Читать книгу Risking the Rapids - Irene O'Garden - Страница 14

Within These Walls

The dining room door swings into the fierce emotional arena of the kitchen. If ever a room embodied conflict, this is it. What pleasures it holds. The bulging promise of Saturday’s grocery bags, the body-swaddling aroma of a rich Sunday roast, the toothpick frills and sparkle of a black-olive party night—Ritz crackers, pimento cheese, Swedish meatballs bubbling in sauce; the humble rapture of just-baked cookies.

Yet what glaring, cold, hard surfaces. What unappetizing colors: metal-edged red Formica countertops, gray plastic wall tiles, an oval black enamel table, scrape-y chrome chairs, strange blue-gray-might-have-once-been-white striated linoleum, lit by an irritating flickering bare fluorescent halo. And, like the rest of the house, none too clean.

I see buttery, flowery, cozy kitchens at neighbors’ or in magazines.

“Mom, why does our kitchen look this way?” I ask over and over.

“It looked chic once,” she answers. Throughout our childhood, she insists that she longs to redo it, but she never gets around to it. Truth is, it accurately reflects her loathing of domestic chores. Unless she’s getting ready for a party, she dislikes spending time here. She states with pride that her favorite cookbook is Peg Bracken’s I Hate To Cook.

While these dingy cupboards, counters, and fridge hold food, my principal source of comfort and happiness, these hard edges sharpen the stinky-sponged meanness of dishwashing arguments, tribal struggle, pilfering, and the delayed detonation of guilt.

•••

But come on, let’s visit my living room.

We don’t use this fireplace. Too much trouble since that time the flue wasn’t open. The third and final time we lit a fire in it was to burn the mortgage.

These Meerschaums belong to Dad’s whopping pipe collection. He loves a fragrant bowl of Brush Creek ever since he gave up cigarettes after his heart attack. What did break his heart?

Right there is our grandmother clock. It used to bong so beautifully, but hasn’t worked in years. Just stuck there at 2:50.

This portrait hanging over the mantel is a jumbo of those Dad signs at the State Fair or down at the station. People line up to see Don O’Brien. He went from broadcasting minor league baseball games in his rich and resonant voice to radio programs, and now he’s on TV.

•••

My father’s voice is who my father is. Images, vivid and faded, advance and retreat on a screen in the mind, but voices enter the body like scent. I still feel your gentle resonance humming my shoulder against your chest.

The sound of you, the many pipe sounds: cleaning the stem with prickly pipe cleaners (Dill’s, lettered red on yellow), knocking the bowl with the heel of your hand, the puff and toot, the skritching match, the suck of breath, your smoke-covered voice answering my questions, clink of the gone-out pipe against the grape glass ashtray.

He’s sitting in this living room portrait, pipe in hand, as if paused in thoughtful conversation, more Walter Cronkite now than Gable.

Whether he’s forecasting a good fishing day or buckets of snow on his evening weather segment, describing the comfort and durability of a King Koil Mattress, or hosting the Gold Award Theatre, people trust my Dad. For good reason.

He can say, “Go First Class…Go Phillips 66!” with real assurance, because he makes a point of always using the products he pitches. We go out of our way to get to Montgomery Ward.

Not only that, he screens the Hollywood Family Playhouse films before they air to see if they’re worth watching. If not, he’ll say, “It’s a dog. Go to bed.” The station goes along with what he calls his “frankness.”

“If people are going to believe in the commercials I give,” he tells them, “then I’d better be honest about the movies.” It makes people want to shake his hand.

Integrity is his hallmark. He takes pride in that.

And see? His eyes really do follow you all over the room. Can’t get away with anything in here.

Here’s his gold reading chair, where once to amuse us he stood on his head. Here’s where you’d find his lap if you needed it. Here’s where I face the consequence of my first sin, at age five.

•••

It begins, as so much does, in the kitchen and centers, as so much does, on food.

“Can I have an apple, Mom?”

She’s checking meatloaf in the oven.

“You mean, ‘May I please have an apple?’ ”

“May I please have an apple?”

