When No One Is Watching(3)

Now I’m sitting on the stoop like I’ve done every morning since summer break started, watching my neighbors come and go as I sip coffee, black, no sugar, gone lukewarm.

When I moved back a year and a half ago, carrying the ashes of my marriage and my pride in an urn I couldn’t stop sifting through, I thought I’d be sitting out here with Mommy and Drea, the holy trinity of familiarity restored—mother, play sister, prodigal child. Mommy would tend to her mini-jungle of potted plants lining the steps, and to me, helping me sprout new metaphorical leaves—tougher ones, more resilient. Drea would sit between us, like she had since she was eleven and basically moved in with us, since her parents sucked, cracking jokes or talking about her latest side hustle. I’d draw strength from them and the neighborhood that’d always had my back. But it hadn’t worked out that way; instead of planting my feet onto solid Brooklyn concrete, I’d found myself neck-deep in wet cement.

Last month, on the Fourth of July, I pried open the old skylight on the top floor of the brownstone and sat up there alone. When I was a teenager, Mommy and Drea and I would picnic on the roof every Fourth of July, Brooklyn sprawling around us as fireworks burst in the distance. When I’d clambered up there as an adult, alone, I’d been struck by how claustrophobic the view looked, with new buildings filling the neighborhoods around us, where there had once been open air. Cranes loomed ominously over the surrounding blocks like invaders from an alien movie, mantis-like shadows with red eyes blinking against the night, the American flags attached to them flapping darkly in the wind, signaling that they came in peace when really they were here to destroy.

To remake.

Maybe my imagination was running away with me, but even at ground level the difference is overwhelming. Scaffolds cling to buildings all over the neighborhood, barnacles of change, and construction workers gut the innards of houses where I played with friends as a kid. New condos that look like stacks of ugly shoeboxes pop up in empty lots.

The landscape of my life is unrecognizable; Gifford Place doesn’t feel like home.

I sigh, close my eyes, and try to remember the freedom I used to feel, first as a carefree child, then as a know-it-all teenager, as I held court from this top step, with the world rolling out before me. Three stories of century-old brick stood behind me like a solid wall of protection, imbued with the love of my mother and my neighbors and the tenacity of my block.

Back then, I used to go barefoot, even though Miss Wanda, who’d wrench open the fire hydrant for kids on sweltering days like the ones we’ve had this summer, used to tell me I was gonna get ringworm. The feel of the stoop’s cool brown concrete beneath my feet had been calming.

Now someone calls the fire department every time the hydrant is opened, even when we use the sprinkler cap that reduces water waste. I wear flip-flops on my own stoop, not worried about the infamous ringworm but suddenly self-conscious where I should be comfortable.

Miss Wanda is gone; she sold her place while I was cocooned in depression at some point this spring. The woman who’d been my neighbor almost all my life is gone, and I didn’t even get to say goodbye.

And Miss Wanda isn’t the only one.

Five families have moved from Gifford Place in less than a year. Five doesn’t seem like much, but each of their buildings had three to four apartments, and the change has been noticeable, to say the least. And that doesn’t even count the renters. It’s gotten to the point where I feel a little twinge of dread every time I see a new white person on the block. Who did they replace? There have, of course, always been a few of them, renters who mostly couldn’t afford to live anywhere else but were also cool and didn’t fuck with anybody. These new homeowners move different.

There’s an older, retired couple who mostly have dinner parties and mind their business, but call 311 to make noise complaints. Jenn and Jen, the nicest of the newcomers, whose main issue is they seem to have been told all Black people are homophobic, so they go out of their way to normalize their own presence, while never stopping to wonder about the two old Black women who live next door to them and are definitely not sisters or just friends.

Then there’re the young families like the people who moved into Miss Wanda’s house, or those ready to start a family, like Ponytail Lululemon and her Wandering Eye husband, who I first encountered on the historical tour. They bought the Payne house across the street—guess they had been casing the neighborhood.

They don’t have blinds, so I see what they do when they’re home. She’s usually tearing shit apart when she’s there, renovating, which I guess is some kind of genetic inheritance thing. He seems to work from home and likes walking around shirtless on the top floor. I’ve never seen them actually interact; if I had a man walking around half-naked in my house, we’d be more than interacting, but that’s none of my business.

The shrill, rapid-fire bark of a dog losing its shit pulls me from my thoughts.

“Goddammit, somebody put him in his cage before the guests arrive! Terry!” a woman yells, followed by a man shouting, “Christ, calm down, Josie! Arwin! Did you let Toby out of his cage?”

Terry and Josie and Arwin and Toby are Miss Wanda’s replacements. They’ve never properly introduced themselves, but with all the yelling they do, I figured out their names quickly.

Toby barks incessantly while they’re at work and school and whenever he damn well pleases because he needs more exercise and better training. Terry wears ill-fitting suits to work, leers at the teenage girls in the neighborhood, and doesn’t pick up Toby’s shit when he thinks no one is watching. Josie wears tailored suits to work, spends her weekends dividing her backyard garden into exactly sized plots, and obsessively posts in the Columbus-ly titled OurHood app about people who don’t pick up dog waste.