The House Next Door

I grew up in a very stable and immovable neighborhood. The denizens of 19th Avenue Southeast in Minneapolis had moved in early, and did not plan on moving out until they were carried out feet first (hopefully after the mortgage had been paid off.)

There was none of this modern helter skelter moving from pillar to post. I don’t know if it’s better to call it ‘putting down roots’ or ‘being shackled to the same place,’ but only capricious vagabonds moved more than once every quarter century. A ‘For Sale’ sign or a ‘For Rent’ sign was as rare in our neighborhood as a palm tree. This was a direct reaction to the Great Depression and World War Two, when ordinary people couldn’t make the rent so they snuck out a window in the middle of the night to find a cheaper place to live with a more patient landlord, and when the Draft took so many men away that it unsettled everyone else to the point where they hitchhiked around the country to different military camps looking for work on base (and love off base.) Or so said my mother, who prided herself somewhat as a social historian of those times. Her conclusion, based on these earlier historical trends, was simple:  Stay Put. There is safety with inertia. Gypsies and Communists are two sides of the same coin.

But then there was the house next door to ours. The owners rented it out to graduate students at the University of Minnesota who had families. So we had new neighbors every few years. This didn’t bother my dad one quark. His motto was “Mind Your Own Damn Business.” He didn’t care if the house next door was burning down; he was going to sit in his easy chair and watch ‘Gunsmoke’ and that was that.

Mom, on the other hand, took a dim view of having to adjust to new people, often from foreign parts, every few years. I’m not calling her bigoted or parochial -- she just wanted a homogenized and pasteurized community for her children’s sake. She herself had had enough experiences with odd and sinister characters while growing up, and they still popped up occassionally when dad would bring home some barfly comrade from Aarone’s Bar and Grill, where he tended the taps -- like a boy brings home a stray dog, hoping he can keep it. Dad seriously thought that some of these rummies could be safely stowed in the garage on a cot and function as his sidekick, uncapping his beer bottles and running to the store for cigarettes. Mom had to use her Death Stare at full force to discourage this tendency in him.

The first family I can remember renting the house next door were from Sweden. They stand out in my memory only because their two kids, a boy and a girl, were blonde, blue eyed twins, and liked to throw things at me. Twigs; rocks; toys; an occasional uprooted plant. My dad called them Frick and Frack, and they threw things at him, too. In fact they tossed stuff at everyone, including the Welcome Wagon lady who showed up on their doorstep a few days after they were settled in. Cautiously peeping from my own front porch, I witnessed the assault unfold. The mother, who spoke no English, answered the doorbell and stood smiling in mute incomprehension while the Welcome Wagon hostess made her spiel and presented the large wicker basket. Frick and Frack politely took the basket from their mother, set it down, slowly stripped off the cellophane wrapping, and began silently pelting the poor hostess with bars of perfumed soap, Brillo pads, coupon books, and packets of Kleenex. It’s a good thing there were no canned goods in that wicker basket!

The Welcome Wagon hostess retreated to her car, strewing the air with some pretty unwelcoming language, and drove off in a hurry.

The next family I recall had six kids. The father was in the military and attended the U of M for some kind of hush-hush advanced Cold War training -- learning how to make exploding cigars for Castro or some such fiddle faddle. The mother raised her clamoring brood with a firm hand, but they had a huge dog that got out of the yard one fell afternoon, loped down the alley, and ate old Mrs. Henderson’s Yorkshire terrier. Or so said mom when the dog catcher came by to pick up the beast next day. Greatly embarrassed, the whole family moved into the student housing quonset huts down on Como Avenue a few weeks later.

