neighbors

    A street with a dead end is a great place to be a kid. Our no-traffic cul-de-sac was a perfect setting for bikes and scooters, and it was even sloped from top to bottom so that you wouldn’t really even have to pedal to go real fast.

    At the top of the street were the Adams.* Their grandma lived in a cottage connected to the house by a covered walkway. She sold Avon and went on long walks with my mother. The dad was really hard on the son, Jay. He built a batting cage in the empty lot next door, and we could hear them in our living room, father yelling at son to do a better job hitting the ball. His sister Kasey used to babysit me and my sister, and all I remember about that is playing Rugrats in Tokyo on the Nintendo 64 and saying the word “crud” over and over again.

    Jay and Kasey lost their mom when I was in 5th grade, in a tragic car accident that robbed their family of something vital. The dad remarried years and years later, to a woman nearly the same age as Kasey.

    The next house down was ours. It was a Jackson Home, the name for one of the many one-story brick houses built along nearly identical floor plans by the same firm. Our house mirrored 2 others on our street alone. Walking into the others always gave me vertigo because they just didn’t feel right. Our house is pretty plain from the outside, the most distinguishing feature being a row of oak trees that my father planted in meticulously measured rows when they were twigs.

We moved in when I was 6 and my sister 2, and so two decades later, it’s not surprising that some spots on the inside are not really holding up. When we come home for Christmas, my sister and I have to take impossibly short showers to avoid overflowing a tub that has never drained quite right.

The next lot down used to have a treehouse. It was there that I pretended to love soccer because all the neighbor kids played it. We once shook up a whole flat of generic coke cans from Sams and sprayed them at each other inside that tree house, delighting in our destruction and freedom in our space. They tore it down when I was at school one day. My mom and sister watched a forklift pick it up and drop it, smashing it to pieces so that they could then cut down the surrounding trees and build another identical house. I’d stopped pretending to like soccer by then.

The treehouse belonged to all of us, but on paper, it belonged to the Blakes, who lived in the next house down the street. Like the Adams, they had a boy and a girl. They were the only family on the street whose parents got divorced while we all lived there. The mom was much younger and prettier than the dad. I have this distinct memory of him sitting at our kitchen table, showing my mother a pair of black gloves he’d gotten at the flea market, and could she believe they were Calvin Klein for the price he paid? She looked them over more closely and laughed and laughed when she spotted the extra letters that revealed them to be Kellvin Clinez. I think my family decided we didn’t like him because we weren’t sure what he did for a living. He may have been retired—he was that much older than his ex-wife—but he also kept redecorating his house with nicer stuff than ours.

Of all the neighbors, the only family with 3 kids was in the next house, the Overstreets. They had three daughters, the last of whom was a surprise blessing to all of us, even though I was in the group of kids who found the box of condoms while we were snooping around in the parents’ bedroom. (My point is that they were still having sex, and those things are only like 99% effective. Ask Rachel from Friends.) The oldest daughter, Amy cried and begged us never to tell anyone—they were Catholic.

There were other houses on the street: the old people who kept to themselves, the one guy with all the pet snakes, and the house that sat unsold while we used its porch to stage our Backstreet Boys choreography. But there were only four families with kids our age. We were friends. We played outside together and tortured each other and had sleepovers together.

We also used to have the most amazing Halloween parties in the Blakes’ empty lot. We would do normal stuff like carve pumpkins and bob for apples, but we would also play this game where everybody got a different kitchen utensil in a brown paper bag and could use only that to eat as much spaghetti as possible. To me, that game is the best part about Halloween. I fucking love spaghetti, and it was a competition to see who could eat the most, and it was messy and wonderful. My mom would also lead us through making our own slime, years before Youtubers got famous selling their own bizarre mixtures of borax and Elmer’s glue.

One year, I even lost a tooth while eating a potato chip at this party. It was one of my top 2 front ones. I spent the whole day singing “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth” knowing full well that I was getting a visit from the tooth fairy that night, a pay day after I’d gored myself on free candy all night.

Besides Halloween, there were other times we’d all get together. We used to all go to this restaurant called O’Neals, where my mom made the Blake boy cry. He was being a little shit, so she bet him a dollar he couldn’t drink Tabasco straight out of the bottle. We also used to drive to this one gas station that sold Blue Bell ice cream because the Blake dad loved it so much. That was where I got my first WWJD bracelet, back when the ones with the plastic clips were so popular and back when I felt tremendous guilt for being the only family on our street who didn’t go to church. Even longer than I pretended to like soccer, I pretended to be a Christian, not fully understanding what that even meant, and correcting people that I wasn’t Catholic, I was Christian.

After the Adams’ mom died, all the grown ups used to get together and drink. It started with these really fun bonfires in the Adams’ lot.  We would breathe in the heady smell of burning wood, make s’mores, and throw whatever we wanted into the fire when our parents weren’t looking. Later, I would miss these fires so much that I would go outside with the neighbor kids and throw lit matches on our driveways. It’s kind of a miracle that none of us ever burned down a house on our street.

There would be drinking at our hurricane parties too. The weather would get crazy, and we’d spend the early hours of the storm holed up at someone’s house, eating snacks, lighting hurricane candles, and talking about how crazy the weather was.

I used to get mad at my mom for drinking with them sometimes. It was all very dramatic to me then, but I realize now that it was pretty tame, and all the grown ups were just doing their best. All the ones who had been left behind—the dads whose wives had left or died, my mom whose husband was away finishing an MBA, and the other mom whose husband was a pilot, flying all over the country—were just doing what they could to make a life with the people who were there.

I go back for the holidays, and it never feels the same as it did when we were all there together, me pretending to like soccer, setting thins on fire, and riding our bikes down and around our no-car street.

*All names are bad fake names because I feel weird about using real names, even though the real names sound soooooo much better.