My childhood home didn’t really come into being until I was nine. Before then my family scurried through more residences than I can remember, as my father finished bachelor’s and doctorate degrees and started his career. The few I can conjure up are blurry, with a common thread of impermanence, instability and wisps of danger.
First was a succession of apartments in campus area Pittsburgh, including: Upper floor rooms the landlady would walk through to get to the attic, and which I associate with spaghetti (maybe because she kept sauce on the stove in her kitchen below, or because my mother, not wanting to stifle my creativity, let me rub it into my hair). A housing project apartment, which my mother attempted to claim by splattering paint on the floor a la Jackson Pollock. Here my younger sister and I were allowed the occasional Eskimo Pie, and I awoke multiple times to belongings rendered useless by her handiwork, and I in turn smashed glass against metal posts, repeatedly broke into an old man’s mailbox simply because I could, and broke my elbow attempting to fly from a bench to test new P.F. Flyers. Somewhere a stabbing took place next door; somewhere I picked up a dead rat in a sand box as if the carcass were a stuffed animal. Or so I’m told.
Then came houses (houses!), the first in Dayton, as big as a mansion with a yard to match, where my sister lined her dolls up on the floor along the wall of our upstairs bedroom, and where my brother rendered the Chatty Cathy an uncle had given me spastic by throwing her down the stairs. (Decades later a friend found the house still standing and sent a photo, of a squat, modest stone house that looked too short for a second floor.) Next was a larger house in Dallas, again campus area but decidedly safer, a one-year rental from professors on sabbatical who tore it down on their return. It had cracks in cowboy-print wallpaper, which of course I had to peel off, a sloping kitchen floor that made objects roll on the table as at Casa Magnetica at Six Flags Over Texas, a sidewalk littered with mulberries that stained my feet purple when I squished them, the magic of lightning bugs in the yard come nightfall.
Where we lived evolved into home when my parents bought a 1940s vintage ranchhouse on the other side of the university from the rental. From this point, the moves stopped. Nearly 60 years later my childhood phone number still rings there, though no longer on the kitchen wall phone where I’d sneak calls to my favorite AM radio station when I was supposed to be sleeping.
We moved in over the course of a day and into the evening, the procedure delayed by an emergency visit to the doctor after I tore open my knee squeezing between jagged metal on the fender of my dad’s Nash and the concrete porch of the house next door, which I’d run to to say goodbye. The next morning, I claimed ownership by climbing a mimosa tree out front that would be my perch into my late teens – and creating a scar that lasts to this day from ripping the stitches open. My parents would soon realize that various objects – a painted wooden giraffe from which we hung clothes, my mother’s wedding suit – had not made it into the house, and surmised that someone had stolen from the open van in the dark. This was an aberration; for almost 15 years, the neighborhood’s air of safety was great enough for me to ride my bike for hours after dark as a preteen.
Here our family took its lasting form, with the arrival of my youngest sister. Patterns and traditions locked into place: We girls amusing ourselves in our bedroom (which my youngest sister had access to once she outgrew the crib in the hallway that served as her sleeping area), with our brother envying our playing together while I envied his having his own room. (I would flee to it in my late teens and actually hide in the curtains when togetherness closed in.) Meals at an indoor picnic table, and later at a larger, proper table a friend found at a garage sale, with assigned seats that did not change. Christmas with a huge tree weighted with decorations and lights (one year, two trees, when my mother came across a boozy lot attendant making deals to empty his inventory). Our father playing classical music on the stereo (rock was verboten when he was on premises) and on his baby grand, while Mom washed the dishes and we kids dried.
A parade of animals cycled through: one neighborhood cat or another that hung around the yard, a turtle, a guinea pig that my brother brought home from school. The lasting companion was a dachshund. Gretel arrived when I was in fifth grade, financed by my brother’s birthday money, or maybe a sister’s, or maybe both. She was as quirky and resourceful as we were, greeting us once at the door with her head through the handle of a Halloween bag that hung empty on her back. For weeks we came upon candy she had tucked away throughout the house. She also made it into the society page of the Dallas Morning News for hosting a puppy shower for the woman who’d kept her while we were out of the country during our father’s sabbatical. Gretel’s successor was sweet-natured Heidi, who had a natural ability to put a spin on a ball when she rolled it. Heidi’s departure a decade later drained my parents and me of any desire for another dog, though my siblings all have, one keeping the dachshund tradition going.
