The Strangest Neighbors Ever

I’ve owned houses for 43 years. If you asked me to name the top ten weirdest neighbors I’ve ever had, I would say that numbers 1 through 14 were Tony Pizzarella and his wife, Annamaria. Maybe at that point some other neighbor I’ve had would come in number 15. But no one has been as close to strange as this couple.

Both in their 40’s, childless, they moved in next door to us—which, in this neighborhood in North Carolina, fortunately wasn’t very close. We had a third of an acre, but, as Annamaria gloated in no uncertain terms one day, they had five. That justified, to her mind, her husband running his leaf blower all day one Sunday.

He had a long black beard and a retreating hairline, and he walked with his arms held out at his sides to indicate that he was so heavily muscled that he couldn’t push his arms against his sides. Annamaria walked every day down our common driveway to the bus stop on the main road, backpack on, head down. Neighbors said that she ignored waves and never greeted anyone.

It was always hard to know who they were. So I have to make a game out of my best guesses: He doesn’t get baseball and is only dimly aware of soccer and follows only pro sports. She cooks earnestly but badly and is relieved when she can grill. She doesn’t own an apron. Their sex is enthusiastic but unimaginative, and they are beginning to wonder how long they’ll have to keep on with it. Each night, he has a sole beer or two and congratulates himself that it isn’t more. She has a glass of wine and wants more but is trying to watch her weight. They watch reality TV thinking that they’re being ironic but secretly aren’t.

A couple of days after they moved in, I walked down the hill to find Tony doing some sort of work with a heavy power tool. Tony was simply a little American boy in men’s clothing: he adored loud machines, speed, and power.

I introduced myself, and Tony and I sat on his porch while he told me that he specialized in underwater insurance claims but was taking a break to pursue some research into alternative uses of concrete—all in a tone of voice that said, you probably don’t actually get this, and I don’t care.

He said nothing about his wife. I met his dogs, whose names I forget; they were never out in the yard, which was odd. Didn’t he want them around? He didn’t say where the two of them had come from, and their accents were mid-Atlantic, no trace of a hillbilly twang or a southern slur. What I most remember him saying was, “I’m keeping an eye out and getting to know who comes driving in and out of this neighborhood.”

We had to have a couple of neighborhood meetings about pitching in to have a part of our common road paved, and he showed up, but not Annamaria. The issues were simple, and he just smirked and nodded. He tried to catch my eye to get me to smirk with him, but already I was avoiding his gaze.

I was to collect the checks for the paving, and he came up one day while I was gardening to deliver his. He held his hand out for a shake, but I put my hands up and said, “I’m sorry, I’m dirty, I’ve been working.” He said, “That’s OK, I’m a workin’ man,” and insisted on a shake with an open-mouthed, brotherly gaze. I glanced away.

In any event, I took his check, and he walked to the end of my driveway. He stopped then and gazed at the neighbor’s lot across the street, then pointed at some wood that had been piled up. Booth had had a couple of dead trees taken down and hadn’t had the trunk pieces or limbs taken away yet. Tony smirked at me and said, “I’m going to have to talk to him about that.”

I was taken aback; what that wood was doing there was so completely none of Tony’s business—he couldn’t even see it from his property down the hill—that I couldn’t think of a response. Later I called Booth, a brilliant trial lawyer, quick on his feet and just mean enough to be funny, to give him a heads-up. “Booth,” I asked, “if this guy comes to talk to you, please tell me? I want to come over and watch you take his kneecaps out.” Tony never did approach Booth, of course.

Once the road was paved, Tony spent an inordinate amount of time in leaf season blowing the leaves off of the road: more loud noise to no purpose. I suppose he thought he was doing everyone a favor.

Soon Tony began to have surveys done, lots of them. Our neighborhood, on the edge of North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park, was heavily wooded, virtually a forest, and, as the neighbors were mainly laid-back transplanted Yankees, no one really cared where the property lines were. But suddenly there were stakes and orange lines everywhere.

A narrow road ran between everyone’s properties. Someone would own the property through which the road wound, and the rest of us had an easement to use it.

Unfortunately, the numbnuts who laid it all out didn’t create the road adjacent to any property line, so Tony and Annamaria actually owned a piece of our side yard. We offered to buy the little sliver of land from them, but they refused.

One day pink ribbons appeared on certain branches of our magnolia tree, as if someone were welcoming home a female prisoner. What the hell was that about? Nancy managed to catch Annamaria, who said that the tree was on their property and they were going to have it trimmed.

OK, I didn’t really care about the property lines unless they were going to be doing work on our trees without our consent. Unless they actually owned the tree, which I doubted.

They claimed that the surveyor said that the property line ran right through a natural area and to our side of the tree. One couldn’t even eyeball it, as the property from the stake to the magnolia was covered in bushes and trees such that the magnolia wasn’t even visible from the stake.

But what could we do? As a lawyer trained in the rules of evidence, I could retort that all I had was their report of what the surveyor said, and their hearsay statements lacked any indicia of reliability. That would sound merely like whining to people who thought that if the problem was a thumbtack, a sledgehammer was the solution.

A few weeks later, men appeared on the property line and laid down a line of rock, extending across our side lawn to the end of the property over a hundred feet away. Again, I could dispute whether the rocks were allowed, but what evidence did I have?

We hired a landscape architect to view the line of rocks and figure out a way to cover it up. She looked at it and laughed. “I can’t believe someone would spend so much money on something so ugly.”

It was. It looked ridiculous, just this little line of rocks sitting on the alleged property line.

Next, they dug up the earth on their side of the line and uncovered the electronic fence wire for our dog. They told us to move the wire to our side of the line. Why, I asked? What harm was it doing?

Annamaria wrote back, and I’ll never forget her tone: “You don’t understand,” her email began. “We are going to have that area next to the road landscaped so that our neighbors can enjoy it as they drive by.” We paid Invisible Fence to come out and move the wire. But all Tony and Annamaria ever did was dump a bunch of wood chips out of which weeds, of course, immediately began to grow.

Our neighborhood was close and friendly; some of the stay-at-home mothers had wine in the afternoons. A couple of women put out a neighborhood directory with all of our birthdays and emergency numbers, and generally people gave two or three neighborhood parties a year. For years after Tony and Annamaria moved in, our next door neighbor finally met them at one of these parties. Later he said, “That guy, Tony, he sure likes himself a lot.” Funny, too, that Annamaria worked in human resources, as she had no people skills either.

People put up holiday decorations in proportion to the number and youth of their children. It seemed right, then, that Tony and Annamaria’s house was always dark around Christmas. Then, suddenly, after they’d lived there eight years, their house was ablaze with tall and long banks of green, red, blue, orange lights. It was inexplicable.

My wonderful therapist, whom sadly I don’t have much reason to see anymore, told me once that we can’t ever know what’s going on with someone else. We’re not privy to their traumas, their biases, their childhood tragedies, their educations, anything—we can’t begin to guess at why they do what they do. I thought that was pretty wise.

I’ve had one revelation though, after we left North Carolina and moved first to Delaware and then out here—it’s taken that long to understand. Tony and Annamaria really liked themselves. Generally I’ve felt that if someone acts like he really likes himself, it’s a sign of deep insecurity and a need to cover it up. But with these two, I wonder if they really thought that they were better than the rest of us. I guess I’ll never know.

Not what Robert Frost meant when he wrote, "Good fences make good neighbors."