The next morning, my coffee was hot and ready for me when I woke up. As I spooned the sugar into my cup, I thought about Mrs. Kaufmann. What could I do to reach out to someone when we didn’t even speak the same language? The answer was clear: I would have to learn German.
The store opened that day, and so began the day-to-day grind of my job at the Higgledy Piggledy. The company had found an apartment that was literally a stone’s throw from the store. All I had to do was walk out of my front door, turn left, pass two houses and a dry cleaner’s, and I was there, in like two minutes.
After I made my two minute commute home a few days later and I was walking in the front door of the house, I saw a woman letting herself out of Mrs. Kaufmann’s apartment. I introduced myself, and she told me that her name was Nancy, and that she used to live in my apartment. She had grown fond of Mrs. Kaufmann and stopped by to check in and say hello every once in a while.
“She has no one,” Nancy told me.
She told me that Mrs. Kaufmann and her husband had moved here from Germany in 2004, to live with their son, who was raising a family here in Kentucky. Her husband ended up dropping dead of a heart attack two months after they moved here; and then her son and his entire family were all killed in a horrible traffic accident six days after that.
“It’s unimaginable, what that lady’s been through,” she said. “I think she’s been kind of frozen since then. She hardly ever leaves the house, and she doesn’t really know anyone here, except maybe for me and one or two people at her church. I hope you’ll keep an eye on her for me.”
I told her I would and we exchanged telephone numbers. I went straight upstairs after that, got on my computer and ordered Rosetta Stone. In German.
Over the next few days, I called Douglas a couple of times. The calls were pretty quick and mostly just small talk. I talked about work and we complained about the weather, that sort of thing. But it sounded like he was glad to have the conversation, and little by little the calls started to get a bit longer. One night, just before we hung up, he said to me, “You’re gonna have to come down, Jake. Take a look at my apartment.”
“That sounds awesome, Douglas,” I said. “We definitely have to do that.”
I hung up the phone, feeling like I was making some sort of progress.
My Rosetta Stone German lessons had arrived after a few days, and I jumped right in. At first I felt kind of stupid, sitting there with a headset on, talking to my laptop in German. But after a while, I actually started to get the hang of it, and it felt like I was making pretty good progress.
One morning, I ran into Mrs. Kaufmann in the foyer as I was leaving for work.
“Guten Morgen, Frau Kaufmann,” I said.
She did a double-take, surprised and tickled at my German greeting. “Guten Morgen, Herr Stubbs. Es ist ein schöner Tag, ja?”
I knew what she meant. She meant, “Isn’t it a lovely day?” It was pouring rain outside.
“Ja, sehr schön,” I said. Yes, very lovely.
Mrs. Kaufmann just stood there for a moment, her hands clasped across her bosom and smiling broadly. “Ja. Sehr, sehr schön.” It was a lovely day, even if it was raining.
That very night, there was a message on my answering machine when I came home. It was Douglas.
“Hey, Jake, it’s Douglas, from downstairs,” he said. He sounded nervous. “Listen, if you feel like it, maybe you’d like to come down tonight after you get home. You know, hang out for a while. Just, knock on the door if you feel like it, okay? Cool. See ya later.”
Amazing! Of course, I decided to go. So I ate a quick dinner, grabbed a six-pack out of the fridge and went downstairs to Douglas’ apartment. I knocked on the door. It opened, all the way this time.
There stood Douglas Murphy, who I was seeing for the first time, even though we had been living in the same house for almost three months. If I thought there would be something about him which said “Agoraphobe”, there wasn’t. He just looked like any normal, ordinary guy, maybe a little skinny and pale, and in need of a haircut, but normal.
“Come in,” he said. “Come on in, Jake.”
I really wasn’t sure what to expect, walking into the home of an agoraphobic. I suppose I expected a cluttered, oppressive place, like one of those houses on “Hoarders”; or else a Paranoid’s Command Center, like a wall full of computer monitors and radar screens and things, designed to keep Government Gamma Rays at bay. What I found, instead, was a perfectly tidy, perfectly neat little mid-century room, filled with clean, spindly, blond wood furniture and just enough wood paneling to make it look like an apartment right out of a 1968 edition of “Better Homes & Gardens”.
