The House of My Childhood

The house of my childhood was very large. It had two stories as well as an attic and a basement. The basement was inhabited by a furnace and a cat, whose name I forget. I remember only that it was an enemy of my mother and participated rarely in the affairs of the household. He came and went, the black cat.

The basement was not done up. At the centre sat the furnace, like the abdomen of a giant insect. Around it a circuit was formed, each stop marked by trays of dusty jars, racks of screws and pliers, christmas ornaments, and the long stacks of firewood. The walls were hidden by terrible shadows.

Two events annually disturbed the evil serenity of the basement. My father raised bees and each year we would go down there to spin out the honeycomb in plastic barrels. The honey flew out to the sides (and all over our arms and faces) and dripped into the jars below. In the fall we stacked the wood that had been dumped in the driveway, for which we were served by an economy of logs to popsicles.

The house of my childhood also had a yard which we mowed. Sometimes I too would drive the ride-on lawnmower. I dreamed of jamming my foot underneath and cutting off my toes, or of driving over a patch of baby rabbits and watching them spray out through the cut grass. We also raised tadpoles into frogs in the kiddy pool. Each day they changed.

My brother invented a game in which we would dig a deep pit in the garden, fill it with dirt highways and dinky cars, and then cruelly turn the hose upon them. I thought he was a genius. My brother also once convinced me to eat a live goldfish. As a teenager this became a sort of parlor trick. In the garden we grew carrots and peas.

My two older brothers shared a room. They hurt me and forced me to pee myself, but still I liked to go in there. Once my best friend and I found a bag of gumballs belonging to one of them. We chewed up every last one and then deposited each sticky piece back into the bag. I don't know what we were thinking.

I don't remember much of my sister's room except that she had trophies. She also had a library of Uncle Remus stories and some dolls that I likely played with the most. My sister and I played real games together and made things up, but she also had friends in the neighborhood that were girls her age.

My parents' room was where my mother ripped the tape out of my hair that my brother had wrapped around my head. I thought she would have a better solution. On the bureau they kept a picture of themselves in which my mother had long, straight hair. In the closet there was an escape ladder that I dreamed daily of using but never did.

I had a room to myself, though I shared it for one year with my foster brother. I drew an invisible line through the middle of the room which he must never, ever cross. He never argued with me because he wanted me to like him. Once I lay awake at night, sobbing loudly. When my mother finally came I told her I wanted him to go.

We had a living room with a CD and tape player. We listened to the Muppets and James Galloway playing The Flight of the Bumblebee on the flute. We also had family meetings in there, during which time we memorized the Bible and presumably sang songs. It was also where we put up the Christmas tree.

It was in the living room that I played murderous, acrobatic games with my G.I. Joes. I had a rule. It was that I could only play if I was absolutely, perfectly alone. If someone came in or peaked through the door, I would scream one, long syllable: "Leave!" There was a big window but I never looked out of it.

By the kitchen we had a room with a TV and a piano in it, as well as some ornamental plates. I played the same stupid song on the piano over and over again for years. On the wall there was a rotary phone. I always answered it in an annoying sing-song voice, as fast as possible: "Hello this is Mark, may I help you?"

In the yard we had two cherry trees and a row of apple trees. There was a village idiot in our town, a dirty, frightening man who wandered around with a sack. Once he came to our yard to eat our apples. "Golden Delicious," he announced. Afterwards, my father often told this story with delight and admiration.

My father is the gentlest man I have ever met. After the rain he would pick up the worms off the sidewalk and throw them into the grass. I liked to cut them into successive pieces with the edge of my shoe. I believed they would grow into new worms. My father also hated to waste time and was always doing things. Once we built an igloo.

We also had a treehouse and a shed. In the fall the leaves fell and we raked them up. In the winter we threw the dog off the porch into the deep snow. In the summer we kicked the soccer ball endlessly against the neighbors garage. Our other neighbor had a giant fishing boat parked in the yard. It was a girl.

Our house was at the top of a very steep hill. At the bottom was the main street of the town, where parades happened. The neighbors' son used to drive golf balls down the hill over the rooftops, and once he smashed a car window. When I was very young I dreamed of biking down that hill. When I was older I did it.

Our house was a big white house. The front porch was the pantry, no one ever came in that way. You had to walk around to the back where we kept the inner tubes from the big trucks. Our best game was to all lie in the road at night and whenever a car came we would run to the back and dive onto the inner tube in a heap.

The driveway was where my mother killed the skunks we caught in the trap my father built. She would put a tarp over them at the back of the car and leave it running for half an hour. I learned later that people sometimes kill themselves that way. Listening to the radio. My father also had a motorcycle but he got rid of it.

When I was twelve we moved to West Virginia. The day we arrived it was so hot it felt like being underwater. Our house was on a golf course and all our neighbors lived in Washington, D.C. After supper the course was empty and I would bike from end to end. In the ponds lived poisonous snakes.