“You may not. It’s too close to dinner.”

I watch. When she turns to unscrew the jar of pimento-stuffed martini olives, I shove a Red Delicious under my striped polo shirt.

“Irene Marie! Did you just take an apple?”

“No,” I reply bald-facedly, sure as an ostrich that I am concealed.

She folds her arms and scowls.

“Go speak to your father about this.”

Stocking feet stretched on the footstool, he’s relaxing in his gold chair reading the Minneapolis Star, tapping his index finger at intervals down the page.

“What are you doing, Daddy?”

“They’re called obituaries, Honey. Listings of people who’ve died. I like to say a little prayer for each soul. What’s on your mind?”

My heart slams my shirt.

“Mom says I took an apple when I wasn’t supposed to.”

“Did you?” he asks evenly, his eyes avoiding the fruit-shaped bump.

“No, Daddy.” I gesture my innocence. On cue the apple drops to the floor, bump, bump, bump and rolls to his feet.

His face goes dark as Lent.

“Young lady, come here.” In one swift movement, he yanks down my jeans, puts me over his knee, swats me once on the bottom, pulls my jeans back up and sets me back on quaking feet. It is the only time he ever does so.

“That was wrong. You disobeyed your mother and you lied about it. Take this back to her and apologize. Don’t ever try anything like that again.”

I am flabbergasted, horrified, ashamed. Daddy’s never been mad at me before. Cast out of Eden, by an apple no less. But you just don’t lie to Mr. Integrity.

•••

Beyond our long unfriendly davenport, upholstered in a nubby puce child-repellent fabric, bookcases teem with Churchill’s World War II books, Mein Kampf, Civil War books, Steinbeck, Fulton J. Sheen, Conan Doyle, Poe, Hemingway, Chesterton, fat and varied Michener volumes, and Books of the Month.

Further random titles include A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Call It Sleep, My Name Is Asher Lev, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, Blackboard Jungle, and Pardon My Blooper. This book screams us with laughter: “Ladies and Gentlemen, President Hoobert Heever!” “The fog is as thick as sea poop!”

Our low polished-slab wooden coffee table makes the perfect Steeplechase horse jump for me early Sunday mornings when everyone’s asleep. Look, Life, and Saturday Evening Post are scattered on it now, along with Erector Set instructions, phonics sheets, somebody’s speller, a couple Scrooge McDuck comics, Perry Mason’s The Case of the Velvet Claws, and the butt-filled red plaid beanbag ashtray.

While Mom has a taste for serious lit—Dickinson, Byron, Shelly, Millay, Phyllis McGinley—she loves a nap and a paperback. Her trip to Rexall Drugs is not complete until the cashier rings up a couple mysteries with the Pepsodent. Josephine Tey, Mary Renault, Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie—she goes through them like we go through milk. Neither a driver nor a walker, Mom escapes family chaos in books.

St. Thomas More, patron saint of lawyers, presides over the carved desk. Dad graduated law school, but practiced only a short time before getting into broadcasting. Luckily, St. Thomas is also patron saint of large families.

And here’s our aquarium of angelfish, black mollies, and guppies, which only Dad can feed them. I mean it.

The screened porch out back is the best place to be in a storm—not out or in. Smell the greeny rain, feel its mist spray softly through the screen, quake unharmed in the body-rumbling thunder. Maybe you’re on Dad’s lap in the wicker rocker, and he’s telling you the story of Candyland, where trees and flowers are made of licorice and gumdrops and chocolate. In fall our porch is our turkey refrigerator. Twenty-two pounds.

•••

Let’s go up my flying stairs. I’ll save the sunroom for last.

Three stairs at the bottom, then a landing. Off to one side above the telephone table is a funny little hole in the wall whose origin we never knew. It is the exact diameter of a cigarette, and one day someone pops in a Pall Mall. Shortly thereafter, Tom sketches a simple face around the cigarette. This ballpoint fresco stays for years, with various augmentations—a mustache, a few penciled phone numbers. Ours is that kind of house. Neglect might induce creativity. A good joke stays put.

