Pizzas and PeaceMaking
The room in which I write is next to my kitchen and directly across from the second-story porch of the apartment house next door. Children play on this porch--Korean children whom, over the course of the last three years, I grew to heartily loathe. They came, they went and they were all incredibly, cruelly loud. There was the preschooler who ran up and down all day wearing sneakers with gadgets built into the soles that made every step sound like a duck with laryngitis. There were the obese brother and sister who hung all over each other like a couple of sumo wrestlers, braying with laughter. There were an 8-year-old girl who wore a red cardigan and her 4-year-old brother, each with precision-cut bangs. Together they roller-bladed, they staged sword fights with cardboard sabers and shields, they played hopscotch and Chinese jump rope, but most of the time they just stood there and shrieked as if someone was tearing out their fingernails. One day I looked over and saw a whole group of the little tykes leaning over the back rail. “Go ahead,” I called encouragingly. “Jump.”
I looked for another place to live but found nothing remotely comparable, for a comparable price, to our spacious Koreatown apartment with its high ceilings and hardwood floors. I tried everything: earplugs, writing at 4 in the morning, thinking of the little wretches as children of God. I even, stupidly, tried reasoning with them. I’d crack the window and say in a tight little voice, “Hey, kids, would you mind lowering the volume a little?” They’d stare at me, their mouths slack, and two seconds later start up louder than ever. “Hey!” I’d yell. “You’ve got neighbors, you know!” It made not the slightest impression on them. A couple of times I went completely over the edge, stuck my head out the window and shrieked at the top of my lungs: “It’s not FAAAAAIIIIIRRRR!!! We don’t scream while YOOOOUUUU’RRREEE trying to work!!! We don’t sit out on the porch yelling while YOOOOUUUU’RRREEE eating dinner!!!” This entertained them to no end. Following such an outburst, one little stinker in a striped T-shirt calmly raised his squirt gun and shot me right in the eye.
To my disgust, my husband, Tim, took an entirely different approach: laughing and joking and even going so far as to learn their names. One night we were washing dishes when a horde of them descended onto the porch.
“Hi, Emily!” he called out the window.
“For God’s sake, don’t encourage them,” I said, shrinking back into the doorway.
“Tim! Tim! Do that funny thing with your eye!” they started shouting.
“Tell them not to play so loud,” I stage-whispered.
“Make the Frankenstein face!” they screamed.
“Tell them we’ll call the cops if they don’t shut up,” I hissed.
Instead, he started prancing around with a dish towel draped over his head, shaking soapsuds from his hands and pretending to be a monster. The kids went insane, jumping up and down, holding their stomachs, rolling on the porch floor moaning with laughter.
“Have you met my wife?” Tim said sweetly, dragging me over to the window. “She’s lots of fun, too!”
I shot him a dirty look. “Hi, kids,” I said bitterly. “Say, can’t you ever play down at the other end of the porch?”
The ringleaders seemed to be 8-year-old Emily, bilingual, responsible in her red sweater and glasses, and her brother, Ben, the 4-year-old hellion. I can’t quite remember how it began, but somehow, no doubt with Tim’s encouragement, the gang got it into their heads that they were coming over to our place one night for a pizza party.
“Pizza party, pizza party, pizza party,” they chanted for hours, standing outside the window. Finally, in a moment of Christmas cheer-induced weakness, I relented.
“OK,” I told Emily, “but I can only hack four of you. You and Ben, and you can each bring one friend.”
After many rounds of shouted negotiations, we settled on party time as 5 o’clock on New Year’s Day. At 4:30, Tim picked up the pizza, at 4:55, Emily yelled across, “NOW?” and at 5, Emily, Ben and two itsy-bitsy girls whose heads barely came up to my waist trooped upstairs and kicked off their shoes, leaving a little jumble of neon thongs and Mickey Mouse shower sandals by the door.
“We were going to bring Calvin, but his father’s drunk again,” Emily said matter-of-factly. “This is Julie and Helen.” Julie and Helen had made identical crayon drawings of houses with smoke-puffing chimneys on top, flowers growing in front and dark-haired little girls standing in the yard, which they presented to me shyly.
“Why, thank you,” I said, genuinely overcome. “They’re beautiful.”