Privacy and solitude were hard to come by, frowned on, treated with suspicion. (Hence my love of that mimosa tree, where I could sit in branches and read and watch cars in both directions; hence my reluctance to practice the cello or voice, because of the attention that drew. Well, and maybe out of laziness, too.) The bathroom was a sanctioned refuge. I loved baths, all the more special when the power went out and a candle lit the room and I got to play with a foamy product with a name that escapes me, which came out of a spray can with a fanciful head-shaped top. The room’s guard-lowering properties were counteracted, during my high school years, by my younger sister’s propensity for hiding at the far side of the door and honking a taxi horn when once of us would emerge.
That was one reason our home was not like anyone else’s. It was not calming or quiet, visually or aurally. The walls were covered, with Alitalia travel posters our mom decoupaged, hand-offs from a neighbor who worked for the airline; black and white Olan Mills portraits that chronicled the kids’ development; and more of Mom’s handiwork – a canal scene painted on the wall directly inside the front door, an ancient Fachwerk structure from a German calendar, Magic-Markered onto a living room wall, lemon trees flanking the doorway of a middle room with ever-changing purpose (dining area, piano room, sitting area), floral garlands high across the kitchen walls. (Years later a museum exhibit of Czech wall motifs triggered the realization that she’d been expressing some ancestral imperative.) As the years progressed the posters and photos gave way to framed art by our mother, bold colored monoprints and paintings, increasingly large.
And elsewhere, built-in shelving filled with a jumble of knickknacks and figurines from international travels (from our favorite uncle’s, our father’s foreign students and, ultimately, ours), and mostly books, books, books, fiction, non-fiction, encyclopedias and largely hard cover. We got piles of them as presents, many the British versions of children’s classics, ordered from Blackwell’s in Oxford. The omnipresence of books wove so tightly into the tapestry of my upbringing that I have always regarded people who live without books as suspect. I recall only one visitor actually voicing a reaction to this décor: a classmate, after a newspaper staff dinner I’d hosted, telling my parents in awe that coming to our house was like visiting a foreign country.
The girls’ room was equally awash with books and toys and visual stimulation. Our room was filled with fairies playing in leaves and an enormous depiction of Cinderella transformed for the ball by her fairy godmother. They were modeled after illustrations in one of my fairy tale collections and phenomenally skillfully done. They lost appeal as we got older, though, and I took a cue from the common rooms and overloaded the environment with art nouveau postcards and silent film posters I came across at Pier 1, which was a treasure trove of anachronisms in the flower power days. Other girls slept amid photos of rock stars; I had Rudolph Valentino as The Sheik and Theda Bara as Cleopatra over my bed (and obscuring Cinderella). Our mother responded to the insult by sanding down the walls and painting them with a solid color during the summer between my junior and senior years in high school, when my younger sister and I were housebound with pneumonia. There must be some cosmic justice in the fact that our former bedroom became our mother’s studio.
It was not a quiet place. We kids played and sang and argued, even during meals, which were boisterous and frequently degenerated into laughter. (And arguing. Did I mention arguing?) The dog barked – at us, for food, at intruders beyond the living room window that weren’t visible to us. Visitors were loud, too. There were sprawling casual parties, with university students and faculty members all over the house and in the back yard, and often ending with our father and the lab manager playing piano and cello duets. The guests often included natives of other countries and, during a church block partnership program, black people, rare for this neighborhood but the majority in my Pittsburgh grade school. That proper dining table was the setting for gigantic gatherings that required extra chairs and the piano bench – when Taiwanese students took over our kitchen and piled the table with dishes we’d never heard of; as marriages brought spouses and in-laws into the mix for holiday meals.
And yet, we were insular and outsiders. We were Northerners among Southerners, financially modest and often struggling amid unfathomable wealth. We were also apart from blood relatives, whose names and stories loomed like mythology. Events that happened long before our births – particularly the splintering of my mother’s family after the early death of her mother – were inescapable backdrops, undercurrents, drivers.
Fitting the post-war family model, our mother was the caretaker and generally at home, in the early years; our father was the provider and generally out, in the classroom or lab, at a church organist job or sidelining in government and litigation consulting. Mom dreamed up creative projects, drove us to the pool, took us to the library and tutored us in German before our dad’s sabbatical in Munich. She was also usually the one to mete out punishment (let’s just say we can relate to the Lifebuoy scene in “A Christmas Story”) and deal with our accidents (though our father accompanied my brother to the hospital the night he got into the children’s aspirin).
We were expected to achieve, academically, musically and artistically, and got attention largely only when we fell short. Each of us played at least one instrument, each of us, at some point, in grade school strings class. I took refuge in guitar, which I got for my 10th birthday for bringing my math grade up to an A.
