New Kids On The Block
The grass is dried and dead on the hill and I make a mental note to remember what it looks like because I can never remember, during the summer months, what the lawn looks like in January. I am pulling into the street and the entire backyard is like matted carpet with bare scabs of dirt where in the spring my father will sprinkle grass seeds. The grass now is a dull green, curled toward the earth and peppered with brown, all of it mushed into the hill by the footsteps of my parents and neighbors’ dogs.
I can never remember how it looks. I always think, “Winter. In winter the ground is white,” because I cannot, for whatever reason, grasp the seasons beyond the pictures from the wall of my first grade classroom. In winter, there is snow and in spring there are flowers. In summer there is a beach ball and surfing and the sun is wearing sunglasses and a hat. And in autumn the leaves turn colors and children wear sweaters and go back to school and there are pictures of pencils and apples and the equation, “1+1=2,” which is the sort of thing that you learn in school, writing with the pencil that was previously depicted.
The grass is dead on the hill and I can’t see beyond that because there is a woman in a minivan blocking my driveway. Her son is standing outside the door in a Rec Soccer Uniform and I have no idea if they are waiting for a bus or if he is getting out of or into the minivan. He is just standing there, with his thick wavy hair that looks a little bit like a toupee and his distended stomach and his too-dark eyebrows, blocking my driveway. I have no idea if he lives on this block now, which is strange because when I was younger, standing like an idiot in my own Rec Soccer uniform, I was preternaturally aware of every person who lived in each of the ten houses on my street. It is not hard to keep track of the people in only ten houses, particularly ones who have children, or give out good candy on Halloween.
Ours was the first of the ten houses: One Almondgrove Court, New City, New York. Sometimes when we would write our address on a letter, Pam or Karen or I would add the extra, unnecessary specifications: One Almondgrove Court, New City, New York, United States of America, Earth, Our Solar System, Milky Way Galaxy, The Universe and then we would think for a while to try and remember if there was anything bigger than the universe that we had learned about but forgotten.
Our mailbox had a hanging sign that said “D’Apice” and “#1” of which I was very proud and which somehow led me to believe that ours was the first house, not only on our cul de sac, but in the world.
“It’s the first house on this block,” my mother told me.
“I know,” I said, beaming.
“But there are other blocks,” she said, craning her neck down to make eye contact, to make sure I understood. “There are other blocks and those blocks also have houses that start with ‘One.’ So we’re ‘One’ Almondgrove Court, but there’s a ‘One’ Blue Willow Lane and a ‘One’ Red Hill Road. Do you understand?”
“I think,” I said, disappointment seeping through me, making me cold, as if I had waded into a puddle in canvas sneakers.
I had learned in school that counting begins with “One” and our address began with “One,” and so I lived my first seven years with an exaggerated sense of my own importance. Marisa Laks’ house was #15, and she lived several blocks away and my cousin Mark’s house in Tampa was 5312 Zallard Street, which seemed a high enough number to account for all of the residences between our house and Florida.
“So what are we the first of?”
“We’re the first of this block,” my mother said. “Of these ten houses.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Oh.”
The interesting houses (besides our own, of whose relative unimportance I was not convinced) were usually the ones with children: houses 3, 4, 10 and sometimes 2. The people in 3, 4 and 10 had children a few years younger than Pam that we could play with. The woman in 8 had a Labrador Retriever with cancer that she let loose to play with whomever, and none of us had a dog of our own, so we shared that one until it died, inevitably, of the gumball-sized tumors that filled its body.
House 2 was MaryAnn, who was five years older than I was and was our babysitter and Pam and I would walk across the street to her house, ringing her doorbell at eight or nine in the morning on a Saturday to see if she was interested in playing with us.
“I can’t,” she’d say. “I have to clean my room.”
“Maybe when you’re done,” Pam offered.
“It’s going to take all day,” she said. “It’s a mess.”
