Our neighbors in the apartment below Grace and me were three generations of women: mother, daughter, and granddaughter. It was the daughter Grace and I knew best, Leslie, a middle-aged Black woman whose eyes lit up in recognition the first time she saw Grace. Leslie’s mother, Ellen, had lived in the apartment for nearly four decades, and raised Leslie there, and they had raised Leslie’s own daughter, Nakia, there together.

      “No white man ever lived here before,” Leslie joked to me the first time we met. “It’s the Amazons.”

      I thought about this joke every time I went down the stairs past Leslie’s front door: How I was a sort of guest in the city of Themiscyra, and how the building we lived in, just two full-floor apartments, top and bottom, was a sort of city of its own, a walled fortress of womanhood.

      One of Ellen’s closest friends had owned the building until a year or two before Grace and I moved in. It was an almost daily reminder of the fabric of the neighborhood, how it had changed and been rethreaded by redlining and urban redevelopment greenlit by commissions of white men whom I always imagined conspiring in smoke-filled rooms. It was another instance of a way in which the city had been vacated before my residence, of how the façade of every building disguised an untold history.

      Ellen’s friend had passed away and left the building to her son who had been like a nephew to Ellen until now, with the incentive of money under his nose, Leslie told us. Now, things between the two families had become increasingly contentious. He had stopped responding to their requests to fix a water tap that continuously leaked, Leslie said, even though he was the one responsible for the water bill. This frustrated Grace immensely, since one of the things that had attracted her to the apartment in the first place was the prospect of having a Black landlord, someone who looked like her and so might have her best interests in mind. But he was proving himself to be more of a landlord than anything else, miserly and with nothing in mind other than his own bottom line.

            By the time Grace and I had moved in, Ellen already spent most of the day in the back room of her apartment smoking cigarettes by the window, except for Sundays when she left to take the bus to church. I worked in the room that was above Ellen’s sitting room, or perhaps it was her own bedroom, a guest bedroom in Grace’s and my apartment in which I had edged a small secretary desk between the bed and the window – I’m sitting there now, writing this – and all day I could smell Ellen’s cigarette smoke wafting up past the window which I, too, keep open while I work, and would hear Ellen’s lungs explode in the occasional burst of a coughing fit. The smell made me miss smoking.

            Nakia, who was in high school, was almost never home or, when she was, got into shouting arguments with her mother about homework or boyfriends or curfew, anguished whining which Grace and I could hear clearly from our kitchen. She was still languishing in her invulnerability, her ignorance of consequence. Nakia and I had very limited interactions. The girl avoided or ignored me, and only mumbled hellos when I passed her in the stairwell or when she and her friends were sitting on the steps of the building, which they often did on warm weekend afternoons, scooting to one side to make room for me to come in or out. I don’t think she knew my name, or cared. It was obvious that she lived in her own world, with slang phrases I didn’t know, music playing on her phone speakers that I had never heard, giggly whispers about celebrities I wouldn’t recognize if I saw them on the cover of a tabloid. There was something about this that endeared her to me, a nonchalance that, like her grandmother’s smoking, I recognized as something we had once shared, even if the nature of this particular thing was a lack of involvement in one another’s lives.

            Leslie and I had a cordial acquaintance which was mostly rooted in our adulthood; we coordinated taking out and bringing back in the trash cans every week; we sent each other text messages about package deliveries; we helped each other carry groceries up the steps. Neighborly things.

            Grace and Leslie had become friends, though their friendship did not extend beyond the boundaries of our shared building. They, too, would sit on the steps of our building in their own matriarchal variation of the way that Nakia and her friends claimed the territory, late at night, after Ellen and the girl had gone to bed and I was still up, reading or watching television. They would share a joint and trade work stories. Grace practiced immigration law and Leslie worked as an intake nurse at the hospital that overlooked our neighborhood like a castle on the side of a mountain, a bastion of twinkling light and cancer care that burned through the night, visible from our bedroom window. Or they would talk about whoever Leslie was dating, a cast that changed frequently, and Grace would complain about me, some minor thing I had said or done, in the spirit of commiseration, and if I overheard it I would smile, because those little annoyances are stitched into the fabric of love, they mean a kind of knowing that all pleasantries surpass. Or they would spend all day Sunday twisting each other’s hair into braids twined with the synthetic strands they extracted from plastic bags.

           There was a sort of privacy to their rapport, subtleties of facial expression and gesture, a vernacular I wasn’t versed in. And there was something I loved about this, too; for as much familiarity accompanied love, so did a certain amount of secrecy, of unknowing and never knowing which deepened both the mystery of love and the anxiety of aloneness. But there was something that moved me in the idea that there was a Grace I did not – would never – know.

