Oh god, here we are almost at Hallmark Sunday. In honor of mothers each May joining voices to yell “the fuck is my village?” I thought I’d tell you about mine.
When people come and visit us, they usually notice the frat houses up and down our street. I don’t know the Greek alphabet so to me as you’re driving in it reads: Greek, Greek, regular house, regular house, regular house, our house, student house, regular house, Greek.
When we moved in, I wondered if we would be living out the mise en scene of Old School, waking up in the morning to find people passed-out in the porch swing and toilet paper all over our Japanese maple.
Neighbors (with Zac Efron, Rose Byrne, and Seth Rogen) is another good frathouse movie, about a couple with a baby moving in next door to a Greek house, and the big problem it reveals is you simply cannot drink like you used to at age 40.
But: The nearby university is a “polytechnic,” which means that the kids here are pretty smart and polite. The first thing I saw at the nearby frat house was a pair of topless young lads painting sealant onto the driveway and diligently straightening the Omega over the porch. I imagine they do party—I mean I’ve heard some parties—but they’re also the kinds of people capable of building a machine that can safely slingshot an egg over a wall. I overtook a student walking across campus the other day only to find, several zigzags around buildings later, that he was walking slowly ahead of me again, because GEOMETRY. He took a more efficient route. I’d say more streaking takes place at my house than any of theirs.
I’m not suuuper worried about them dinging our property prices. Then again, the Sealed Driveway Frathouse has a giant cutout of Peter Griffin in the front window, and random folding chairs are littered around the neighborhood, a bigger tell than the letters, even.
Because we don’t live near family — my in-laws are a solid two-hour drive away; my folks are of course in Australia; and we foolishly left our friend-packed Brooklyn nabe for a town where we knew one person — neighbors have to step into the breach and keep me from going full Bertha Mason alone with kids in my Victorian. To the right of us is Rose, nearing 80, who has been married for 50 years, or “50 years … of hell!” she likes to joke. She gives the kids toys that her grandson isn’t using anymore, some of which Japhy recently attempted to “sell” in a sidewalk yard sale. She was nice about it! When Scout put up a lemonade stall, Rose was the only customer.
The house to the left is home to four architecture students who have a rainbow hammock strung between the pillars of their front porch. They’re lovely girls and don’t care when Japhy hits “home run” balls over their fence, because it’s a neglected jungle they never enter or tend to. Scout, too, loves them because they push her in the hammock and braid her hair and even, recently, let her bring home a giant orange witch’s hat that said CITY OF TROY. “They gave it to me!” she said, after lugging it into our backyard, her first criminal misdemeanor.
The architecture students have become our babysitters — and by extension our friends’ babysitters — since they’re right there and I refuse to pay for Care.com. I have them over when Noodles is stuck at work and I want to go to my nighttime art class, or when I need to get shit done but it’s “early release” from school at 10:30 a.m. I see their presence next door to us, a young family (well, the kids are young), and nearby retirees and singles and such, as a suburban whisper of the promise of Jane Jacobs’ ballet of the sidewalk:
The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out the garbage can, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrappers. (How do they eat so much candy so early in the morning?) While I sweep up the wrappers I watch the other rituals of morning: Mr. Halpert unlocking the laundry’s handcart from its mooring to a cellar door, Joe Cornacchia’s son-in-law stacking out the empty crates from the delicatessen, the barber bringing out his sidewalk folding chair, Mr. Goldstein arranging the coils of wire which proclaim the hardware store is open, the wife of the tenement’s superintendent depositing her chunky three-year-old with a toy mandolin on the stoop, the vantage point from which he is learning the English his mother cannot speak.
Everyone, each in their different life stages, forms an ecosystem, eyes on the street at different times of day. For Jane Jacobs, it was Mr Halpert unlocking the laundromat; for us, it’s someone in giant headphones taking an electric scooter to class, or a dude needlessly jogging shirtless when it is literally snowing, or a young entrepreneur hosting a sidewalk sale of things gifted to him by his neighbor.
When one of the girls babysits, the kids have the TIME OF THEIR LIVES, since not only do they get the babysitter, but sometimes some housemates will also come over to play, and or maybe a boyfriend (lol fine I guess).
On sunny days, there will be a nice crowd of them outside their house, and Scout will go sit with them, a 7-year-old feeling no compunction about breaking into the 22-year-old social circle.
