Exotics

     When I was 5 we had exotic neighbors. We moved into the house in Glen Cove in 1953 and they may have lived there then, but they didn’t make big impressions on me for a couple of years. We left for California when I was almost 9; they relocated about a year before we did.

We were a suburban family, so neighbors were like aunts and uncles and cousins to us: not necessarily liked or respected, but always around, familiar.

Across the street and on one side we had small Catholic households; a culture with which my ghetto-raised mother was well-acquainted. A pale but Jewish family lived on the other side; their son Barry was my age, dull-witted and slow-eating, enamored of ketchup on his crustless sandwiches, and memorable to me only for the occasion when he tried to get me to lick blood off the back of his hand, the area between his thumb and his wrist, by telling me it was ketchup (whatever made Barry think I’d lick anything off his hand?!)

Up the street, on our side and near the curve it made on its way from dead end to through road, lived Dabney’s family. They were from the South. They talked funny. They had a Saint Bernard named Sheba. Dabney was the only child in the house, a daughter two or three years older than I.

I’d never known a Dabney. The family language sounded odd and graceful. The father was courteous and the mother had glamour. The dog was drool-y but lovable. I have memories of brother Steve walking down our street beside a sauntering Sheba, his right arm laid like it belonged there, upon her neck.

Dabney’s birthday was on Halloween. Each year they had a party for her and I was invited along with the other neighborhood kids. I remember that the cake had a charm hidden in it, and the person who found the charm got a special gift.

I think I went to three of the Halloween birthday parties before the family left. Their move was soon after and probably caused by the mother’s suicide. It was the first time tragedy occurred so close to where I lived. It was the first time I was around self murder.

We had amazing neighbors. I recall
a Saint Bernard, and every Halloween
they threw a party and invited all
the children on the block. That festive scene
astounded: all was glitter, costume, charm
inside a chocolate cake the mother made,
her rubies like a gash upon her arm,
her shirtwaist dress a banner in the shade.

They cut a dashing figure on our block –
transplanted Southern hospitality
engrafted on Long Island – till the shock
my mother, washing dishes, handed me.
While weeping she addressed the window shelf
and told me Dabney’s mother killed herself.