Children in the Closet - Chapter 15

 Chapter 15

We had just been living there a week or so when it snowed! On March 5. I was sitting outside on our tiny little balcony on the second floor watching the street when big fat flakes of snow began to fall. I ran over and knocked on Gloria’s door and she came out to see. We were as excited a couple of kids to see snow in March. Truth be told, we were a couple of kids! We each sat there with a baby on our laps taking in the beauty of a spring snow.

I loved Mrs. Morrison dearly and she loved us. Every weekday afternoon, I would put Summer down for her nap and leave the door open so I could hear her if she cried and I would go downstairs and watch soap operas with Mrs. Morrison. She left her door open, as well, and she always had a glass of tea waiting for me when I got there.

We watched several programs together and Mrs. Morrison called them her stories.  The first one was Search for Tomorrow followed by The Edge of Night and then our favorite - As the World Turns.  Summer would wake up and I’d go upstairs to get her and bring her back down as we finished out with The Secret Storm and General Hospital.

We didn’t watch all of them every single day and missed them completely on Tuesdays when we went to WMU but we saw enough to keep up with the story lines. Once again, I was looking for normal even in the television shows I was watching and never seemed to find what I was looking for. 

When I was younger and still at home, I would watch shows like Ozzie and Harriet and Leave it to Beaver. They were wonderful and I longed to have that kind of family but even I knew that was never going to be a part of my life. Mother was nowhere near being a Mrs. Nelson or Mrs. Cleaver and Daddy was gone and he had never struck me as a big personality and wise father figure like the ones I saw on TV. Clayton was a wild card and didn’t fit into any of the family scenes.

I was a mother and wife and so much younger than the ones I saw on Mrs. Morrison’s soap operas and Jesse was unlike any of the men characters, so I was still left searching for what life should be like for me.

I noticed that the couples on TV would go out to dinner and perhaps take in a movie. I suggested this to Jesse and reminded him that he went out twice a month without me. Perhaps once a month, he could take me to a movie or something. Mrs. Morrison was only too happy to babysit Summer for us so the next Friday we had a date night! 

I will never forget the movie. We went downtown to the Majestic theater and saw Sean Connery in Goldfinger.  

Most of our Friday nights were spent buying groceries and going to the washeteria. Sometimes we would get a hamburger and maybe some fries. 

I told Jesse one day that I didn’t have much to do during all the long hours he was working. Summer was still taking two naps a day and Gloria had more family around than I did so we didn’t visit all that much. I tried cooking and slowly improved but our lack of money to buy all the ingredients for a recipe prevented me from doing more than prepare basic meals.

I watched Julia Child in The French Chef and yearned to be able to cook – not so much like her but just to be able to cook, period! The one thing I could do was set the table and make things as pretty as possible. I did that when Jesse was home. Most meals I ate alone and always had a book next to my plate.

Since I had only finished 7th grade, and I knew it wasn’t likely that I would be going back to school, I tried to figure out how I could somewhat educate myself. I read somewhere that if you read the Reader’s Digest from cover to cover every single month, you would be able to talk intelligently to absolutely anyone. So, every month when we bought groceries, I would buy the latest issue of Reader’s Digest for fifty cents and proceed to read every single word on every single page.

One day, Jesse came home with a couple of packages under his arms. He had been to a dime store looking for things I could do to stay busy and had found some craft kits. I was so excited! I had never done crafts before and opened up one of the packages. It was a picture plaque you could make by gluing on small colored stones and various other beads and such. The picture was outlined for you and everything was included – plaque, pattern, stones, even the glue!

Another package was netting and other materials to make poodle dogs. After I did these in the following weeks, he brought home paint by number kits. It was kind of him to think of things that would keep me occupied and these first projects would lead into a lifelong interest in arts and crafts.

I had suffered from toothaches since I was 11 years old, and the front tooth that had been chipped to the nerve when I fell off that bicycle four years ago had turned black with an infection. I coped with the pain better during the day but at night it would hurt so much I couldn’t sleep. I would wrap up in a quilt and go in the kitchen and lie on the floor underneath the open windows trying to get cold enough to fall asleep.

