You’re the girl from the ghetto; it’s what they call you in this affluent neighborhood.  Your husband buys a house here when you’re in your early twenties because it’s safer for your children. The women in the playground wear Ralph Lauren pants, Eileen Fisher blouses, Calvin Klein jackets. You wear jeans and flannel shirts over turtlenecks. They are a little wary of you but you are determined to make friends for the sake of your kids. You are invited to happy hour by a few who wonder about you. By the second glass of wine, they are relaxed, laughing about their mothers and fathers and childhoods. They ask you and you share a little about the ghetto, no father, mother with two jobs, being a latchkey kid, gang wars. They are quiet, then excited. They say, “Oh my God, what a childhood, yet here you are.” They say that they could never have accomplished what you did: master’s degree, house in a beautiful neighborhood, public admiration for your work in domestic violence, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful children. They say what a poetic last name you have. 

They say, “Aren’t you something.”

You see issues differently than they do. You don’t care that much about things. Whatever remains in good working order isn’t replaced. Your clothes rarely match. Your hair sometimes gets too long and unruly. You prefer sneakers to heels. Your car is ten years old but works fine.

Before you know it, you’ve lived here ten years. The neighborhood increasingly gentrifies. New people look at your curiously. Your old neighbors say, “Oh, that’s the girl from the ghetto.” There are gatherings that you’re not invited to. You think that you should be hurt but you’re not. Vivian Gornick wrote about not being invited to a party she never wanted to go to; exactly.

Your house has appreciated. Your half-acre of lawn has appreciated. As outside agencies claim bias in your neighborhood, you’ve appreciated. You are now invited everywhere. You, the girl from the ghetto, are proof that anyone is welcome (if they can afford it).  You, the girl from the ghetto, are the trophy on the neighborhood shelf. You, the girl from the ghetto, are asked to give talks.  You refuse. You turn down social invitations as well. This neighborhood was your husband’s choice. You never liked it. Now you actively dislike it. The two of you disagree about the neighborhood. You disagree about private schools, updating your house, getting new cars. But you do agree that you don’t belong together. 

You will move away with the kids. Your husband won’t. The neighborhood throws a goodbye party for you. They tell you how much they will miss you, how much you contributed to the “flavor” of the neighborhood. When they think you can’t hear them, they tell your husband they have a friend he should meet. 

You walk through the neighborhood that last night, past the large houses, the gardener-tended lawns, the automatic sprinklers. Next morning you load the last cartons into the moving van and think that years from now they will ask each other, do you remember the girl from the ghetto? What was her name? Nobody will remember.

Michelle Cacho-Negrete is the author of Stealing: Life in America. She has 90+ publications, including four among the most notable of the year, five in anthologies, two winners of the Best of the Net, as well as the Hope Award. She is a retired social worker in Portland, Maine who writes essays to figure it all out.