It
was as though we had stepped foot into an idyllic Norman Rockwellesque painting
depicting a romanticized vision of what we had imagined hip suburban life would
be. Maybe, it was the crispness of the air or the tumbling fall leaves swirling
in a perfectly choreographed fluid dance that had enticed us. Or, perhaps it
was the combination of the glossy sheen and newly renovated smell of the house
that allowed us to believe that this could be our home. If I am to be
completely honest, the predominant catalysts for pulling the trigger on giving
up my left arm and my husband’s manhood to afford the overpriced home, were the
euphoria from realizing we finally had reached the light at the end of the
“living at home with my parents” tunnel, married with my pregnancy
hormone-fueled desperation to find a place to bring our baby home when we
eventually would be ushered unceremoniously out of the hospital once the ankle biter
would be born. Now, beholden to a mortgage more than to my husband, our new
large and spacious pied-a-terre was tricked out with every tantalizing and
enticing accoutrement over which any “MLS is my porn” addict would salivate: a
rain shower in the Carrera-marbled master ensuite, a large modern chef’s
kitchen and a fifty foot wide lot in a land of partitioned grass that had been
reduced to twenty-five footers with one to two million dollar plus price tags.
We signed, sealed and delivered out agreement of purchase and sale and down
payment to the keeper of escrow and set about decamping as swiftly as the wind
and movers could transport us from my childhood bedroom to our new palace.
Boxes unpacked, furniture placement perfected, we settled into our kingdom only
to have the polish of the environs of our abode lose its sheen faster than we
could have ever anticipated.
“Brrring!”
trilled the phone a few weeks after our big move.
“Hello?”
I answered.
“Is
this Mrs. A?” the voice queried.
“No,
she and her husband do not live here anymore. We bought the house from them and
moved in several weeks ago,” I replied.
“Do
you know where they are? Do you have their new number?” the voice pressed.
“Who
may I ask is calling?” I queried.
“I
am Alex from the Debt Recovery Center. Mr. and Mrs. A owe our clients quite a
bit of money and we are trying to track them down to recover it,” he informed
me.
“I’m
sorry, but I have no idea where they moved, but please remove our phone number
and address from your files as the As do not live here anymore,” I instructed.
“Thank
you very much for your time. I will make note of it,” Alex advised prior to
ending the call.
Two
years have passed since the time of that memorial call and the demand letters
in my mailbox and angry voicemail messages from Alex and his band of creditors
have failed to stop flowing notwithstanding our sharing with them an email
address for Mr. A that we had managed to track down through the neighbourhood’s
underground nanny network.
This
first list of our ship veering off course exposed us to the skeletons that
lurked superficially beneath the surface living in our neighbours’ financially
precarious master walk-in closets. House rich and life poor was something we
soon learned was the mantra written in invisible ink on the welcome mat on many
a house porch of our neighbours. We discovered that our little microcosm was
inhabited by three groups of families: those who could afford to live in the
area by virtue of their earned incomes; those who stretched themselves
financially like Gumby to buy in; and those whose parents were financially
buoying their kids’ houses of cards by giving them their down payments, paying
their mortgage payments, paying for vacations, and in some cases having bought
them their homes outright. Quickly, I was awoken to the realization that in
buying our home, unwittingly I was returned to a non-nostalgic high school era
dystopia populated with too many people with a variety of personality disorders
from my shared ethnic background with whom I mingled as a camper and eventually
met at university. In order words, Jewish American (read: Canadian) Princes and
Princesses. This was no Wisteria Lane on which my house was situated, but
rather we were housed in my come-to-life nightmare version of the horror flick
“Hostel.”
“How
are you enjoying the area?” Mrs. X, my neighbour called out to me in her Chihuahua-like nasal voice
characteristic of many women in the community one day when I was on a walk six
months after we had moved in.
“Great,
thanks,” I offered tentatively, as I pushed my pram cocooning my baby as fast I
as I could towards my house. How I wished it could have cocooned me too.
“So
how many strollers do you have?” Mrs. X queried aggressively running after me.
“Excuse
me?” I replied off-guard.
“Well,
I’ve seen your purple Stokke and your Snap ‘N Go, but this Bugaboo Bee is new,”
Mrs. X advised.
“I
didn’t realize that you had such a keen and watchful eye keeping track of the
number of strollers I owned,” I replied to no reaction. “I have one for every
day of the week, just like my underwear.”
