Children in the Closet....

 

Chapter Seven

We moved to another rundown rental property in a seedy part of town close to the county hospital. The floor plan was much like a duplex except there were no doors to close off one area from the other.  Mother hung old thick quilts over the doorways that separated our living area from theirs. Clayton liked to walk around naked when he was home so she made sure you couldn’t see through them. As I recall, we had three whole rooms all to ourselves. And a really nice big closet. I took one room as my bedroom and also made it a kind of living room for us. We even had a television set! The back room was a bedroom for the other three and the middle room had a sink in it, so we used it as a make shift kitchen when Clayton was home. We were happy to have running water available all the time now so we could get a drink and brush our teeth.

There were no appliances in the middle room, just an open-faced heater with an asbestos backing. I would light that thing and turn it up high so that it would boil a pan of water sitting on top. I could make oatmeal for us to eat when we didn’t have access to the real kitchen. I also discovered I could use a skillet on top and fry bologna. I learned to keep the other kids out of there while I was cooking after Lanita got too close and her nightgown caught on fire. We all rushed at her and smothered the flames. She wasn’t hurt so we never told Mother about it. I wadded up the nightgown and threw it in the trash.

Reading was my one great pleasure in life. I remember how exciting it was to open up a big cardboard box of books that Clayton would buy at an auction. The boxes were sold sealed up with tape so the buyer had no idea what kind of books he was getting. Thankfully, Clayton allowed Mother to give us the boxes after he went through and kept the ones he wanted.

The Box Car Children series by Gertrude Chandler Warner was in one of the boxes and I could not read them fast enough! It was such a comfort to me to read about and relate to other children living on their own. I so identified with Jessie who was the oldest girl in the family and took on the role of mother for her younger siblings, Violet and Benny. I would read these books out loud over and over. 

A few months later, in yet another box of random books, I discovered the first 4 volumes in the Little House series. While I dearly loved reading them, they caused a longing in my heart to have a Ma and Pa who would love and take care of us. I continued to read them to myself but I would reread the Box Car Children to my sisters and brother.

Lloydine and I started school at Alexander Hogg Elementary in September of 1960. I was in the fifth grade and my sister was in the second. Once again, Mother worked nights and stayed home during the day with Lanita and Lonnie. We randomly had what clothes and shoes came to us by way of boxes. I never knew exactly where these boxes came from. Maybe they were hand-me-downs from our cousins. Maybe Clayton bought them at the auctions he liked to attend. No matter, though, as we loved it when Mother would bring a box in to us and we would be as excited as if it were Christmas pulling out one thing and another. We cobbled together a school wardrobe from the most recent box and I was lucky enough to get some decent shoes from it. Lloydine was forced to wear Lanita’s shoes and they pinched her feet something terrible! She cried all the way to school and would take them off and just put her feet on top of them once she got to her desk.

School was a nice escape from our real life and I enjoyed it. I was a good student by nature. I loved to read and learn and just absorbed as much as I possibly could. Lloydine, on the other hand, struggled in school from the very beginning. Mother told her she was lazy and should pay attention. She tried. I tried to help her but school was never a favorite place for her. Not that we actually attended all that much. We missed nearly as many days as we went. Sometimes I had to stay home and babysit. Sometimes Mother was sick and needed us to take care of her. Sometimes Lanita or Lonnie was sick and then there were many days that I had an excruciating headache. I had a lot of headaches as well as toothaches. 

Lloydine remembers being afraid at school every bit as much as she was at home. This was during the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, air raids and the Bay of Pigs. It was also around the time of the Kennedy-Goldwater presidential election.  She had been told by someone at school that if Goldwater won, we would have to go to school on Saturdays and this was a real cause for alarm in her young heart! 

One day her teacher was giving a lesson on the solar system. She told all the pupils to close their eyes. Then she told them to imagine seeing stars and then clouds. Lloydine closed her eyes but she couldn’t “see” anything. When the teacher asked her what she saw, she responded, “All I see is dark!”

My sister’s world was, indeed, a dark one.

One bright spot in our lives that year occurred when Mother became friends with Betty Jo. She and Betty Jo worked together at the telephone answering service. Betty and her husband, Bob, had four kids. Three girls and a boy – just like us! Lloydine was really excited to have friends since we had never had any before. Sadly, the friendship between all of us children didn’t last very long. Mother was obsessed with having what belonged to someone else and this applied to husbands. And so, it happened that Mother and Bob began having an affair that lasted for many years even long after we had left home.