“Very nice!” I said, looking around and handing Douglas the six-pack. “I like it.”
“Thanks,” said Douglas, as he placed the beers in the fridge. He brought back two bottles for us.
I sat down on the couch and Douglas turned the TV on. We just talked for a while, small talk mostly, drinking our beers, but as we did, I kept looking around the apartment. There was something about it, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. But somehow or other, the room looked really familiar to me, as if I had somehow seen it before.
After a while, I said, “Douglas, I’m having the strongest sense of déjà vû right now. Do you believe in that sort of thing?”
“What do you mean?” he said.
“I could swear I’ve been in your apartment before. And I know that I haven’t.”
Douglas’ face broke into a huge grin. “Really?” he said. “It’s not déjà vû, Jake. But you have seen this apartment before.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Douglas just folded his arms across his chest and blinked hard. He was looking at me as if I were supposed to react.
He blinked again. I had no idea what was going on. Maybe this was some sort of OCD thing that agoraphobics have.
Douglas looked exasperated, like there was some sort of joke that I just wasn’t getting. “C’mere,” he said, finally.
He led me down to the end of the hallway, where he opened a closed door and turned on the light. I looked inside.
I could not believe my eyes. I saw a room, wallpapered in a purple metallic paper decorated with elaborate Moorish designs. I saw a couch, a circular couch, filling nearly the entire room, upholstered in purple velvet and piled high with pillows of all different colors. I was looking at the inside of Jeannie’s bottle, from “I Dream of Jeannie”.
“Oh, my god,” I said. “That is awesome.”
Then I realized why it had all seemed so familiar. Douglas had turned his apartment into Major Nelson’s house in Cocoa Beach.
“Remember that first night when you called,” Douglas said, “and I told you that I have agoraphobia, “among other things”? Well, one of the “other things” is this, this little “obsession” I have with ‘I Dream of Jeannie’”.
“So I see,” I said, as I flopped down onto Jeannie’s purple couch. “So I see.”
“When I was little,” he told me, “I wished I could be like Jeannie. I wished that I could just blink my eyes and blink away all the bad things; that I could just blink and everything would be different, everything would be okay. Over the years, I guess, it sort of turned into this.” He gestured to the room around him.
“Well, I love it,” I told him. “I think it’s fantastic. I could live in this room.”
Douglas seemed relieved in a way, that I actually kind of admired his obsession. And I did. I mean, it was cool, and funky. Weird and obsessive, yes, but still cool and funky. Most of the cool and funky people I’ve met in my life also turned out to be sort of weird and obsessive anyway, so it was kind of no big deal.
So, we hung out there in Jeannie’s bottle for a while, drinking beer and talking about old TV shows and stuff. We argued for a while over who would win in a fight: Jeannie or Samantha Stevens from “Bewitched”? We settled on Jeannie because Douglas would never be satisfied otherwise, and I thought it best not to upset an agoraphobic.
As we finished the last of our beers, Douglas began to open up a little about his phobia. His entire world had basically become the inside of this apartment. Once a night, after he was sure everyone else was asleep, he would screw up the courage he needed to tiptoe down the stairs and get his mail, and once a month he would slip his rent check underneath Mrs. Kaufmann’s door. “I’ve never even met her, Jake,” he said, “and I’ve lived here for eight years.”
I told him the little I knew about Mrs. Kaufmann”, and he looked positively wounded as he contemplated her sorrow. He sat for a while, quiet, and then he said, “You know, Jake, I need to meet her, face to face. Sometime soon, some time when I’m ready, do you think you could take me to meet her?”
“Sure, Douglas. Sure I could. That would be nice,” I said.
Soon after that I said that I had to be at work in the morning and that I needed to get going. I turned as I left the apartment, and Douglas and I regarded one another for a moment. We were both smiling. Douglas took a single step out of his apartment.
He grabbed my hand and shook it. “I’m really glad you moved in here, Jake,” he said to me. “And I’m really glad that you’ve become my, well, my friend. I feel like my world is opening up a little bit.”
“Thanks, Douglas,” I said. “So do I.”
