My neighbor across the street is throwing a Labor Day party tomorrow. She has the prerequisites: a big house, a big yard, a pool, a well-paying job, and an outgoing, inclusive personality.
Last weekend, she and I, or so I thought, put together a shopping list, and since we share a BJ’s membership, I was the designated grocery-on-wheels, a task I frequently perform since she can’t stand the summer traffic.
BJ’s is not crowded in the middle of the week, so I trucked down there yesterday, and managed to find almost everything on the list, including about 2 big packages of Perdue chicken priced at least 40 cents a pound lower than the grocery stores.
My instructions were to deliver the chicken to another neighbor who had offered to cook it, but unbeknownst to me, in an alcohol-fueled post-planning session, the plans were changed: it turned out, the chicken chef had already gone shopping.
It sounds stupid in retrospect, but this totally threw me for a loop. Although I’ve known some of these neighbors for over 8 years, we have an uneasy detente. They are for the most part married, or at least seriously involved with a man, and relatively well-off, two-income households.
The women are cute and well-dressed, and their conversations are peppered with references to “my husband” or, in the way that implies sexual intimacy, their boyfriend’s full formal names: not “Tom”, for example, but “Thomas” (an ersatz name, by the way, no one in this neighborhood is sleeping with a Thomas).
This creates a huge cultural divide between them, the Sadies, and me, a struggling single woman close to age 60 who is neither cute, nor fashionable, nor affluent, who enjoys intellectual work and researches current events on a daily basis.
In other words, I’m a geek living in a land of Barbies and Kens.
I’ve been uncomfortable with this for a long time, but yesterday’s miscommunication about poultry pushed me right over the edge. It’s as if the Sadies have their own, secret language, conveying their wishes through compatible pheromones or synchronous menstrual cycles.
I tried to find a home for these now redundant packages of cold chicken. I made the mistake of calling one of the Sadies, who blew me off with cold, hard-nosed contempt.
Fortunately, another neighbor was harboring a yen for parts, and took one of the embarassing packages off my hands. I offered the other to a friend who’s recently lost her job, and even repackaged and froze the things to a more manageable size for her small family.
Crisis averted, but it left me with a bad (you should excuse the pun) taste. At my neighbor’s invitation, I’d invited several of my friends and family to the event tomorrow, and am glad of it now – I’ll be able to enjoy myself with people I like, as opposed to being drawn into yet another unwelcome/unwinnable competition game with the Sadies, their husbands/consorts and endless tales of home improvements, private schools and other evidence of their superior disposable incomes.
Exuburbia. You can have it.