Betty Jo suspected it and instructed her children to have nothing to do with us. I think this was harder on Lloydine than the rest of us. She was desperately looking for a friend. If only she had known then that in future years, she and Betty Jo would become close friends and work together. Lloydine was devoted to her and they were close right up until the day Betty Jo died. Mother felt betrayed by their friendship but strangely felt no guilt over the love affair that lasted decades. In the end, when Bob was available and asked Mother to marry him, she refused. By this time, he didn’t belong to anyone else and the charm was gone.

I made a friend at school named Judy and walked home with her after school one day. Judy had a large family with more siblings than I had plus lots of aunts and uncles and cousins. We entered the house through the kitchen door, and there was Judy’s mother baking.  She was a large woman, plain of face with her hair pulled up into a loose bun. She was wearing a big apron and had flour all over her hands. She had rolled out the dough and was cutting the biscuits with a small tin can that had both ends cut out. I thought then and there that Judy was one of the luckiest girls I would ever know. I spent the night with her a time or two and she spent the night with me once. That was the only friend I had that entire school year and, when I look back on it now, I realize that we were really just acquaintances.

Lloydine finally discovered a friend, a red headed little girl named Cindy who lived just a few doors down the street at the corner of Galveston and Richmond.   She was thrilled to have a friend! She gathered up her paper dolls and took them over there to play with her. The next day, Cindy shared her dolls and doll clothes with Lloydine. They visited nearly every afternoon – always at Cindy’s house. 

One afternoon Cindy was brushing her hair when my sister walked up. Lloydine had beautiful curly dark brown hair. Cindy’s mother had been watching the girls from inside the house and when she saw her daughter reach out to put her brush to Lloydine’s hair, she came running out the front door yelling for her to stop. The mother was afraid my sister had head lice.  We didn’t. We never had lice. However, that was enough to embarrass Lloydine so much that she would never go back to visit again. This was no doubt a certain relief for Cindy’s mother, but it broke my sister’s heart.

One day Clayton brought home a bicycle and, surprisingly, he let me ride it. I was tall for my age at that time and gangly. It was on the second lap down the block that I fell off the bike and broke my front tooth. It broke all the way to the nerve but it would be several months before I was taken to the dentist. The toothaches were constant and I lived in pain. Mother bought those little lozenges that looked like tiny brown burlap bags. You could press one of them to your tooth and it would help with the pain, or at least it helped a little bit. Finally, Mother took me to a dentist and he started a root canal by drilling an angled hole in the back of that tooth.  There was supposed to be a series of visits but this one procedure cut down on the pain considerably. Mother did not see any need to take me back to the dentist to finish the procedure and told me she simply did not have the money. I suffered with that tooth for years to come, plus, I developed other toothaches as well.  I didn’t know it then but by the time I was 18, I would be wearing dentures.

We didn’t have much of a Christmas the year of 1960. No tree or presents or even a special meal. Mother came in to what we called “our side of the house” one afternoon with her hands behind her back. She told Lloydine and Lanita to pick a hand. She had two dolls – one had blond hair and one had brown hair. That’s what they got for Christmas. They weren’t wrapped or anything. Lanita never cared about dolls so she handed hers to Lloydine. Mother gave me a bottle of Arpege cologne that someone at work had given her. Lonnie was only four years old and he didn’t get anything.

I do remember a box of used clothes that came to us that winter.  I pulled out a long maroon velvet coat with a curved collar. It fit me perfectly.  That night after the others had gone to bed, I wrapped myself up in that velvet coat and put some perfume on my wrists. I had a small radio in my room and I just sat there by the door looking out into the night and listening to Sam Cook singing She Was Only Sixteen.  I felt all grown up and beautiful when, in fact, I was a shy 12-year-old skinny girl with a broken front tooth that had turned an unsightly blackish color and drab dishwater blonde hair. 

One really cold day that January, Mother told me to gather up all the dirty clothes and she would take me to the washeteria. The way we did the wash was to lay out one dirty sheet and Mother would dump all her and Clayton’s dirty clothes in the middle and then the kids and I would throw ours on top. Then I would tie it up like a knapsack. When Mother took the sheets off their bed, she would give them to us to use and we would get to wash the ones we had on our beds.  Lloydine and Lonnie slept together and Lanita slept with me by this time because she didn’t wet the bed anymore.