He closed his door and I went upstairs to my apartment. I began to get an idea, about widening Douglas’ world. I mean, if we started with his apartment and occasionally the foyer and the mailboxes, maybe I could talk him into trying out the rest of the house. My apartment, maybe Mrs. Kaufmann’s apartment, eventually his world could include the entire house, and from there, who knows?
I started working really hard on my German lessons, and calling Douglas every day, and even dropped by on the weekend when we watched the ball game sitting on Jeannie’s purple round couch.
A few days later, Mrs. Kaufmann came out of her door when I got home from work, as if she had been waiting for me.
“Herr Stubbs!” she said. “Möchten Sie zum Essen kommen?”
She was inviting me to dinner. I think she was trying very hard to speak slowly and clearly and in easy Beginner German.
“Ja, sehr gut!” I answered, accepting with enthusiasm.
Dinner at Mrs. Kaufmann’s was delightful. Sitting in her apartment was like sitting in a stage set for “Arsenic and Old Lace” or “The Whales of August”. It looked like Grandmother’s house because that’s exactly what it was. The furniture was all old and soft and comfortable, well worn but never threadbare, upholstered in warm burgundy velvets. There were fade marks on the arms of the sofa where the sun had hit it in the same place day after day. Lace curtains on the windows, lace doilies on the armchairs, and black and white photographs of stern-looking Edwardian ancestors lined the walls. The food she served was delicious and plentiful, and it seemed to me that she missed cooking for someone else. I think it pleased her that I asked for second helpings of everything, including dessert.
We started out having the kinds of conversations, in German, which only people in second-language classes have.
“Hello, Mrs. Kaufmann”
“Hello, Mr. Stubbs.”
“How are you?”
“Fine, thank you. How are you?”
“I am fine. The weather is good.”
“It is warm today.”
Then, I would say something like, “Thank you for asking me to your typewriter.”
She would laugh, and eventually I’d catch my mistake. Soon, though, I began to feel more comfortable, and even though our conversations were simple and kind of superficial, we managed to actually communicate with one another. I told her about my home town and my family, and she told me that she had been a teacher back in Germany. That explains why she was able to communicate with me so easily as if I were a dim-witted little German child.
Before the meal ended, we talked a little bit about Douglas. I tried to explain his agoraphobia to her as best I could in my halting German. She is not a stupid woman, and I think she understands pretty well. I asked her how she felt about meeting him, and she said, I think, that it would be lovely.
I tried to tell Mrs. Kaufmann how much I enjoyed the evening as well as I could with my broken German, and she told me that she enjoyed having me very much. I kissed her gently on the cheek before I left.
“Gute Nacht, liebe Dame,” I said. Good night, dear lady.
“Gute Nacht, lieber Freund,” she answered. She had called me a “dear friend”.
Over the next couple of weeks, things started to happen more quickly. I was continuing my German lessons on Rosetta Stone, and a few times a week, I would stop in to Mrs. Kaufmann’s apartment and we would have tea and work on conjugating my verbs and stuff like that. I started seeing her in the store now and then, and I would help her find things when she was having trouble; and before long I saw her smiling at the other patrons and cooing over babies, that sort of thing.
I managed to get Douglas to come up to my apartment one night for pizza. Mrs. Kaufmann and I had to promise to stay behind closed doors, and he found the strength to leave his apartment and climb the stairs up to my door. When he knocked, I opened the door and found him there, pale and sweating, and gnawing the fingernails on his left hand. In his right hand he held a six-pack of beer, which I knew must have been piss warm, because I know for a fact that it had taken him nearly 45 minutes to get from his apartment to mine. I could hear the sound of his jacket as he tried to slide his way up the stairs with his back pressed up against the wall, and every few minutes I could hear him hyperventilating, probably sitting on the steps.
“Hi Jake,” he said, forcing a smile and trying to appear nonchalant. “Thanks for inviting me over.”
I asked him to come in and he did, although I could tell it wasn’t easy at all for him. I just acted like everything was completely normal and everyday, and once Douglas got settled in the living room and we started talking and watching TV and stuff, he started to relax.
