Rear Window Mee Ok Icaro (bio) In Brookline, a Boston suburb so affluent you practically need a PhD to live there, a brick building sits, unremarkable in every way except for its size: it spans two full blocks and stands five stories tall. From the top floor, choppy waves of gambrel and Victorian rooftops flow out toward the hazy hills; in the distance, a few steeples stab the sky. And on the ground, a playground swings, plays tag, and scores baskets before resting for the evening, its expensive toys dreaming in the night shadows, unafraid of being stolen. From a place that may or may not be real, a piano strokes out the notes of a Dvořák sonata, and they float over the rows of stately homes with their manicured lawns and exotic vegetation. Then there's our building, expansive and manufactured, with its mummed and pansied gardens doing their best impression of a grandma's front yard. And next to the gardens, a population curious for these parts: the elderly with canes and walkers, young people in wheelchairs, and the ambulating poor, cigarettes dangling from their mouths, their faces reflecting the serenity of someone inhaling a gulp of fresh, apexed air. We are a "mixed use" Section 8 building, government housing without targeted restrictions, like being over fifty-five or having hiv. Translation: we are largely a collection of elderly Russian Jewish émigrés, disabled people, and impoverished blacks and whites, mostly ignored by our nimby, neoliberal neighbors. I am the exception: in my thirties, Korean, adopted, alone. I moved in during the summer of 2012 from the hospice floor of a nursing home to live out the rest of my days. After depleting my options with Western medicine, I turned to a hallucinogenic tea from South America that dramatically improved my health, though I still remained disabled, and I began to slowly meet people again. Three of the four black people I have known in our building were once in show business: a 1970s blaxploitation actor who only recently came out [End Page 143] of the closet, an impossibly beautiful stage actress from the 1960s, and a former backup singer for Patti LaBelle, who sends him a birthday cake every year. The fourth black neighbor is Iris. Well, black if you don't count the Irish and two Native American grandparents, one Pequot and one Narragansett. At eighty-six, she looks younger than the daughter she recently lost to drug addiction not so long ago. She herself recently gave up smoking and stopped drinking wine, but you'd never guess she had any vices, given her spry step and the delicate creases lining her face. She is the mother hen of the place, if it can be said there is one, having lived in the building for three decades—when another ninety-year-old neighbor with the ninety-year-old name of Doris first initiated affordable housing here. Born in 1933, Iris remembers having gained the right to eat in restaurants. "My mother got on the bus," she says, "to ride all the way downtown so that she could go into the Checker Smoker diner over on Dover and drink a cup of coffee at the countertop. Because, you know, we couldn't." Her hands plead to me, "We didn't have the damn money to be taking a bus!" As her arms fall to her side, she laughs and shakes her head, before becoming a daughter for a moment. "But there was no stopping Mom . . ." I often see Iris in our newly revamped common area. The downstairs lobby is as basic as it always was—a tiny mailroom and laundry room for our packages and clothes to be stolen, and a small area with a wall made of windows that feels like a waiting room. It just looks nicer now—less prison and more like a finished basement. The recent renovations sparked whispers about the building moving to private housing—and us moving out into the street. In the afternoons Iris regularly sits with two lesbian neighbors bound by companionship and separated by a generation. The younger of the two has a seeing-eye dog and...
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May 28, 2023
Catherine H Ju + 1
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