“Really?”
Mrs. X asked as her eyeballs bulged out of her head, not noting my sarcastic
tone. As if on cue, my parents’
car pulled into my driveway, providing me with a perfect exit strategy from
this grating conversation. Retreating from being behind enemy lines, I quickly
veered my pram on to my property hoping that Mrs. X. would not trespass upon my
sacrosanct land.
“Oh,
you were really kidding about the number of strollers. But, why are your
parents driving your car?” Mrs. X chortled chasing me after I had refused to be
further engaged by her incessant prattling. “Hi there! I am your daughter’s
neighbour.”
“Nice
to meet you,” my mother returned as she tried to squeeze out of her car as Mrs.
X blocked her way.
“I
was just asking your daughter why you and your husband are driving her car,”
Mrs. X explained to my mother.
Shooting
me a quizzical look, I had no choice but to answer the riddle of the Sphinx
hoping that in doing so I would free both myself and my parents from her
clutches.
“It’s
my parents car. I don’t know why you thought it was mine,” I replied.
“Well
it’s been in your driveway for several months,” Mrs. X explained.
“My
parents had asked us to drive it for them for personal reasons,” I advised.
“Oh,
so you only have one car,” Mrs.
X stated with a sense of satisfaction like that of a cat having swallowed a
canary. “What were the reasons?”
“The
reasons were first, you’re a nosy bitch and second, mind your own fucking business.
Now get off my lawn!” I ordered.
After
that run-in, I came to know that my day would never be complete without an
undesirable chitchat with one of my many warm and friendly neighbours. Two of
my other neighbours, whom I like to refer to respectively as
Jealous-of-my-Jewelry-Dee and Lipo-Dee-Bum, were constantly engaged in a
competition of one-upsmanship in their never-ending game of keeping up with the
Jonesbergs, which was endemic to the neighbourhood and they were always
entreating me to join. The raison d’etre for Jealous-of-my-Jewelry-Dee and
Lipo-Dee-Bum, neither of whom were gainfully employed and left such manual
labour to their nebbish husbands who were once coveted by many a princess-y girl in
high school, was solely to outdo each other and then combine efforts to gang up
on any other woman who dared to outdo them, whether she was trying to or not.
“Hey
you,” Jealous-of-my-Jewelry-Dee and Lipo-Dee-Bum called out in unison when they
spotted me pushing my daughter on the swing at the park.
“Hi
Ladies,” I muttered.
“Your
daughter is so cute!” Lipo-Dee-Bum advised. “My nanny tells me how at every
music class the teacher fawns all over her. You must be so proud that she is so
popular already.”
“My
nanny tries to get the teacher to notice my daughter, but yours shines like
such a bright little star that its hard for him to take notice of mine,”
Jealous-of-my-Jewelry-Dee stated with envy.
Ignoring
their trap, I continued to push my daughter on the swing. How wonderful it was
to watch her, as she laughed blissfully unaware of the social spider web in
which I found myself tangled, and one that eventually she too would inevitably
be caught.
“So
have you enrolled your daughter in nursery school yet?”
Jealous-of-my-Jewelry-Dee asked.
“No,
she is only a few months old,” I replied.
“Oh
no, then you are already behind the eight ball!” Jealous-of-my-Jewelry-Dee
chimed gleefully. “You have to sign up at St. Xavier’s when you are trying to
conceive. It is the only acceptable
school to send your child to in the area. Didn’t anyone tell you that?”
“I
have had my child’s name on that list since before my three failed in-vitro
surrogacy attempts,” Lipo-Dee-Bum stated.
“St.
Xavier’s, isn’t that the church with all of the Jews in the basement?” I asked.
“That
is not very funny. Churches hid Jews during the Holocaust, so you should be
grateful,” Jealous-of-my-Jewelry-Dee scolded as though I had forgotten my
Jewish heritage. “Well, you won’t have to worry about your daughter going there
anyway because it is too late to get her in now.”
“Too
bad! Now we’ll never know if my daughter will outshine both of yours in school
just like she does in music class. In any event, my daughter will be going to
the Toronto French School, just like her mama did, being a legacy and all,” I
said pulling my daughter from the
swing and heading to the slide before either snake could reply.
