Queens, 1963 by Julia Alvarez

 

Everyone seemed more American

than we, newly arrived,

foreign dirt still on our soles.

By year’s end, a sprinkler waving

like a flag on our mowed lawn,

we were blended into the block,

owned our own mock Tudor house.

Then the house across the street

sold to a black family.

Cop cars patrolled our block

from the Castellucci’s at one end

to the Balakian’s on the other.

We heard rumors of bomb threats,

a burning cross on their lawn.

(It turned out to be a sprinkler.)

Still the neighborhood buzzed.

The barber’s family, Haralambides,

our left-side neighbors, didn’t want trouble.

They’d come a long way to be free!

Mr. Scott, the retired plumber,

and his plump midwestern wife,

considered moving back home

where white and black got along

by staying where they belonged.

They had cultivated our street

like the garden she’d given up

on account of her ailing back,

bad knees, poor eyes, arthritic hands.

She went through her litany daily.

Politely, my mother listened—

Ay, Mrs. Scott, que pena!

—her Dominican good manners

still running on automatic.

The Jewish counselor next door,

had a practice in her house;

clients hurried up her walk

ashamed to be seen needing.

(I watched from my upstairs window,

Gloomy with adolescence,

And guessed how they too must have

Hypocritical old-world parents.)

Mrs. Bernstein said it was time

T\the neighborhood opened up.

As the first Jew on the block,

she remembered the snubbing she got

a few years back from Mrs. Scott.

But real estate worried her,

our houses’ plummeting value.

She shook her head as she might

at a client’s grim disclosures.

Too bad the world works this way.

The German girl playing the piano

down the street abruptly stopped

in the middle of a note.

I completed the tune in my head

as I watched their front door open.

A dark man in a suit

with a girl about my age

walked quickly into a car.

My hand lifted but fell

before I made a welcoming gesture.

On her face I had seen a look

from the days before we had melted

into the United States of America.

It was hardness mixed with hurt.

It was knowing she could never be

the right kind of American.

A police car followed their car.

Down the street, curtains fell back.

Mrs. Scott swept her walk

as if it had just been dirtied.

Then the German piano commenced

downward scales as if tracking

the plummeting real estate.

One by one I imagined the houses

sinking into their lawns,

the grass grown wild and tall

in the past tense of this continent

before the first foreigners owned

any of this free country.