When I Was Your Age, Volume Two

by When I Was Your Age, Volume 02 (retail) (epub)

  I thought to myself, “It better be a boy.” A baby brother would allow me to be The Baby Sister, a secondary role, but one that would certainly have more status than being The Middle Child.

  She delivered it on June 12, right on schedule.

  It was a girl.

  She named it Sherry Hope.

  She actually thought that she had invented the name Sherry.

  I found out that she was nursing it instead of giving it a bottle, and that was just more proof of how she was just too old and too old-fashioned to be having babies. To myself, I called it Sherry Hope-There’s-No-More.

  Back then, Southside Hospital in Youngstown, Ohio, kept women who had just given birth for two full weeks, and they would not allow anyone under the age of fourteen to set foot inside. So Harriett, who was fifteen and a half, got to see it, and so did Aunt Rozella. Uncle Iz could have gone if he had wanted to. Even Aunt Ruth was allowed to go. Aunt Ruth was about to have a baby herself, but Southside let her in regardless of what she might be carrying. Not me. They wouldn’t let me see it. Everyone who did said that it was as beautiful as its name.

  Since Dad’s new job meant that he had regular working hours, he went every night, and guess who he took along with him? Harriett, his fifteen-and-a-half-year-old daughter. He told me that even though he, too, had wanted a boy, he had to admit that it was beautiful.

  So on the fifteenth day after it was born, Harriett and my father went to the hospital to bring them home. I had to stay behind to redd up the house. I waited by the window until I saw the car pull up. I was outside by the curb waiting when she stepped out of the family Plymouth and handed me a bundle in a pink flannel receiving blanket. She told me to support its neck.

  I pulled the blanket back.

  And I saw.

  I saw the most beautiful baby in the whole world. A gorgeous, golden baby girl.

  This was no “it.” This was Sherry. Sherry Hope Lobl. This was my baby sister, as bright and as golden as the wine of her name.

  From that moment on, I didn’t want to let her go, and I never have. The new baby of the family became the girl who is my sister who became the woman who is my lifelong friend.

  Sherry and I are both grandmothers now. She lives in southern Ohio, and I live in north Florida, but we talk to each other on the phone every day — sometimes a couple of times a day — and we have the phone bills to prove it.

  “In those Youngstown days when my father was out of work and trying so hard to find a job, I didn’t know that what was happening to our family was happening to a lot of other families, too. That period of history is so famous that it has a name: The Great Depression.

  When I was your age, the only way I could relate to the world at large was by reading books, but what I found there never matched what I saw around me. If the kids were poor, they lived in England a long time ago. If they had adventures, they didn’t live in landlocked places like Farrell, Pennsylvania, or Youngstown, Ohio. And if their mothers were having babies, no one mentioned varicose veins or children who felt they were being replaced.

  I was a grown woman and a mother of three before I even thought about becoming a writer. After the third of my three children started kindergarten, I decided to write. I was prompted to do so more by incidents that happened in their lives than by incidents that happened in mine. I wanted to write something that reflected their kind of growing up because when I was your age, I never felt that the books I read reflected me.

  My sister Harriett lived in Farrell until last year, when she moved to nearby Hermitage. Both of her married children live near Youngstown.

  I don’t think you would call my cousin Morley cute now, but you would call him handsome. He is still smart for his age. He is a federal judge in Ohio.

  The yellow brick building that was William McKinley Elementary School is boarded up, and the little patch of yard around it is littered and unkempt. Towns change. Memories don’t. In my mind, those yellow bricks are golden.”

  In the summer of 1959, I spent every weekday as an assistant to Mr. Pinnie Oler, librarian and driver of the bookmobile. This was in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It was a very hot summer. In fact, on the day I want especially to tell about, July 23, WGRD radio announced that it was the hottest day of the decade so far: 103º.

  The bookmobile was an old, rickety school bus painted blue. It was fitted inside with bookshelves and two leather benches you could sit on to read. The benches were repaired with small strips of masking tape. There was a fan screwed to the dashboard, and a second fan was nailed to the back shelves, so that air circulated nicely and helped cool things down.

