Pink Flamingos

The old lady next door lives alone and has few visitors. She is gray and plump and strong as a Chinese mastiff, with a rounded back and a beautiful open face whose skin bears the stamp of six children and a half century of steelbelt air. Though nimble for her age, her walk evokes images of a pachyderm on stilts, each step a jerky plunge, the integrity of the limbs a miracle. Evenings she can be seen plop-plopping to the garage, which she enters with a button and exits in a four door cream colored sedan which roars off into the rain on errands unknown. She is always smiling, scurrying past.

For a long time I've wanted to engage this woman in a conversation. Perhaps it is her smile, perhaps the fact that I find her presence improbable, a woman in the twilight of her life alone in rented quarters in one of America's grayest cities. Whatever the reason, our interaction seemed fated to exist within the small, dry world of formal hellos and distant waves. But yesterday the good lord sent a sign that it was time to talk: as I was heading out to the garage to get my bike, what should mine wondering eyes behold but a flaming pink flamingo, perched with acrylic calm under the flowering dogwood and gazing with dull nobility over a demi-ring of obeisant petunias. At the heel of the bird squatted the neighbor, grinning like a jackal and packing dirt with her bare hands.

"That should hold 'em" she wheezes as she flails into a standing position, wiping her hands on her trousers. She is smiling, as usual, and there is something girlish in her manner, giddy and nervous, as if she wants to make a good impression (or avoid a bad one.) Following my glance in the direction of the pink monstrosity, she giggles "oh, I just couldn't resist," and goes on to explain that she'd really like a little fountain, too, to make the presence of the bird seem more natural, but that the sort of fountain she has in mind, rock, with a little trickle, would be both very expensive and prohibitively heavy. And the flowers? Ah, yes, well, those are technically unrelated to the bird theme, they just look pretty. They are plunked down without skill in small holes dug directly into the lawn.

And so we talk, about gardening, about birds, about living in Pittsburgh and raising families and traveling to distant, sunny countries. She, it turns out, is the widow of a Pittsburgh Petroleum and Glass man, a naval engineer turned corporate flunky who ended up in Pittsburgh because 'that's where the job was.' They came in 1957, and though the husband apparently had ambitions to transition into international banking (she mentioned the dream of an apartment in Buenos Aires) that era was coming to end, while Petroleum and Glass was the Great New Hope. And though the prospect of hacking away in a corporate cubicle in the slushbelt quickly lost its luster, the husband had the good sense to transfer to the international division, where he was promptly shipped out to Cuba. They were living in Havana on New Year's Day, 1959. She talks about sneaking out to watch the parades, witnessing the buses full of young men converging on the plaza, the long lines of singing barbudos queued for their pistolas and their cuchillos: the arming of the People's Army. She talks about six months of splendid sunshine, rum, poker, hired help, corporate privilege, before the fusilamientos began, and the mood changed, and Fidel smirked as the Americans slunk away. She talks about the death of the unsustainable, the return of the inevitable: sure jobs in ugly places, swelling bellies and growing roots.

The rest, then, was the Burgh, black and smelly in those early days, slowly evolving into something different. She recalls black air days in which she would keep her children inside the house. Curtains were taken down weekly and scrubbed white. When some visiting Uncle made mention of the foulness of the air, their response was yes, well, that's how things are around here. As if it were a fact of nature. As if the conditions in which one lived were imposed by a higher power, and one had no choice but to accept them. And anyway, wait and see: Pittsburgh's day is coming. The fact that Pittsburgh was 20 years behind Boston was, for the husband, a selling point, for it meant space, freedom, room to grow: they could support a big Victorian house adjacent to the park, countless children, a colony of tabby cats. "And we sent our kids to the Catholic school over there by Saint Bede's" she tells me, adding, almost as an afterthought, "at least before the finances went belly up," suggesting a whole layer of suffering I don't have the courage or the tact to investigate. Her youngest boy, apparently, didn't make it out before the drying of the wells. He was taken from his Catholic school and sent to the big public school in Wilkinsburg, the predominantly black neighborhood three blocks down the road. "He had a hard time," she says with the resigned neutrality of someone determined to give setbacks no more than a bit part in the narrative of their life. The boy works for the government now and has "a very stable job," which I surmise is a hallmark of success. I ask about the periodic smell of sulphur that wafts across our neighborhood some mornings in the summers. She nods. "I can't smell it, but Nichole says she can, and we think it must come from the Thomas Edgarton Steelworks down in Braddock." She looks a little sad. "It's unfortunate that it smells bad, but you know, I think it's good that that plant is still going. After all, so many have closed. And it's part of the history of this town...."

The conversation goes on for an hour. Eventually, I wriggle off, making my excuses about being late for work and promising that we should get together soon for a picnic and more stories. On the way to work, I let her stories swish around in my brain, excerpting small segments, blowing them up and letting their narrative implications swell and shrink as they may. I think about how, in the absence of great will, chance defines the main contours of a life. How the difference between conditions imposed by man and by God blur in the daily struggle for sustenance. I think about how one in four people in Braddock have asthma, how nostalgia clouds common sense, and how identity and allegiance coalesce around prominent accidentals.

This woman is an object lesson in adaptation, and I admire her. She has spent 50 years carving out a life in this rough and dirty adopted city. Her fortunes have risen and fallen, her children are long out of the nest, she can no longer smell sulphur in the air but she likes the fact that steel mills continue to churn out their foul product four miles down the river. She is vital and quick, she laughs and she smiles, and at the age of 70 she has finally indulged in the guilty pleasure of buying a pink plastic flamingo for her back lawn. Let us hear it for knowing when to let your hair down.