Upside Down

The Others

Marilyn didn’t know how to be me. I was the crossed-eyed, buck-toothed, frizzy, thin-haired girl across the street. Second in the line of the four girl family that lived next door to the four boy family.

By second grade, aged seven, I was working hard at not sucking my thumb and trying not to peek around the patch over my good eye to survey the world that had unexpected pokes, slaps and abusive name calling.

Baby Janis Hansen lived directly across the street. But to the right, Danny and Marilyn Margolis lived with their father and mother. They were the OTHERS. They were the designated outsiders to all the other families in the neighborhood. They were Jewish.

In our west-coast suburb, there was pride in being open, accepting and understanding, in a general sort of way, as long as it did not come too close to home or threaten you -- your job, your house value, your own family pride.

The facts of the Holocaust were seeping out into the daily papers in those early post war years -- the facts and the horror. It was the horrific truth of war – torture, abuse, and deliberate genocide.

Marilyn was my best friend and constant playmate. I was allowed to ride in Marilyn’s family car with her mother on trips to the grocery store or to the park or to Marilyn’s Hebrew classes after school. Or ride to brownie troop field trips to the Golden Grain factory. Marilyn’s mother liked me. She made matching clothes for the two of us and generally washed my face and brushed my hair along with Marilyn’s.

On autumn Saturday mornings we would play in the grass of Marilyn's front yard with our marble families. Our pebble-like marble collections were organized by color into families of momma, poppa and babies. Sometimes a marble would put up a fight, trying to get out of one family to join another. A yellow cat’s eye would want to join the cat’s eye family and leave the yellows far behind. Hours would be spent putting families together by color, glass design and size. We would line them up, trading between ourselves and other kids on the block. Our marble collections were important and centered most of our outdoor activities that fall.

Late night rain made full street gutters and our marbles swam or boated up and down the gutter in front of Marilyn’s house. We wore corduroy overalls, red for Marilyn and navy blue for me. Our hair was pulled back by ribbons to keep it out of the water we worked so diligently in. We kept dry mostly, except for the wrists of our blouses. We rolled up our damp sleeves and continued working, sweaters cast off and discarded on the sidewalk behind us.

Mrs. Margolis made lunch for us. We put our marbles in our cigar boxes, picked up our sweaters and sat on the front porch step. We ate white bread, cheese, baloney and mayonnaise sandwiches. We each had a glass of ice cold milk and four graham crackers to finish our picnic meal. We were very careful of our glass near the concrete of the front step. We knew the consequences of a broken glass with splinters and shards, expletives and day long separation as punishment.

I was a natural in my overalls. I preferred wearing pants and riding my tricycle and skating and climbing and hanging upside down on the monkey bars at school. Marilyn preferred dresses and doing things with dolls and clothes, books and paper, pencil and crayons. Sometimes she was the boss. Sometimes, I was. We very rarely fought or had disagreements. We had learned how to play together productively, sharing the wants and wish fulfillments for each other.

The Bad Word

Life was not as simple for Danny, Marilyn’s older brother. Our world was our immediate neighbors on our street. Our section of the straight five block lane coming down from East 14th Street had about nine houses on either side of the dead end of 140th Avenue. We lived on the south side, the Margolis’ lived on the north side.

Janis Hansen’s father was a real estate broker. His pronouncements about whether something was ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for property values reflected like significant whispers in the halls of Delphi. In the early 1950s, the young couples in the neighborhood had all their savings invested in their small suburban houses. They had hopes of making prudent and economic improvements to secure their investments and perhaps to trade-up, if the future looked bright.

Mr. Hansen watched the Margolis house next door. He worried about his investment. He ensured the Margolis front and back gardens were tended and mowed carefully. Mr. Hansen paid Danny to mow his own front lawn on Sunday afternoons. He taught Danny how to sharpen the rotary mower blades, to oil and clean the cogs by the wheels. He showed Danny how to put the mower on the cardboard liner in the garage to protect the concrete under the mower from any accidental oil drips.

Mr. Margolis was an engineer at the Ford Plant. However, he did not show the same reverence for household tools and equipment that Mr. Hansen did. Sometimes Mr. Margolis would work on his drafting table in his dining room, his tools and instruments were all on paper. Mr. Hansen had love for things you could touch and polish.

But Mr. Hansen had a bad habit of using racial slurs, especially when he was surprised or agitated.

So, when Mr. Hansen found the oil stains on his garage floor, “Damn little kike kid!” slipped off his lips a little too easily. Mrs. Margolis heard him from her back yard where she was taking her dried sheets off the line. Something snapped in her head and she picked up her laundry basket and stomped in the back door of her house. She called Danny who was on the living room floor reading the colored-inked comics from the Sunday paper.

‘You are never to speak to that man again. You do not work for him any more. That is enough. He will never speak to any of us again. Never. Ever.”

“Who, Ma?” Danny asked. Herb Margolis came into the kitchen, put both his hands on Mrs. Margolis’ shoulders and faced her.

“What is this?” he asked.

“He called my Danny a ‘kike’. I will never forgive him. That is IT,” she said trembling in her anger. She sat down and covered her face with her hands.

Herb sat down. Danny stood there looking from one parent to the other. “Was that Mr. Hansen?” Danny asked. His mother nodded her head.

Marilyn and I had been playing in the back bedroom. This was the room where everyone had knocked a door through to the kitchen to improve the flow around the rooms of the house. When Mrs. Margolis had begun talking, both Marilyn and I had frozen.