  Mr. Oler was, I would guess, about forty. He had a slight Dutch accent. There were a lot of Dutch Reform churches in town. He was about five feet eight inches tall, the same height as my father. Mr. Oler had a thin face, a sad face, I thought. He had sandy brown hair combed straight back. He always wore tan-colored slacks, white socks, black high-topped tennis shoes and a long-sleeved white shirt. He never rolled up the sleeves, not even on the hottest day of the 1950s.

  In the Grand Rapids Press, the job had been listed as a “volunteer position.” The day after school got out, June 9, my mother, Estelle, took me to the bookmobile and said, “My son’s interested in the job.” After shaking my hand and scarcely looking me over, Mr. Oler said, “He’ll do fine.” I started work the very next morning. My job included repairing torn pages with Scotch tape, spraying books with a special solution that killed dust mites, writing out overdue notices, and other odds and ends. From the get-go, I took my job seriously. When I stepped into the bookmobile at 8:45 on the corner of Giddings and Market Street, Mr. Oler would say, “Good morning, kid,” then hand me a list of chores. Also, he kept an ice chest near his seat and gave me a bottle of Ne-Hi orange soda to go with my lunch every noon. Actually, in the Midwest we called it “pop,” not soda. I remember this job as being the first thing I was truly proud of.

  I had only one friend — one was enough. His name was Paul Amundson. I would have hung out with Paul after work and on weekends, no doubt about it, but that summer he was visiting his grandparents in Norway. I wrote him a letter:

  Dear Paul,

  I’m working on the bookmobile this summer. See you this September.

  Your friend,

  Howard

  It was the first letter I ever wrote. A few weeks later, I got Paul’s return postcard from Norway; it had a stamp showing the head and antlers of a reindeer.

  Let us say that you were standing next to the driver’s seat of the bookmobile and facing the back. Filling the right-side top three shelves were books about zoology, astronomy, medicine, all under the category of SCIENCE. The bottom three shelves held GOVERNMENT/SOCIAL SCIENCE. The shelves along the back wall contained SPORTS/RECREATION/HOBBIES. Now, along the left side of the bookmobile: the top three shelves held FICTION/ POETRY, whereas the bottom three were reserved for children’s books, under the sign that said JUVENILE. The wooden card catalogue was in the back left corner. On top of the catalogue was a slotted box: BOOK REQUESTS.

  The bookmobile was a secure and peaceful place. My father was away somewhere mysterious and unknown to me that summer. He was what I would call a ghost in our house, someone who once belonged but no longer did, yet insisted on showing up now and then, causing a disturbance, getting everyone upset, then disappearing to who knows where. I had three brothers. My older brother was at a disciplinary camp for juvenile delinquents; he had stolen a car. My two younger brothers were at home with my mother. I was happy to not spend my days at home. All in all, the bookmobile gave me a lot of privacy. And I had ample time to carry out my most private passion, which was looking at photographs (in the SCIENCE section) and reading (in SCIENCE and FICTION) about the Arctic — the most remote and barren region of the world. Eskimos, polar bears, icebergs. In the bookmobile I read all the books written by Jack London. White Fang was my favorite. From such novels I understood that the far north was a place where serious once-in-a-l
ifetime adventures were taking place. Though I also remember thinking that if I lived in the Arctic I would miss trees. I loved the big shady maple and oak trees in Michigan.

  Like any kid footloose on the weekends, I more or less killed time. I rode my bicycle. I fished for crappies and sunfish in Reed’s Lake and the Thornapple River. But the bookmobile was my weekday home that summer.

  Engine-wise, the bus was dilapidated, and often broke down. Mr. Oler would just shrug and say, “We’ve got a bus problem.” The bus might stall out in the middle of the street, the radiator might spout steam and water like a geyser, or oil might spill out beneath the bus. When we had a bus problem, Mr. Oler would find the nearest telephone and call his wife, Martha, who was a mechanic for the Grand Rapids school system.