Mother dropped me off and then went on to meet Bob. They continued to see each other and I didn’t mind staying there by myself. The truth was, I loved the smell of detergent, the friendly hum of the machines and the cozy warmth from the dryers. I was never without a book so the time passed quickly. It was rather nice being all by myself with no one to look after. Mother had been gone about three hours when she picked me up. I had all the laundry folded and in pillowcases to take home.

As soon as we pulled up to the house we knew something was wrong. The weather had turned colder during the afternoon and Lloydine had tried to light the heater. She had used up all the matches and, confused, she couldn’t tell if the gas was still on or not. She got Lanita and Lonnie out of the house and they were all huddled under a blanket by the corner of the porch, too afraid to go back inside.

Mother was angry and Lloydine started to cry. Then so did Lanita and Lonnie. I was so grateful that Clayton wasn’t home to see and hear all this.

Life was not easy for us.  As soon as I felt a peace in my heart, something horrible would happen. I continued in my cope and survival mode, not allowing myself any but small doses of happiness whenever I could find them.

There was a front porch made of wood and painted gray - the total width of the house.  In the spring, summer and fall, that porch was covered with flies. I would take a water hose and spray it all down but it never helped. How I longed for Pine Sol or fly spray. We didn’t even have fly swatters. I remember reading in a book about a family that was poor but they were clean. I wondered how that could really be true. You needed soap and cleaning supplies to be really clean. I wanted so very much to have a clean place to live and tried my best to make our rooms as nice as I possibly could.

We lived next door to the Ramirez family. I admired Mrs. Ramirez because she had several children and stayed home with them. I watched through my window that faced their back room where I could look on into the kitchen beyond as she mopped her floors and cooked. I wanted to be just like her. All of her children were younger than we and once she asked me to babysit them for an hour or so. I loved being in her clean house. She left snacks for me to give them and they had a TV to watch cartoons. I tip toed into Mrs. Ramirez’s bedroom and marveled at the dresser where she had rows of lipsticks and powders and bottles of perfumes. I didn’t touch a single thing. I just feasted my eyes looking at it all.

The Ramirez family was large and extended. While I liked Mrs. Ramirez and her husband, her nephews were gangsters. Gilbert Ramirez was a young teenager and he had an older and meaner brother. They would torment us when Clayton and Mother weren’t at home.  He and his brother liked to tie firecrackers onto cat’s tails and light them up.   Late one night I heard someone up on the roof of our house. I was home alone with my siblings.  I went outside to see what was happening and when I looked up, Gibby (that was his nickname) kicked off one of his shoes and threw it at me. He wore metal taps on them and the metal struck me right in the forehead up by my hair line. It bled something awful and was still bleeding when Mother and Clayton came home. Lloydine remembers Clayton waking her up and telling her that he and Mother were taking me to the hospital. Clayton was all excited and they took me to the emergency room where I had several stitches. Clayton enjoyed the sight of blood no matter who’s it was and the gorier it was, the better. 

Gilbert’s cousin was gunned down and murdered years later in the Leonard’s parking lot by the gangster Paprascar and Gilbert and his brother were in and out of the penitentiary the rest of their surprisingly long lives. 

 

Since we lived close to John Peter Smith Hospital, which was and is a county hospital, Clayton took to putting us all in the car and taking us to watch for ambulances to arrive. He would also listen to his police scanner and when there were murders or traffic accidents anywhere close, he would tell all of us to get in the car and he would take us to look at them. When Mother was home, she would go, too. It was like entertainment for them and they seemed to enjoy it but we were always scared.  Clayton told us to look at all the blood and mayhem; Mother would sometimes tell us we could close our eyes. 

