The Education of Sheldon
I was twenty-six years old when I bought my first house, and I made the mistake that most twenty-six-year-olds make when they buy their first house: I confused wanting peace with having it.
The house was not impressive by any objective measure. Two bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen with cabinets that had stopped being fashionable sometime during the previous administration and had not found their way back. But it was mine in a way that nothing had ever been mine before, and that fact made every imperfection feel like a feature. The outdated cabinets were my outdated cabinets. The patch of lawn along the south side where the grass grew in sparse, reluctant tufts was my patch of lawn, and I would nurse it back to reasonable health with the same attention I gave to my savings rate and my mortgage amortization schedule, because I had spent enough time in finance to understand that neglected assets compound in the wrong direction.
I had used my father’s inheritance and four years of disciplined saving to get there. My father had died when I was twenty-two, and he had left me enough to matter but not enough to be careless with, which was probably the most accurate financial advice he ever gave me, delivered without intending to. I was determined to honor it.
The street was quiet and established, populated by people who had been there long enough to have opinions about how things were done. I was the youngest homeowner by at least a decade, and at first this produced a warmth I had not anticipated. Lawson from across the street arrived with banana bread within forty-eight hours of my moving in. Frank, the retired mechanic three houses down, appeared when my lawn mower stopped working and had it running again before I finished making him coffee. Elise, who lived at the corner and served on the homeowners association board, invited me to the neighborhood barbecue while my boxes were still stacked in the hallway.
Then there was Sheldon.
Sheldon lived next door, which meant he was unavoidable in the way that only a next-door neighbor can be, present at the edges of every ordinary morning and evening, occupying the peripheral vision of daily life. He was in his mid-fifties, tall and broad, with the posture of a man who considers himself significant. He dressed with a formality that seemed misaligned with the actual events of his life. Pressed shirt and polished shoes to take out the trash. Pressed shirt and polished shoes to check the mail. It was the wardrobe of someone who expected to be evaluated at any moment and had decided to remain permanently prepared for the assessment.
Our first conversation established the terms of our relationship with remarkable efficiency.
He appeared at the edge of my driveway on my third day in the house and looked over the property with the unhurried attention of a building inspector.
“So you’re the new owner,” he said.
“I am. Amanda.”
He nodded. He did not offer his own name until I asked for it.
“Sheldon.”
Then his eyes moved to my front yard, to the hedges along the property line that I had not yet had time to address.
“The previous owner kept those lower,” he said. “You should do the same.”