  Martha Oler was a very beautiful woman. I’d guess she was at least ten years younger than Mr. Oler. I saw her about five times that summer. I thought that she looked confident and interesting in her mechanic’s overalls. When she pulled up in her pickup truck, Mr. Oler was always happy to see her. She would park the truck and carry her toolbox to the bookmobile. But before looking at the engine, she always kissed Mr. Oler. I mean, they took a long moment to hold and kiss each other. Martha Oler had dark red hair and was an inch or so taller than Mr. Oler. She had a quick smile.

  Whenever she came to fix the bookmobile, she poked her head inside and said, “Fancy seeing you here!” Which of course was a little joke, since I was always on the bookmobile. A couple of times she could not fix the bus problem and had to call a tow truck. Waiting for the tow, she and Mr. Oler would hold hands, lean against her truck, and talk. Mr. Oler would pop open a Ne-Hi orange and share it with his wife without wiping the rim on his sleeve, the way us kids were taught to do.

  Besides stops for bus problems, there were what Mr. Oler called “unscheduled stops.” He was truthful with me about this. “Howard,” he said, the first time he parked the bus in front of his and Martha’s apartment in the middle of an afternoon, “I’m making an unscheduled stop. My wife and I are trying to have a baby.” That is all he said or needed to say. I was too young to think about it in any detail. I only knew that he and Martha needed to see each other privately. At such times, Mr. Oler carried out the same routine. He would step out of the bookmobile, pop open the hood as if the radiator had boiled over, then disappear inside his apartment building. I would keep myself busy.

  And so it was, on July 23 at about 3:00 P.M., that Mr. Oler made an unscheduled stop. He propped open the hood and went into his building. Using a world atlas open on my lap as a table, I wrote out the overdue notices. But it was no more than five minutes after Mr. Oler had gone inside that a surprise visitor stepped on board. I recognized Tommy Allen right away. He was what my mother called a “JD,” which stood for Juvenile Delinquent. Still, she fed him supper three or four nights a week. I had seen a magazine photograph of Sal Mineo in the movie Rebel Without A Cause, and had heard my brother and Tommy call the actor “very cool.” I think Tommy modeled his look after Sal Mineo: slicked-back black hair, black jeans, black tee shirt. He was my older brother’s best friend.

  When he got inside the bookmobile, he said, “I was walking to downtown. I see the hood’s up. You got a breakdown?”

  “Yeah. Mr. Oler had to make a phone call,” I said, trying to protect Mr. Oler’s privacy, since the truth was none of Tommy’s business, I felt. “He’s in his apartment. He’ll be out pretty soon.”

  “That’s convenient, the bus breaking down in front of his apartment,” Tommy said. “Oh well. I’ll just wait here with you. Maybe Pinnie Oler’d give me a lift toward downtown a ways. It’s a scorcher out, ain’t it?”

  “Hottest day of the decade.”

  “Says who?” Tommy said.

  “Says WGRD.”

  “WGRD,” Tommy said, “oh, well, then. Sure it’s true.”

  “Can you really cook an egg on the sidewalk on a day like this?” I said.

  “I cooked one this morning,” Tommy said. “Right out in front of my house.”

  “I wish I could’ve seen that,” I said. “What’d you do with the egg?”

  “I ate it, dummy,” Tommy said. “If it’s this hot tomorrow, come on by. I’ll cook one on the sidewalk for you.”

  I looked out the window and saw a young woman, about age fifteen, riding her bicycle across the field opposite the apartment building. As she got closer, I could see that she wore a one-piece black bathing suit with a short-sleeved white shirt over it, and flip-flop sandals. She had a fancy new-looking bicycle. She rode right up to the bookmobile, got off her bike, opened the kickstand, propped up the bicycle, and stepped into the bookmobile. She was about Tommy’s height. She had dark brown hair; you could see comb tracks in it. Tommy took one look at her and said, “Hello, baby,” but he said it in a fake television-actor kind of way, I thought.

  “Baby, baby, baby, wah wah wah,” the young woman said, as though she was a baby in a crib. “Do I look like a baby to you?”

  “No, I guess not,” Tommy said.

  Things happened in a strange and quick order now. She took out a comb from her shirt pocket, stood in front of the rear-view mirror above the driver’s seat, crouched a bit, and combed her hair. Then she turned and said, “What are you boys doing inside on a day like this? Just across the field’s a pond. Nobody else is there. Oh, my mom would kill me if she knew I went swimming with two boys and no lifeguard around. She’d be so mad.”

