Bitter Greens with Grapes and Orange Sherry Vinaigrette! Cherry Tomatoes with Horseradish Crème Fraîche!
Perfect salads for company (if you actually let people in your house) and block parties (if your neighborhood still believes in those sorts of things).
BEFORE I MOVED INTO THE HOUSE I now occupy, it had been a while since I’d lived in a neighborhood per se. Now that I do, I think about the concept of neighborhoods a lot—perhaps in an unhealthy way.
I really like this neighborhood, especially the sounds that float through my walls and windows: kids on the cul-de-sac shooting hoops; dogs barking to be let out—or let back in; the muffled-blaring music of sullen teenage drivers; songbirds; clanking mailboxes; and, on Tuesday night, the rumble of all of us rolling our garbage and recycling bins to the curb.
But I rarely see my neighbors, who seem so unknowable that I have considered sifting through these bins for clues to who the hell they might be.
I imagine it’s a pretty representative neighborhood, especially in terms of the stereotypical notion we seemed to have collectively settled upon and then used as inspiration for LEGO homes and toy train villages and the set of Edward Scissorhands
It has well-kept lawns, with loads of beautiful trees and lush flowers. And the street names are an aspirational mashup of Game of Thrones, British Elite University, and Quaint Connecticut Town. On my street, the interior house plans are almost exactly alike—with exteriors just different enough to keep us from entering one another’s homes by mistake and getting clonked on the head with a frying pan.
Quite frankly—although I certainly don’t want anyone to get hurt—I would absolutely relish some kind of fracas like that. Because not only are we not accidentally going into neighbors’ houses on my street, but I also don’t see anyone doing it on purpose either. It’s a little sad.
Maybe I’m just neighboring wrong. My idea of what a neighborhood is supposed to be has been informed mostly by old television shows and Broadway musicals and cartoon strips, so in the back of my mind I probably thought I’d be gabbing across a back fence with my hair in rollers and a cup of coffee in one hand or attending progressive suppers and the big annual ice cream social (with a brass band playing under a gazebo). In the neighborhood of my imagination, at least before I got here, I was forced to turn down invitations to bridge nights and block parties and garden club meetings. I was just too exhausted from all my other activities!
It’s not like I wanted a parade just for moving in. But the closest I got to visit from the welcome wagon was when a neighbor banged on my door (not once but twice) to tell me I had a wasp nest that was endangering their children. (Cost to remove wasp nest: $225).
And where are all the bikes? Shouldn’t there be kids on bikes?
I have made one very nice casual friend since I arrived, and I also flipped on the porch light at 11 pm one night to let Cookie out and found a woman I’d never seen before standing in the middle of my yard, halfway up from the street, who claimed to be my friend.
“Hello?” I yell-screamed before I had my wits about me. What was she doing there? That’s when I saw her tiny dog using my grass as its private lounge, if you know what I mean. After the animal had finished, it started barking at me wildly.
“Oh, Coco, stop!” I heard the woman say to the dog (whose real name is not Coco) in a merry voice. “That’s our friend.”
Whaaat, I said under my breath. I waved and waited until she’d left the yard, noticing that she’d never leaned over to pick anything up, if you know what I mean again. So now, not only is this woman not my friend, she is my enemy for life (and will not be invited to the potluck I will never be hosting).
The thing I have to remember, I suppose, is that I am the outlier here, someone with little of the stickiness you want in a neighbor. I’m sure some of mine are wondering why I am here, unloading a huge number of groceries more than once a week, despite the fact that I appear to have no family. (How can they possibly know about my ghost children and ghost husbands?)
But I guess my question for them might be: Why are any of us still here? In these late-stage neighborhoods? It’s been ages since we overshot their original purpose, which, for our early ancestors, was survival—through the sharing of food, defenses, and later fire.
Maybe the problem is that neighborhoods did their job too well. They’ve made us safe from predators, but also from each other. No one gathers around the fire pit or shares food and tools. (No one even uses their grill around here, from what I can tell.) People walk their dogs, but they’re on their phones, obliviously happy to be living side by side with their neighbors without ever connecting.
To me there is something mysterious— menacing even—about this life, which always seems to be simmering without ever boiling over. And it makes my imagination go a little haywire.
Today, when I was buying olive oil and parsley at the big chain grocery store closest to me, I heard a woman in a pretty tennis dress say to another woman in a cute tennis dress, “Oh, Marcy is a killer. She gets shit done.”
I felt an electric sensation travel up my spine. Murderers!
I was afraid to look back at them, because I knew their evil might blind me. And when I did, they were both looking directly at me (or perhaps at my outfit—my usual clogs and athletic socks with vinaigrette-stained khakis and a button down. Or at my hair, which looked like a bale of hay).