Anita Kestin, M.D., M.P.H has worked in academics, nursing homes, hospices, and locked wards of a psychiatric facility. She’s a daughter (of immigrants fleeing the Holocaust), wife, mother, grandmother, and a progressive activist.

She is now attempting to calm nerves and stave off longing for family by writing (memoir, short fiction, nonfiction, poetry).

She submitted her first non-scientific piece in her sixties (during the Pandemic) and is thrilled to see her work in print.

Buffalo Grass

By Anita Kestin

None of the Japanese cherry trees still stand at the end of the driveway across the street from the house where I grew up. In the spring, not just the driveway, but the sidewalk and the street were heaped with pink petals and, when the wind picked up, whole flowers danced off the pavement into the air.

There used to be two of the trees but one disappeared while I was in college and the other was cut down later.

People on this street typically stayed for a long, long time. There was the wealthy divorcee who lived in the ranch house near us who spent her time in her back garden baking herself in the sun until her skin turned into leather. She must have been on good terms with her ex because every Saturday night he pulled up in his sleek Cadillac and off they went to dinner. She would be home by 9 pm and we would hear his car slide off into the night.

In contrast, families spun in and out of the house with the Japanese cherry trees. There was one family whose tenure there was so brief that they entered and left during a single semester when I was away at college.

For many years, none of the families had kids my age.

And then there were the Wards who moved in when I was in high school and left just before I graduated. A son was already in college, but they had a daughter who was a year older than me, and her name was Pam.

My parents’ friendship with the Wards will always be a mystery to me. Despite the way their name sounded, the Wards were Jewish, but totally nonobservant. John Ward was a climber of corporate ladders and their time as our neighbors turned out to be the longest time their family had ever lived in one place. Lila Ward was outgoing, a fanatic tennis player, flirtatious, and, like her husband, rarely completely sober after 7 pm.

Soon after the Wards moved in, they managed to scare up some people from the country club they had joined, and they threw the first of their many parties. My mother put on her black sleeveless dress with the tropical flowers and my father wore powder blue pants, a white shirt, and a silk tie and over they went to the Wards, a bottle of wine in hand. My father was the only man wearing a tie. I stayed home and played Monkees records and talked to my friends on the phone.

A little after ten, my parents came home with a message for me: “Pam says the next time her parents have a party, the two of you should go out somewhere.”

***

I had a good friend who moved to the same street about when we did and whose parents, like mine, lived there for a long time after the two of us had gone off to college. Her name was Maddie, and she was a year younger than me. Most evenings, Maddie and I walked to the local drug store to get a soda or a candy bar. Mostly, we were waiting for our lives to begin. Then, we would go up to Maddie’s room to listen to Fleetwood Mac or Jethro Tull. Playing records replaced our previous favorite activity, namely doing “experiments” mixing shampoo with tooth paste and baby powder to see what we might be able to create.

Maddie’s parents went out together every Saturday night on a date, leaving Maddie in the care of my parents for many years, until she was able to stay home on her own, which was right around the time that Pam moved in. I can never remember seeing Pam and Maddie doing anything together.

Maddie and I talked about boys all the time, but Pam soon had an actual boyfriend named Dex. Dex was supposedly taking a year off before college and he had a convertible. Dex would drive up to the Ward’s house and beep the horn. Pam kept him waiting most of the time but eventually she’d emerge, open the passenger seat, and the two of them would kiss passionately before driving off. There weren’t any seatbelts in those days and, as Dex pressed the gas, we would see Pam lurch forward in her seat and grab the dashboard.

Maddie had once gone to the house of an older guy- 22 years old, I think. He had suggested that they take off their clothes and “see what happens.” Maddie declined and walked the three-mile distance home by herself in the dark, where she found her mother sitting in the living room frantic with worry while her father sat in the den watching the Jackie Gleason show.

***

I don’t know how this came up, but Mrs. Ward once mentioned that she liked buffalo grass vodka and, when my father came back from a trip abroad, he brought a bottle back with him. My dad went over to invite the Wards for buffalo grass vodka and when the Wards arrived a short while later, Lila Ward was wildly enthusiastic. They all exclaimed at the appearance of the bottle, which had a single stalk of buffalo grass inside the clear liquid.

I still don’t get the point of vodka. Isn’t it tasteless? But John and Lila downed glass after glass of the stuff, all the while exclaiming about how impossible it was to find buffalo grass vodka in the US.

***

I never hung out with Pam when my parents went over to the Ward’s house for parties. I wasn’t sure she had really meant for me to do that, and, besides, she seemed pretty busy with Dex most of the time.

The school year was still in full swing when my father was invited to give a lecture near Lake Como. My parents asked me whether I would mind staying with the Wards so my mother could go to Europe with my father. My mother loved Lake Como and had always wanted to go back. I would have a key to our house and could go home during the day whenever I wanted. My parents told me that the Wards had offered to watch me if my parents had both decided to go. Lila would drive me to school on the way to dropping off Pam and she would pick us up as well. In retrospect, I found it odd that they hadn’t asked Maddie’s parents. I knew how much my mother was itching to take this trip and so I said that plan would be fine.

Pam wore low cut tops, smoked, had a driver’s license, and listened to the Stones. Her room, however, was an ode to American girlhood with twin beds covered in pink bedspreads, fluttery lace curtains, and matching glossy lacquered cream-colored furniture. On a shelf were the only books in the room, three Nancy Drew mysteries.