“Ok,” we said, and would walk off to find someone else who would pull the wagon or hold the other end of the jump rope or let us borrow their Whitney Houston tape.
MaryAnn cleaned her room all day, every Saturday, for seven and a half years. Pam and I discussed, while walking back to our driveway, how messy it must be.
The woman in the minivan wasn’t moving so I put on my turn signal to show her I was trying to pull into the driveway she was blocking. Her mouth went ‘Oh!’ and she pressed her palm to the closed window and mouthed ‘sorry!’ and I waved and mouthed the words ‘it’s fine,’ which wasn’t really intended for her to lip read since I also said ‘it’s fine’ with my face, smiling and tilting my head to the side and trying to look generally good natured. The woman herself seemed good natured, which was why I wasn’t angry, and she reminded me of Diane Wiest, who I like, especially in Parenthood in that scene where Steve Martin thinks her vibrator is a flashlight. The first time I saw that scene I didn’t know why it was funny, the same way when I first saw Big, I didn’t laugh when Tom Hanks jumps into the bunk bed and says, “I get to be on top!”
“It’s a bunk bed,” I thought. “Everyone wants to be on top.”
Pam and Karen had had bunkbeds and Karen had the bottom because she was the littlest and might fall off and Pam would slide her arm down the side of the bed each night in the dark, grabbing Karen and stealing her stuffed animals. If there is something lurking under your bed that is going to frighten and devour you in the middle of the night, it is under the bottom of the two bunk beds, unless your younger sibling is a cannibal. If the female actress from Big was ok with being on the bottom bunk, then she was probably an idiot, I figured.
I continue smiling at the woman while pulling into the driveway. The grass is definitely green and brown mixed, which is never what I picture when I picture dead grass. Not that I do that a lot-sit around picturing dead grass, but if you asked me to draw a picture of my yard in January, I would draw it covered in snow even though it isn’t like we lived in Alaska or Buffalo or anything, and there definitely wasn’t snow on the ground most of the time. If you forced me to draw a picture of my yard in January without snow, first of all, you would have way too much time on your hands, forcing people to do things like that, but if you forced me, I would draw all of the grass brown, stretched out in a field like that Andrew Wyeth painting with the girl looking at the farmhouse.
I punch the code for my garage door opener, which is my mother’s birthday, and walk into the house, which is empty. I plug in my cell phone charger, which is what I was out getting. I had left my cell phone charger at my sister’s house in Westchester and she was driving home from work in the Bronx where she teaches and had told me if I met her on the other side of the bridge she would give me the charger.
I plug in the phone and it plays two notes-DEE doh, and will play the opposite when I unplug it later-doh DEE. I look out the big living room window and that woman is still there, her son waiting beside her now in the passenger seat, and it occurs to me that Rec soccer is finished by January and that he must be wearing his Rec soccer shirt as a regular shirt, which makes me feel bad for him. He looks a little like E.B. who lived next door to us. I wonder if maybe it was EB and I wasn’t paying close attention but it couldn’t have been because E.B.’s mom doesn’t look anything like Diane Wiest and doesn’t drive a minivan and because anyway E.B. is probably in his early 20’s by now. When he was younger, maybe six, he idolized the sweaty, tanktop-wearing men who mowed all the lawns on our cul de sac. He would walk to our house in his own white undershirt that probably his mom had bought him and would ask if we needed him to cut the grass in the front yard. And we would say, sure, knock yourself out and he would tie a long sleeved shirt around his waist and push an empty baby stroller up and down our lawn, making wheel-creases in the grass.
My phone makes a noise-not the noise of it being unplugged, but the double beep of a text message, which is from Pam, which says, “It was good to see you, sissa” with an emoticon smiley face. I had seen her for only a few minutes, our cars sitting next to each other, window to window, in the parking lot of a Hess station. She had an abrupt, shoulder length hairstyle with side swept bangs and was wearing a khaki raincoat.
“I like your haircut.”
“Thank you,” she said, pulling the phone charger from her purse. The cord was much longer than she or I realized and she continued to extract it, eyes wide, like a magician doing an exceptionally boring trick, sponsored by Verizon. She handed it to me, part of it dropping to the pavement between our cars.
“Thank you,” I said, peering into her car, which is full of small packages and bottled water and Ann Taylor Loft bags. “What’re the boxes?”
“Packages I’m sending to our platoon.”
My sister and her first grade class have a platoon of soldiers to whom they send playing cards and Starbursts and SuDoKu puzzles.
“It’s our final shipment before they relocate.”
“What’s the thing on top?” I asked, pointing to a much larger box and my sister’s eyes got very wide, the way they do when she tells the story of how some idiot woman cut in front of her on the Saw Mill Parkway or used a hundred dollar bill to buy a single doughnut at the pastry place across from her house.
“That,” she said, is from my principal. “The platoon asked if we’d send them toys for them to hand out to the Iraqi children. Like crayons or action figures or like-you know-something they can carry on them and give out. Because there are always kids around and they wanted something to give them.” She took a swig from her water bottle and continued.
“So my principal,” she went on, “MISSES Morganstein, brings me this.”
Peering in, I glance at the cartoonish letters off the front of the box, which read, “Baby Gymnastics Bounce and Spin Zebra.”
“It’s really big,” I said.
“It’s huge!” she cried. “Is she thinking?” My sister calmed herself, resting her face on the tips of her fingers. “Are the soldiers going to walk around carrying that? Are they going to take it with them in the tank?” She shook her head.
I smiled and lowered myself back into my own car, the window still rolled down and Pam said, “Wait!” and smiled and threw two small boxes of strawberry flavored Nerds into the car window, and said, “for your trouble!” and we blew kisses at each other and drove off in different directions.
I text Pam back saying, “Nice to see you too,” staring out the window at the mint green house across the street where Phillip Cleary used to live and where Phillip and Pam and I got yelled twice-the first time for walking on the pool cover and second for putting Scotch tape on his 6 month old sister’s nose so it looked like a pig’s nose. And we had taped all our own noses up too, thinking it was funny, but it wasn’t funny, my mother told us, it was dangerous. She forced us to write apology notes to Mrs. Cleary, with Pam, who only knew capital letters, writing “IM SORRE,” and putting about a thousand prongs on her capital E, which she always did, so that it looked like a fine tooth comb or a millipede.
The minivan’s red brake lights go on and exhaust begins sputtering from the tail pipe as another boy who had come down the street from somewhere-I have no idea which house-slides open the back door and scrambles onto the seat. I peer up the street, hoping to see where he lives. I am looking for a still-closing screen door or a yard strewn with bigwheels or a driveway marked with chalk drawings of flowers and tic-tac-toe boards. I listen for the sound of someone burping the alphabet or falling off a bike but there is nothing; the block is a graveyard. The minivan pulls up toward the street, idling at our bus stop, across from MaryAnn’s house, which now houses only MaryAnn’s mother and older sister, who works for the cable company. MaryAnn herself has married a soldier stationed in Hawaii, where she hopefully has a reasonably neat bedroom that she does not need to clean every weekend.
My mother arrives home later, putting her keys on the key hook and asking if I will help her unload the car.
“Are there kids who live on this block?” I ask.
“A couple,” she says. “I see kids around sometimes.
“I saw this kid I didn’t recognize,” I say, “and I was trying to figure out if he lived here.”
Looking out the window, I wonder if maybe the boy left footsteps from his front door to the edge of his lawn, but the grass is so dead and gross and matted down you couldn’t really tell where someone had stepped on it even if you were really looking. It would be easier if there were snow on the ground, I think. Not enough snow for a two-hour delay or school cancellation, but just enough to follow his footsteps back to his front porch, to whatever house it is that he will someday say he grew up in-the one that he is certain is number one in the universe. I would follow his bootprints across numerous yards, back to the garage filled with outgrown hockey skates and to the driveway littered with small helicopters and Frisbees, and to the doorbell-covered in decades of hopeful fingerprints-that the other kids ring when they ask if he can come out and play.