Most magnificent of all was the family that came from Cameroon in Africa. They were tall people. The father towered over my dad a good half foot, and the mother could look over the top of my mother’s head without getting on her tiptoes. He wore a yellow kaftan with black horizontal zig zag lines, with a bellboy hat to match. And boy, could he speak the language! They’d come directly from Oxford, where he garnered an advanced degree in higher mathematics, and spoke precise, clipped English with an accent that was the uppermost crust of the upper crust, old bean. They were classy people. No sitting on the front porch of an evening in t-shirt, dungarees, and flip flops, sucking on a beer can and belching. No sir. The whole family attended St Andrew’s Episcopal Church, not just on Sundays, but also several evenings a week -- where I suspect they were encouraged to spread Christian civilization among the heathens, meaning my own declasse family, probably.

I forget how many kids they had, since they all went to a private school -- no grody public education for them! I remember one of the boys, about my age, invited me over to play chess. I was in the 7th grade, and barely understood how to play Chinese checkers. Their living room walls were covered with carved wooden masks, of some kind of odiferous wood that made me sneeze violently. When it became obvious I hadn’t the capacity to learn how to play even a rudimentary game of chess, I was invited into the kitchen for cucumber sandwiches and a spot of Marmite. Not one lousy potato chip in sight.

The last transient family in the house next door was certainly an anomaly for the early 1960’s. A single mother working on her Master’s in Social Work, and her one daughter, Shirley. Our street was crammed cheek by jowl with nothing but stay at home moms -- but something about this lone woman struggling for an advanced degree while caring for her daughter resonated deeply with them, and they fell all over themselves being the kind of neighborly folk you might meet in Mayberry, but nowhere else. She was inundated with hearty casseroles and thick slabs of dessert bars, “so you don’t have to wear yourself out cooking after a long day at school, dear.”

Shirley was in the same grade as I was at Marshall High School, so I saw a lot of her. She had long brown mousey hair, freckles, and a soft brooding expression that could light up into a heady smile in a second. She played the guitar, and in the summer she would often sit out on her front porch strumming those early Dylan tunes, like Blowin’ in the Wind, that adults thought were Kremlin-inspired blasphemy. And although I still thought of girls as suspicious agents bent on some kind of worldwide conspiracy to hector or embarass me to death, Shirley obviously had defected from that evil organization. She seemed to like it when I came over to listen to her play the guitar. Her mom brought out iced tea for us. She began to disturb me, and I started to obsess about her in a sweaty Peter Lorre kind of way. I couldn’t act normal around her (not that I ever acted normal most of the time anyway) and was tongue tied and diffident when trying to talk to her. One evening I finally managed to blurt out “You sure play good -- I could listen to you all night.” She gave me a brilliant smile, then took my hand. We silently held hands as the twilight melted into darkness. And then, seeing Venus, I suppose it was, on the black rim of the sky, I recited to Shirley:

Star light star bright

First star I see tonight

I wish I may I wish I might

Have the wish I wish tonight

“What are you gonna wish for, Tim?” she asked me.

“A kiss from you.”

“Okay. But just one.”

Afterwards her mother brought out a second pitcher of iced tea, even though we had barely touched the first pitcher. She went back inside to turn on the porch light, then joined us, sitting in a rattan chair that was unraveling like an old bale of hay. She fanned herself with a section of the Minneapolis Tribune and asked pleasantly “Well, what have you kids been talking about out here all night?”

Stupefied by the sudden rush of hormones circulating through our bodies, neither Shirley nor I could frame a comprehensible reply. I think I finally managed something like “Duh, yup” in a voice like that of Pinto Colvig, and then stumbled back home.

That was the only kiss I got from Shirley, because within a week their rented house had been sold right out from under them. The new owners wanted to take immediate possession. They had to find a new place, pronto. It turned out to be an apartment in the wilds of Rosedale, beyond that last bastion of civilization, Apache Plaza. I helped Shirley carry boxes into their Volkswagen van, and waved wanly at its dwindling backside. We hadn’t exchanged phone numbers or addresses or anything. The whole thing was one of those sudden, crushing blows that make the universe seem uncaring, or even malign.

That was a long time ago, but the poignancy is still sharp. Think I’ll go drown my sorrows with a generous slug of Metamucil . . .