I started putting my marbles in my cigar box. When I heard the word ‘kike’, I knew it was going to be bad in that house. I slipped through the door to the kitchen and then scurried out the back door. I did not belong in that house right then. This was private family business.

My House

Growing up in my house, I had learned early how to be a chameleon. I had learned how to melt into the woodwork going down the hall, so as not to be caught by the spider-web silk of my mother calling my name. In my house, when my stepfather was at work, it was always best to stay outside and away from my mother and from my older sister.

My stepfather was both a safe harbor and a source of pain depending on the whims and winds winding around the inside of the house. My stepfather had his own two baby girls, two and three years old. Sometimes he remembered that he liked me, and invited me to crawl into his lap for hugs and pets, too. But these times were becoming memories and I was getting lonesome for his company and affection. I learned to sit near him and be very, very quiet. Then, sometimes, the good feeling would sort of radiate out from him and make me feel safe from my mother and my older sister.

My stepfather had been the first on the block to do a significant home improvement to the standard house of the neighborhood. He had added a large room and a bathroom off the back corner bedroom. It meant you had to walk through the bedroom to get to the back room, but a precedent for this had been set when the bedroom-kitchen door had been created in the other bedroom. The parent’s bedroom, the front bedroom, was the only bedroom that did not have a sort of built-in walkway-hall feature.

The backroom became the TV room, and the music room, and the library room and the playroom. Most times, noise could be safely made in this long, wide room. The construction of the room was pretty sound. My step father had done a good level, poured cement slab and squared up all his timbers. The room was sturdy and plumb. He even let it dry and sort of age a bit before he finished it off with 2x4 wood walls and roof. He was a good carpenter.

However, he was not a good plumber.

Soldering joints, threading, measuring, lining pipes up just didn’t work for him. He did not know about bee’s wax sealing collars, so the toilet wiggled and tipped when young girls sat on it. This made the water connections work loose, which caused leaks and constantly running water. He did not caulk the shower pan, so when little girls sat and covered the drain of the shower, making a sort of 4 inch bath for themselves, the water over ran the shower pan and worked its way under the pan, rotting the sub-flooring.

This back bathroom was the family dungeon – dank and fetid. Wet towels that were hung there never dried out. Mold crept up the walls and the door. Asphalt floor tiles floated up, refusing to stick to the damp wood sub-flooring.

A double-wide door opened between the bedroom and the bathroom platform and the step down to the large room. A hinged folding door was hung to cover this double arch. When my bedtime was called, I would sometimes slip to the carpet behind the hinge on that folding door and put my good eye to the opening to watch at least 30 more minutes of TV. I don’t think I ever actually fell asleep in that position, but I was quiet as a mouse and was never caught doing it. I went to sleep with the sound of the TV murmuring in the background.

This backroom settled my parents into their long held roles and routines. My mother was enthroned in the living room. She had converted the dining room area in the front room into a sort of office – a large desk and chair on one wall and corner, and a large overstuffed Windsor chair and foot stool in the other corner.

This corner was windowed on both sides, so that my mother could use her ring to tap on either side to let the neighborhood children know they were playing, and making noise, too close for HER comfort. She was the designated witch of the block and some kids delighted in annoying her, others were just afraid of her.

She rose each day about 9:00am. She started a pot of coffee and wrapping her robe around her. She would sit, smoke, sip and scan the paper. On the weekends, any child who caught her attention was assigned housework – vacuuming, dusting, polishing, laundry, ironing and watering the indoor plants.

My stepfather usually rose at 5:30am, dressed and left the house. He would open up the gas station and have breakfast with his brother. He would return home about 4:30pm, done for the day. He would scrub his hands so that no evidence of grease could be found on them and then he would bathe. He would wear a terrycloth robe and boxer shorts for the rest of the day and evening. He would sit down in the backroom and watch TV news. Dinner would be served buffet style in the kitchen. All would serve their own plates. My mother would return to her front room chair, my stepfather to his backroom TV watching chair.

I stayed around the house that week, knowing I was not welcome at Marilyn’s house. It was rainy and I played Candyland and Chutes and Ladders by myself. I watched Twinkie Dink and Crusader Rabbit on TV in the afternoons. I stayed away from my older sister. She was a pincher when she was bored. My little sisters rose from their naps, and after being cleaned up by our older sister, they spent the rest of the afternoon together in the playpen in the living room.

At around 5:30pm, my mother would rise from her living room throne and set her teeth into a grimace and go into kitchen to fix dinner. She did not like to cook. If it was Friday, we would have cornmeal-drenched sole fillets, fried potatoes and a tossed green salad.

At that time, it was the rule for Catholics to not eat meat on Fridays. My mother was baptized a Catholic, but stopped practicing when she divorced and married my stepfather. My stepfather was baptized also, but he, too, stopped practicing when he married a divorced woman. My older sister and I were baptized also, but we were not allowed to go to the after-school catechism classes with the other kids from the public school. The only acknowledgement of our religious background was these Friday night dinners.

Lemon, cornmeal, cidar vinegar, hot oil and crisp potatoes. Those smells and memories are fixed in my mind for those years of my life.

The word Mr. Hansen had used dug deep into the sensibilities of the Margolis parents. It curdled and stung all through that winter and spring. Finally, at the end of spring, the For Sale sign went up. The house sold easily to another young family and the Margolis family moved away.

Marilyn could never have been me, but I think I could have been her, or her sister.