            When I saw Grace and Leslie on the stoop, leaned toward each other conspiratorially, or overheard them talking late into the night, I often thought how much they resembled Nakia and her friends, and how the two women were playing out a familiar scene from their own girlhoods. And how this, childhood, was another part of Grace I could never fully know. The realization filled me with yearning regret. I wished that I had known her then and had been known by her as a child, in my purity, before the recklessness. Before the changes wrought by age and realization. Which was why I lingered, some nights, by the window, listening to her and Leslie speak, imagining, like squinting my mind, what Grace was like before I knew her at all.

§

            The landlord came around our building sometimes, to work on his car, a lowrider he left parked in the garage. Leslie thought he did this only to fill her apartment with fumes. He had been trying, for decades, she said, to make her life there uncomfortable. One time, he brought a pair of pit bulls and let them stalk up and down the block without their leashes on, which had frightened Grace as much as it had enraged Leslie, and it had seemed, to me, unquestionably hostile behavior.

            The landlord was frequently the focus of Grace and Leslie’s late-night conversation on the stoop, commiserating and comforting one another. Finally, the situation reached a boiling point. I’m not sure if it was because the two women had conspired enough to embolden each other to act, or because the landlord’s latest transgression was particularly egregious, but one afternoon, late summer, another overheated day when tensions seemed to be running high across the city, things came to a head.

            I was holed up in the bedroom, the only cool room in the house for its lack of direct sunlight, focused on a writing project that was facing deadline. Grace passed the bedroom doorway briskly, her movement catching the corner of my eye. When I asked where she was going, she called out something about the landlord or his car. My focus was still between the page and her passing remark and I didn’t quite make out what she said, or process it, before I heard shouting in the street outside the building. I recognized Grace’s voice, then Leslie’s. I rushed downstairs to find Leslie and Grace in the landlord’s face, the man backing away slowly with his hands up and an expression of feigned apology on his face.

            He was saying that he didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to come around without giving notice and Grace was trying to show him something on her cell phone screen, maybe supporting evidence for the tenants’ rights laws she was explaining. She was moving the phone closer and closer to his face as he backed away and pointing to a specific line of text. They were all three talking over each other and I could not clearly distinguish anything that what said until there was a lull in the conversation.

            “You’re not going to be able to get away with this stuff when your tenants aren’t Black!” Grace said.

            The landlord noticed me and gave me a chagrined look, shrugging. I didn’t know what to say, so I shrugged back. He took a step toward me, turning slightly to move between Grace and Leslie who stood between us. They both turned to look at me and Grace gave me a look that told me to go back inside.

            I turned to climb the stairs, not wanting to entertain, for a second, the landlord’s apparent notion that he might find some camaraderie with another man.

            A few minutes later I heard the landlord’s car start up and pull out of the garage, and then Grace and Leslie talking in heated tones. They stayed out there almost an hour. I was trying to write but remained distracted by their the rise and fall of their voices. 

            When Grace came in, I asked if she would have wanted me to join in the conversation with the landlord, to have taken a stand on her and Leslie’s behalf.

            “No,” she said. “All of that was between us.”

§

            One night in late autumn, Grace and I came home to find an ambulance parked outside of our apartment building.

            “Oh god,” Grace whispered, even before knowing the reason that the ambulance was there. Or, perhaps, knowing before being told.

            The building’s façade was lit up in a wash of red light from the ambulance, casting odd shadows underneath the windows. Neighbors I had never seen before were gathered in the street. A car slowed as it passed.

            Leslie was standing outside our building, her cell phone pressed to her ear. When Grace and I came up to the gate, she hung up the call and hugged us. She told us that her mother had suffered a stroke. Nakia wasn’t home and couldn’t be reached.

            “Does she know what happened?” I asked.

            “She’s out with friends,” Leslie said, feigning calm, though her voice quivered when she spoke.

            Grace put and arm around her, and I thought that the older woman looked suddenly young, her head resting on Grace’s shoulder, looked like a child herself. Caught in this moment between the mortality of her mother and the uncertainty of where her daughter was, there was nothing for her left to inhabit other than the familiar helplessness of being a child.

            We moved away from the gate when the medics emerged with Ellen, lying still on a stretcher. Leslie followed to watch her mother trundled into the back of the ambulance. I slipped an arm around Grace, who watched the scene anxiously, though the embrace was more to comfort myself, I realized as soon as I had done it.

