There’s Something Unsettling About the Neighbors

An Excerpt from Human/Animal by Amie Souza Reilly

I. What Happened

to badger/to ape

In late August 2014, we moved into an old white house with green shutters. It was within walking distance to the station where I and my husband would catch our daily trains. The middle school my six-year-old would someday attend was also down the street, a selling point that back then seemed like a far-off future, but now that he is older seems like an impossible past. This house has hardwood floors and leaded glass windows. The ropes inside the windows snapped ages ago, so we hold them open with thick sticks. You can feel the horsehair in the plaster walls if you run your hand over certain spots. There is a bedroom at either end of the hallway upstairs, and a tiny office with a pull-string light. Outside, a patio laid from old bricks and two walnut trees held up a hammock. The beach is nearby, only a very long walk or a moderate bike ride away. In The Sea Around Us, Rachel Carson writes, “Beginnings are apt to be shadowy.” I had just gotten remarried and was about to start graduate school. For the first three years we lived here, we were stalked. The men following us were brothers. They had grown up in and still owned, though no longer lived in, the little yellow house with which we shared a driveway. Jim spoke slowly and deliberately and wore gray-tinted glasses. Wes had a ponytail curling out from beneath a dark blue baseball hat. He spoke in chaos—repetitive, jumpy, and self—congratulatory. Both were White, tall, and in their sixties. They drove a silver Buick Century. 

We were returning from a walk the first time we caught them in our driveway, standing close to our house, arms crossed and waiting for us as if we’d broken curfew. Days before, in a lawyer’s office, after we’d signed the papers and held the keys to our new house, our real estate agent told us these neighbors were nosy, but mostly harmless. Did she emphasize mostly? In our driveway, they introduced themselves with their hands out, walking closer and closer to us. Wes pointed at their yellow house and said, This is the house that was built for us, then Jim followed with, We know all the families who’ve ever lived in your house, and then one of them said, We gave Jerry that statue in your backyard. I didn’t realize we’d been walking backward. By the time they stopped talking, they had backed us up against our door.I am a woman who often feels afraid around men. My fear is gut-deep, learned through culture and history and also from my mother. I anticipate feeling afraid, or at least wary, in meeting rooms and in bars and on elevators and in parking garages because these are places where I have been shouted at, leered at, groped, and followed. But I did not expect to feel this kind of fear in my new house with my new husband. This house is on a street I had driven down countless times before, in a town I had already lived in for fifteen years. My husband had been my boyfriend for several years before we’d married. The familiarity of city, street, and partner were a comfort. The familiarity of fear, though familiar, was unexpected. “Fluency in fear—and making us police ourselves—is how women are kept in check,” writes Pumla Dineo Gqola.1 Even with my back against our house, as Matt opened the door and hurriedly let us in, I smiled at the brothers, nodded, and said, It is so nice to meet you.

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Our house is nearly 150 years old. This means it wasn’t possible for Wes and Jim to have known all the families who’d lived here before us. As they backed us into our door, Wes told us they also knew where we had lived before. The way you decorated, he said, we can tell you are good people. (I would have thought, There is too much subjectivity to correlate a person’s “goodness” with their art, but they were standing so close to me.) We realized, after we told them we had to go, after we opened the door enough to get inside, after we closed and locked ourselves in, that this was another impossible claim. We had not lived together before. Whose house had they seen? Whether it was Matt’s house or mine, in order for the brothers to have seen the rooms we’d lived in, they could have come to an open house. Or worse, they peered in the windows. Imagine two faces pressed against locked glass. The boldness of daytime voyeurism.

Our real estate agent told us these neighbors were nosy, but mostly harmless.

I am not guiltless in the act of snooping. I have scrolled strangers’ social media accounts, have googled the names of people I am about to meet, or have recently met, or would like to someday meet. I’ve peeked through cracks in doors, pressed my ear against a wall to hear private conversations. The difference between their voyeurism and mine is I never told those I spied on what I had done. I knew to keep my acts a secret. Nosy, but mostly harmless. But Wes and Jim told us they had seen inside one of our houses, had copped to their nosiness. That could only mean they wanted us to know they had been looking.

In her book Staring: How We Look, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes “…staring at once provokes and paralyzes its object, eliciting both anger and anxiety.”2 Once inside our house, my fists clenched and ready, I wanted to hit them. For the rest of the evening, I worried over curtains—we hadn’t bought any yet. We rifled through unpacked boxes, found towels, a few blankets, some nails, and a hammer and covered up all the windows.

Garland-Thomson goes on to write about staring as an act of dominance, enforcing social hierarchies and regulating access to resources. Here is a conversation I dismissed when it first happened: Just after we put in the offer to buy this house, before we received word the sellers accepted, our real estate agent called. She said another bid had come in, higher, and in cash. We could not offer more money and did not have that kind of cash. We were nervous. We did not have a backup plan. And then, overnight, we got the all clear. The current homeowners are not interested in selling to anyone else. We mistook this as a sign of good luck. In our gratitude, we did not ask questions.

The day after our neighbors’ forceful introduction, they came back. I saw them in the yard when I left to catch my train. It was shortly after lunch. My classes all happened in the evenings, in the Bronx, a two-hour train ride away. I waved to them but quickened my steps. Wes shouted at my back as I walked away. We offered Jerry more money for that house, you know. And we offered him cash. He paused, waited for me to react, but I did not turn around. For a moment, I did not move at all; no fight or flight, only freeze. But they didn’t like us. They said they like you better. The brothers’ first attempt to own this house was to buy us out, and though it failed, it was quickly clear they were not ready to give up. I didn’t know how to respond to Wes, so I left. I got on my train and went to class. When I returned home, I found a note from them in our mailbox taped to a small gift bag. Inside the bag, a candleholder from IKEA. Inside the card, they had written: Congratulations Reilly family! May God bless your home. I threw it all away.

We didn’t see them every day. Mostly they lived in another town. In a house like yours. But bigger. Much bigger, they told us. Another flex of strength. (Did I look it up? Of course. I saw on Google Street View that it was a very large colonial, new construction. White like ours, but without shutters. Dozens of small American flags lined the garden and the walkway.) But at least once a week, they arrived next door. Several times, we caught them walking the perimeter of our backyard. Once, they lifted the lid and poked through our compost bin. During every visit, I watched them pluck at invisible tufts of grass in their front lawn until their plastic solar lights flicked on. After the grass, they picked up sticks, from their yard and ours, and then dumped the small twig—piles across the street, beneath a tree at the end of another neighbor’s driveway. 

They wanted us to know they had been looking.

They learned our schedules quickly and pulled into their driveway twice a week at the same time I left to walk to the bus stop at the end of my son’s school day. When I started picking him up at school instead, I saw their silver Buick drive past us as we pulled into the doughnut shop. At home in our living room, whenever something cut across the outside light and cast a shadow on the porch, we froze, hair on end, eyes widened, and listened.

Their car’s loose muffler rumbled. I could hear when it crested the hill—a warning, and so my ears stayed tuned. Here’s Gqola again, on female fear: “This heightened vigilance requires that women consider how they will fight back, or modify their behaviour, to try and remain safe.” Running up to our attic, where the air was hot and dusty with exposed insulation, I watched them, unseen, from a small window. As I looked down, I questioned what they were capable of, worried whether we were safe. Mostly harmless, the real estate agent had said. They are a little odd, the previous owners told us. But if that’s all they were, then why did my skin go slick whenever I heard them pull up?

For the nine hundred forty-three days we lived next to them, I was always waiting for them to arrive. As I waited, I imagined what it would feel like to close Wes’s hands in my car door or hit him with sacks of oranges. I thought about running them over, or spraying their driveway with water and letting it freeze so Jim would slip and fall. Even though I have always hated guns, one night, I sat on our couch and started a whisper-debate with my husband about getting one, just in case.

