This blog was supposed to be recipes, the recipes I had made my two children cook in my quest to make them learn to cook and obscure the fact that I was learning to cook. The project was going pretty well—not great—when my next-door neighbor Maggie lost her marbles.

We got the first hint she was going mad on a sunny evening in May. We went outside on the stoop with glasses of wine and waited for the 7:00 pm clapping and pot banging for first responders. The clapping/banging hadn’t really taken hold on our quiet Astoria block but the night before someone clapped, so tonight I was going to be ready for it and really clap.

My husband Calvin and my daughter Daisy* were on our front stairs, admiring the twinkly new green leaves on our city-planted river birch tree. Maggie sat on her front stoop, so I threw her a few friendly looks so she would know it’s okay to say hi.

I’d forgiven her, you see, for her nervous breakdown four years ago, when she threw glass bottles into our carport, left us threatening notes and tweeted at the children’s TV show where Calvin works that we were anti-Semites and Vichy informants. She had been insane then, I knew. Her then-husband had told me this was not the first mental breakdown they had lived through.

I had watched the beginning of the breakdown on FaceBook, where Maggie had posted about being held hostage in a mental hospital. She came back months later homeless and ragged. One dark, frigid January night, Maggie double-parked in front of their house, and raged up and down the sidewalk, shouting up at her family’s house that she wanted her winter coat. Calvin and I huddled in the back wall of the kitchen, lights off, living-room blinds open, drinking cognac and listening. Finally she drove away.

Maggie reappeared in the summer, when she broke convinced Old Nick, the elderly gent with a table saw and many, many geraniums who lived across the alley, to drill out the lock. I described it to Maggie’s then husband.

“She’s breaking in,” he said. “Can you call the cops?”

I declined to call the police. It wasn’t my marriage and it wasn’t my house. Maggie stayed in the house until the family came home. Another time she got a locksmith and really did break in and start taking away the furniture. I called the husband and he sent the cops to his house.

But all the sturm und drang happened four years ago. About a year ago, Calvin and I noticed that Maggie had moved back in and Ricky, the husband, was gone. There were tenants in the top floor. I half-expected Maggie to apologize to me for trying to rip holes in my car’s tires with the broken bottles of hard cider. She never did, and then the pandemic rolled in, and now here she was on the stoop next door and I was giving her friendly face. I was lonely. I would talk to a fucking lawn mower if it would laugh at one of my jokes, so I was trying to have a little chat. She had recovered, right? Maggie was normal now.

She harrumphed at us and flounced back inside her house. “Whoah,” I said to Calvin.

He wouldn’t meet my eyes. The clapping was pretty much only us.