I can never remember how it looks. I always think, “Winter. In winter the ground is white,” because I cannot, for whatever reason, grasp the seasons beyond the pictures from the wall of my first grade classroom. In winter, there is snow and in spring there are flowers. In summer there is a beach ball and surfing and the sun is wearing sunglasses and a hat. And in autumn the leaves turn colors and children wear sweaters and go back to school and there are pictures of pencils and apples and the equation, “1+1=2,” which is the sort of thing that you learn in school, writing with the pencil that was previously depicted.
The grass is dead on the hill and I can’t see beyond that because there is a woman in a minivan blocking my driveway. Her son is standing outside the door in a Rec Soccer Uniform and I have no idea if they are waiting for a bus or if he is getting out of or into the minivan. He is just standing there, with his thick wavy hair that looks a little bit like a toupee and his distended stomach and his too-dark eyebrows, blocking my driveway. I have no idea if he lives on this block now, which is strange because when I was younger, standing like an idiot in my own Rec Soccer uniform, I was preternaturally aware of every person who lived in each of the ten houses on my street. It is not hard to keep track of the people in only ten houses, particularly ones who have children, or give out good candy on Halloween.
Ours was the first of the ten houses: One Almondgrove Court, New City, New York. Sometimes when we would write our address on a letter, Pam or Karen or I would add the extra, unnecessary specifications: One Almondgrove Court, New City, New York, United States of America, Earth, Our Solar System, Milky Way Galaxy, The Universe and then we would think for a while to try and remember if there was anything bigger than the universe that we had learned about but forgotten.
Our mailbox had a hanging sign that said “D’Apice” and “#1” of which I was very proud and which somehow led me to believe that ours was the first house, not only on our cul de sac, but in the world.
“It’s the first house on this block,” my mother told me.
“I know,” I said, beaming.
“But there are other blocks,” she said, craning her neck down to make eye contact, to make sure I understood. “There are other blocks and those blocks also have houses that start with ‘One.’ So we’re ‘One’ Almondgrove Court, but there’s a ‘One’ Blue Willow Lane and a ‘One’ Red Hill Road. Do you understand?”
“I think,” I said, disappointment seeping through me, making me cold, as if I had waded into a puddle in canvas sneakers.
I had learned in school that counting begins with “One” and our address began with “One,” and so I lived my first seven years with an exaggerated sense of my own importance. Marisa Laks’ house was #15, and she lived several blocks away and my cousin Mark’s house in Tampa was 5312 Zallard Street, which seemed a high enough number to account for all of the residences between our house and Florida.
“So what are we the first of?”
“We’re the first of this block,” my mother said. “Of these ten houses.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Oh.”
The interesting houses (besides our own, of whose relative unimportance I was not convinced) were usually the ones with children: houses 3, 4, 10 and sometimes 2. The people in 3, 4 and 10 had children a few years younger than Pam that we could play with. The woman in 8 had a Labrador Retriever with cancer that she let loose to play with whomever, and none of us had a dog of our own, so we shared that one until it died, inevitably, of the gumball-sized tumors that filled its body.
House 2 was MaryAnn, who was five years older than I was and was our babysitter and Pam and I would walk across the street to her house, ringing her doorbell at eight or nine in the morning on a Saturday to see if she was interested in playing with us.
“I can’t,” she’d say. “I have to clean my room.”
“Maybe when you’re done,” Pam offered.
“It’s going to take all day,” she said. “It’s a mess.”
“Ok,” we said, and would walk off to find someone else who would pull the wagon or hold the other end of the jump rope or let us borrow their Whitney Houston tape.
MaryAnn cleaned her room all day, every Saturday, for seven and a half years. Pam and I discussed, while walking back to our driveway, how messy it must be.
