Left To My Own Devices
Eve Marx
Author’s childhood home
Word Count 1280
On fitful nights when I can’t sleep, I like to walk myself through a house I lived in when I transitioned from child to teen. My mother, who had been out of my life for several years, wagged her finger and said I had to live with her. She rented the house, a beat-up Victorian, in the same small South Jersey town she grew up in and claimed to loathe. After a five-year hiatus from having to mother me, she took it into her head to open a business in this town which was, of course, very familiar, but also where her man friend had his law practice. He also owned the commercial building where she had her business and possibly found the Victorian house for us to live in. While we were in it, he used the house to store a trio of oil paintings by the Philadelphia-based portrait painter Thomas Sully. He was hiding them from his third wife, who believed they belonged to her and was still fighting him to get them. Although he advised my mother to keep them hidden away, she boldly hung them on the stained cabbage rose wallpapered walls of the Victorian’s faded front parlor.
My mother was seldom home. I was an only child, which meant I had the run of the house. I explored it minutely with my little dog Dolly, a Pekingese gifted to me as a consolation prize after the death of my father. Even though I was just ten when we moved in, my mother expected me to dust and make the beds and do the laundry and cook simple meals—all of which I was perfectly capable of doing.
Angry as I was about having to live with her again, I was seduced by the house. Its raw bones enthralled me. I didn’t have the words for it at the time, but it was a bohemian rhapsody. The kitchen was a hideous wreck and the bathrooms were crumbling and rusty, but I looked past all of that and fell under the spell of the double parlor with its fabulous pocket doors and the transom panes of beveled glass that allowed in dappled light. As my mother had been living in hotels and possessed no furniture of her own, her man friend partially furnished the house. He loaned us things from his supply of distressed antiques and semi-antiques he’d won at auction at Freeman’s, a famous Philadelphia auction house. The Victorian’s battered but beautiful cherry wood hallways and the two parlor floors he covered with old Persian rugs. There was an old velvet divan and pair of stained brocade wing chairs, and in the dining room, there was a monstrous mahogany dining room set where my mother occasionally served him corned beef sandwiches he’d brought from the famous 4th Street Deli. Upstairs, there were four bedrooms, two walk-in cedar closets, and a tiny alcove sewing room my mother turned into a tv room because she didn’t sew.
The third floor was my private domain. To reach it one had to climb a very steep staircase with no hand railing. The rooms had deeply slanted, sloping ceilings. My favorite room was papered in its original 1940s trailing vines. I dragged a slipper chair up the stairs and placed it near the window where I began writing made up things and drawing tiny pictures.
Some funny things happened in that house. Once, a few of my new sixth-grade chums came over after school. They were eager to visit because there was no adult supervision. High on sugar and salt from the Cokes and chips we were eating, I shared a hilarious story about my dog Dolly grabbing my mother’s panty girdle as she was getting dressed for work and dragging it under the bed. I described my mother on her hands and knees in a tug of war with my dog. Rosemary, who plucked her brows and attended the John Robert Powers Modeling School said she was wearing a girdle under her slacks. “A girdle!” someone cried and the next thing I knew, we were depantsing her on the floor. while she twisted and writhed in mock fear or possibly real fear. She says she doesn’t remember. I still remember her girdle, which was puckered and pink and white, with ruching on the sides.
My mother, who was not much for housework, hired Teeny to help out. Teeny was an extremely social person who thought nothing of inviting her friends to come over to keep her company while she was vacuuming. More than once I came home from school to find Teeny taking a cleaning break, smoking cigarettes, and drinking a beer with a friend or two in the kitchen. They were always jovial and always invited me to join them. Teeny was married. Her husband’s name was Mix. She had two children, Laura, who was about my age, and Luxury, who was a baby. Teeny was pregnant with Luxury when she started working for my mother. After Luxury was born, I asked Teeny why she’d named the baby Luxury.
“Because the idea of having another baby at my age is purely a luxury,” she said.
For about six months, we had a house guest. Her name was Mary Stibitz and she was just released from prison where she’d served a few years for child endangerment. A concerned neighbor called the police while she was on a three-day bender. They discovered her passed out on the couch with her two young daughters, one still in diapers, tied to chair legs. In her testimony, she said she wasn’t neglecting them and in fact had cared for them by leaving half-pint cartons of milk and bowls of cereal on the floor within their reach so they would have something to eat and drink while she was unconscious.
My mother’s man friend represented Mary at her trial, and he convinced my mother to give her one of the empty bedrooms in the Victorian until she could get back on her feet. She took a miserable sounding job in a factory where she spent her day making hats and kept to herself, rarely using the kitchen, and slipping in and out of the bathroom on the second floor like a ghost so my mother barely noticed her presence. From her time in jail, however, she’d developed an aversion to Motown and I was all about the Supremes and “You Can’t Hurry Love” which I played at top volume on my suitcase turntable stereo, singing along loudly. Mrs. Stibitz and I were often alone in the house and I’d crank up the stereo which caused her to open her bedroom door, screaming at the top of her lungs, “Shut up! Shut up!” I delighted in arousing her anger and spent a lot of time at the library reading old newspapers to learn everything I could about her.
From Teeny, I developed the habit of smoking cigarettes which I did, surreptitiously, blowing smoke out the upstairs bathroom window. My mother only smoked when she was on dates and had a cocktail in her hand. She didn’t really drink either. But one night she surprised me after a dinner I’d made of toast and bacon and scrambled eggs, by pulling out a package of Virginia Slims. The brand was very new. I think she was impressed with the marketing.
“Shall we?” she said and we lit up, me feeling very grown-up and worldly because I was far suaver than she about match striking. We sat in the kitchen smoking for a few minutes. It was nice.
“You know cigarettes stunt your growth,” she said before stubbing hers out.
Eve is a journalist and author currently scraping out a tiny living crafting police reports for newspapers in New York and Oregon. She is the author of What’s Your Sexual IQ?, The Goddess Orgasm, 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex
