March 14, 2006

• I thought it couldn’t get worse…

  …and for a while things did get a little better.

  The winter of 1956-’57 in north Texas was cold and the little one-room
  shack my mother and I lived in didn’t keep the wind out.  There
  wasn’t a place to hang up our clothes, so we lived out of cardboard
  boxes.  I didn’t have my own bed, much less a room of my
  own.  I remember eating breakfasts there when I could see my
  breath and my oatmeal was cold before I could get half of it down. 

  The only heat was a small gas thing with ceramic inserts like lacy
  bricks that glowed when they got hot.  It sat out in the floor
  between the bed and the table, attached to the gas pipe by an old
  cracked red rubber hose.  My mother was always cautioning me not
  to trip over the hose or tip the heater over.  I escaped
  gratefully to school each morning, and spent most of my time under the
  covers on the bed when I was home, with only nose and eyes poking out
  from under, watching the same old 17-inch Philco black and white TV
  we’d brought with us from San Jose.  I didn’t know anyone who had
  color TV, but I’d heard of it.

  We
  got through the worst of that winter, and spring was coming when I brought home
  a Weekly Reader magazine from school.  It had a picture of the
  Atomium, and the entire issue was about the upcoming World’s Fair in Brussels. 
  There was a lot of hoopla over that Expo, because it was the first
  world’s fair in 18 years, since they’d been cancelled during World War
  II. 

  I wanted to go.  The hype had gotten to me.  I loved the
  county fairs I’d been to, and the thought of a WORLD fair was
  overwhelming.  Mama listened to me gush and then reminisced about
  a World’s Fair in Chicago when she was young.  It must have been
  the one in 1933. when she would have been 22, three years before she
  met my father.  The Brussels fair was scheduled to open in about a
  year.  When I told my mother that I wanted to go, she said, “Save
  your pennies.”

  Since she advised me thusly, I thought I could do it.  I actually,
  at twelve years of age, believed that I could stash away enough money
  in a year to go to Europe for a World’s Fair.  We had broken my
  piggy bank some time before then and used my savings for some
  necessities.  When I asked my mother for something to keep my
  savings in, she looked around, picked up the box of “strike anywhere”
  kitchen matches, emptied the matches into an old teacup with a broken
  handle, and gave me the box.  I wrote “Brussels” on the top of it,
  put a few nickels and pennies in it, and set it on the windowsill over
  the table.

  We couldn’t have lived in that little shack for more than three months,
  but it seemed longer.  The next place we found to live had a big
  L-shaped room that wrapped around a bathroom that was about half as big
  as the main room.  There was a bed for Mama and a couch for me to
  sleep on, a dresser we shared, and a clothes-hanging rod enclosed by a
  curtain.  Off the narrow side of the L was a lean-to kitchen with
  windows on all 3 sides, sunny, bright and WARM.  The landlady,
  Marie, was sweet, friendly and funny.  She showed us where her
  storm cellar was and told us to join her there when the tornado sirens
  blew.  Suddenly, home was a better place to be than school.

  Safeway
  was giving away dishes with wide yellow rims, gold trim, and a sheaf of
  wheat in the center.  We would get a plate with each purchase one
  month, a cup, cereal bowl or saucer with each purchase in following
  months.  We ended up with a basic service for four, but since they
  wanted money for the platters and serving dishes, I never had any of
  them.  I wanted to use the new dishes, but Mama told me to put
  them away for my “hope chest” to use after I was married.  We went
  on using the old dishes she had gotten years before as premiums from
  Jewel Tea Company.

  This was a time when “gas wars” were going on.  Some filling stations
  were selling gasoline for nineteen cents a gallon, until the place
  across the street lowered their price to fifteen cents so the first one
  would go down to fourteen, and so on.  For a while, when the stations
  in town were selling their gas at twelve cents a gallon, we would go to
  a station out on the highway to get it for a dime.

  
  We saved “trading stamps:” S & H Green Stamps when we lived in
  Kansas, and then Blue Chip Stamps after we moved to Texas.  We
  bought groceries only at stores that gave stamps (one stamp for every
  ten cents worth of merchandise we bought) and always shopped on
  Wednesday, double-stamp day.  Sometimes the stores offered triple
  stamps on certain promotions and if it was something we needed, we went
  for it.  I licked the stamps and stuck them in a book and tucked
  the books away until we had enough to trade in on some luxury item from
  the catalog or the stamp store.

  While we lived in that little house with the sunny kitchen, I traded seven and a half books of stamps for a copy of the Joy of Cooking,
  and
  started learning to really cook.  I had been getting a lot of
  basic instruction from home ec classes in school, mostly knowledge I’d
  already picked up from hanging out in the school cafeterias where my
  mother worked.  After taking us through how to measure, mix, boil
  and stir, and emphasizing safety tips such as not leaving pan handles
  sticking out or cupboard doors hanging open, the first recipe they let
  us actually cook was “Eggs
  Goldenrod.”  It consisted of simple white sauce (milk, butter,
  flour and salt), with the diced white of hard boiled eggs, poured over
  toast and
  garnished with the boiled egg yolk that had been forced through a tea
  strainer. 

  Mama never had the energy or inclination for cooking at home.  We
  were both tired of eating quick-to-fix boxed spaghetti dinners and
  macaroni and cheese.  After eating Eggs Goldenrod a few times,
  Mama put up no argument when I asked her to let me trade the Blue Chip
  Stamps for a cookbook.  The first meal I cooked from “Joy” was
  baked beans.  The next one was pot roast.  Beyond that, I
  don’t remember what came next.  I went for variety.  I do
  remember making popcorn balls, and some experimenting with different fudge recipes.  The fudge taste
  tests were lots of fun.  Mama and I finally agreed that Mamie
  Eisenhower’s recipe using Marshmallow Creme, that I’d cut from a newspaper, was the best.

  The bathroom in this house had a bathtub of modest proportions, not an
  old claw-foot giant that I could stretch out in, but a big improvement
  over the dank and rusty old shower stall in the hovel we’d just moved
  from.  I took to it passionately.  My autoerotic experiences
  ratcheted up a notch in that house, when I started combining my
  orgasmic bubble baths with the soap operas on TV.  Then, up
  another notch when I started my own soap-opera-like fantasies.  I
  anticipated reality TV by a few decades, sitting there in my tub of
  bubbles, imagining myself the focus of a video camera.

  I have been trying to remember how I managed so much free time home
  alone in the daytime without Mama around.  Maybe I pretended sick
  and played hooky, or maybe they were times when I had a cold or
  something and legitimately couldn’t go to school.  After we moved
  from Halstead to Wichita at the end of sixth grade and my menstrual
  periods started, I’d experienced a remission of most of my rheumatic or
  autoimmune symptoms.  I had a series of ear and bladder infections
  during that time period, and pictures of me from that time show dark
  bags under my eyes, but my general health was better than it had been
  for several years.
  

  • 11:09 pm
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