I felt afraid, though for the first few months we lived here the reason for my fear was hard to pinpoint. In the beginning, there were no overt threats, but they stood too close, said peculiar things, stood in our yard uninvited and stared. Back then, I felt I should be able to dismiss these behaviors, that though I felt something off, I could have been overreacting. But the language in those warnings from the agent and Jerry felt coded, couched; mostly harmless, a little strange.

Even if I wasn’t immediately certain why I was afraid of them, I recognized my physical reactions to them. I hesitated to say hello, felt a yawning pit in my gut when I saw them. I always wanted to know when they were outside and then, when they did arrive, I’d shut all the windows. These were feelings I’d had before, moves I’d made in other situations in order to avoid men I’d perceived to be threatening. From Gqola: “Patriarchy runs on fear, fear of being an outsider, fear of being brutalized, fear of being too much, too inadequate, too vocal, or too different.”3

The hold they had over me was recognizable because it was familiar. And the more I watched them, it became clear that they saw themselves as a team—the two of them against the neighborhood, perhaps even me, specifically. The smirks, the repetitive door slamming, the dumped yard waste, the positions of their bodies as they stood in our yard and stared appeared to be strategic moves, as if they came here to play a game where only they knew the rules. French writer and filmmaker Virginie Despentes wrote that the exclusion of women’s bodies is the foundation masculinity is built upon, because it is in such moments “that their famous male bonding takes place.”4 Men together hold more potential for violence than a man alone.

When bell hooks wrote about a group of White men she observed walking in front of her in New Haven, she noticed how they become louder and stronger in a group. As she listened to them talk and categorize the women they had sex with, she also noticed how they “claim the body of the colored Other instrumentally, as unexplored terrain, a symbolic frontier that will be fertile ground for their reconstruction of the masculine norm.”5 Not only a game of exclusion, but conquest. hooks’ language evokes images of westward-driving settler colonizers. The women those young men were talking about rendered not as human beings, but as property, like land to be stood upon, claimed, owned. They hadn’t even noticed bell hooks walking behind them. Racism and sexism, as well as classism and ableism, intersect to perpetuate the power dynamics implicit in the brotherhood Despentes and hooks describe. Anyone outside of that brotherhood of straight, White, able-bodied men of some financial comfort becomes feminized, mocked, dominated, dubbed as Other. Before seeing us, Jim and Wes assumed economic superiority, tried to outbid us on our house. A year later, Wes tried to embarrass my husband with homophobic taunts. When they learned of my previous divorce, they repeatedly mentioned it as a failure of my character. In 2019, in a tweet echoing the ways men have been calling women hysterical, Donald Trump told teen climate activist Greta Thunberg to “work on her anger management problem” after she won Time Magazine’s Person of the Year award.6 In 2022, Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell voted against legislation that would protect interracial marriage.7 In August 2023, Texas governor Greg Abbott placed a row of buoys affixed with sawblades into the Rio Grande to maim anyone attempting to climb over the border.8 There is a comradery in cruelty.

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There is a comradery in cruelty.

Whenever the brothers arrived, they brought stuff—boxes of Entenmann’s baked goods, stacks of newspapers and magazines. Once, I came home from the post office and there was a three-foot- tall stuffed banana propped against their garage. Each holiday, they put a new wreath on the door and a new garland on the railing. Nothing ever came back out of their house. I am reminded of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch off the coast of California, that floating tangle of plastic that will never go away, large enough to be seen from space. They never rolled out the bins on trash night, never moved the filthy car parked in their garage out into the light.Even though I watched them carry brown paper bags and canvas totes up their three front steps and inside their front door while thinking of and planning their deaths, (if not oranges, then perhaps a sock filled with loose change) I had also tried, we had also tried, to show them kindness. As if good deeds might work as a shield. The first winter we lived here, we cleared the snow from their driveway. I waved when I saw them outside, though averted my eyes from theirs. We said hellohowareyou quickly when they walked past us with fists full of sticks. All acts of self-preservation, kindnesses like stiffened elbows to keep them at arm’s length. But if we were only pretending to be nice to avoid getting yelled at, does that diminish our acts?

It is strange to write about feeling trapped in my house, afraid of our neighbors, given that we are living with a virus that had, when it began, kept us sequestered inside for so long, afraid of everyone. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, as my family tried to adjust to endless time indoors, I grew feral with worry. When we could, we bought groceries in bulk, wiped them down with hand sanitizer and put them in empty coolers in the basement. We were squirreling away food. Upstairs, in an attempt to make us feel safe even if we weren’t, I piled the living room couch with blankets and pillows. Like a nest. It was during those first bleak days when I began making a list of all the animal names we use as verbs.9 The list became our family game. In the middle of eating dinner, or watching television, or taking a masked walk around the block, someone would shout out Peacock! Ferret! Upstairs, in our shared office, I looked up each animal in my OED, taking notes in the order we thought of them. And then I noticed something. Almost every animal, when reconsidered into its verb form, defines an act of violence, labor, or motherhood.

The violence of these verbs is, at times, overt. To bat, to ram, and to slug are all verbs connected to hitting. There is also to goose, which means to grab someone, likely in the rear, likely without consent. These are verbs of attack.

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Then there are verbs like to fish and to hawk, which are verbs tied to labor. These are words of work. Additionally, the verb forms of these animal names often mean the hunting of themselves. We can see this not only in to fish, but also to clam and to louse. How often, especially under our American capitalism, is labor an act of violence? To hawk used to mean to hunt with falcons, but more commonly we use it to mean to sell. We also use to squirrel with away as a way of saying to store. Other verbs, like to hog, to wolf, and to swallow are connected to the act of eating, and therefore consumption, which brings us right back to labor and violence.

Labor is also connected to motherhood, both in the birth processes we call labor, and in the invisible work of mothering. The word labor itself means to work and to endure pain or suffer. Verbs like to bear are often used to describe childbirth, as in to bear a child, but we also use to bear in relation to guns, as in to bear arms. Nowadays, to pig is mostly used with out, as in to pig out, which we use to mean to gorge oneself, but to pig once also meant to give birth, though it was used derogatorily. There is violence in these mother-verbs, too, not just because of the inherent blood and pain of birth, but also in the statistics. According to a 2023 PBS News Hour podcast, the maternal mortality rate among Black women in America in the same year was nearly 70 deaths for every 100,000 live births, which is 2.6 times the rate for White women, regardless of income or education.10 America is a country without maternal leave or universal health care, but with endlessly increasing costs for childcare. More recently and with growing frequency, motherhood is a value signifier; politicians argue that a woman’s purpose is tied to motherhood and stay-at-home moms with seemingly endless wealth become social media influencers, while the right to abortion in many states has been restricted or banned.11

Taken collectively, these verbs become metaphors. Although the use of animals in language—as metaphors, dual noun/verbs, and idioms—isn’t unique to English, as I look up each of these words in the OED, I can’t help but think about how the British came here and spread their white violence everywhere. The language I speak is the language of violent power. These animal verbs seem to be a perfect representation of that power.

This is also how I see my neighbors.

Though at first I wasn’t sure why I was afraid, their behavior escalated to more overt acts of violence, of invasion and boundary crossing. My fear was validated, even when I called it into question. And as they threatened, stalked, and shouted at us, something else became clear—their behavior, though troubling, scary even, was not unique. They are just like many other neighbors throughout history and in other American suburbs.

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Copyright Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2025.

Gqola, Female Fear Factory, xviii. ︎Garland-Thomson, Staring, 39. ︎Gqola, Female Fear Factory, 67. ︎Despentes, King Kong Theory, 28. ︎hooks, “Eating the Other,” 368. ︎Donald Trump (@realDonalTrump), Twitter (now X), December 12, 2019, 7:22 a.m., https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1205100602025545730?lang=en. ︎Senator Mitch McConnell is married to an Asian American woman. ︎Khaleda Rahman. “Close-Up Video Shows Texas Floating Barrier Has Circular Saws.” Newsweek, August 9, 2023. ︎Grammarians call the verbing of a noun denominalization. ︎PBS NewsHour, “American Black women,” June 28, 2023. ︎In late summer, 2024, fourteen US states have total abortion bans. These states are: Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia. ︎

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