I studied in my room in the evening and then went to the Wards at bedtime. My room was filled with matching pieces of Danish modern furniture, which clearly fit my parents’ aesthetic as there were other such pieces in various rooms of the house. In my room, there were three bookshelves and my books were arranged alphabetically by author’s last name. I had a box with file cards corresponding to each of the books, also arranged alphabetically by author. Sometimes, my parents would ask to borrow a book, and I would fill in the file card with their names and the date when the book was due to return to my “library.”

It was the weekend, and Dex was away when Pam asked me to go somewhere with her in the evening. Dex had left her his car. The somewhere turned out to be a dance club. No one carded in those days and Pam headed immediately for the bar where she flirted with two guys who offered to buy us drinks. I took my drink, had a sip, and then stashed the glass. Pam lit up a cigarette and wandered onto the dance floor where Gimme Shelter was playing loudly. An enormous screen silently played movies. They Shoot Horses Don’t They, was playing that night, I think.

At one point, Pam pulled me onto the dance floor and we danced a bit as a variety of boys tried to swoop in on Pam and grab her attention by buying her drinks. She danced away in the arms of a guy who was already balding and I returned to my seat. They disappeared for a time and when she came back, she said it was time to leave. It was 2 am.

The streets were mostly deserted and, when we got to her house, there was an empty bottle of scotch on the dining room table and Pam’s parents’ bedroom door was closed.

***

My parents were due to come home after the following weekend and Dex was still away. Pam asked me to go somewhere with her again. It seemed rude of me to refuse although I hadn’t really enjoyed our last evening out. Off we went to the same club. Klute was playing silently on the huge screen. The balding guy was there but Pam brushed him aside after he had bought her a drink. She swept by later as she danced with a guy who was burrowing into her neck with an intensity that suggested that her body was a source of oxygen and he was in danger of asphyxiating. I had on my A-line green dress with the blue trim that my mother had bought for me to wear for dances. I sat on a chair and watched the scene in front of me (which, I had to admit, was pretty interesting) while Pam worked the room. I was there but not there. Was this what I would be doing when I was older?

It was even later this time when Pam decided it was time to leave. Her mannerisms had by this point become indistinguishable from those of her mother. Pam was shoeless, and we hunted for her shoes, finding them at last in the bathroom next to the sink.

The night was cool and still when Pam revved up the car’s engine. The streets were straight and empty of other cars when Pam began to swerve a bit. I asked her to stop doing that and she did for a bit but about a half a mile from home, she couldn’t resist swerving Dex’s car all over the street in ever widening semi-circles.

That is when she hit a telephone pole. I heard the crunch of the metal of the front of the car before I felt the impact. Pam looked at me in shock and then began to laugh. Neither one of us was injured. The car couldn’t be driven as the front of the car was fully embedded in the pole.

We walked home silently and when we got there I said: “You need to tell your parents and if you don’t, I will.” I fingered the key to my house and tried to decide whether to sleep at home. My parents would be home in a day. As I left the house, I saw Pam knocking on her parents’ bedroom door.

***

My house was still and familiar. Everything was in its place. My parents’ bed was neatly made, my books were on their shelves, and I knew that the buffalo grass vodka would have been stored downstairs in the cellar where my parents kept their liquor.

I had never spent the night alone in the house before. One of my bedroom windows looked out on the Ward’s house. At first, there were lights on downstairs, but when I looked again, the house was dark. It took me a long time to fall asleep.

***

I never went out anywhere with Pam again. I don’t know what my parents really understood about that night or what they may have said to the Wards, or if they were too polite to say anything at all.

Mrs. Ward invited me over one day for tea and cookies after her tennis game and I went. In spite of everything, I was fond of Lila Ward. I admired her exuberance and her ability to make connections wherever her husband’s career took them. Pam was out somewhere, and I never had the nerve to ask Mrs. Ward about the car and the telephone pole.

Dex had returned by this time, his car had been repaired, but an indentation was still visible if you knew where to look. Pam began to go out with Dex most evenings while I stayed home and studied. I resumed evening walks with Maddie and began listening to Rumours and Rumble in the Jungle in her room.

Pam and I were both seniors that year. One day a moving van appeared outside their house, and I saw things being loaded onto the truck. There was the shiny cream-colored lacquer bedroom set and the bikes they owned but never seemed to ride, and Mrs. Ward’s tennis rackets tucked inside a chic bag.

Mrs. Ward appeared at our door to hug us all goodbye. The next day they were gone.

***

A psychologist moved in, and I went off to college. One day, when my father was in our driveway a young man emerged from under the Japanese cherry trees, walked across the street, and pulled a gun on my father. My father told him firmly to put the gun away and amazingly he did.

I sometimes thought about the Wards and wondered what had become of them. Googling didn’t work well as Pam Ward is such a common name and so are the names John and Lila Ward.

I did find a Pam Ward who died in a car accident at the age of 50. It’s unlikely to be the Pam Ward I had known because this woman was born about five years earlier than my neighbor.

I did learn more about buffalo grass vodka. It wasn’t sold in the US because it contained high levels of coumadin, which is an anticoagulant.

I think back on those days in our living room where the Wards sat with my parents. At a certain point, the Wards began to pour their own glasses of vodka without waiting to be offered more. I can hear Mrs. Ward becoming more flirtatious and dramatic as she and John downed glass after glass of the stuff, becoming, I now know, not just more inebriated with each sip but also anticoagulated as well.