Pozuelo

All of the streets in our neighborhood are named after maritime elements – Timón, Sotavento, Driza, Bitacora – and if you walk down each of the cul-de-sacs that branch off from the main road like shady appendages, you will hear, but won’t see because of the walled-in yards, sprinklers and dogs whining, children who play, children who cry instead of taking their siestas, extended families on the third hour of their Sunday lunches, smoking and drinking and bitching about the Liberals, you will hear people being kind and you will realize that their kindness is not so nice, and you will hear sometimes nothing at all because people here are just so private but during their lunches whisper you know what I heard?, I heard…, and from up the hill you can see over the fence of the house of the man with the German Shepherd, that never stops barking, and you will see the man with his head in his hands on his front stoop with an unlabeled bottle beside him because last night we woke up to see ambulance lights through our blinds because his mother that had lived with him died, and you will see Annie with a double-wide stroller taking slow laps around the cherry tree at the bottom of the street to get her babies to stop crying and to get herself to stop crying because she followed her husband to his deployment here and she misses South Dakota, you will see proud grandmothers and pearl-wearing grandmothers and haughty grandmothers who are so attached to their family names that they sent their grandsons to conversion camps and told the town that they’re at boarding schools in England, you will see few fathers like mine from outside of Cleveland, power washing their walkways, and many fathers who wear matching linen shirts with all three of their sons, because any moment is one for a family portrait, or fathers who get too drunk at these family functions and get in fights with their sisters’ husbands and make comments about how girls look so much older than their age these days, you will notice how each child of these families who is over thirteen is already chainsmoking and you will see how the many crystal ashtrays on the lunchtable overflow, and you will smell burning wood and the sweet honeysuckle that grows all down the street, and you will realize that each house with orange-tiled roofing is walled-in by more than just the yard hedge fences that keep their kids, and affairs, and prejudices inside, and you will see family reunions held one, two, three times a week to keep the blood blue and the loyalty strong, and you will see these families going on walks and you will see one sullen teenager that doesn’t quite belong in the white and cream and pink colorscape of the rest, so their grandfathers take pity on them and let them smoke the good cigars once the younger kids with stiff bows and gel in their hair retire for the afternoon, and you will see how this parade gossips louder as they pass by the walled-in houses of the foreigners on the street should they be Middle Eastern or Colombian or anything other than nobly bred, and you will see these foreign children like me running amok with our etiquette-less gang on bikes, and penny boards that we ride laying on our bellies to torpedo down the hill, and you will see us scratch our cheeks and palms on the way, and you will notice how unafraid we are to take up space in this beautiful place because we aren’t yet aware of its hostility and how one day we will belong to a friend group made up of the children from these families and we too will smoke their cigarettes and drink their sangria but we will always be a little too dirty to be mistaken as one of them, but they love us for this grittiness, even though we lived in houses across from theirs and just because they were paid for by the government we aren’t so gritty after all, but we allow them to think they know about the outside world, about a lack of trust funds because in turn we get to pretend that we too have generational pearls and ugly burried secrets, and you will see that this exchange is kind to us, so when we are invited to the grandiose lunches we know just what to wear and say to be interesting but not attract the wrath of the grandmothers, and you will see us drinking their beer and eating their papas bravas and in a moment of calm between business talks and gossip you see me write on my napkin: what a thing to pretend this is home

Cover picture credit : iStock