This
encounter was typical. If I was not having one wannabe MILF lord over my
head that they can afford live-in nanny help twenty-four hours a day seven days
a week, when we were planning only on sending our kid to daycare when I
returned to the place that shall not be named, also known as work, then it was
having another boast about how they will go to the cottage (conveniently
leaving out the part that it is owned by their in-laws) every weekend in the
summer, when we will frequent only the local public pool. However, to date,
Mrs. X remained the title-holder of having thrust upon me the most obnoxious
conversation that I had to endure. After having both invited herself into my
home and taken a self-initiated tour, she preceded to tell me that by choosing
to send my daughter to my alma matter, I was denying my daughter a terrific
education at our local public school, where she was sending her kids, as she
waved her garish six carat diamond ring in my face. For the record, the local
public school supported by my property tax dollars, is populated by kids bussed
in from the wrong side of the tracks because no one in the area wants to send
their kids there because the test scores are so low and the building is falling
apart. Only those who had maxed themselves out on buying two million plus
dollar homes and carrying one point five million dollar mortgages, or those
with grandparents refusing to pay for private school, were forced to send their
kids to our local piece of public crap. Those people in the neighbourhood who
made substantial livings and others who had opted for less expensive (and less
expansive) homes did enroll their kids in private schools, so as to avoid
having their children’s post-secondary matriculation options limited. I suppose
Mrs. X had come to the decision to send her kids to public school after
reconciling her Sophie’s choice dilemma: either hawk the skating rink on her
finger on Craigslist to pay for private education, or keep the sparkler and
seal her kids’ fates as future gold-digging “Mrs.” degree hunters because they
were unlikely to climb far up the educational food chain.
The
husbands were no better than their wives. Being the ones who were the major or
sole breadwinners of the family, with their receding hairlines and paunchy
bellies, they looked upon their wives with disdain and resentment wondering
where their salad days of being sought after by a glut of women had gone.
Notwithstanding their wives constant primping, stair-climbing and social
climbing efforts, the vacuous and vapid women failed to hold their hubbies’
attention. In attending a Bar Mitzvah for my cousin in the local public
school’s gymnasium, out of which the area Chabad operated, my husband learned
from the Rabbi that not only did we live in a land of smoke and mirrors, but
one that existed in a time warp. That of the 1970s to be exact. As it turned out, not only were our
neighbours great pretenders at playing house, but they excelled at swinging
over the thin red line of infidelity.
“So
will we be seeing you at services?” the Rabbi asked us.
“We
are not religious people,” my husband advised.
“We
mostly prescribe to the Shul of Christopher Hitchens,” I stated.
“That’s
fine,” the Rabbi exclaimed. “We have many, many members here who are secular,
but have become supportive congregants as a result of seeking my marital
counsel. We offer great couples counseling.”
“Um, thanks, but our marriage is quite solid,” my husband stated.
“Um, thanks, but our marriage is quite solid,” my husband stated.
“Maybe
for now, but sooner or later you will be going to one of these key parties,
and…” the Rabbi whispered.
“What
are you talking about?” I asked.
“You
know that your neighbours throw key parties and go home with each other’s
spouses,” the Rabbi explained to our dumbfounded expressions.
“Are
you serious?” my husband laughed.
“It’s
like they’re still fucking campers switching boyfriends and girlfriends every
month, except that now they have nicer cabins paid for by their mommies and
daddies!” I cried.
“Please
mind your language, this is a sanctuary of God,” the Rabbi chastised.
“Excuse
me, Rabbi, but this is nothing more than a sanctuary of stinky jockstraps and
athlete’s foot,” I stated, as I ushered my husband to the buffet table away
from Rabbi Dr. Ruth.
The
visual allure of the neighbourhood initially was dazzling, but woefully bereft
of any substance. Our trustafarian and self-made neighbours alike were nothing
more than materialistic, competitive, insecure and jealous “adults” still
living out their adolescence. Incentivized by discovering that we lived in
Swingtown, we were ready to eat the apple and be expelled from this hedonistic
Garden of Eden. Our house sold within a blink of putting it on the market,
faster than we could say “we only drive a Subaru,” and we got out of dodge
before we could be transformed into pod people. No matter how bad the curry
smell wafting through the air of our new neighbourhood gets, or how many times
my husband is asked by the lovely ladies of the night living a few doors over
if he wants to become the area’s local pimp, we would never return to the old
shtetl.
© 2013 Naomi Elana Zener. All
rights reserved.
