Who are the people in your neighborhood?

The dynamic of the Parisian neighborhood fascinates me. There are characters present that did not exist in my childhood. I had the mailman, the grocery store cashier, the man who asked us if we wanted paper or plastic and then loaded the groceries into our car and the man who sold us orange push-ups in the park during the summer. Parisian neighborhood characters are plentiful and predictable-there's the pharmacist, the baker, the butcher, the florist, the hairdresser, the newspaper salesman, the street sweeper, the mailman, the Arab grocer. You can sometimes still find the chocolate maker, the dog groomer and, my personal favorite stomach-turner, the tripist. There's a tripist in Vincennes and I have to close my eyes when the bus goes by. Their motto? Les tripes, c'est chic.

I vaguely recall a Sesame Street song called Who are the People in your Neighborhood, but I don't think they ever included the most important (and universal) character--the nosey old bitty neighbor. My childhood nosey old bitty neighbor had nothing better to do than spy on us. Once we went on a family vacation and left my father-who had been in a motorcycle accident-home by himself. Our neighbor promised to "keep an eye on him" for us. When we got back, she submitted to my mother a list of my father's activities, including, among other things, "Relieved himself off back patio into pink azaleas at 10:34 p.m. on Saturday evening". My mother almost died of embarrassment.

Old bitty neighbors. I only had one in the U.S. My luck tripled here.

The main one is our lord and great overseer. She is not just a gardienne, but a Malevolent Omniscient Matriarch (or M.O.M. for short). She is one of only three native French people in our building and I suspect she has a problem with that. The best word to describe her is severe. From her facial expression to her demeanor to her hair in its tight bun, she is severe. She wears 4-inch high heels and is always very properly dressed. Ready in case an opera strikes at any moment. The only missing accessory is the little poodle, but that's because she doesn't like animals and has actually banned them from the entire building. If she doesn't want a poodle, then neither do we is her logic. She also has a similar distaste for flowers, so flower boxes have been banned from our windows. In a battle of wills, the Spaniard (see below) defies the ban. I do not have the guts to face the wrath of M.O.M. and so I keep half-dead, limp flowers inside, safely out of the reach of the sun's golden rays.

When we moved in, M.O.M. rang the doorbell on day two to tell us that she was in charge of our building and if we had a problem, we should let her know-day or night. She added that she was born in the building 79 years earlier. In the building itself. As in born in the same bed that she sleeps in every night. She has never lived anywhere else. Her husband, also French, leaves the building once a day to purchase a Figaro and a baguette. She leaves occasionally to fuss at people. Once a traveling salesman rang my doorbell to sell me something. I don't know what he was selling because before he could finish his pitch, M.O.M. had traveled down four flights of stairs to scream at him and run him out of her building. Then she fussed at me for answering the door to a stranger. Then when Andy came home from work, her ears perked up again and she ran downstairs to tell him that I had opened the door to a strange man. I was left having to explain that no, there was no cinq à sept. Unfortunately for us, I don't think M.O.M. will ever die.

Old bitty number two is also French. She's slightly younger than M.O.M., clocking in at a spry 74 years of age. She is short and plump with frumpy blonde hair. I think that she's clumsier than I am because one of her arms is usually in a cast. It's not always the same one. That's not where her misfortune ends, either. She is one of a handful of people on this earth born with prosopagnosia. In layman's terms, this is known as "face blindness". In practical terms, it means that she does not have a friend in the world because her brain cannot remember anyone. Ever. It's sorta the opposite of a super power. I often scare her in the hallway or on the stairs because she thinks I'm an intruder. I'm frankly not quite sure why she hasn't died of a heart attack yet.

Every time I scare Face Blind Girl, she explains prosopagnosia to me. So I'm thinking she has other memory issues, as well. I will pass her on the street and say hello and she looks at me as if I'm crazy. Finally, a few months ago, she stopped me on the street and said you live in my building! I said yes, ma'am, I do. She said you're the one who smiles. I know you. I remember you because I told myself, that woman who always smiles at me is the woman who lives in my building. See, that goofy American smile that I just can't rid myself of comes in handy in the strangest of situations, although it's a sad fact that she sees so few smiles on the street that she can pick out a neighbor as the one and only person within miles who smiles. I looked up prosopagnosia on the Internet and it turns out that people with this disorder generally resort to remembering people based on secondary characteristics, like a goofy smile. Even though Face Blind Girl knows me through my smile, I still scare the bejesus out of her every time she ventures outside of her apartment.

My third old bitty is the Spaniard. Her French is horrid. Fluent, but her accent is so thick, I can't tell when she's speaking Spanish and when she's speaking French. And she speaks both to me because she knows that my Spanish is better than my French. It doesn't even matter what she's saying because I know by her demeanor and her right hand waving in the air that she's complaining about something. She is excruciatingly short. About the same height as my 6-year-old son. She has been here for forever and a day, immigrating from an economically depressed Madrid under Franco to be a maid. She still thinks that Madrid is economically depressed and talks incessantly about how poor and oppressed everyone is in Spain. I don't have the heart to tell her that things have changed. Franco is gone now. There's a democracy. The economy is booming. She should try going back home sometime, even just to vote, buy a little modern fashion at Zara and gawk and stare at the city skyline.

The Spaniard was the maid to the people who lived in our apartment years ago. So if she's ever on the first floor when I've got the door open, she just walks right on in and helps herself to a sentimental tour of our apartment, explaining in great detail which room was which and what the furniture was like. What the kitchen was like. What the bathroom was like. Where the staircase was (our apartment was on two levels, but the current owner took out the staircase, renovated everything and now makes twice as much rent income). She gets nostalgic at the drop of a hat and can easily spend an hour talking at me about her former employers and how France is just not what it used to be.

The Spaniard's daughter, in her mid-40s, still lives with the Spaniard and is a maid for another French family. To the Spaniard's dismay, her daughter got pregnant with an African man. She gave birth to an adorable little girl, coincidentally the day before our daughter was born. And in the same hospital.

The Spaniard takes care of the granddaughter, but constantly complains to me about her nappy hair. The Spaniard doesn't know how to comb it or fix it up. The little girl looks great in an afro, but this drives the Spaniard crazy. I just wanna say hey, look, lady, your daughter smoked like three packs of cigarettes a day during the pregnancy, so you're lucky she came out with any hair at all! But I can't say a word because I'm not a nosey old bitty of a neighbor.

Not yet, anyway.