            “We’ll keep an eye out for Nakia,” I said, again perhaps comforting myself more than Leslie, wanting to conjure some sense of assurance to the utterly precarious moment. But Leslie didn’t hear me or was too focused on her mother, who was being strapped in for transportation, and my words landed flatly, seemed to smack against the moment and dissipate, meaningless.

            Grace and I went upstairs to give Leslie some sense of privacy, though one of the paramedics was gently coaxing her away from the ambulance as we took our leave, saying something about how they had to move quickly in the interest of her mother’s health. But Grace and I standing there was useless. There was nothing, it felt, that anyone could do.

            “Poor thing,” Grace said.

            I nodded.

            We watched from our living room window as the ambulance pulled away and Leslie got into her car and followed. The buildings along the block were awash with the red light from the sirens, moving away, creating the illusion of a tunnel-like effect down the street. Then the street and the room were quiet. The strange neighbors went back inside.

§

            I saw Leslie outside the next morning, smoking a cigarette in her bathrobe. Before I could speak, she flicked her butt to the curb and said, “We lost mom last night.”

            “I’m so sorry,” I said. But it felt as hollow as my remark about keeping an eye out for Nakia had felt, it was exactly what anyone else would have said and because of that it felt impersonal. But it was true, I was sorry, and it was true that our relationship was, after all, somehow impersonal, colored with the distance that somehow wedged itself between neighbors, at least here, in this city, this country.

            Leslie smiled and rubbed her eyes. “It’s all right,” she said.

            And wasn’t that, too, a prescribed bit of dialogue? How the hell could it be all right? I thought. A woman was dead.

            “And Nakia?” I said. And this, too, felt like an admission of failure, that I had somehow not kept my word to keep an eye out for the girl.

            “I got ahold of her,” Leslie said. “She knows what happened. But she still isn’t home.”

            I couldn’t tell if Leslie was crying or hadn’t slept or both. It struck me that she was facing this moment alone. That she had been abandoned by both her mother and her daughter in a single instant. Did this make her the child I had seen her as last night or the adult I could not imagine ever having to pretend to be?

            That night, in an effort to console Leslie, to offer her some solidarity, Grace baked a lasagna and brought it downstairs. I could hear the two of them talking in low voices in the doorway, punctuated by laughter and loud, throaty sighs. Then I heard Leslie’s door close.

Grace stayed downstairs until two or three o’clock in the morning, when she tiptoed into our bedroom. She undressed and slid underneath the covers beside me. I could smell alcohol on her breath.

            “Is she all right?” I asked.

            “No,” Grace said. “How could she be?”

            “But did you talk?”

            “We took shots and watched a true crime documentary,” Grace said. “It’s what she needed.”

            “That was good of you. Is Nakia back?”

            “No.”

            Grace was quiet then for a long time. I could only imagine how the exchange with Leslie had made her think about her own mother’s illness a few years earlier, her near brush with death. This had been a period of immense difficulty for Grace, one in which she had been subsumed by panic and fear. But I would let her bring that up herself if she felt like it. I thought she had fallen asleep, when she got up and went to the kitchen. I could hear her making coffee or tea.

            I lay still in bed, watching the light of day slowly brighten the room, dull and gray, and wondering, if I concentrated hard enough, if I could feel Ellen’s ghost in the bedroom below. Well, not her ghost, exactly, perhaps that was too superstitious, but the lack of her, the vacant space so recently filled by her presence, and the smoke I would now never smell again.

            It reminded me of a time in college, when I was living in a small apartment alone and a woman in my building died. She was living alone, too, though she was much older, in her eighties. I knew her from the elevator, sliding the sticky metal grate for each other to get on or off. She lived one floor above me and across the airshaft, so that I could see into her apartment from the window above my kitchen sink, the yellowing corner where one of the walls in her kitchen met the ceiling. When she died, the landlord asked for my help cleaning out her apartment. He was always asking me to perform odd jobs around the building, for a discount on my rent. This particular job was more difficult than the rest—than patching holes in the hallway or sweeping up the trash area—and not because my neighbor, my former neighbor, had a bloat of possessions. She had lived relatively minimally, in a manner fitting an older, single person, but the baggage of her death weighed heavily on me.

            I could not quite fathom her having lived and died in that apartment above my own. Just as I could not quite fathom Ellen having lived and died in the apartment below mine and Grace’s. I was struck with the familiar feeling that it was, is, impossible to imagine another person’s life, all the complexities and realities that define it.

