Once in the small suburban neighborhood, Oak’s Ridge, on Olive Street, there lived two neighbors, both women, both born around the same year, but not both happy. Dakota lived on the left, and Mallory on the right. Mallory was a rather small woman at about five feet two inches, married to a very attractive man named Tom. Tom gave her everything she had ever wanted, whether it be the excessively green grass in the front yard, the large indoor porch in the rear of the house, or the small dog with the loud yipping bark. Their home was all white, with a white kitchen and white baths. The chairs were always in their place and the white bookshelves were lined with white frames in which they kept the photos from their latest vacations. Next door in the little blue house lived Dakota, a single mother, and her eight year old son. They had no Tom to bring home small dogs or put down new grass every year, but they did keep a string of colored lights up in the back yard all year round so that they could eat dinner outside on clear nights and tell stories about their day. Sometimes they even had people over, and though no more than 10 people could fit in their yard, they always seemed to have a good time.
On one of those clear nights, Mallory happened to glance out the window in the direction of those colored lights to see Dakota and her son cooking hamburgers on the grill and looking at the stars laughing. She wondered what was so funny about the stars. She had never seen anything humorous about them. Deep in her thoughts, she had forgotten which new product Tom had been talking about his company releasing, and just nodded through the rest of the dinner conversation, never looking back up from her grilled chicken. As their butler cleared away the last of their dishes, Mallory and Tom decided to go out for drinks.
“Why do we never invite people over, cook on the grill, and enjoy our meal outdoors?” Mallory asked on the way to the country club.
“Well, why would we do that?” Tom replied, “We can buy the best meal around and enjoy it ourselves, in our beautiful home! If it will make you happier, we can buy a new grill outside and have our meals prepared there.” But Mallory was already back into her deep thoughts about the stars when she had realized Tom did not understand that what she wanted had no monetary value. They went to the country club for drinks, spoke without smiling or looking at each other, and then went home.
The next day, about an hour after Tom had left for work, Mallory came across a small envelope in the mail that had neither her name nor Tom’s on it; it was addressed to Dakota’s son from a summer camp. Mallory’s eyes lit up as if she had just received a get out of jail free card in Monopoly. Grabbing her sunglasses, she rushed down the street to her next door neighbor's home and rang the doorbell.
“Mrs. Hall! How wonderful to see you! What brings you over here?” Dakota said, answering the door with a bright smile.
“Well, I seemed to have been delivered a piece of your mail,” Mallory said quietly, suddenly overcome with shyness, “And I wished to get it to the right recipient.” Behind Dakota, Mallory could see the pink walls filled with paintings and yellow shelves stocked with books of all colors.
“Oh well thank you! Why don’t you come on in, Mrs. Hall. I just made a big pitcher of lemonade!” Dakota said, still smiling as she led Mallory through the house to the kitchen.
“You can call me Mallory,” she was fascinated by every new color in each room, and the overwhelming number of books everywhere. There had to have been hundreds of them! She noticed several books on science, many more on art, and even some about places all over the world such as Fiji and Prussia and Nigeria. No subject seemed to have a shelf of its own, the red book on astronomy was next to the black book about World War I, which sat next to the yellow book about the Arctic Ocean, sitting next to another red book of poetry. The randomness of each color, each book shelf, each room left Mallory in ecstatic disarray.
“Oh sure, Mallory! I’m really sorry about the mess! Why don’t we enjoy this lemonade outside, where there isn’t so much stuff around,” Dakota said, bringing Mallory back from her thoughts. That was secretly what she had hoped for the entire time, to sit outside for once and enjoy some real company.
The two women sat outside, they sipped lemonade and enjoyed the day. Mallory asked when Dakota’s son would be in school again.
“Oh not for another couple weeks. He’s awfully thrilled though. Always asking me to get more books for him so he can be ahead of the class. He’s so excited to learn I don’t know if the teachers will be able to handle his eagerness!” Mallory laughed genuinely for the first time in quite a while. She had only known Dakota as the neighbor next door that laughed at the stars. But now she was discovering a different person: a person that had so much joy in life, that when she spoke she shared that joy with others. In those hours on Dakota’s back porch, Mallory had discovered something she hadn’t ever experienced since even before marrying Tom: a true friendship. She loved the real conversation she could have with a person like Dakota, and the realness she felt in return when Dakota listened and appreciated what she had said. There was nothing blank about her friendship with Dakota, everything was as colorful as the bookshelves.
And so each day Dakota would invite Mallory over, whether it be for lemonade or tea or pie and they would talk for hours about everything. One day, Mallory thought back to that night when she had seen Dakota and her son laughing at the stars.
“What do you find so funny about the stars?” she asked.
“I’m sorry? I don’t think I understand what you mean. What is funny about the stars, you said?” Dakota asked, confused. Mallory explained what she had saw that night through her window at dinner, privately wishing to be able to laugh at the stars herself.
“Oh! I see what’s happened,” Dakota began to explain, “No we weren’t laughing at the stars. We were laughing at the idea of being a star, living so disconnected from everything else. We were laughing because even though stars are beautiful and bright, they are lonely because they are really so far away from one another and from us.” Dakota then began to laugh again at the ideas and soon Mallory was able to laugh, too.
That evening, when Tom arrived at home, the white house was silent. He sat and ate his dinner, assuming Mallory had gone out shopping for new clothing or shoes like she sometimes did. It wasn’t until late when he was reviewing work files, that he noticed how long she had been gone, and finally thought for the first time that perhaps she wouldn’t come back.