The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons

We have careers that we like-or rather, Walter has a career he’s president of a medium-sized, good advertising agency which he formed seven years ago with his friend and then co-worker at a large, exceedingly dull advertising agency. They are both neutered, but race memory is strong and they tackle with relish any marauding tom who comes through looking for a fight. It accommodates the cats and their carrier very well, too, on their frequent trips to the vet.

Walter has the obligatory tobacco-brown Mercedes sedan, and I have the obligatory compact station wagon, in which I can comfortably carry the things I like and collect-some antique pieces of the Georgia Federal period, which do not at all fit the mood of my old, square, two-story brick house but which I love many plants stones picked up out by the river for the rock garden I’m slowly building. We have two cars, which is all we need since there are only two of us. We have a good house, but not a grand one, in a better neighborhood than we can really afford, because the down payment was a wedding gift from my parents. We have some friends who are fairly eminent in other ways too-in their professions, in their social standings (though not a great many of those), in the amounts of their personal fortunes (not so many of those either). We do have some few friends who have been in People magazine, fringe celebrities, people who do odd things, but none of the biggies, none of the ones who elicit two columns of letters to the editors. We have formed no national organizations for minority groups or children with rare and baffling diseases. We have neither of us ever written-nor will we write-a first novel that sold for $1.5 million in paperback rights and caught the fancy of Robert Redford, who thought it would make a fine movie. We have no particular talents except, I think, a small talent for living fairly serenely and well most of the time. We are not rich or about-to-be rich enough we are not young and lithe and up-and-coming, though we are not old and venerable and full of endearing foibles and crusts of pithy wisdom either. PEOPLE LIKE US don’t appear in People magazine.

The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons