FBR 80: One time I remember . . .
. . . is an incident involving a couple of boys and the garden next door to my house. It must have been around 1960. These days, the neighborhood at the corner of Cliffview Road and Weston in South Euclid is dotted with a few empty houses, and the house next to the one I grew up in is one of them. At the time I am remembering, however, it was occupied by a pair of old ladies, sisters, probably, who had aged along with the house. My brother and I even used to call it “the old ladies’ house.”
On this particular day I had been playing in the neighborhood with a couple of other boys. I say “playing,” but I didn’t like those boys. Joey, I’ll call the larger one, was a bully, the sort who preyed on pasty boys like me. On this day, however, he may have been lonely or otherwise distracted, for we ended up playing together with a third, smaller boy, who is now no more than a shadow in my memory. Maybe he was a shadow even then, a timid boy who hung with Joey to avoid being kicked so often.
What were the three of us up to? I don’t know. Snapping twigs? I have an oddly powerful memory of this fairly mindless activity that boys seem to have done a lot when I was that age. Running in the woods? In those days, simply running around seemed like something with character to it. Certainly, there were far more woody areas then than survive in the neighborhood today. Where then an oak forest grew across the street from my house now stands a condominium development wholly at odds with the derelict feel of some of the houses. We used to — my older brother and I — play in those woods for hours, doing I haven’t the slightest idea what, playing Civil War, perhaps, or Korea. To this day when the words oak or acorn are spoken or when I read them on a page, my mind’s eye flies inevitably to an acorn littered patch of ground at the base of one particular giant, and now-felled, oak tree.
Joey and his forever nameless companion were poor, waif-like wanderers in the neighborhood; I’m not sure I know where they lived, though perhaps my mother did, warning us never to go “there.” But that day, we had been doing something together and gradually made our way back to my house. My brother was not at home. My father was away at Georgetown. My mother was napping inside.
“I need to go to the bathroom,” Joey said.
“Me, too,” said the other boy.
“No,” I said. “My mother is inside.”
“So?”
“She’s sleeping.”
“So?”
“You’ll wake her up.”
Besides waking my mother up prematurely from her nap, I couldn’t allow Joey and his friend in the house because we were not the sort of family that had people inside. In my nine years there, I can’t remember a single person coming inside who was not family. There must have been exceptions, and I do recall when the FBI came one morning. Plumbers, electricians must also have muscled their way into the sanctum. But there was another reason.
On waking, in the morning or after a nap, my mother could sometimes be seen without her glasses. It wasn’t often, but without the glare of her glasses hiding them, the deep brown circles under her eyes were plainly visible. I think now she must have developed them during childbirth, my birth, the fact of which I was somehow dimly aware even then. My mother’s young face was normally lovely when she smiled, and was so until her death last year. The circles, or half-circles, however, marred her beauty like smudges of mortality, badges of pain, and to me she was simply someone else without her glasses. I didn’t want Joey or anyone else to see her that way.
“Let us in,” he said, walking through our carport to the side door.
“I can’t,” I said, standing in his way.
“I have to poop.”
“Me, too,” said his friend.
“No,” I said. “Poop at your own house.”
“I can’t wait!”
I tried to keep my voice down. “No,” I said firmly.
Either seeing that it was fruitless or impelled by the pressure of their intestines, Joey and his friend strode across the side yard to the old ladies’s house, squatted among the flowers under the windows, lowered their pants, and did their business.
I was stunned by the primitive nature of their action, but the insult took its course. They were soon finished and, ignoring me, laughingly pulled up their pants without any intervening act of hygiene, and left.