Jesse finally called a dentist and took me in. He said the tooth was too abscessed to pull immediately and gave us a prescription for antibiotics. He also gave me some pain pills to help get me through the next few days. 

I had been so embarrassed by the way my smile looked with that front black tooth and now I was even more embarrassed to not even have a front tooth. We didn’t have the money for a partial that the dentist suggested but Jesse promised we would save up and get it as soon as we could. That’s when I started wearing earrings every day from the time I got up in the morning until I went to bed at night. I didn’t want to be ugly so I thought if I looked nice all over except for my smile, I would feel better. I also learned not to smile as often.

It took him nearly a month but Jesse made good on his promise and I was so grateful. I continued to have toothaches nearly every day but none were quite as bad as that front one had been.

When Jesse started working for Kenneth as a mason’s helper, he was making $1.25 an hour. To make a little extra, Jesse would clean his boss’s house and do his laundry and Jesse did that himself. I never set foot in Kenneth’s house. I was proud of Jesse being such a hard worker and doing whatever he could to provide for Summer and me.

He had just been given a $.50 raise so he now made $1.50 an hour. However, a job came in that was out of town and Jesse, his boss and a helper named Claud, would be gone for a week, maybe more. Jesse knew I would be upset about him being gone so he didn’t tell me until the very last minute when he was walking out the door. I cried and cried at the thought of being left alone for all that time. He promised to come home on Friday. I tried to be a grown up about it but I couldn’t help being depressed.

I continued to take care of Summer and one evening we were walking up and down the big spiral staircase just for something to do when the lady who lived in apartment #1 opened her door and invited us in. Her name was Ann and she lived alone. She was probably about 50 years old. She could have been younger because at 15, nearly everyone around me those days looked old.

Ann was cooking her dinner and invited us to stay. The smell was wonderful! She was frying potatoes and onions. I don’t remember what else she was cooking that night but I never forgot those potatoes and onions. I had fried potatoes since I was 9 years old. But I had never thought to add onions.

It tasted so good that night and forever after I would cook potatoes and onions just like Ann did.

Friday came and went and Jesse didn’t come home. I was hysterical. Saturday was a long lonely day and he still didn’t come home. Finally, on Sunday afternoon, Mrs. Morrison came upstairs to tell me I had a phone call. We didn’t have a telephone but she was gracious in allowing us to use her number as long as we didn’t abuse the privilege. She stayed with Summer and I ran downstairs to the telephone. She had already told me it was Jesse. He apologized but said the job had run long and it had rained twice and that had stopped work. They still had another two days and then he would be home.

I was so relieved to hear from him that I didn’t cry or get upset at first. In my mind, I had begun to think he had left and would never be back and I had been wildly wondering what I would do and what would happen to me and my baby.

As it was, the only real and true concern I had was that we were all but out of groceries. We lived from Friday night to Friday night as far as food was concerned and here it was Sunday afternoon and he was telling me it would be Wednesday before he would be home. He suggested I borrow $5 from Mrs. Morrison but that wouldn’t really help since she didn’t have a car to take me to the grocery store and there wasn’t one within walking distance and I didn’t know how to ride the bus or know the schedule and routes that would take me to one. Plus, Summer was getting too big for me to carry her for long at a time. I only weighed 100 pounds and she was nearly 18 pounds herself plus I would have to carry the groceries.

I started to cry and he started to get mad. He said he would be home as soon as he could and hung up on me. I sat there a minute or two composing myself before slowly walking back upstairs. I tried to be cheerful about it and Mrs. Morrison pretended not to notice my red swollen eyes. She stayed a few more minutes and then went back downstairs.

Summer wasn’t on formula anymore so I checked to see how much milk we had left. I hadn’t used any of it and I was glad because there was enough for 3 more bottles. She would need more than that but I had a box of powdered milk that we kept for emergencies. I figured that if I mixed real milk with water and powdered milk – there would be enough for at least 3 days – maybe 4.