            But what had made the life of my deceased neighbor a little more fathomable was a box of photographs I discovered in one of her closets while I was helping the landlord clean out the apartment. It was a midsized cardboard moving box, with leather photo albums and loose pictures inside, as well as a metal case full of thirty-five-millimeter film slides, a manila envelope stuffed with letters, a passport. I was able to use the pictures to piece together some semblance of my neighbor’s life.

            She had been born in Philadelphia, her father the owner of a prominent department store. The family was Jewish; her parents had fled Europe in the 1930s. In the fifties, on a trip with some college classmates, she had returned to Europe, to excavate her past. That was when she had taken the majority of the photographs, documenting the French countryside where her family was from, and the sights along the way: the journey by cruise ship, the art and architecture of the old world, her American friends and new, European friends she made. I wondered what it must have been like for her to see the place her parents had left behind. I wondered if she felt any semblance of connection to it, any sense of homecoming.

            Her path from the East to West Coast was less clear to me. There was a gap in the dates she had meticulously labeled on the back of the photographs. But in the 1960s, the aperture of her camera opened again, this time in San Francisco. Though hers was not the San Francisco of the free-love movement or the Black Panther Party, but the San Francisco of the conservative upper middle-class of the Sixties and Seventies, of financiers and lawyers, the world of whom I realized I knew so little about.

            I wished that I had a similar index of Ellen’s life, some way of knowing more intimately, even if only superficially, who she had been, now that she was gone.

§

            One afternoon, coming home from the grocery store, I ran into Leslie outside, stuffing the trash bins with several black garbage bags.

            “We’re moving out,” she said, gesturing to the slumped and shapeless bags on the sidewalk which I couldn’t help but think looked like dead bodies on television shows.

            When I asked what had happened, she rolled her eyes.

            “We’re getting evicted,” she said.

            “Evicted?”

            “Well, bought out of the lease. The landlord said he was moving in, but I call bullshit.”

            I had heard of this happening before: landlords offering their tenants a buyout, only to turn around and jack up the rent some obscene amount.

            “Is it a good offer?” I asked.

            Leslie shrugged.

            “He’s giving us fifty thousand dollars. But to get something the same size as this place you’d practically have to move out of state. And forget cheap tent. But he said if we didn’t take the deal, he would find another way to get us out.”

            “That’s terrible,” I said, “I’m sorry.”

            Leslie threw her hands up. She looked thinner than usual, I thought. And she was either stoned or about to cry or both.

            “It’s all right,” she said. “Well, it’s how it goes. I just don’t want to move out of the city. You know, I grew up in this apartment.”

            That evening, I could hear Leslie shouting at Nakia that the girl would have to get a job and start helping her pay rent.

            Over our next handful of encounters, I followed Leslie’s search for a new place. It was a tumultuous process, at one point looking like it might culminate in a one-bedroom which her and Nakia would have to share. But finally, Leslie’s name was drawn in a housing lottery for a duplex not far from our building.

            “Thank God me and my baby will have some place to go,” she said.

§

            When I saw Nakia one afternoon waiting for the bus, her acrylic nails clacking against her phone screen, I decided to take what would probably be my last chance to engage with the girl. I asked where she was going.

            “Work,” she said, looking up at me only long enough to confirm my identity.

            “Where’s that? I asked.

            She mumbled something about how she had started working at a sneaker store in the mall.

            “No shame in that,” I said.

            “Uh huh,” she said, and I thought I saw her mouth twist into a smile. Then, “You think the landlord is really going to move in me and my mom’s apartment?”

            I bit my fingernail. Nakia still hadn’t looked up fully from her phone, but I could see now that the screen was dark, reflecting only her quivering lip.

            “I don’t know,” I said.

            “I heard about a thing called a move-out eviction, or move-in eviction, or something,” she said, “when a landlord says they’re moving in so they can kick you out and rent the place to someone anyway for more money.”

            “I’ve heard of that,” I said. “I don’t know.”

            “My mom and grandma paid seven hundred dollars since the Eighties or something.”

            “Right.”

            “So I think they’ll try to get more.”

            “I think you’re probably right,” I said.

            She looked at me.

            “What the fuck,” she said, “you know?”

            It seemed to be a genuine question. I took a deep breath.

            “Yeah,” I said. “I know. What the fuck.”

            “No,” the girl said. “But you don’t.”

            She said it plainly, stating a fact that we both knew was true. She wasn’t even upset, I thought, just certain, more certain than I, of the distance between us that could never be closed. Her bus was pulling up and the doors opened. Nakia got on and smiled at me with a shy wave as the doors closed, but it struck me that her smile was one of sympathy, even pity.

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