Door to Door
My sixth grader wants the LED fidget spinner pen. Even better would be the Chill Pillow, for those who sell 110 items in the middle school fundraiser. He likes to earn points, win things. He also loves his new school. The other day he sang me the fight song, his voice high and clear.
I said yes to his request to go door to door, though our neighborhood is studded with Trump voters.
Let me acknowledge some privileges. My kid is white and blond. He jogs around our block with his cross country team. We own our house in this battleground city in a battleground state. Maybe we’ve become too used to the yard signs that sprout in even-numbered years, a grotesque inverse of spring flowers. Ours is blue. Fifty feet away there’s a red one, tasteful compared to the 4 by 6 homemade plywood version with razor wire that was erected around the corner.
When we first moved here, we hosted potlucks. That was before the pandemic, before the 2016 election. Our midwestern neighbors brought their lawn chairs and coolers. My toddler and I went door to door with fliers because I wanted him to know how to knock on a door in case he ever needed help and I wanted my neighbors to know the tow-headed kid, to which house he belonged. But of course we haven’t done that in years. Let me be clear: I don’t want to be friends with these red signs. This isn’t me saying we could just enjoy a beer and talk about something else.
And we know that no one, these days, wants to answer their door. We’d tried to dissuade our son by warning him that the frozen cheesecakes and Christmas wrapping paper were overpriced. That people wouldn’t want to give him their information, even those in the blue-sign houses. Our friends don’t even pop by without texting. Our families live hours away. Like our cats, some part of me bolts from the room at footsteps on our front porch.
It’s not normal anymore to interact with strangers around here. And even here in the “heartland,” neighbors are strangers. Last summer we watched a stray cat slip in and out of our bushes for weeks before learning of the existence of the elderly house-bound woman who’d been aching for her lost pet from just the other side of our back fence, behind the overgrown lilac bush.
Another neighbor, during the pandemic, died of the regular flu while enroute to the hospital five minutes away. We learned of it the next spring. They were neighbors who used to come to the potlucks.
The neighbor right next door has a gun in his garage. Our son told us; he can see it from the height of our back porch. People can own guns in responsible ways, my husband and I told him, mimicking a slogan to avoid a late night of worries, maybe for us as much as him. But our son looked at us warily. He knows our views on guns. He knew this was some kind of bullshit.
Why did I want my kid to think well of those neighbors? Four years ago, in a strange mood I was ashamed of later, I brought them candy and a small card. They had moved in that covid year, and the driveway face-off of our red and blue signs was one of our few interactions. We have different signs, my dorky card said. Still wanted to say Happy Halloween. I dragged along my at-the-time seven-year-old, though even he knew this was bananas, even a betrayal. (A week later he’d track election returns on his United States floor map puzzle, barking at the babysitter who cooed at his cute game about delayed results from Maricopa County.) But the neighbors were human beings who lived and ate and slept less than fifty yards from where I did—from where I do. The way they vote is bizarre to me, antithetical to my values, but when I wash my dishes I look into their kitchen window. In the winters we snowblow our driveways together in the morning dark. If I fell down the stairs and twisted my neck, my kid would need someone’s house to run to—but don’t worry, this year I am not giving them a fucking Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.
It’s not that I don’t know that people I interact with every day in this purple city in this swing state—maybe half the women I sweat with at the Y, half the people in line at the post office, maybe my eye doctor or hairstylist—might be red signers.
We could move. When we bought this house, the young banker scoffingly assured us we wouldn’t stay in a “starter” home. There were better neighborhoods, “better” elementary schools. He didn’t know the kind of people we were. Not the kind who wanted our kid to befriend the town’s rich kids. Not the kind who were interested in a home as a thing to trade.
I’m writing this just before the 2024 election, and we don’t yet know what will happen. After my son returns from his afternoon outing (he will have knocked on 35 doors), I’ll be so humbled, so awed by him (despite that he was motivated by the Chill Pillow) that I’ll volunteer to knock on doors for the Democrats—though I am afraid of my neighbors, afraid of their dogs. Maybe it’s this point of heightened terror that will seem unreal later on—or maybe it is the only real thing, the truth of our divide, our separation. Maybe we’ll need to work not to forget it. Maybe the next terror could be so real we can’t imagine it now.
It was a long hour my son was gone. I couldn’t even see his little blond head from my spot on our front swing, one someone else screwed to the porch ceiling decades ago.
I could only trust he’d rounded the corner.
This is the only neighborhood he’s ever known. These strangers to him are what neighbors are, no one knowing what’s behind anyone’s door.
Feature image (arrow on blue wall) by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
About the Author
Jill Stukenberg is the author of the novel News of the Air and co-editor of Midwest Review. She wrote previously for Mutha about parenting through online school during the pandemic.
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