Haunted House

I think every house is haunted by the memories of those who lived within them.  The house I grew up in certainly was.

When I was four, we moved to Highview Avenue in Nanuet, New York.  My mother always assured us it was the best street in Nanuet, possibly because it was on a hill and some of the houses were quite old.

My mother designed our house.  Someone should have stopped her.  It was a two-story with the top story overhanging the bottom by about a foot.   What was the point?

I’m sure there was a lot of trauma getting that house built.  Later in her life, my mother told me that, during construction, they were running out of money; and a neighbor down the street was just waiting for the bank to repossess so he could buy it.  But she had her father to depend on, and he came through with the necessary funds.  So she had her house.

What I liked best about the house was being out of it.  There was a sassafras tree in the back and one of the branches served as a surrogate pony ride.  Beyond the house, before the developers arrived in my teens, there was a thick woods, leading downhill to a stream.  This is where I spent most of my time after school, being absorbed by nature.  Every season brought new joy from sleighing in the winter to watching the leaves return in the spring, tadpoles and crayfish making a reappearance, and in the summer wading in the water to cool off.

If I followed the stream, it led to a stone wall and an old cottage, in ruins but still containing a broomstick made of branches.  The story was that the Ramapo Mountain people once lived there, as they had throughout many parts of Rockland County.  But I never saw anyone there except other kids.

(When the housing development was built, the stream was “eliminated” somehow, and the new buyers from the city wondered why their houses always flooded.  It was the stream getting its revenge.)

By dinner time I had to return to the house and sadness descended.  I hated being being in that house.

Over the years, the kitchen had many different dining tables and a variety of dishes, but the basics of it never changed.  Oh, the refrigerators had to be replaced, but the linoleum remained, along with the cabinets, the drawers and the stove.

Dinner was always a fraught affair.  My mother—the food—the canned peas—  Maybe she wasn’t a horrible cook.  Maybe it was just my imagination that most of her food was gag-worthy.  After all, I couldn’t have starved, since I was called “Fatty” by the kids, as I walked or biked to school.

There were six of us at the dinner table.  My mother was at one end, my father at the other.  I was sitting at my father’s left hand, my brother Joe was on his right.  Both of us were within striking distance of my father, when he lost his temper.  My sister and my younger brother were at a safer distance away.

I found myself many times not being able to finish the meal that was dished out to me.  This entailed isolation in the half bath, where I was shut in until I finished the meal.  I was too dumb to flush it down the toilet.

My mother had a drawer in the kitchen where she kept all the little things  no one knows where to put, like slips of paper she might need, her keys, the hairbrush she used alternatively to comb our hair before school and to take us over her knee and spank us, sparing her hand.  The poor woman had a laugh once when, in the midst of striking someone’s behind, the hairbrush broke.  Since she was very frugal with money, this was a setback.

My father at one time bodily picked me up and threw me against the kitchen wall.  The dent remained.  He showed it to my husband when my husband first came to the house.  Was it a preemptive move?

The kitchen was at the back of the house, the dining room in the front. Before my mother bought the hutch she so enjoyed, in which she placed her silverware and fine glassware, there used to be an upright piano.  Both my sister and I took piano lessons.  Neither of us was any good.  The practice was tedious. The recitals a nightmare.  But since our parents never came, they never heard how much of their money was being wasted.

Soon enough the piano was thankfully gone.  My mother—did she love to entertain or was it part of her wifely duties?  I know there was a whole crowd of people from Lederle’s that were very close, and I came to know them well.  When my mother entertained, she would always make a standing rib roast.  I don’t know how she did it.  I’ve never made one in my life.

As soon as those dinner parties were over, we kids were in the kitchen, cleaning up.  So many dishes and glasses, and my mother never had a dishwasher.  She washed her dishes morning noon and night.

The living room extended across the length of the entire house.  It had a fireplace with a mantel and a large picture window in the back, overlooking the “lawn” and my father’s garden.  To the side were lilac bushes, and in the spring, when the windows were open, they were delicious.

My mother never had shades but transparent white curtains, which always had to be washed, a chore she didn’t relish.  There was never any comfortable furniture in the living room, and I couldn’t understand why until I got older.  My father and my brother managed to create canyons where they sat.  Not that my father was fat, he was just huge, but my brother was obese.