After school was out for the summer, Mother started working days at the answering service and I took care of my sisters and brother. I was 12 years old but I did all the child care plus the laundry and ironing and prepared most of our meals. We ate simple food. Cereal, oatmeal, and sandwiches, mostly. I knew how to cook a pot of pinto beans if I had the kitchen long enough and that was always hard to predict. Some meals were just boiled potatoes or bologna and cheese with a big dill pickle. We always had mustard for our sandwiches. I longed for sweets. For some reason we had quit going to August Pie Factory so we didn’t have any desserts. I loved Deviled Dogs, while Lloydine favored Hostess Cupcakes with the chocolate frosting and a squiggle of white piped on. Lonnie and Lanita liked Snowballs. In order to get these little treats from time to time, we would scrounge up empty cold drink bottles. You know, the kind you could return for a deposit. We crawled under vacant houses and searched high and low for these bottles and when we had enough, we would take them to the small neighborhood store at Richmond and May street and redeem them for our sweets. The store owner soon got tired of us doing that and said, “No more bottles!” Now what?

I had an idea. We were not allowed to even enter Mother and Clayton’s bedroom. But one day I snuck in there to see if I could find some change. I did better than that. I found a big fat pink piggy bank! The old-fashioned kind that you had to break to get the money out! Except I figured out how to slide a butter knife in the crack and coax a quarter, nickel or dime out. Sometimes I would get a fifty-cent piece! I then took the new-found money and bought our weekly treats. We didn’t get these every day. But, in time, the pig began to weigh noticeably less. Clayton figured it out and confronted me. He accused me of stealing his money and buying cigarettes! Now that had never even crossed my mind, but I did admit to stealing his money. Now he knew I needed money and was willing to steal in order to get it.  He told me he would not tell Mother about it if I would do a few things for him. He gave me a pair of black fishnet pantyhose and asked me to put them on. He asked me to take off some of my clothes and to pose like the photographs in a magazine he showed me. He reminded me that he was not touching me and that it was worth $5 to spend at the corner store. While I am not proud of what I did, it is a memory of that time and I must own it. I only did it once and I never told Mother.

I discovered other ways I could make a little money for our sweet treats. Babysitting. Goodness knows I knew how to do that. Faydell Hester had two small children, younger than my siblings. They lived just around the corner from us. I was twelve years old and Lloydine was nine. She was now old enough to take care of Lanita and Lonnie. About twice a month, I would babysit for Faydell on a Friday or Saturday night while she and her husband went out. Their house had really small rooms – much smaller than our rooms, but it was a real home. Everything was clean and neat. The children shared a tiny room that barely had space for the bed and a chest of drawers. Their mother would leave a snack for me to give them, usually popcorn which I popped and we would eat while watching TV. Then I would put them to bed and look around for something to do until the parents returned home. 

I was looking for a book to read and all I could find was a telephone book. It sat on the corner of the table right there by a big black rotary dial phone. We were never allowed to answer or call out on the phone at our house. I picked up the receiver and dialed a number I found randomly in the book. I had forgotten it was late at night and most people would be asleep, I heard a sleepy voice quiver, “Hello?” It scared me so I hung up! I decided that was not such a good thing to do.

Faydell took in ironing to make a little extra money on the side. I knew how to iron, so I ironed all the flat pieces that were in her basket. She paid me a little bit extra when I did this. 

One Saturday afternoon I babysat for Faydell so she could take the bus downtown and did some shopping. She told me when she got home that she had taken $5 with her. She bought pajamas for her children, a blouse for herself and a few other things. She totally forgot about needing to save enough money for her bus fare home. “Thank goodness every time I broke a dollar bill to pay for something, there would be a few cents left over,” she said, “It was just exactly enough for the bus fare!” She wasn’t able to pay me for the babysitting that afternoon, so instead, she gave me some fruit and cookies instead which I took home and shared with my siblings.

I did all of the laundry from Mother, Clayton and us at the washateria in the neighborhood. It was close enough that we could walk to it if we only had a few loads to carry. Mother gave me a small coin purse of change and the kids and I would go to do the washing like it was a real treat to get to go somewhere, which I guess it was. I liked everything about going to the washateria – the sights, sounds and smells.

While we waited for the washing cycles to end before putting them in the dryer, we would play in the vacant lot right next door. We found a book of matches so we searched around for something to burn. There was a lot of dry grass so we struck the first match and then another. We got scared when we saw the fire spreading! Someone called the fire department. We slipped back inside and finished our laundry acting like we didn’t know anything about the grass fire. This was the third time I ever played with matches, and the last.