In the morning hours, their house is generally silent.
*
A friend was dropping me home from yoga around 11 a.m. one day when she asked, “Is that a fire? On the porch?” She gestured at the girls’ house.
I looked at the porch next door and yes, there was a fire on it. A perfect campfire, two-foot tall, flamed over a stew of beer cans, like a trash sculpture. It was crackling and surging up against one of the columns at the top of the porch stairs.
“Shit!” I said to my friend, S. as we ran over. I had my yoga mat under my arm. “Should I put my yoga mat on it, or do you think that would go up like a tire fire?”
The fire hissed and spat back. I had an image of my Good Yoga Mat turning into airborne formaldehyde.
“Do you have a fire extinguisher?” S. in a tidy redirect.
“I do!” I galloped around back to my kitchen and fetched one of our pristine extinguishers from under the sink, yanking the pin as I jogged back around.
When you let loose with a slim kitchen fire extinguisher, what’s impressive is the mess that the powder makes. The beer cans went skittling over the porch, and revealed a fire eating into the deck and up the column. I blasted it again and again as it hissed back.
I also texted the girls, “Hi! Your deck was on fire so I’ve put it out, but I’m just going to call the fire department just in case!!” I might have used more exclamations to keep it light. One replied that she was in class. The others didn’t respond.
Soon enough the fire department came honking up the road (not the first time emergency services have been called out), S. and I still standing there in yoga gear, and other neighbors coming out of their houses. The firies had crow-barred the column open and blitzed it with water when one of the girls came out the front door in sweats, looking confused.
“Hey!” I said, with a jolly don’t-you-worry-now smile, “all good!” I waved my arms a bit to show it was true.
Poor girl was in shock. “Did it happen when my boyfriend left?” she asked herself, looking around at the scattered beer cans, trying to piece it together. Could he have dropped a cigarette? Does Bud Light ignite under the right conditions?
I gave her a hug, and the firemen had driven away by the time her boyfriend pulled up in his car, shaggily migrating out of the car onto the curb, a walking teenaged Keanu Reeves shrug. Whoaaa, you saw him shudder as he walked up the path to find the porch lightly toasted, the column busted open.
*
We’re sorry to lose the girls over summer — we’re down to one now until August classes. The good news is that the front porch seems just as full as before with hangers-on.
I was out front working on my scotch moss project the other day, fussing over tiny arms of creeping Jenny that were encroaching on my pathway, the kids “helping” with trowels, when one of the college kids yelled out from a camping chair near the beer pong table, “that’s beautiful! And I love your tulips!”
“Thank you!” I yelled back.
🌷
[insert ambivalent mom meme, take your pick]
“Study in Maternal Attitude,” 1959 — hahaha oh lord
From Sophie Hamacher’s epic book Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance, and you thought Jessamine Chan was exaggerating.
Goodies
This prose takedown of chopped salads — and the illustration!
Really loved Connie Wang’s memoir Oh My Mother! And this piece she wrote on all the people whose parents named them after Connie Chung coming together is a dreammm.
Don’t let ME tell YOU to read Biography of X, let Bigolas Dickolas tell you — or better yet, read a bit of Catherine Lacey on the impossibility of accurately characterizing a person or a relationship:
author Sarah Wheeler has a cracker in The Cut: Moms gone wild.I felt all our years together mounting up in me, full of things, full of words, positively saturated with sentences spoken that were meant to vanish immediately, or sentences spoken that were meant to stand forever, words we gave each other to explain ourselves, words that were misunderstood, words we stole, images we held in private, moments made significant to one and not the other or to the other and not the one, two realities pressed against each other, stupid impossible human points of view …
And Kaitlyn Greenidge on good uses for anger, after quashing it since childhood:
then I had a daughter, and all of a sudden, all of that felt like supreme bullshit. Her birth was hard on me, and there were numerous times—when nurses lied, when the doctors ignored me, when the care given contradicted itself—when I knew another woman would have gotten angry. I wanted to get angry.
Any other Wednesday night painters out there? You might like to peruse the winners (and nominees) of Oz’s big landscape and portrait prizes, the Wynne and the Archibald. Lucy Culliton I love you.
My parents are visiting in a day!!! I shall accordingly be devolving to an earlier version of myself, and buckling myself into the backseat like a 2-year-old so we can all fit in the car.