Self-expression was encouraged, mostly. I wrote and produced plays in the living room at Christmas, with parts for all my siblings. My younger sister and I engaged in all kinds of make believe, once emptying most of the contents of our shelves reenacting the Disney film Robinson Crusoe U.S.N. I also recall her swaddling the dog in a towel, walking around the house till she found one of us, pulling the towel from the dog’s head and saying, “My daughter has leprosy.” We painted in the breakfast room. We tie-dyed t-shirts in the kitchen; we made candles in the garage by poking our fingers into buckets of sand and pouring wax into the haphazard holes. Each Sunday in advent, our dad would play carols on the piano while we sang and banged away on maracas, a triangle, cymbals, a wood block and other percussion in a Creative Playthings rhythm band set. A friend joined me once during high school and could not hide his horror at the din.
And the noise included fights, loud fights, fights that made me want to hide under the bed, between our parents, especially early on. We didn’t always know why, but often money was a factor. It was a constant source of tension and worry. We kids seemed to be a big part of the cause, especially when back-to-school shopping rolled around.
Maybe that was why this was a place of making do, of putting up with whatever the external conditions were. We learned to compensate for a light switch that was wired backward, so that off was on and on was off. I put a table knife in a bathroom drawer to deal with a door knob that often refused to open. (It was finally replaced years later after a visiting child got stuck.) I never quite remembered to duck under the low-hanging globe light that was installed in my bedroom during high school. And as for the heat – the furnace setting was such a constant source of dispute with our dad that he took a plastic magnifying glass from a box of Cap’n Crunch and put it on the thermostat’s temperature display.
The environment got upgrades as the years and my dad’s career progressed, and our mother returned to teaching. The picnic table went into the backyard when a round breakfast table and chairs arrived. Shag carpet. The living room got shag carpet, a development so momentous that my youngest sister and I slept on it to celebrate. Central air came after I left for college. I still recall the chill coming off the bedroom window unit in summer, and putting a green and purple pinwheel I got for graduation (and still have) into its vent. Other changes followed: A couple of small fountains in the backyard, one of which I named Esmerelda; for a while, a scavenged hot tub, all gone now. New, reddish brown wood-like siding that masked the original white shingles.
And gradually the barricade against the outside world eroded. The first instance took the form of weird thuds and dragging sounds in the backyard that my early adolescent self decided had to come from a UFO, but I was not inclined to look outside and check. Verified threats arrived late in adolescence, when a dangerous teenager from around the corner took to climbing our fence at night. My dad chased him down the block once; another time, I heard a clatter when I turned on the bathroom light and found mud on the fence the next morning. He knifed a woman two doors down, who survived with the help of a neighbor who’d been a nurse and knew where to apply pressure until the ambulance arrived. My youngest sister started sleeping with a knife under her pillow. For years afterward, if I was the last to bed in the house, I lost the ability to fall asleep, feeling an obligation to act as watchdog.
I have not visited much as an adult. I drove back for Thanksgiving once in law school to find the house empty and the lock changed, and waited, that being before cell phones, for hours before someone returned. The mimosa is long gone, along with the redbud trees, my brother’s attempt at a vegetable garden and the trampoline where my younger sister bounced herself into oblivion during her rebellious years. The front yard is now ivy instead of grass. The house remains fundamentally intact, one of three original structures left on the street, which has given way to lot-line monsters with no driveways and SUVs parked in front that make it hard to pull out of my parents’. The inside is a lot quieter now – a lot. My parents did resurrect the party tradition late in life and held piano recitals cum biographical speeches for a decade, which one friend who always attended equated with a European salon.
Weird, key attributes have cropped up in my own homes – Art, books and weird little figurines everywhere. (On one visit my younger sister wandered gingerly through my living room and said, “You have so much … stuff.” So does she, now.) Proximity to a university and a highway. Strange and inexplicable quirks in wiring or plumbing or room set-up. And sometimes a slightly dodgy environment. For a while my brother accused me of deliberately causing Mom worry and living in places so edgy I needed to sleep with the refrigerator door open. (That was an exaggeration.) I throw sprawling parties myself, now and again, but mostly I prefer living in solitude and silence.
In my mid-20s, my parents flirted with selling the house. Even though I didn’t particularly want to spend time there, the prospect was devastating. “The walls are hallowed,” a friend said in solidarity. Now the prospect is inching toward probability. A realtor classmate says it may not go as a tear down; habitable houses are rare in its price range. The complex cocktail of emotions I’ve had about the place neutralized long ago; the phone number and address have remained subtle anchors for decades. I suspect their departure will trigger the final phase of growing up at last.
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