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What's a mother to do when her plans don't pan out?
The apartment had always been temporary, but not in the way it turned
out to be. By Spring of Nineteen Seventy-Six, I had settled into the
big bedroom and I had even gotten a modular shelving system which you
could choose how it fit together. I used one section for a bed table
between the two beds and the rest made a blocky pyramid shape for the
far wall of the room which finally left no more empty looking areas.
By May, mother rewarded me with a small black & white television
set for the room and it fit nicely on the top shelf of the unit. The
following month, I discovered the trick of the 'selfless gift' of the
T.V.: It would now be her room.
Her three pieces of furniture were moved into the area where the big
round throw rug had been while mine was moved piece by piece into the
now empty smaller bedroom. The bed had to once again be stacked into
bunk beds with my pieces of furniture squirreled into the handful of
available corners. She kept the shelving system and the T.V. though
I needed to clear my stuff and put it into boxes as I didn't have
shelves in the smaller room. After a year of slowly expanding my
belongings to fit in the large room, my stuff now seemed cramped in
the other room whereas mother's, which had just fit the smaller room,
now looked lost in the large room.
Mother explained that we were doing this because Joe, the store
owner, was separating from his wife and would soon be moving in with
us and bring his son, William. William would be taking the lower
bunk of my bed and the larger bedroom would soon be full because of
Joe's stuff when he moved in. Mother also bought a large brown faux
leather recliner for the living area of the first floor and the
original third chair of the living room set was pinched into the
smaller bedroom with me. It was nice having a club chair in my
bedroom as I had never had one before, but it now meant a bit of
careful maneuvering when crossing the room.
In July, mother arranged a play date for William and me which was the
rare time I had seen him outside of school since second grade five
years earlier. But this play date was nothing more than Joe arriving
at the apartment with William; mom and I got into his car and we
drove to an out of town burger stand for lunch. Once done, we
returned to the apartment where mom and Joe talked downstairs while
she had me show William around upstairs. About a half hour later Joe
left with William and that was the last of it. She later told me
that Joe's wife wouldn't let him leave without taking William and
mother didn't want to deal with William. I suspect in reality Joe
had never signed-up for the deal and mother set-up the lunch date
saying it was at my request. Once we'd been sent upstairs, mother
had lobbied Joe about how well the lunch went and how he should move
in, and he declined. To me,
that theory makes more sense. But it is just my theory.
For New Years Nineteen Seventy-Seven, mother decided it was silly
having the large room mostly empty to herself and me stuffed into the
smaller room and we swapped back to how it had been, only this time I
had the chair in the large room along with the rest of my original
two bed layout. I also got to keep the television.
While it was nice to have the black & white T.V. in my bedroom,
mother was so rarely home during the early evenings or Sunday
afternoons that I had plenty of time to watch the color set on the
main floor, so it sat mostly unused in the large bedroom until my
thirteenth birthday. For that year's twenty dollars and my
additional ten, I discovered a video game console I could afford at a
capital city department store and snatched it up. Featuring 'Pong'
and the single player version called 'Squash', it also had a plastic
gun and you could do target practice. The pong dot would wander
around the dark screen and you'd aim and press the trigger button and
if the light sensor in the gun saw white, you scored a point. When
Luke would visit my house we'd play this and he marveled at how good
I was at it as I most always scored. In reality, I had
accidentally found out that aiming at the white wall behind the T.V.
worked just as well as aiming at the dot, and the white wall
didn't move around either. I'm so evil.
If Joe wasn't going to move in, mother decided to make the apartment
his full service retreat away from home. Specifically, as the branch
grocery store was open Friday evenings, mother would take the
evenings off to prepare dinner for 'us'. Since moving into the
apartment, I had been on my own for food preparation, the only
exceptions being when other family members had visited during the
holidays. But now mother was actually making dinner for 'us',
meaning her & Joe... and I was welcome to join. The most
common two meals were fondue, where we could stick various small bits
of food into boiling oil or melted cheese, and 'True Italian
Spaghetti'. For the latter, mother explained that Joe had told her
that true Italian spaghetti sauce was very chunky with clumps of
vegetables and chicken and so she made that for him. These dinners
lasted for about six months, then Joe started to find excuses not to
come anymore. Mother would prepare the meal and we'd sit and wait
for Joe to come. Then she'd call to find out when he'd get there and
then a couple hours later we'd eat without him. She stopped making
Friday night dinners after three weeks of this and returned to 'work'
on those evenings instead.
We settled back to the old practice of once a month for Fridays, Joe
would take us to the burger stand out of town. Over the four years
I'd see this stand expand, starting out as a box with two serving
windows in front and a couple of picnic tables to the side. First
they made a back room with tables and chairs protected from the
weather where you could have something fancy like burger patties
without the buns as if it were therefore a ground steak dinner on a
paper plate. Then a true dining room was built in where the picnic
tables had been. Half high walls and a roof, it was enclosed with
windows all around making a rather nice space with full dinner tables
and a really expanded menu featuring items other than burgers and
fries. By the time the four years had come to an end a chain had
bought them out and it was officially a full service
restaurant. Once that happened, Joe no longer wanted to go there,
perhaps because it was too public, and we instead went to a
dank greasy spoon room attached to a small interstate highway
side-motel. Obviously intended for truckers, I wondered if this was
where mother and Joe had been coming too over the years when 'staying
at the store late to count the money'. Given the atmosphere, I soon
bowed out of joining these dinners and any pretense of being a
'family' disappeared.
Actually, as a side note, during those four years the kids in the
apartment town took it as 'common sense' that I was Joe's
illegitimate kid. This impression was enhanced when my Iroquois nose
hump sprouted in my preteens and they took it to be an Italian nose.
It turns out generations of Native American actors had made a living
playing Italian mobsters in the movies and on the small screen.
By the Spring of Nineteen Seventy-Nine, mother had realized that this
was all that her life with Joe would be and she started house
hunting. There were a few I could see living in, but mother compared
the color-painted or wall-papered walls of those houses to the bright
white walls of the apartment and found them wanting. And in
fact, she found her life of the past few years wanting and
prospective future as well.
Suddenly, I was told we were moving to Colorado.
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