A HOUSE OF COLD AND FOG

All good things must come to an end and so did my freshman year at Wesleyan.  I packed up my clothes, caught the Trailways bus and rode home to Sarasota.  I had not been home since Christmas and I could sense added tension in the household.  Dad seemed always to be working, but not earning any money.  Mom mopped the terrazzo floors every day and drank beer.  Rick and Bill were teenagers and involved in their own activities.  And Jim looked like a little boy lost.  He was quiet and anxious, wandering around the house like a small ghost.  Every night he fell asleep on the couch while we watched television in the stifling heat of summer.  It finally penetrated my consciousness that the child not only did not have a bedroom of his own, he had no bed.  My other brothers still slept in the cheerless garage with the washer and the lawnmower.  Why had I never really seen this before?

I quickly found a job downtown at Maas Brothers, selling knick-knacks and "permanent" flowers (we were not allowed to say "artificial.")  Having very few customers, I wandered around dusting vases and greeting high school friends who invariably said, "You've gained weight!" in triumphant tones.  Since after "gaining weight" I still only hit the scale at 110
pounds, I did not feel I had to go on a diet just yet. On my days off I went to the beach, little  knowing I was sowing the seeds of skin cancer which was to begin blossoming some twenty years later.  During the airless nights I sat on the couch and watched one TV show after another.  Could one die of boredom?

I began to see that my family didn't know how  to be one.  My parents never wrote me at Wesleyan; it did not occur to them that they should.  No one asked me what college was like or what I was learning.  We seldom had family outings or went on vacation.  We never talked about anything important.  We seldom talked at all.  We were six people living in an airless house.  And my little brother didn't have a bed.  That summer I realized I would never live in that house again.  One by one my brothers would leave too and escape into the world.