A is for Address - by Nan Brooks

 

The address on West 43^rd Street was home for most of my childhood in a real 1950's neighborhood. The people in those few blocks, were important to how I saw the world – and still do.  We were a pretty diverse group of white folks, so I learned about some other religions, traditions, and ways of living. I knew families that were richer than we were, and those who were poorer. I met my friend Joan’s deaf parents and attempted to use sign language. I understood that Janie’s father drank too much and he scared her. I knew to avoid the bullies and confide in the girls. I learned that everyone had problems, even the pretty girls and people with money. I learned from the kids; most days we played outside until someone was first to call, “Streetlights!” or our mothers called us in to dinner. And dinner meant everyone at the table every night, good manners, and often laughter at our house. But Leave it to Beaver it was not.

All along the street, the old elm trees formed an arched canopy, the blocks-long row of them planted carefully in the grassy strip between the street and sidewalks.  I could kneel at my bedroom window and look out into tree tops, the streetlights glimmering through the leaves. A  blight has left the street naked now.

City plats say that was once Brown’s Farm and I think 43^rd Street was probably a dirt lane between orchards, pears on one side, apples on the other. In the 50s, ripe fruit made the street slippery until a good rain came along. It also made handy weapons for the fights waged by neighborhood kids, democrats on one side of the street with rotten apples, republicans on the other with stinking pears. Eisenhower vs Stevenson. We kids: the Raders and Oslers,  Koorsens and Smiths, Becks and Mossimans, Maderies, and Leibowitz’s were aware of politics, which is not to say that we were well informed. Mr. Leibowitz was editor of the Indianapolis Times, the liberal paper that met its demise in the conservative climate, so Alan and Dennis were our very young experts. I hated the fights, partly because I couldn’t throw the rotten fruit very far and partly because I hated conflict of any kind.

There were two doubles on the street, tiny two story side-by-sides owned by Mrs. Teeter, who lived in the other side of ours. I saw her only once through her screen door, but she was a hovering presence, as in, “Shhhh, be quiet. Don’t bother Mrs. Teeter!” She could throw us out at any time and the rent was often late. I suspect the need for quiet had more to do with parental hangovers, but my fear of Mrs. Teeter was constant.

We moved there when my little brother was born. While my mom rested in the hospital, as was the way in 1944, my father painted the entire inside of the house. The rest of his life he talked about how the cockroaches were so bad that after a while he just painted over them as they ran across the walls.

While my mom was convalescing and my dad was painting, I stayed with my beloved Aunt Alice and Uncle Bert, who loved me and I knew it. Aunt Alice wrote notes to my mother as if my nearly three-year-old self had written them. I still have the notes to prove I was well behaved and had a good appetite. The appetite part is still true.

All kinds of wonders came out of the tiny kitchen in our little house and my mother’s pies were the best. She said it was the lard and her rolling pin, the likes of which I have not seen since. It was made of glass with a screw-on lid on one end so that the baker could fill it with ice water to keep the crust cold. She fried chicken in lard, too, then made milk gravy in the big heavy cast iron skillet and poured it from that skillet into a delicate gravy boat with one hand. To make merengue for chocolate pie, she held a big oval meat platter on her left shoulder and whipped egg whites with a flat gadget strung with twisted wire, walking around the house singing while she whisked relentlessly.  

She fried fish for the neighborhood fish fry every summer when my father returned from his trip to Minnesota. He and his buddies came home with big shiny aluminum trash cans full of ice and the fish they’d caught, all cleaned and ready. Blue gills dipped in egg, then cornmeal and fried in Crisco went on big platters out the back door, down the steps, across the driveway, over the wire fence, and to tables set up in the vacant lot that ran behind the doubles. There were plates piled with sliced Indiana tomatoes, corn on the cob drenched in butter, vinegar cole slaw, pies, and a lot of beer. My mother and one or two other women spent most of their time in that hot kitchen, frantic lest the fish burn or the grease catch fire. I was excited when they finally let me help and that’s when I saw how much cold beer the cooks could consume. The dark brown bottles dripped rivulets of sweat onto the kitchen counters; now and then someone would put a cold bottle against her own sweating face.