  But I don’t think Tommy heard past the word “pond.” A look of horror crossed his face.

  The pond the girl had spoken of was known in our neighborhood as the “polio pond.” It was a small pond at a gravel quarry gouged out of a vast rocky field. The quarry was about a quarter-mile from Mr. and Mrs. Oler’s apartment. Anyway, this was a time in which polio, a really frightening disease that paralyzed you, was on everyone’s mind. Staring out from posters all over town were a lame boy and a lame girl, both on crutches. The posters were designed to raise money to fight polio. In Life magazine I’d seen pictures of a girl who had to spend her childhood trapped inside an iron lung in a special hospital.

  In our neighborhood, rumor had it that you could catch polio from getting even one single drop of the polio pond in your mouth. I don’t know how such a stupid and false rumor got started and then became a more powerful truth than real truth, but I believed this rumor with all my heart. I knew that Tommy and my older brother believed it, too, because they had a curse, “I hope you fall into the polio pond!” which they used only on their worst enemies. True, the pond looked normal. It was very pleasant looking, actually, with frogs and tadpoles and cattails waving along the edges, and lily pads. But hidden in its waters was polio, and God help the person who dared swim or fish or even dip a toe in that pond.

  “. . . pond . . .” said the girl, and Tommy was fast out the bookmobile door.

  He ran to the front and slammed down the hood. Then he raced back inside, sat in the driver’s seat, turned the key in the ignition, started up the engine, and yelled back at me, “A breakdown, huh? You lied to me!” He shifted gears, and we hurtled forward. The bus jerked a few times, but Tommy was handy with vehicles — my brother had called him “a genius with cars” — and he quickly got the hang of driving the bus.

  “Hey, what’re you doing?” the young woman shouted, and then broke into a nervous laugh.

  “Getting you to the hospital!” Tommy shouted, then concentrated on the road.

  I threw myself onto a reading bench and hung on for dear life.

  “You idiot!” the girl screamed at Tommy. “My new bike’s back there!”

  Blodgett Memorial Hospital was only five or six blocks away. Tommy pulled up to the EMERGENCY entrance. He turned off the ignition, yanked up the emergency brake, opened the door, and ran inside. In a minute he returned with two attendants, a nurse, and a doctor. They all piled into the bookmobile. By this time the girl was standing straight-backed against the card catalogue. “There she is,” Tommy said,
pointing.

  “What seems to be the trouble with her?” the doctor asked Tommy in a very gruff, doubting voice.

  “She . . . she . . . she swam in a pond that’s got polio germs in it. The quarry pond. She’s probably caught it.”

  The doctor’s face stiffened and he looked furious. “There’s nothing wrong with that girl, is there? This hospital, son, is not a place for practical jokes. Polio is not a practical joke.” Without another word, he nodded to the two attendants, who grabbed Tommy and me and took us into the hospital. The nurse escorted the young woman from the bookmobile. She was laughing and crying. Inside a room marked SECURITY we were watched over by an attendant.

  Two policemen soon arrived. They took down our names and telephone numbers. Then they went out into the hallway to consult with each other. One policeman came back and said, “Okay, you and you,” — he pointed to me and the young woman — “my partner’s calling your parents to come and get each of you. You,” — he pointed to Tommy — “you come with me.” Tommy followed the policeman out to the police car.

  In the hour or so that we waited in the room, the girl only said, “My name is Marcia.”

  When I got home, I told my mother the whole story.

  A few weeks later, we all met again in a courtroom. My mother stood next to me. Tommy’s uncle Will stood with him. Marcia had both of her parents with her. The judge said, “Now, Mr. Thomas Allen, for the offenses listed here today, you could be charged as an adult. You don’t, however, have any previous record. And your uncle suggests there was actually a reason why you stole a bookmobile, and then foisted some far-fetched story having to do with” — the judge looked at his notes — “polio to the emergency-room doctor. What in the world possessed you to concoct such a tall tale, Mr. Allen?”