Christmas Eve in that living room we used to listen to “A Christmas Carol” on the radio.  It was so scary with the chains clinking and the door creaking.  Then television arrived.  For some that was the end of radio, but I loved to go into my bedroom and listen to all the radio shows that were still on, like the Lone Ranger and Jack Benny and Edgar Bergen.

My father bought the television for the Army-McCarthy hearings.  Every afternoon, when it wasn’t being sent to the repair shop, men from the lab would come to our house and watch the hearings, which even I found quite dramatic.

Television brought a new dynamic into the household.  Those who could physically overpower the others ruled the channel choices.  Needless to say, my brother with his heft dominated.  Although somehow my sister and I got to watch the Mickey Mouse Club, which I loved, especially the story of Spin and Marty.  At night of course it was my father’s choice. “Gunsmoke?”  Never really got it.  I found it quite boring.  Jackie Gleason and the “Honeymooners.”  Where was the humor with those sad sack people?  “I Love Lucy?”  I didn’t.

The stairs to the upper floor were quite steep.  They led straight to the hall bathroom and two bedrooms on either side. Then down a dark, narrow hall were two other bedrooms.

Before my younger brother was born, I had the bedroom overlooking the patio and the garage, right near the bathroom.  My older brother was on the other side.  My sister, the “fragile” one, was in the bedroom across from my parents, who had as yet to put in their en suite.

As soon as my younger brother was born, I was removed from my haven of safety and thrust into the company of my sister, with whom I never got along.  So there was never any sanctuary for me in that house at all.  Plus, at night I would have to make the long, dark trek to the bathroom, with my fear of monsters lurking.  Shadows take so many ferocious shapes.

When I had the chance, I would retreat to that bedroom and listen to the radio.  After the radio shows faded, I liked to hear full cast albums of new Broadway shows. And of course there was Alan Freed and all the other radio stations where one could hear real music after “That Doggy in the Window” made his escape. How I loved rhythm and blues and rock and roll.

It was dangerous to be sick in that room, especially if you had a cough that would keep your father awake.  How to stifle a cough?  Bury your face in a pillow, lest he come into the bedroom in a rage.

But sickness comes to children.  I can remember being in that room when I had the Asian flu.  I was so ill, but we never had a family doctor, so none was called.  I struggled through the fever and the drenching alone.  Then one night I awoke and such a feeling of calm enveloped me.  I felt an overwhelming sense of peace, a feeling of being surrounded by love.  Ever since that night, I’ve never been afraid of death.

Somewhere in the house there was a treadle sewing machine.  I know later it was in Joe’s room, but was it always thus?  In any case, I learned to sew on a treadle machine, tipping my little feet back and forth.  My sister was always trying to organize joint Christmas gifts for our parents.  One year she decided to get my mother a new sewing machine.  I didn’t go in on any of Ellen’s gift ideas because—well, I just didn’t want to.  So Christmas comes and Ellen stages her big reveal.  My mother’s response:  “What did you buy that for?” This response followed in the long tradition of no one ever appreciating anyone else’s gifts.

We had a basement that held the water heater and the washer dryer.  My father tried to turn half the basement into a “rec center.”  It was too bad about the water damage.  But there was at one point a ping pong table down there, and later in life he used it for his fly tying and his stained glass, at which he became quite accomplished.

Last of all was the garage, two car.  I remember my father trying to teach me how to drive the way he tried to teach me how to ride a bicycle.  (After my father threw one of his fits and stormed off because I couldn’t ride the bike instantly, our neighbor Harry Hansen came over; and within five minutes of his gentle instructions I was riding a bike.)  But back to the car.  After a rather fraught session on the road, I pulled into the driveway and my father told me to put the car into the garage.  “Pull straight in,” he ordered.  At that point I told him, if I pulled straight in, I’d hit the side of the open garage door.  “Do as I say!”  I pulled in.  The wood splintered.  A driving instructor was hired.

My mother never left the house she loved so much.  Ever after my father died, she hung on there for another twenty-five years.  At the end she didn’t know where she was or who we were, but she had that house, haunted by our memories.