We were out of baby food but I found a package of spaghetti dinner and 2 cans of spaghetti plus a couple of cans of soup and a tin of tuna fish along with a few odds and ends that were in the refrigerator. We could make do. All at once I was grateful for that good meal we had at Ann’s a few nights before. 

I knew without a doubt we wouldn’t go hungry. I could always ask Mrs. Morrison for some food. The point was I didn’t want to have to do that. I was supposed to be a grown up now and not have to be asking for help or for someone to take care of me. 

We made do and Jesse came home late Wednesday afternoon. I already had Summer in her high chair feeding her spaghetti – again. It was a good thing she really like spaghetti. The first thing I did was clean her up and insist that Jesse take us to the grocery store – right then! And he did.

Two weeks later, he had to go out of town again. But this time he decided it would be better if I went over to Fort Worth and stayed with Mother. Clayton had left her for another woman and Mother and my siblings were living with Aunt Viola. I went downstairs and asked Mrs. Morrison if I could use her telephone. I called Mother and she asked Aunt Viola if it was okay if Summer and I came over to stay for a few days. She agreed and Jesse took us over the night before he was going out of town.

I was excited to be able to see my family again since I had been banned from the house after I married. Clayton told Mother if he ever saw my baby, he would kill her. I think he thought that would make me stay away and it did. When Mother left Clayton, she had nowhere to go and it was kind of Aunt Viola to take her and Lloydine, Lanita and Lonnie in. It was even kinder for her to let Summer and me stay with her for a few days.

We arrived with a diaper bag, a sack of clothes for me and $10 to buy groceries since we would be there nearly a week and Mother didn’t have extra money to feed us and Aunt Viola was already footing the bill for all of us to be there.

Sadly, Mother had taken up with an alcoholic named Benny. Lanita and Lloydine begged and begged Mother not to let him stay with them at Aunt Viola’s but she let him stay anyway. Benny scared all of us every bit as much as Clayton had, just in a different way. We had been traumatized by Clayton wielding his gun and shooting randomly out of the car window as he drove along with all of us kids in the back seat. And we remembered the time he shot the light bulb out in the bathroom and then shot a hole through my book. But Benny was even scarier if that was possible. 

For one thing, he stayed drunk most of the time. At least Clayton didn’t drink. Thank God for that. Plus, Benny was self-destructive and threatened to kill himself and would wave the gun around so wildly that we were afraid he would accidently shoot one of us. I was surprised that Aunt Viola let him stay there but our aunt was extremely partial to Mother and put up with a lot more from her than she would have from even her own daughter.

The first night I was there, things weren’t so bad. The second night, Mother uncharacteristically started drinking and got drunk. We were all piled up in the big bed and were talking together, Mother and all four of us kids and Summer was sitting in the middle of us and we were all playing with her. It seemed strange to us to hear Mother slur her words and act silly. She had never done this before. Pretty soon she went to sleep and we all crept off the bed and sat bewildered in the living room not quite knowing what to do. Aunt Viola worked nights as a nurse so Summer and I went in and slept on her bed and the kids made themselves beds on the floor with quilts and blankets. Benny didn’t come to the house that night and we later realized that was probably what made Mother mad so she drank up his liquor not that she wanted it but to get even with him. 

The next morning, she acted like nothing had happened so we played along and pretended just as we always did. In a way, I was sorry I had brought my baby into this situation. On the other hand, I had missed my brother and sisters and it made me sad to see that their life wasn’t any better than it had been and was perhaps even worse.

School was out for the summer so I did enjoy being there as long as it was just us. Aunt Viola stayed in her bedroom during the day to sleep and Mother was working at the answering service so as long as Benny didn’t show up, we had a good time. 

Summer wasn’t quite walking on her own yet so the kids took turns holding onto her and letting her toddle around the house. Lloydine took care of her while Lanita and I walked to August Pie Factory just a few blocks away and I bought us all some day-old baked goods. When we got back, I fried some bologna and potatoes and opened a big can of cling peaches for a good meal when Mother got home from work.

