NOT THAT EASY

In the spring after I turned ten, Bev and Gus sold the duplex on Raymond to Davona and Lou, a young couple with a baby named Thayer. I wanted to post a sketch I did of Thayer above—the last portrait I would draw for a number of years—but haven’t been able to find it yet. In any case, Davona and Lou evicted us in short order, and we had to move across the Park. They claimed they were planning to renovate, but I seem to remember some altercation that my dad had with Lou.

In A Patchwork Memoir I wrote:

 My mom hated the rambling Doswell house, with its big, drafty rooms and old-fashioned kitchen and bathrooms. She’d wanted something cozy and modern. The previous tenant, a batty old lady named Mrs. Zon, had upped and disappeared several years before, leaving all her worldly possessions behind.   She hadn’t met with foul play, our new neighbors, the Balcomes, reassured us; she’d called them more than once to ask after her adult daughter, but she wouldn’t tell them where she was.

When we went to look at the house, it was crammed with dark, stodgy furniture and dusty draperies. My dad promised my mom to have the house painted, and Mrs. Zon’s belongings were carted up to the attic (where I went poking around, my imagination getting the better of me when I discovered knives among the linens). In the small room at the front of the attic, I also found a huge pile of books that had been dumped there. Sifting through them, I came across one on animal intelligence, a subject that still fascinates me, as well as a book with illustrations called Jungle Babies. I was thrilled to read the chapter on okapis, because they’d only been recently “discovered” in the African rain forest, though, of course, the native people had always known of their existence.

Besides the attic and basement, the house had five bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a separate breakfast nook in the kitchen, which my father didn’t let Doug and me leave each night until we’d eaten our vegetables. I’d distract my brother, then dump my peas on his plate and excuse myself. One night my father came home and roared, “What stinks in here?” He followed his nose to the stove, behind which he found a mess of rotten vegetables. What a dope! I thought uncharitably about my brother. He could have flushed them down the toilet (a bathroom was just off the breakfast nook), and no one would have ever known.

The dirty, cobwebby basement had two large rooms and three small ones, so I was nonplussed when one day my dad ordered Doug and me to go down and clean it all up. As I went down the stairs I thought to myself, “Grownups are always telling you how great you have it as a kid, but the truth is it isn’t easy at all.” And I charged myself to remember that moment when I was an adult so I would never say the same thing to my own children.

To me the old house had a spooky kind of romance. That summer before sixth grade, I started a club with my girlfriends, meeting in the dark little room under the staircase. We hauled a tiny table down from the attic and lighted the place with a small lamp and an extension cord. I think we had, at most, three meetings.

Then late one afternoon I came home and heard my mother in the kitchen telling my father she wanted a divorce—this at a time and place that divorce was almost unheard of. My parents had never fought in front of Doug and me, so her announcement came as a complete shock. She followed me upstairs to my bedroom, where I lay on my bed, sobbing—and promised me that despite the divorce “nothing would change.”