Up the remaining steps, past the door to the teeny balcony where Ro stuck her knee between the rails and firemen came and sawed her free.

Like everything else in our house, sleeping arrangements seemed to shift constantly. How do seven children grow up in a four-bedroom house? Sequentially.

The Littles regularly move in and out of this tiny daisy-flecked bedroom. Early on, that’s where I slept, or tried to, in a bunk bed upper berth while brother Skip in the lower routinely kicked my mattress. When he moves to the big boys’ room, Ro and I share. When I move, it’s Ro and Jim. Then just Ro.

•••

Now pass the clothes chute (once a plunger got stuck there).

Here’s my room from Kako when she joined the convent. Me and my mom and Tom put new wallpaper of blue with pink flowers on. Wallpaper paste smells good like Cream Of Wheat.

In my room I like to be by myself. When my feelings get hurt, flop on bed and scream in pillow. When I am bad they send me here.

I’m proud of Kako to be a nun so kind and loving. She is good, which I wish I could be. I’m like a stick on the ground who wants to be a ruler on teacher’s desk, but how?

Sometimes I stay overnight at the convent, which I hope rubs off on me. I thought I’d see nun hair at night but they wear nightcaps.

On my walls I put my saint, my pennants, my black paper shadow a State Fair man cut, shelf of statues of two colts grazing and Morgan horse, china lady of my birthstone and two china nuns playing baseball that I had three but dropped the catcher and she broke.

In my window seat I read Bookmobile books, which comes by our school on Wednesdays. Get King of the Wind, Misty of Chincoteague, Black Beauty and every book of horses I love so much. Tame them, ride them, care for them, they always love you. I read everything about and draw them. If I only had one horse I would be happy as a millionaire. Or even just more horse statues.

Kako left me these three dolls of foreign lands to look at but I don’t. Dolls are boring. I would give them to Ro but she’d pull them apart. If you’re a girl you’re supposed to have dolls but what do they see in them? Why pretend they walk or run around or talk when you can? Go outside and do it yourself.

The other thing I like in here is make things: cards, pictures, or of Play-doh that smells so salty and good or paint paint-by-numbers though I hate numbers, or sentences I really like to make.

Making makes you happy. Better than Monopoly because at the end you have something to give away or keep. But that’s not easy.

You can’t get it right, only so you feel okay if you stop. Everything goes wrong. Glue spills or your hand wrecks the line. All you want to do is throw the whole thing out because you spent all this time and all you have is something ugly. Sometimes you feel so bad and mad you never want to make another thing. Stomp outside to play or read your book.

But nothing’s interesting or your eyes can’t keep on your sentence and then you know you want to get it right so try again. And sometimes it’s pretty good.

Next is our bathroom, big enough to walk back and forth of it. Our shower never works, so there Mom hangs her nylons.

Over the tub are sticker penguins washing who smile at you when I take my bath. What I love of baths is: to have bubbles and to wait until the water is almost gone and slip and slide back and forth it feels so slick and good.

Also in the tub, play with submarine I sent away to Kellogg’s for which just put baking soda in and it swims but took so long to come now I don’t send away even for sea-monkeys.

The best of all is thick mirror of the medicine chest. Swing it open, put your eye on the edge and see a whole green city of skinny green bars with no end. If you have to stay home just come to the mirror and go way far into Infinity City.

The blue colonial wallpaper in Mom and Dad’s bedroom is punctuated by crucifixes, saints, and the Sacred Heart. Over the glossy cherry bed, a laden bookshelf sports a fluorescent tube for bedtime reading. Smells of pipe tobacco, Coty face powder, and personal parental scents.

They, too, have a window seat, where the Infant of Prague resides off-season. We bring Him downstairs for special occasions. He has a whole set of vestments for the liturgical year in purple, green, and gold brocade. I love dressing Him. Later, our first portable television finds a spot there. Reverberating here still is the gushy joy I felt when Mom invited me up to watch An Affair To Remember with her.

