I will myself back to the top of our basement stairs at 830 North Ash—our “new” basement—goose-bump chilly, a little skittish at the edge of darkness and rising dank. Hungry nonetheless for the lives that lay below. Restaurateur, dress-shop owner, teacher. The rest of the house is quiet. Mother’s writing letters; Daddy’s falling asleep over his Time Magazine. I slide between realities.
*****
We moved from our first small bungalow when I was seven—on the wheels of my dad’s longing for success in some arena of his life. He’d gone to college to be a high school biology teacher, when no such jobs were available in Dust-Bowl Depression Kansas. In 1946, at the end of his noncombatant Navy weatherman service, he came back to McPherson and took the work that he could find—insurance underwriting for a hometown company run by Ebenezer Scrooge. My sister predated the war. I followed. Mother sewed and gardened and crafted Sunday school lessons and hosted church banquets, yearning, I think, for something of her life in the decade she spent as an independent, city-savvy school teacher.
But the brick-veneer baby Tudor fed my dad’s aspirations for respectability and status in our county-seat town. Set on a corner lot with a gracious, middle-aged elm in front, it offered two first-floor bedrooms, a den, a counter-less kitchen, and the remnants of a basement apartment—the space we’d needed for a steady stream of visitors. Plus a sunken living room with an 18-foot tall wooden-beamed ceiling, a knotty-pine feature wall that framed a big mirror and a gas fireplace—elegances the likes of which weren’t part of our story. My mother accepted the move to better accommodate company and asked my dad to enlarge her unusable kitchen.
But that was before my folks discovered that water sluiced down the basement walls with every summer thunderstorm. And that the previous owners sold the house to avoid evicting resident termites entrenched in the studs and floor joists, hidden from view by the “finished” basement’s celotex ceiling tiles.
I suspect that my parents funded exterminators and carpenters only by approaching one of their church-friend bankers for a loan. They never solved the flooding. Every rain sent my mom down to the basement—layering old bedspreads, frayed towels, and ancient dresses around the perimeter. When the sun shone, we ran the rags through her 1929 Maytag ringer washer and hung them out on the line to dry.
Which meant that my folks’ dream of having ample and hospitable room for company never materialized. When someone visited, we’d move downstairs ourselves—surrounded by those rags and sagging ceiling tiles, a flat or two of plums waiting to be canned, Christmas wrapping paper.
Which meant that the basement was mine. Literally. When friends came over, we played outside or upstairs.
The kitchen was almost as big as my mother’s, but outfitted from another era: icebox, tiny apartment gas stove, a white wood and enamel Hoosier cupboard, a grimy sink. The old apartment’s living room, next to the kitchen, sported the davenport and chair too dated for the sunken living room, my folks’ first brick and board bookcase, their original dining table, and the orange crate toy shelf my mom built for my sister during the war.
Never mind that we almost never ate out unless maiden Aunt Mary was paying, I knew the business. I cut out food from construction paper—little green rounds for peas, hunks of brown for roast, splotches of cream colors for potatoes, yellow peaches, orange carrots, two-layered fried eggs. I intermingled some relative’s discarded serving dishes with my doll’s pink plastic ones. I talked out loud as I took customers’ orders and delivered plates to the dining table. I air-mixed dough on the Hoosier’s pull-out enamel shelf and baked in the oven. I can’t recall being fussed by the rain-catcher bedding or the National Geographics that curled up in musty piles in the bookcase. Diners seemed to enjoy the café–as did I. Who needed a dad-made, miniature kitchen with the real McCoy right there.
Mother had sacrificed most everyone’s cast off clothes to flood prevention. But the adjacent bedroom closet held garments wildly unsuited to her mop and ringer operation: svelte, short, beaded black dresses she hadn’t worn for 15 years, a long moss-green satin gown with lace insets, a couple pink taffeta party dresses, my dad’s wool Navy uniforms—complete with improbable 13 button flies, and an assortment of store-bought, cousin hand-me downs made of shiny, impermeable fabric.
Earlier tenants had painted the bedroom a bilious turquoise not much brightened by the naked light bulb. So, I used the space as my stockroom, taking dresses out to elegant ladies in the living room—now envisioned as a women’s ready-to-wear store. Drawing on a little experience from Mother’s shopping, I could talk style and design flatteries with my customers. We spoke about cost in hushed voices. I’d retrieve alternatives for picky shoppers, picturing myself as efficient and chic. No one bought the uniform pants.
And then, when food service and clerking seemed dull, I had the back room. It lacked even a ground-level window. The chain on the fluorescent fixture was broken. I stood on tiptoe feeling around in serious dark to reach the “classroom” light. Tucked back of the furnace, the space was a warm and cheerful yellow. My mom’s single-girl trunk sat dead center—the room’s altar. Once in a great while, Mother would stop by on a trip downstairs for laundry—and open it: double-decker interior packed with beaded purses, unframed oil paintings, musical programs, worn pastel chalks. She didn’t linger; I didn’t beg. Once every so often was enough for me to see and idolize that young flapper teacher.
I took up my own teaching career around the trunk. We had an easel and a 1920s child’s chalkboard, framed by simple alphabet letters and stylized animals. Those cast-off celotex tiles propped on boxes served as bulletin boards. I gathered up magazines and my folks’ old spelling and arithmetic texts. I turned a cast-off ledger into a grade book, handed out my own school worksheets, and exhorted and encouraged. I tried not to mimic all-too-real second-grade teacher Miss Karber/Miss Carburetor, notorious for making classmate Teddy stand in front of the radiator all morning with his pee-soaked pants, punishment—seemingly–for all of us.
I don’t remember when I abandoned my make-believe basement professions. In 1997, when my sister and I sorted and emptied the house to ready it for sale, all the accoutrements of my imaginary lives were still in situ. I seem to have gone upstairs one day, likely into junior high anxieties and crushes, without looking back.
While we combed through the basement, I took a little time to list what I saw—to capture as fast as I could that make-believe world. I shipped Mother’s trunk home to Montana. Her oil paintings light my living room. The little chalkboard hangs above my desk.
Except for a problematic single year of high school history teaching, I pursued none of my fancied professions. But the sheer exhilaration of action, service, conversation, competencies, possibilities, adulthood in that miniature realm set the growing-up stage for me. I couldn’t wait to join the working world, see what might happen, be out on my own.
The basement haunted my father his whole life. He paid—he believed—a steep price for his pride and envy, his wish to own a home “like the guys on Main Street.” In an era before home inspections and with his Kiwanis Club watching, he had no way to undo his choice or recoup his losses. He never risked his finances or limited construction knowledge to remodel the kitchen. He never joined my sister and me as we sorted. After my mother’s death, he stayed on Ash Street just a year and then moved, easily, gratefully, into a retirement community apartment. And told us that it was the first time in half-a-century that he could sleep through rain. ©