The woman in the minivan wasn’t moving so I put on my turn signal to show her I was trying to pull into the driveway she was blocking. Her mouth went ‘Oh!’ and she pressed her palm to the closed window and mouthed ‘sorry!’ and I waved and mouthed the words ‘it’s fine,’ which wasn’t really intended for her to lip read since I also said ‘it’s fine’ with my face, smiling and tilting my head to the side and trying to look generally good natured. The woman herself seemed good natured, which was why I wasn’t angry, and she reminded me of Diane Wiest, who I like, especially in Parenthood in that scene where Steve Martin thinks her vibrator is a flashlight. The first time I saw that scene I didn’t know why it was funny, the same way when I first saw Big, I didn’t laugh when Tom Hanks jumps into the bunk bed and says, “I get to be on top!”
“It’s a bunk bed,” I thought. “Everyone wants to be on top.”
Pam and Karen had had bunkbeds and Karen had the bottom because she was the littlest and might fall off and Pam would slide her arm down the side of the bed each night in the dark, grabbing Karen and stealing her stuffed animals. If there is something lurking under your bed that is going to frighten and devour you in the middle of the night, it is under the bottom of the two bunk beds, unless your younger sibling is a cannibal. If the female actress from Big was ok with being on the bottom bunk, then she was probably an idiot, I figured.
I continue smiling at the woman while pulling into the driveway. The grass is definitely green and brown mixed, which is never what I picture when I picture dead grass. Not that I do that a lot-sit around picturing dead grass, but if you asked me to draw a picture of my yard in January, I would draw it covered in snow even though it isn’t like we lived in Alaska or Buffalo or anything, and there definitely wasn’t snow on the ground most of the time. If you forced me to draw a picture of my yard in January without snow, first of all, you would have way too much time on your hands, forcing people to do things like that, but if you forced me, I would draw all of the grass brown, stretched out in a field like that Andrew Wyeth painting with the girl looking at the farmhouse.
I punch the code for my garage door opener, which is my mother’s birthday, and walk into the house, which is empty. I plug in my cell phone charger, which is what I was out getting. I had left my cell phone charger at my sister’s house in Westchester and she was driving home from work in the Bronx where she teaches and had told me if I met her on the other side of the bridge she would give me the charger.
I plug in the phone and it plays two notes-DEE doh, and will play the opposite when I unplug it later-doh DEE. I look out the big living room window and that woman is still there, her son waiting beside her now in the passenger seat, and it occurs to me that Rec soccer is finished by January and that he must be wearing his Rec soccer shirt as a regular shirt, which makes me feel bad for him. He looks a little like E.B. who lived next door to us. I wonder if maybe it was EB and I wasn’t paying close attention but it couldn’t have been because E.B.’s mom doesn’t look anything like Diane Wiest and doesn’t drive a minivan and because anyway E.B. is probably in his early 20’s by now. When he was younger, maybe six, he idolized the sweaty, tanktop-wearing men who mowed all the lawns on our cul de sac. He would walk to our house in his own white undershirt that probably his mom had bought him and would ask if we needed him to cut the grass in the front yard. And we would say, sure, knock yourself out and he would tie a long sleeved shirt around his waist and push an empty baby stroller up and down our lawn, making wheel-creases in the grass.
My phone makes a noise-not the noise of it being unplugged, but the double beep of a text message, which is from Pam, which says, “It was good to see you, sissa” with an emoticon smiley face. I had seen her for only a few minutes, our cars sitting next to each other, window to window, in the parking lot of a Hess station. She had an abrupt, shoulder length hairstyle with side swept bangs and was wearing a khaki raincoat.
“I like your haircut.”
“Thank you,” she said, pulling the phone charger from her purse. The cord was much longer than she or I realized and she continued to extract it, eyes wide, like a magician doing an exceptionally boring trick, sponsored by Verizon. She handed it to me, part of it dropping to the pavement between our cars.