Emily immediately called her mother to report that they’d made it safely the whole 20 feet. Ben twirled a yo-yo with an audio effect that sounded like a cross between a digital alarm and the screech of a hyena. Julie and Helen wandered around gently touching things: a box of seashells, a tray of earrings. After all four of them had minutely examined everything in the apartment, including the drawers of my bedside table, the inside of the piano seat and the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink, I called, “OK, you guys, ready to eat?” and they filed obediently into the dining room.
We’d bought two pizzas, thinking one wouldn’t be big enough, but, in spite of the fact that they were capable of making an inhuman amount of noise, in person they were tiny and took tiny nibbles, like caterpillars eating leaves. I’d bought Sprite, per Emily’s instructions, and poured it over ice in our regular glasses, but their hands were so minuscule that it looked as if they were trying to hoist tree trunks. I repoured it into juice glasses, from which they were barely able to take birdlike sips.
Julie was in a brown velvet dress with pigtails held in place with plastic orange butterflies. “How old are you, Julie?” I asked. She opened her mouth to answer but no sound came out.
“She’s too shy,” Emily explained helpfully. “She’s 5.”
“What did you get for Christmas, Helen?” Tim asked.
Helen, in a white turtleneck imprinted with pink piglets, gave him a small, apologetic smile and shook her head.
“She didn’t get anything,” Emily piped up. “Her parents can’t afford it.”
“Oh,” I said hurriedly, “well, that is certainly a pretty green skirt you have on, Helen.”
Other than that, dinner went well. Ben picked off rounds of pepperoni and stuck them to his face like scabs. Tim did his imitation of a man pulling a giant worm out of his nose. Emily put her hand over her mouth after every bite.
“How come you do that?” I asked.
“It’s more polite,” she said, “so people can’t see what you’re chewing.”
“You ought to try that,” I remarked to Tim, who was hysterically laughing with his mouth full of tomatoey crust.
Afterward we lounged around the living room eating ice cream and chocolate sauce. Ben pounded on the piano, Julie and Helen sat quietly on the couch--together, they took up less space than our cat, Blanche--and I grilled Emily with important questions such as, “How do you say, ‘Shut up’ in Korean?” “What do you call us when you talk to your mother? Do you call us ‘the white people’?” and “So, have you guys ever eaten dog?” She explained that she, Ben and their parents all slept in the same room, that her father worked at a grocery store--”A long way away on the freeway. He leaves before we go to school and then he comes back at 10 o’clock at night”--and her mother worked at home sewing “little pieces of cloth like pockets.” “How many hours does she work?” I asked. “All the time,” Emily sighed, “even when we get up in the morning, she’s already working.”
They terrorized the cat for a while, then I put on the new Queers CD--donated by my brother Joe, the lead singer--and we danced. It was a blast. Afterward I slipped away and dug up some corn-husk dolls from Guatemala, an animal calendar, candy canes for Ben. Tim and I were distributing everything when a familiar nasal voice singsonged across from next door: Emily and Ben’s mother calling them home.
I ran to the kitchen and opened the window. “I’ll walk them over right now!” I assured her, bowing my head and grinning wildly, even though Emily had told us she didn’t speak a word of English. “They were good. They were good!” She bowed back and smiled shyly, and we exchanged enthusiastic waves.
It’s hard to believe a pizza party could have changed so much but after that we were like one big, happy family. Emily mouthed, “Open the window” while we were doing dishes and told us about her school field trip to Catalina. Ben showed off his new plastic airplane. Julie and Helen ran up and threw their arms around our thighs when they saw us on the sidewalk. Even Emily and Ben’s father, who had never so much as nodded at us before, became friendly. One morning as I was washing dishes, he appeared on the porch, proudly grasped Ben’s shoulders and announced with tears glinting in his eyes, “Is my son birthday today!”
“Yes! Wonderful!” I nodded, practically choking up myself. “Happy birthday, Ben!”
Not that the kids have relented one iota. One day last week, they all clattered up the steps and started howling like a pack of banshees. “Hey!” I shouted, sprinting to the window, “how would you like it if we . . .”
“I’m very sorry, Heather,” Emily apologized humbly, her palms clasped together as if in prayer. Three seconds after I retreated, Ben emitted a bloodcurdling scream and initiated a downstairs stampede. But, somehow, these days the noise doesn’t bother me as much as it used to.
Heather King illustration by Christian Clayton
