Just like a one-winged dove

I debated writing this, in case it makes you think that I’m a horrible person.

I told Nicole and Maude almost immediately and Nicole was all, “You must write it! I want to read it! I’m sure people can relate.”

(Hope…fully?)

I also spoke about it with India, because she was there. She paused to consider and said, “I feel like they’ve had plenty of time to make up their minds about you.”

So.

We have a garage, which is very lucky in the city. It opens onto a narrow alley. It’s challenging to get in and out of.

You can only enter it from one end of the alley, because our car fits diagonally one direction, nose through the opening toward the house. Nick hung a ball from the ceiling to line up with the rear-view mirror. Tapping it means the garage door won’t close on the car; any further and you’ll scrape the wall opening.

I wish the car nosed the other way, because that direction is a more direct exit to the street. But as I said, we’re lucky.

The alley is narrow and often blocked at one end or another by a garbage truck or delivery van or random car. Unless someone has left their space open, there isn’t room to turn around, and even so, it’s tight. A few times I’ve had to back up nearly half a block to get out of the alley.

I’m not a good backer-upper, and doing so practically gives me hives.

All this to say, getting out to the street is fraught with uncertainty. I try to build in time for this. (I was unnecessarily driving at “unreasonable speed” the other day.)

However. India and I are always verging on late for swim team.

A few weeks ago, leaving for swim on a bright, sunny evening, I backed our car out, shut the garage door, and started heading up the alley. I was raised to lock car doors immediately, and I always start with windows up.

I suddenly saw a neighbor driving straight toward us.

I don’t know her, though we’ve lived on the same block for nigh on 17 years. Early on, I invited every neighbor I ran into, including her and her husband, to a party at our house so we could get to know people.

They were older than us, and I thought Betty might want to be friends with them.

She did not. Betty became friends with some lovely neighbors, and I mostly forgot about those people.

We have great neighbors. We look out for each other, and stop and chat if we’re walking our dogs or out on the stoop. We band together for snow plowing and Halloween in the alley, and, most recently, to tackle our huge rat problem.

I don’t know this neighbor at all. We haven’t even said hello on the sidewalk since I invited her to that party a million years ago.

So I saw her and she saw me and we both stopped. I started looking around to see if there was somewhere with space to pull over, because best case scenario, we could squeeze by each other.

I was really hoping not to have to get back into the garage.

While I was looking around, she started honking her horn and making faces and waving her arms like she was trying to shoo me backwards. I looked straight at her, like, what?

I suppose you might do this to a stranger (I wouldn’t) but we’re neighbors. If work trucks are parked in my way, I get out of my car and ask them if they can please move, or, if it looks possible, if they can help me turn around because I’m not confident in my ability to do so.

This is true, so this is what I say. I’m not trying to force them to move for the point of it. I just need to get to my garage or get out of it, and if you’re blocking the alley, I need help. People are generally very nice in these circumstances.

I definitely tap my horn when drivers hang out at a green light in front of me. Sometimes I space out, and someone behind me honks, and I totally get it. Near us, there’s a very short green turn arrow on a big street with a long light the other direction, no turn once it goes red, and I’m quick to use my horn.

So let me not clutch pearls and pretend that I would never.

But!

She knows what our alley is like. This is how she behaves with a neighbor?

She continued. HONK HONK ANGRY WEIRD FACES SHOO SHOO HONK HONK.

What. The. Hell.

So I was like, “OK, OK, no need to be an asshole!”

I enunciated so she could see what I was saying. I’m not above this.

HONK HONK SHOO SHOO. ETC.

Honestly, I had a belligerent urge to just turn off the car and sit there, but we needed to get to swim. So I decided to back up and diagonal carefully back into the garage and let her go.

I thought it would be helpful to gesticulate with my arm to show her I planned to go into the garage, so she could fucking stop honking. So I flicked the window button, but when I tried to put my arm out, the window was shut.

I sometimes push the wrong button—all four are close together—but she was stressing me out and pissing me off, so instead of trying to figure it out, I just backed up and opened the garage door.

This whole time she continued honking. I don’t know if she was still making faces and waving her arms because I was concentrating on carefully angling in.

As I started driving into the garage I yelled, “You don’t have to be such a MASSIVE C*NT!”

She blared her horn the whole way past our garage and down the alley.

I turned to India and said, “The next time I see that woman on the street, I’m going to tell her what a huge bitch she is.”

India replied, “Oh, Mama. You don’t need to. She had her windows down, and you had the back window down, and you were loud. She heard exactly what you said. You should’ve seen her face.”

At first, I was horrified.

I couldn’t believe I’d called someone that. It’s not a word I ever used or even thought about until I misnamed that online geography game. Which is why I didn’t get it when India kept saying, “That is not the name.”

But now, because our phones know everything, I get so much of what my friend Pam dubbed “c*ntent” on Instagram. It went from not part of my vernacular, really not even on my radar, to hovering on the periphery.

And then it just fell out of my mouth. So loudly and clearly. I did theater in my youth. Turns out I still project from the diaphragm.

I couldn’t believe it. India couldn’t believe it. Then I started to laugh, and so did she. Some of that was release of anxiety. It had been an incredibly stressful situation.

We giggled all the way to swim.

My mama never swore, and I think she’d have been shocked, too, and then she’d have laughed with us. She was like that. Maybe she’s laughing now.

We got home that night, and India immediately announced, “Mama called one of our neighbors a MASSIVE C-WORD!”

Nick and Jordan were, uh, surprised.

Nick asked which neighbor, and I described her, and he was like, “Oh, her. She’s awful. Don’t feel bad.”

It’s not a word I want to start using. I know for a fact that, at least for me, anything can start to feel normal, no matter how awful. It’s a slippery slope.

But it is An Incident to which we refer, so we’ve shortened it to MC. We came up with this because of Fiona and the fanny pack (if you’re British, sorry, please click; I get it), which she refers to as an FP.

I was walking Wanda in the park the other day and I saw the MC from a distance. We were in the grass, and I was wearing sunglasses and a big hat like I always do, and she was on the sidewalk. I don’t think she noticed me.

I very briefly—barely, really, just in the most fleeting way—imagined myself yelling “HONK HONK” and waving my arms.

Which, now that I write it, sounds insane.

Only two of us would’ve known what I was doing, if she even recognized me. Others might’ve thought I was impersonating a goose. I would’ve scared the crap out of anxious little Wanda.

She passed by, and I hope to never engage with her again.

But if I do, she already knows what I think.

And now, so do you.