After a while, I could tell that Douglas wasn’t looking at the TV at all. He was just looking around himself, at my apartment, and the view through my windows and things like that. My apartment is nothing special, it’s not so much ‘decorated’ as it is ‘furnished’. I’ve always called my style “Early Salvation Army”. But it dawned on me that Douglas hadn’t seen anything, really, beyond his own four walls, in eight years. He seemed to be drinking it all in, letting it wash over him, the newness, the tiny taste of the outside world.
At the end of the night, I heard him fairly skipping down the steps in one shot. It took him about 30 seconds, and I think he was humming the whole time.
Two days later, when I came home from work, I came across Douglas, standing by his mailbox in the foyer, leafing through that day’s mail. It was like 6 o’clock, the sun was still up, and everyone in the house was, presumably, awake.
He glanced in my direction when he heard me come in. “Oh, hi Jake,” he said, as if this were nothing at all remarkable. “What’s up?”
“Nothing much,” I answered. “Same shit, different day.”
“Mmm-hmm,” he muttered.
I breezed past him and went upstairs to my apartment. Same shit, different day, I thought. Hardly.
That weekend, Mrs. Kaufmann invited us both to her apartment for dinner. Douglas and I both wore jackets and ties, and Mrs. Kaufmann put on a beautiful dress that made her look fifty years younger in the soft light.
Mrs. Kaufmann and I had to promise to be safely ensconced in her apartment before Douglas could come out and make his way downstairs. He seemed to come down pretty quickly, though. I think he spent more time at the door of Mrs. Kaufmann’s apartment, stressing out and hyperventilating about actually knocking.
He did knock, eventually, though, and when he did, the rapport between the two of them was instantaneous. He treated her as if she were visiting royalty, and she treated him like a long-lost nephew. I was able to act as translator, but before long, the three of us found a rhythm in our conversation which made it very easy for all of us to understand what was being said, and for all of us to contribute.
After another one of Mrs. Kaufmann’s amazing meals, we all went in to the parlor for some strong German coffee. She put an old classical record on the record player, and the three of us just sat there for a while, sipping our coffee as the music played, saying absolutely nothing. And it was okay. I think sometimes it’s harder to be quiet around people than it is to make constant chatter. But the three of us had begun to feel comfortable around one another, like a little family.
All three of our worlds were expanding.
And soon it was the Fourth of July. We made plans to have a good old-fashioned Independence Day picnic in the backyard. This would be a big deal for Mrs. Kaufmann, who has never had a Fourth of July anything, and an even bigger deal for Douglas. He had gotten pretty comfortable within the confines of the house; he could move pretty freely among all three apartments, even when Mrs. Kaufmann and I were still around. But he still hadn’t stepped outside. He only agreed to even think about it because the back yard is enclosed by a huge high hedge all around, and there is a door to the back yard only feet away from the stairs back up to his apartment.
So, after getting up early for no reason on that day, I put together the classic Fourth of July Picnic for my little dysfunctional Paducah family. I made potato salad, cheeseburgers, hot dogs, corn on the cob, cole slaw, baked beans, jello, a cake with red white and blue sprinkles, and s’mores. There was enough food for about fifty people, even though I knew there was only three of us.
Mrs. Kaufmann and I were waiting for Douglas in the back yard. It was just getting dark. He had been wrestling with his demons for quite a while just within earshot. When he finally appeared in the doorway to the house, he was waving a tiny American flag in one hand. “Happy Independence Day, y’all,” he said.
Mrs. Kaufmann walked over to him slowly. He took a few, tentative steps outside the house and froze. When Mrs. Kaufmann reached him, she simply enveloped him in her arms, embracing him as if she were embracing her whole, lost family. They stood there for a moment, and then she led him over to the picnic table.
“Hi, Jake,” he said.
“Hey, Douglas. Beer?”
He nodded yes, and I walked over to the cooler. Just then, the first of the fireworks started over the river. We could see them between the two old oaks at the far end of the yard. As I walked over toward my friends, my family, I watched them as they looked up towards the sky and smiled, and laughed.
I began to realize how much I had done for myself, for them- how much anyone can do, by reaching out. We’re all a little happier.
__END__
