The nightlight puts shadows in the corners of my old
bedroom. This room is the same salmon orange I painted it in high school for a
Home Ec project. Drops of paint still dot the brown linoleum floor.
I
get undressed and under the covers and move toward my husband’s warmth. In the twenty-five years since I’ve been
gone, Mom has filled this room with antiques, many that belonged to our
ancestors. A sleigh bed with a matching vanity and dresser, my great Aunt
Lena’s hand mirror and brush, a green vase with orange poppies painted on it.
There’s an old trunk at the end of the bed, filled with handmade quilts that
Nana, my grandmother, made: Dresden Plate, Flower Basket, Pinwheel, Butterfly,
Hole in the Barn Door.
When
this was my room it wasn’t so full. There was just a dresser and an old bed
with a sway-backed mattress and squeaky bare springs. The linoleum floor wasn’t
covered with this blue and green Oriental rug. In the winters, the sheets were
icy cold and it took long shivers to settle in. Back then my parents were
afraid to give a child an electric blanket, Mom said this old stick house would
burn in a flash.
Some
nights the wind blew and the house swayed. This house of my father, house of
his father, and his father before that. There was the high whistle of the wind
making its way past, the small give of wood timbers, a loose shingle slapping.
My
father spent every year of his life here, save the months he went away to try
college and during the first year of his married life. I grew up here comforted
by the history painted on our lives like the thick layers of paint that coat
the walls.
In
the days when this was my room, I woke on winter mornings to the weight of many
blankets that made a distance between me and the cold. The cold drew itself in
icy landscapes on both sides of the upstairs bedroom windows. The only heat
came from my small child’s body. My breath made fog.
On
those mornings, it was best to stay in the fold of blankets; my face fresh in
the air and my body warm. I trailed one foot to the cooler parts of the bed, to
meet the icy sheet, for the rush of pleasure at bringing it back into the
pocket of warmth.
There
was a vent on the floor in one corner of the room. It was meant to let up the
heat from downstairs. But in the winter we kept it closed, to save on oil.
At
some point my parents moved downstairs, to make room upstairs for all us kids.
They settled in to the only bedroom in the downstairs, next to the only
bathroom in the house. On Saturday nights, they got ready in those two rooms,
for a night out at the Round-Up Lounge of the Elks Lodge.
On
those nights I sat on the bathroom counter while Dad shaved, his lathered face
clearing into pink swaths of bare skin. Mom took her turn in the bathroom,
pulling out the curlers she’d worn all day under a flowered scarf. She put on
her face. The steam from her bath mixed with her hairspray and perfume.
Dressed
and ready, Dad paced and waited. He
jingled the change in his pocket and trailed Old Spice while us kids watched Jackie
Gleason and the Honeymooners.
I
wanted to be a dancer like one of the June Taylor girls on the show. But the best part of the program was the Honeymooners: Ralph and Alice Kramden, Ed and Trixie
Norton. They lived in a whole different world from us. We didn’t know about
taxi drivers or sewer workers. None of them had kids.
My
brother Brad liked the show as much as I did and he could do a fine likeness of
Ralph Kramden. I’d learned to keep my distance at those times because once I
was sitting next to him on the sofa and I said some kind of sassy, sisterly
thing to him. Brad wound up his arm and shook his fist. “One of these days
Alice,” he said in the perfect pace of Ralph.
In
my delight, I leaned in.
“Pow!”
Brad yelled. “Right to the kisser.”
His
fist met my eye.
Brad’s
eyes got round and worried, already knowing the ways I could make use of the
bruise which, over the next few days, only came to a sad yellow-green outline
that might’ve been mistaken for mustard or egg yolk.
Mom
and Dad kissed us before they left on those Saturday nights. Dad’s cheek was
damp and soft and he left a little Old Spice on me, next to the place where I
hoped Mom’s red lipstick kiss had left its mark.
Late
on those nights, the scent of my parents had faded when the lights of their
car, pulling up to the gate, shone in my room. The Honeymooners were
traces of dreams as I listened for my parents’ voices.
Sometimes
I crawled out of bed and squatted by the heat vent on the floor, sliding it
open, quiet. The vent had wide open squares and looked onto the room below, the
living room, just next to the front door. I lay down on the floor, shivering
and listening, worrying at the sound of my parents’ voices raised in the anger
of alcohol or jealousy.
Some
nights they came home without anger. The gentle murmur of their voices was not
clear. On those nights love hung in the air like cigarette smoke. I went back
to the warmth of my bed. On those nights of peace their soft exchange left me
with a mix of relief and loneliness.
The
farmhouse isn’t as cold these days. After us kids moved away my parents finally
had enough money to put on new vinyl siding, new windows and an extra oil stove
to spread the warmth.
But
I still prefer to sleep in a cold room with an open window. Though one down
comforter gives enough heat, I long for the weight of many blankets to press me
into a sway-backed mattress and for the sound of my parents coming home.