There were old apple trees in the vacant lot that by this time yielded only hard little green fruit. We sat in the trees with salt shakers purloined from various kitchens, eating salted apples and watching for worms. I never found a worm, but I was an easy mark, so the other kids told me about how they once ate half a worm, just to scare me.

We played baseball on that vacant lot, too. It was all grassy lumps and there were no bases, but we played anyway. Mostly I watched, especially after I got hit in the mouth by a ball. The pitch was so soft that I wasn’t even bruised, but it scared me. Everything scared me in those days, so I preferred to be indoors reading Nancy Drew mysteries and all of the biographies with orange covers from the grade school library.

Our other games included tossing empty rusty tin cans dug from the trash onto the garage. The goal was to throw the can all the way over the pitched roof and into Mrs. Teeter’s backyard, but we could never throw well enough. Which was probably best given Mrs Teeter’s disposition. One day a can came rolling down onto my head and the lid cut a gash in my scalp, which of course bled profusely. I had to be stitched up and then get a series of shots so I wouldn’t get lockjaw. That meant weekly trips downtown on the bus to the Hume Mansur building and a nurse with a mean streak. She would stand over me, sing-songing “Here comes a bee, here comes a bee, watch out, it’s going to sting you!”  jabbing my arm and laughing.  I had nightmares involving swarms of bees for months, which my mother did everything she could to soothe.

We played outdoors or we read books, we children of the forties and fifties. Some evenings we listed to Baby Snooks on the radio. We were the last house on the street to get a television around 1952. It was a huge boxy wonder with its test patterns and grainy black and white images. Now we could watch at home, but that meant missing Sunday suppers with Aunt Alice and Uncle Bert where we ate soup and homemade yeast rolls with homemade butter and jam before we settled down together to watch Ed Sullivan. The day the TV came I was home alone and the first image I saw was Eleanor Roosevelt speaking at the United Nations. I loved her for her crooked teeth, just like mine. She would be good company in my middle age when I toured a one-woman show of my own making. "Born with the teeth to pay the role," I would brag in press interviews.

I was spellbound watching television that day and got in trouble because I didn’t do my chores. Some kids had fewer chores than my brother and I because their mothers didn’t go to work every day. We knew she went to work for the money, but it was also clear that she was happy about getting out of the house. She was very smart and must have been bored to a stupor. So I learned to do the laundry. I remember learning to iron when I had to kneel on a chair to reach the iron teetering on the creaking wooden ironing board. I practiced on Saturdays with handkerchiefs and tea towels while my mother dozed on the sofa. Graduating to ironing blouses and even my father’s shirts was a big deal.

Ah, that dark green sofa – we called it the davenport and it was scratchy and miserable for sick kids. But my brother and I shared a bedroom until adolescence, so a fever would send one of us downstairs to the davenport. Measles, mumps, chicken pox, colds, tonsillectomies, pneumonia, injuries – we toughed them out. If things got really bad, the doctor came to see us. It was a drastic experiment when he brought a new drug called penicillin to cure the pneumonia that had made me a first-grade drop out.

John was almost three years younger than I and we usually shared pretty well, probably because we knew the consequences if we didn’t. I think kids were better behaved in those days, but probably not. Seldom encouraged to express ourselves and taught to be polite to grown-ups, we were pretty fierce in those rotten pear fights. John went to school one day at about age 12 with a red imprint of my mother’s hand on his face. She had caught him smoking behind the old coal furnace, realized he had been lying about it, and slapped him hard. When she saw his face the next morning, she ordered him to go to school and tell his teachers why she had hit him. If anyone called her about it, we never knew.

The one thing John and I squabbled about was who would turn off the light before we went to sleep. My bed was in an alcove and furthest from the light switch, so he had only one choice – to stall long enough to make me get up and turn off the light. Some fifty years later, when John was terminally ill, I helped care for him. He was struggling to breathe but finally able to sleep one night and as I tiptoed out of the room he murmured, “Would you turn out the hall light?” When I did, he said, “Gotcha! I always won.”

Here’s to my little brother playful to the end, to my mother who juggled it all, to my father who loved to tell me stories and go fishing. Here’s to ice cream cones from a drug store soda fountain, one dip for a dime. Here’s to fish fries, Indiana tomatoes, lightning bugs and pear fights, smart neighborhood kids, to streetlights making dappled patterns through the elm trees, and to that tiny double on 43^rd Street.