Walking the Neighborhood

Last night Leila and I took a walk to Ample Hills, a hip new ice cream parlor that opened up just off the Gowanus Canal. I suppose it’s only natural to find gelato-quality ice cream in the Venice of Brooklyn, but I’m a little nostalgic for the neighborhood’s grittier manufacturing days. A huge concrete factory is still churning nearby, along with an industrial bakery and a dry cleaning hub, both there in the early 2000s when the neighborhood wasn’t on a single realtor’s hit list and my husband, like a monk, moved in with one rug.  Even back in my Dad’s youth, Carroll Gardens was home to a metal shop where he pressed plates for gate designs to pay his way through college. 

            Now there’s a Whole Foods Market a few blocks away from us and the cleanup of this chemical-drenched superfund site has meant the conversion of abandoned buildings into condominiums, and a tentative return of nature. Back in the winter, every time we walked over the canal toward Leila’s school, I felt compelled to tell her that the water is poisonous, as though I was afraid she might vault herself (like the fictional Madeleine) into the canal; and we would discuss the fate of the occasional duck that landed on its slick orange surface. She would put on that professorial tone she gets when she’s trying to sound grown up and tell it, “Duck, duck, get OUT of the water!”
But my information was considered alongside the news she got from Walter, Pre K2’s reigning, red-headed, know-it-all, who had assured her that the fetid water was just fine for birds.

            “Walter knows everything,” she told me.

            "Like what?"

            “Like everything about dinosaurs…and he knows some pretty bad stuff.”

Two years ago she wouldn’t have told me a thing about her day in preschool, like it was some sort of secret Freemason society, and while I’m glad for the dribs and drabs she now passes on, a day can seem like it took place so many years ago that she sometimes has trouble remembering it all.  Right now she seems concerned that she doesn’t know nearly as much as Walter does, and I point out that she knows a great deal, including exactly how to guide her directionally challenged mother toward the place where she can get cotton-candy ice cream. I was about to head us down the entirely wrong bridge.

            When pressed, it turns out that Walter’s parents were stretching the truth to scare him into compliance, so his truths always seemed starker and scarier than anything I passed on. For example, he told Leila “If you touch fire you will die,” although neither one of them seemed to worry that this fact conflicted with the report that his dad could eat fire.  

            So at any rate, we’re walking over the canal on this August day and see fish and an actual live crab swimming near the surface, and pass a tree so filled with singing birds we have to back up and stand under it to admire it.

            “See, they camouflaged themselves,” she tells me, a bit of knowledge from PreK’s unit on animal life.

            “But why would they do that?”

            “Well, you see, they didn’t want us to know that they’re having a party!”

Two things strike me: how naturally her hand slips into mine, and that I might have walked by all of this without noticing it if I’d been on my own. That mural on the water tower of the face bubbling under water, was it always there?

            “Of course, Mama.  You just didn’t look up.”

~

We do a lot of walking in my neighborhood, and during the summer everyone is out stooping, as my husband, Josh, calls it:  sitting on the stairs to their brownstones or on benches in their front gardens, if they have them. Carroll Gardens is known for these lush stretches of green, which put people more on display and more in touch with one another than in most areas of the city.  I’m originally from Staten Island, where we STAKE OUT our property lines, and God forbid you or your plants cross over them. Unfortunately, ours is a wide, two-way street that never had the characteristic front lawns, so Josh calls the area around our city-planted curbside tree “The Front 40,” and faithfully waters the rose bush he’s planted at its feet, along with some tiger lily bulbs transplanted from his grandfather’s Pennsylvania farm.

We live in a four-story, 19th-century brick brownstone with a gated concrete patio, one of 57 such buildings on a short block. There’s a small round metal table and chairs in one corner of the enclosure, with bags of recycling piled up in another waiting for our autistic handyman, George, to come by and put them out to the curb. Nine units in our COOP and ours is one of the smallest: a 900-sf duplex into which we fit Leila on a trundle bed in the living room, Emma on a dog bed in the kitchen, and Josh and I in the basement bedroom with all of his wine-making equipment. At the moment, this includes an aeration oxidation apparatus and several test tube racks; a French ebuillometer to measure alcohol content; two diver-size tanks of argon gas for preventing oxygenation that could probably suffocate us if they leaked; and a four-foot, ten-spigot beer tower that looks like a giant ’s flute. How we got here from such a spartan beginning is, I suppose, what happens after eleven years of marriage and the birth of a child. Whether we can and should continue living this way is the question looming over us. 

I’m still hopeful that all of this clutter, all this paraphernalia, will go away the day Josh finds a site for his tasting room—even though it’s already been one year? two? of searching, and much longer than that to build up the business while I hold down an office job far from my original field of study. People often ask me how long he can keep the dream going before he (or I) give up. How long is too long? I honestly don’t know. But until that day comes, Josh can be found on warmish nights running an informal bar on our front steps, handing out glasses of his Rosé or Cab Franc or Sauv Blanc like a Santa Claus for grown-ups while I keep watch over Leila as she zooms up and down the sidewalk on her bike.

Around this time of night, she has to circumnavigate the dry cleaning ladies trudging toward the subway and the Whole Foods shoppers pushing in the opposite direction toward their dinners, and on this particular night, there are also some older girls standing on a rooftop raining down comments on everyone who passes.

“We like your bald head. We like your white shirt! We like your dog with the shaggy tail. Yo, little blond girl, we like your pink helmet!”

At this, Leila skids to a stop before our gate, whispering, “They said ‘Yo’ to me,” as if it’s a bad word. She is mildly incensed that they have noticed her, riding faster than the wind (and surely invisibly) as she does. Sliding off her seat, she squares off in front of me to explain her theory of all adolescent humor.

“It’s funny when you say ‘Yo’ to someone else, but not when someone says it to you.”

Then she flattens herself and her bike against the building where she can’t be seen, and while we wait for the rooftop crowd to go inside for dinner, we debate whether it’s mean to point out that someone is bald or just a statement of fact. Should you, for example, tell your mother when two women behind her in line make fun of her faded red jeans, or just keep quiet?

“You say a white lie,” Leila advises, “like when someone gives you something you already have or you don’t like— you do a lie and say, ’It’s wonderful. Thank you!’ so you don’t hurt someone’s feelings.”

I sigh. She’s got the concept, but apparently this courtesy, like so many others, doesn’t apply to mothers—so we go back to trying to figure out who the girls might be. In the steadily descending dusk, we can only glimpse their outlines as they lean dangerously over the precipice, like gargoyles ready to spout whatever water they’ve collected from the clouds.