There wasn’t a bathroom at the washeteria we had to walk home or just wait. By the end of the summer, all of our clothes were getting pretty tight on us. I was wearing a pair of white shorts that were really Lloydine’s, but it was the only clean thing I had left that I could get into. All of a sudden I needed to go to the bathroom in the worst way. Sadly, I didn’t make it back to the house in time and, since I didn’t have anything else to put on until after the clothes had finished washing and drying, I had to keep those poopy white shorts on. And then I had to walk home that way. I was humiliated. Clayton was at home so there was no way I could get to the bathroom and clean up until he left again.  I put the soiled pants in a trash bag and threw them away after I had snuck out in the backyard and hid in the bushes while I washed myself off using the water hose.

Our Aunt Viola dearly loved Mother and I believe she loved us as well. Darla was her youngest granddaughter and she was just a year or two older than I. That summer Aunt Viola loaded up her station wagon with all four of us as well as Darla and her little brother, Chuckie, and we went off to Harper, Texas to visit Aunt Viola’s boyfriend, Fritz. He was a German farmer and a kind man. Not overly friendly but he didn’t seem to mind Aunt Viola bringing us all with her when she visited.

The first thing she would do when we got there was to take a long-handled broom and sweep all the cobwebs down from the corners of the rooms. She had brought lots of extra sheets for us and we all got to sleep in a bed. Our supper that night was a big bowl of oatmeal. Our breakfast the next morning was another big bowl of oatmeal. For lunch, we had sandwiches and for dinner we had fried pork chops and sweet potatoes. The menu was repeated again and again with the only variation being the raisins we would find in our oatmeal sometimes. We were happy enough to eat whatever she gave us. Aunt Viola did all the cooking and Darla and I did the dishes. It was wonderful to be a child again and not have the responsibilities I had when we were home.

There were no curtains in the farmhouse so we would wake up with the sunrise. We loved being on that farm. Uncle Fritz had a wonderful barn with hay and horses, chickens and roosters, dogs and cats. It was a child’s dream to spend the long summer days down there.

There were no saddles on the horses but that didn’t keep us from trying to get on them. One day I got up on one of the horses and was as surprised as I could be when he took off running with me on his back. I grabbed his mane and held on for dear life. He ran out into the pasture and up along the fence line where he slowed down, stopped and started nibbling some grass. I was a long way from the barn but I could see it in the distance. I wondered how I could manage to get off of that horse so I could walk back. Just about that time, the critter raised his head, looked around and then started galloping back to the barn at a full run. I had loosened my grip on his mane and, as he began to run, I could feel myself sliding from on top of the horse’s back. Before I knew it, I was hanging under his belly! I clamped my bare feet against his side, pinching my toes into his body and holding on for all I was worth. Just as he slowed down and pranced back into the barnyard, I dropped and rolled in one swift smooth movement. When I stood up, I found that my legs were like jelly and I had to sit down on a bale of hay for several minutes. I did not mess with the horses ever again.

On our way back from Harper, Aunt Viola stopped at Lake Worth so we could go swimming. She tried her best to give us as many life experiences as she could. We headed for the water and dove right in. I’m not sure if Aunt Viola knew that not one of us could swim! The one thing we could all do, at least a little bit, was to dog paddle. That’s how Lanita got so far out into the lake and the deep water. She began to flounder when she discovered she could not touch the bottom.

This is the way Lanita’s recollection of what happened that day: “I got really scared when I couldn’t touch bottom so I paddled a little closer to shore and tried again. I was still in too deep. I kept trying to get into the shallower water but I was growing so tired I was afraid I wasn’t going to make it. No one was paying any attention to me so I decided to do what I had learned from the cartoons on TV. As I was going down the first time I held up one finger. The next time I went down, I held up two fingers. I was holding up three fingers as I went down for the third time when I felt a pair of hands encircle my waist and lift me up out of the water and throw me forward. When I landed, my feet were touching the bottom! I turned around to thank the person who saved me, and there was no one there. No one unless you count the Guardian Angel who delivered me from drowning that day. That was not the first time nor would it be the last that God sent a Guardian Angel to protect me.”

Things must have changed while we were gone with Aunt Viola. We moved every year just around Labor Day, but this year we moved to an apartment without Clayton.

1824 Galveston St.

Fort Worth, Texas

Alexander Hogg Elementary Schhol

Fort Worth, Texas

Faydell's house where I would babysit for her.

Washateria

Corner store