’t live that far from one another in Germany. Less than a mile or so.”

To live so close but move across bodies of land and water to finally meet. Their story is immense and filled with more than I can ever know. But so too is ours—Pawel from Europe and me from the Caribbean, New Jersey our meeting place. I’m beginning to appreciate our own story now too, not anxious for it to be like theirs, but patient that ours will unfold with time.

I can’t stop marveling at this woman who tries so hard. It doesn’t occur to me that what she does for me, I will do for others one day soon. She’s teaching me about the kind of woman I want to become.

She pulls me into one of her now familiar hugs, but this time I feel a marked difference. She is smaller, bonier, and so much frailer than ever before.

III.

Another child comes along, making our family complete. He rounds out our angles with his shouts, demanding to be heard from the bottom of three. He turns three amid a pandemic that will mark all our lifetimes, and also marks seven years we’ve lived in the same house across the street from Martha and her husband.

“If you need meats, he knows the best places,” she shares.

I continue to unearth gems about Martha and her husband. He was a butcher for most of his life and even though he no longer must, he chooses to work a handful of days a week. They reflect our own histories and lives—immigrants from scattered parts of the globe who share common roots. Where I first saw no potential for a friendship because of our deep age divide, I’ve come to rely on the exchanges I have with Martha and her husband.

But now many months—six, seven, eight, I lose count—go by before I glimpse them again. The friendship I’ve come to rely on dissipates. They are elderly and in the face of covid they must be extra cautious.

I catch a glimpse of them one day. Her husband is transformed, and I feel my heart crack when I see he can’t walk on his own. His hair is now a shock of white, his body almost folded at ninety degrees. This man who pushed and shoveled, dug and axed, now hobbles along with a walker.

“Honey, he’s sick,” I tell Pawel. “If you saw him, you’d feel it in your bones.”

And now I’m sick with worry, too, and I’m not sure if there’s any ease or comfort I can bring while the pandemic rages on.

On a beautiful day when the sky is clear and only a few clouds scud overhead, Martha surprises me by crossing the street to reach me.

“He has leukemia,” she shares.

The love of her life, the person she traveled the world to find, is ill. As we’ve done countless times over the last seven years, she spills her heart to me in my driveway now instead of our living rooms. How can she navigate this world without the person she loves? This day is coming soon.

I can’t embrace her to quell her pain as her tears fall from those forest green eyes that once sparkled with love and light. It is the only part of her face I can see around her N-95 mask now splotched with tears. I’ve always felt like I had nothing to give Martha but as we stood there crying with one another unable to touch like we would normally do, I realize we were the only two who spoke to each other in this neighborhood, offering one another a friendship we so desperately needed.

“I’m sorry, Martha,” I say.

I tell her I want to hug her. I tell her I will cook her a meal. I tell her I will do anything she wants, but she politely declines and instead offers me something. As she always does.

The next day I find boxes upon boxes of paper goods they’d held onto for years. So many paper plates and cups, utensils and napkins, everything we could possibly desire for years to come.

“We don’t need all this anymore,” she says. “Use it for the kids and their projects. For your family gatherings. For your life.”

Her words cling heavy to us both.

They thought they had time to use it. They thought they had all the time in the world.

Though I knew it was coming, when I see the FOR SALE sign hung in front of their home, I weep.

She forces me to look to the future and to understand in my heart nothing is set in stone. I know old souls hold our histories, and if we don’t listen, we lose everything dear. But I’m scared to cross the street and say goodbye.

I want to tell her I see how special they are. I want to tell them I see their love and their stories. I want to tell them they matter, and they’ve changed me deeply. I want to share with them the way they’ve shared with me.

When I cross the street to say my final goodbye, all the emotions I carry in my heart stay right there and the words I thought I wanted to say never come. This time I feel her teaching me again, but I won’t know the lesson until after she’s gone.

When I first met them, I wanted to leave, and they yearned for me to stay. And now.

All I want is for them to stay.

But now they must go.