A triple mirror sits atop Mom’s vanity table, which features a gold-doored triptych of the Blessed Mother, as well as Cherries in the Snow lipstick, tiny gold safety pins, drawers for cosmetics, lacy slips, and prosaic underwear. Red slidey tray of mascara which she can’t apply without tearing up, so she stops. An atomizer with a fleshy tasseled bulb. Evening in Paris, White Shoulders. Chanel No. 5 is her favorite.

Dad’s chest of drawers is covered with bent pipe cleaners, handkerchiefs, coins, and Clorets. What coins pass through his hands, he examines. The best he keeps, inserted into blue numismatic books.

•••

They’re gone. Look in their closets, Dad’s of suits and shirts and wood egg things to go in shoes and Mom’s of dresses and dusters and pedal pushers, poinky shoes and puffy party dresses. Right here I played doctor with David H. but lucky they never found out. Up top in a round plastic box: two velvet hats and collar of foxes with feet, eyes, and teeth who are biting each other’s tails in a row.

When I go in their closets, it’s like they are there.

With twin bunk beds and a single, the boys’ room sleeps three brothers at any given time—first Pogo and Tom and Skip, then Tom, Skip, and Jim when Pogo leaves. A constant complex of smells—brass polish, shoe polish, sweet-smelling Butch Wax, Brylcreem and adolescence. All my brothers attended high school at a military academy and the required paraphernalia—clips and brass bits and hats and uniform sashes—spills from the room. Here’s the fold-down desk Tom built to map and shelter the family genealogy on which he labors. Saggy chenille bedspreads, but topnotch uniforms, clean shirts, the cleanest in the house but for Dad’s immaculate blue shirts—blue because he couldn’t wear white on camera.

Behind this glass-knobbed door, a set of stairs leads to the desiccated, suffocating air of the attic—cardboard boxes, bins, outgrown moth-eaten whatevers, troves of old letters, a tatted blouse or two belonging to a grandmother. Place of discomfort and mystery—only utter summer boredom drives us up there, usually on solo expeditions.

•••

Oh, and the first floor sunroom? This glassy front room, ornamented with a few bony African violets from the last church bazaar, is lined with yet more bookcases holding Maryknoll Crusade magazines, atlases, a trim set of Britannica, and a ten-volume set of The Book of Knowledge (Great Saturday afternoon fodder. Did you know the Pyramids were so old they were in black and white?) We watch TV here, too, but that’s not why we’re here now.

This room compasses more of Mom’s creativity than any other—she sewed these green slipcovers, made these muslin café curtains with Greek-key trim, and braided this huge rag-rug on winter nights watching Dad’s Gold Award Theatre.

But best of all, on particular afternoons she lifts the center handle on this prosaic oak desk. A hidden hinge squeaks, a hidden spring twangs, a rough cough of metal. A whoosh of steely, oily, inky odor, and out of thin air, it appears.

Nothing in our house matches the theatricality of the typewriter ascending though its trapdoor in the desk, or the satisfaction of its thunk as it lands squarely in place every time, ready for action.

I love when Mom gets a phone call just as she’s about to type, and I’m alone with the olive green L.C. Smith Secretariat. How pleasing to caress its toothy keys and fondle the silver oval on the carriage return.

Even more compelling, the orderly crescent rib cage of typebars, alluring to me as ship’s hull to sailor. Keys are mere pictures of letters. Here’s where they actually live. I love stroking that intimate arc, then pressing a letter into my fingertip, just to see. Wanting to press them all into my hands. Nudging a cluster of keys simultaneously to watch the bars rise and catch each other, releasing them back to their personal places.

My mother feeds this sturdy friendly animal fat sandwiches of onionskin and carbon paper and thereon types “The Family Journal,” a one-page newsletter of The O’Brien Household as dictated by her children.

Whatever else my mother could or could not give, she gives me this symphonic experience of writing, a big production marked with clacketing keys and the thrilling ding! of the carriage return. A returning carriage. Which carried words. Which are important. Which are important to write down. Which are important to share.

It doesn’t happen often. But it happens. It almost makes up for not flying.