The next night Aunt Viola made a big pan of goulash for supper since she didn’t have to go to work and we had the apricot pie I bought for dessert. That was a nice evening until Benny showed up – drunk as usual. Mother left with him driving and we wondered why she would go anywhere with a man who was so drunk he couldn’t even walk straight. She said, “The more he drinks, the better he drives.”

Now that didn’t make sense even to us. But the good thing is that they were gone and that meant we had a good time together. 

Jesse arrived to take Summer and me home just a day after he said he would. I was glad to get away from Mother and Benny but sad that my sisters and brother had to stay there because there was nowhere else for them to go. 

Just a week later, Mother brought Lanita over to stay with me while Jesse once again went out of town. After Mother left, Lanita told me that Benny had threatened to commit suicide right there in front of all three of them – Mother was at work and Aunt Viola was asleep. Instead of shooting himself while they watched, he shot holes in the floor of Aunt Viola’s living room. That did it! She told Mother she had to leave. Mother did. She took the kids and moved back to Bewick Street where they had been living with Clayton. Turns out she didn’t leave Clayton, after all. He had left her for a 22-year-old school teacher. Mother was now 38 and had been married to Clayton for less than 6 years. 6 years of trauma and drama for her children and now life went from bad to worse for Lloydine, Lanita and Lonnie. Benny moved in with them.

Now that Clayton was gone, money was even tighter than it had been. They lived on rice and beans and little else. Grandma Collins would help out by taking food over from the Food Bank whenever she could. As a nurse, she knew more about what resources were available to needy families. Even so, there was never an abundance of nutritious food in the house. 

Mother used the fact she had so little money as the reason she let Benny live there. But the kids didn’t see how he was much help since he was too drunk to hold down a job.

One afternoon Mother told the kids to get in the car with her and Benny. They were going to the grocery store. Apparently, Benny had a bit of money and Mother wanted to use it for a bill of groceries before he drank it all up. Lanita was sick and didn’t want to go but Mother insisted. They had just gone a mile or two when the car died. They were on a side street – Benny avoided major roads and highways – because of his drinking. Everyone got out to push it so except Lanita. She was lying down in the back seat and when she felt the car start rolling and picking up speed and heard everyone screaming and yelling, she jumped over the seat and got behind the wheel. However, her legs were too short to reach the brake pedal so she crouched down in the floor board and pushed down on the brake with both hands and managed to bring the car to a stop. When she raised herself up, she saw that the car was inches away from going through a plate glass window of a business. Mother, Lonnie and Lloydine ran up to the car and when they all looked around for Benny, they found he had fallen flat on his face in the road. He was so drunk he just passed out and lay there without even realizing how close they had come to wrecking the car with Lanita in it.

Mother never seemed to be able to attract a decent man and she seldom gave up on a bad one.

Even after all the shenanigans Benny pulled, she did not make him leave. One day a week or so after the car incident, Benny took Lonnie with him over to see a buddy. They started drinking and when it was time to go home, Benny was so drunk he couldn’t see to drive. He sat 8-year-old Lonnie in his lap and told him to steer the car. Lonnie did and they made it home. Mother didn’t seem to think there was a problem with that at all. 

Thankfully, Benny left one afternoon to go to the store and didn’t come back for a couple of months. The kids were so relieved. However, Mother managed to hook up with a couple of other losers while she waited for Benny to return.

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I waited until late this afternoon to decide whether to publish this unedited chapter or not.

Amber is my editor and she is one busy lady!

Not only is she the mom of Trystan, Kailey, Harrison and Logan - who are all the within a minute of being the same age, she also supports all four in their hockey games, the girls' band, and is a free lance writer working on her own writing projects.

This photo is of her as she was going to interview an interior decorator for a featured article in Fort Worth magazine.

I'm grateful for her expertise and will update this post with her added edits soon.

I also thank my friend, Nikki, for catching mistakes for me.

And, as always, thank you for reading my words and being so supportive of me.