“Thank you,” I said, peering into her car, which is full of small packages and bottled water and Ann Taylor Loft bags. “What’re the boxes?”
“Packages I’m sending to our platoon.”
My sister and her first grade class have a platoon of soldiers to whom they send playing cards and Starbursts and SuDoKu puzzles.
“It’s our final shipment before they relocate.”
“What’s the thing on top?” I asked, pointing to a much larger box and my sister’s eyes got very wide, the way they do when she tells the story of how some idiot woman cut in front of her on the Saw Mill Parkway or used a hundred dollar bill to buy a single doughnut at the pastry place across from her house.
“That,” she said, is from my principal. “The platoon asked if we’d send them toys for them to hand out to the Iraqi children. Like crayons or action figures or like-you know-something they can carry on them and give out. Because there are always kids around and they wanted something to give them.” She took a swig from her water bottle and continued.
“So my principal,” she went on, “MISSES Morganstein, brings me this.”
Peering in, I glance at the cartoonish letters off the front of the box, which read, “Baby Gymnastics Bounce and Spin Zebra.”
“It’s really big,” I said.
“It’s huge!” she cried. “Is she thinking?” My sister calmed herself, resting her face on the tips of her fingers. “Are the soldiers going to walk around carrying that? Are they going to take it with them in the tank?” She shook her head.
I smiled and lowered myself back into my own car, the window still rolled down and Pam said, “Wait!” and smiled and threw two small boxes of strawberry flavored Nerds into the car window, and said, “for your trouble!” and we blew kisses at each other and drove off in different directions.
I text Pam back saying, “Nice to see you too,” staring out the window at the mint green house across the street where Phillip Cleary used to live and where Phillip and Pam and I got yelled twice-the first time for walking on the pool cover and second for putting Scotch tape on his 6 month old sister’s nose so it looked like a pig’s nose. And we had taped all our own noses up too, thinking it was funny, but it wasn’t funny, my mother told us, it was dangerous. She forced us to write apology notes to Mrs. Cleary, with Pam, who only knew capital letters, writing “IM SORRE,” and putting about a thousand prongs on her capital E, which she always did, so that it looked like a fine tooth comb or a millipede.
The minivan’s red brake lights go on and exhaust begins sputtering from the tail pipe as another boy who had come down the street from somewhere-I have no idea which house-slides open the back door and scrambles onto the seat. I peer up the street, hoping to see where he lives. I am looking for a still-closing screen door or a yard strewn with bigwheels or a driveway marked with chalk drawings of flowers and tic-tac-toe boards. I listen for the sound of someone burping the alphabet or falling off a bike but there is nothing; the block is a graveyard. The minivan pulls up toward the street, idling at our bus stop, across from MaryAnn’s house, which now houses only MaryAnn’s mother and older sister, who works for the cable company. MaryAnn herself has married a soldier stationed in Hawaii, where she hopefully has a reasonably neat bedroom that she does not need to clean every weekend.
My mother arrives home later, putting her keys on the key hook and asking if I will help her unload the car.
“Are there kids who live on this block?” I ask.
“A couple,” she says. “I see kids around sometimes.
“I saw this kid I didn’t recognize,” I say, “and I was trying to figure out if he lived here.”
Looking out the window, I wonder if maybe the boy left footsteps from his front door to the edge of his lawn, but the grass is so dead and gross and matted down you couldn’t really tell where someone had stepped on it even if you were really looking. It would be easier if there were snow on the ground, I think. Not enough snow for a two-hour delay or school cancellation, but just enough to follow his footsteps back to his front porch, to whatever house it is that he will someday say he grew up in-the one that he is certain is number one in the universe. I would follow his bootprints across numerous yards, back to the garage filled with outgrown hockey skates and to the driveway littered with small helicopters and Frisbees, and to the doorbell-covered in decades of hopeful fingerprints-that the other kids ring when they ask if he can come out and play.