1952

1952

The window was open just enough to let in the cool night air. In other words, “just a crack, Marcie, a tiny crack.” I was dealing with my father’s non-negotiable rule—no open windows at night. Probably in case someone tried to get me. As if. Not here. Nothing ever happened here. I had turned my pillow over so many times I’d lost count, and still I couldn’t sleep. And I had a stupid headache. Had it since before supper.

I could hear Daddy snoring through both closed doors, theirs and mine, so it was clear the heat wasn’t keeping him awake. Granted, he’d been in the sun all day delivering mail and dodging angry dogs. Those were different from the ones he called “his tired dogs” when he pulled off his work shoes.

Okay, I had to get cooled off. I tiptoed out of my room and into the bathroom, closing the door silently and leaving the light off. Successful first step. I plugged the tub with the rubber stopper, feeling to make sure the little chain didn’t get caught, and turned on the cold water faucet.  As the bathtub filled, I peeled off my sweaty pajamas off, stepped in, and felt instant relief. I sat down and let the cool liquid surround me. Then I slid all the way down and turned the knob off with my foot. In the silence, with only my face above water, the pulse in my ears slowed down as my body cooled off.

Tomorrow was Friday and we usually went skating on Friday nights, but a lot of the parents, including mine, were saying they weren’t so sure it was a good idea right now with what was going on. I had polished my skates and hoped my folks would change their minds, but if my friends couldn’t go, what was the point?

When the water temperature was the same as my body, I pulled the stopper chain with my toe to let some water out, and it gurgled – too loud.

“Marcie, is that you?” My mother called out in a loud whisper. Probably trying not to wake Daddy, as if that was possible.

“Yes, ma’am, it’s me. I’m cooling off.”

“Okay, honey.”

So I reset the plug and turned on the water again but kept the washrag near the faucet so there wouldn’t be any splash noises, and lay back down. From the moonlight coming through the high bathroom window I could see my tiny breasts barely poking above the water. It ticked me off that some of the girls in my class were wearing real bras now, not just training bras, and they filled them out. Meanwhile, some stuffed their bras with toilet paper. No thank you.

I had read that little booklet, “Menstruation and Your Maturing Bodies,” and even though Sandra started her period a couple of months ago, Kathy and I hadn’t yet. Momma bought me the belt and Kotex pads, but no amount of talk about that part of “becoming a woman” interested me. 

My grandmother visited last month for as long as she and my father could stand each other. “Heavens to Betsy, when your mother fell off the roof, there was none of this falderal about it,” Gram said.

Momma explained later that she didn’t really fall off of a roof, which I assumed, but that it was just an expression. A stupid one, if you ask me.

The water had warmed up again and I wasn’t sleepy yet, so I emptied it silently this time, refilled it, and scooted back down, careful not to make sloshing sounds.

***

Every day when my mother got home, she changed into her house clothes and started dinner.  While she did that, I was supposed to set the table. Besides making my bed, that was my only job, but sometimes she let me get out of it. “If you have homework, Marcie, that’s the most important job you have,” she said. No argument from me.

Daddy usually wanted a hot meal, but tonight we had cold ham, potato salad, and pineapple rings for dinner to keep from having to heat up the kitchen. He didn’t complain. Well, not about that anyway. He hated his job. I told him that one of the kids at school said her father quit his job. “Why don’t you just quit, Daddy?” I asked.

My mother gave me a dirty look, but he said, “Gotta keep the wolves at bay, baby.”

 Momma said he meant bill collectors, not real wolves, and they exchanged the look. It was the one that meant they thought I was too young to know what they were talking about. We didn’t have wolves, for heaven’s sake. Who didn’t know that? After we ate, I could hear them talking softly in the kitchen. They didn’t sound mad at each other, a good thing.

While I pretended to do homework, I wrote notes to Sandra and Kathy. We exchanged them at the bus stop every morning. Sandra taught me how to fold them into neat little squares with the flap all tucked in so they would stay closed. I put them into my little zip-up pencil holder clipped into my notebook—safe from prying eyes, not that my parents ever looked. Kathy’s mother went through her stuff all the time.

After dishes, my parents listened to the radio. We might have been the only family in our neighborhood without a TV set, but my parents seemed content to listen to their shows, him in his big recliner either cleaning his pipes or making fishing lures, and her with her crossword puzzles. She would touch the pencil to her tongue and fill in the squares until it was done.

They each had their favorite programs. “Dragnet” was hers, and “Gunsmoke” was his. I liked “The Shadow.” When Daddy turned off the radio, he asked Momma, just like he did every night, “Aren’t you coming to bed?”  It was part of their routine.

“In a bit,” she said.

He made a “humph” noise as he went into to their bedroom and she sighed. Why did he care when she went to bed? We could hear him snoring within five minutes. Momma said that between his highball before dinner, and then a beer while we ate, he was as good as gone by the time his head hit the pillow. It was hard to tell if she was mad about that or not.

***

When I sat up and cleared the water from my ears. I could hear the cicadas chirping, and in the distance the late train was clicking along on its way from Miami to Jacksonville. It sounded its horn but didn’t seem to be in a real hurry to get there.  Down the street the Williams’s crazy dog was barking at nothing, and one of the neighbors was watching a comedy show. There were these random bursts of loud laughter. It sounded phony. You never heard people laughing like that.

If it was from the Finch’s house, they didn’t have much to laugh about these days. Michael was walking now, but with braces on his legs. He was one of two neighborhood kids who got sick. Momma said Michael was lucky because the Bennet kid two blocks over was still in an iron lung, and while Michael was only partially paralyzed. She said he would probably live a productive life because look at FDR.  

My parents called it a flu epidemic, even though that’s not what my teacher said. To my friends and me it meant, for one thing, that the public pool was closed, even with record-breaking heat. In fact, we were supposed to go only to school and then back home. It felt like prison. Sandra said her mother complained that was harder on the parents than on us, but I didn’t see how. 

After Michael came home from the hospital, my mother and a few of the other neighborhood moms took food over there. That Saturday, by some miracle, we all got to go to the movies to see Doris Day in Calamity Jane. Everyone was there, and sure enough so was that cute boy who was new in my class. He just enrolled in our school, and Mrs. Ellis assigned him a seat near me. He smiled at me, and I smiled back, but I didn’t say anything. Stupid, I know.

After the movie, Momma took me to the record store and I bought the single, “Secret Love.” I played it lots of times on my portable player, and my mother even hummed it herself with a smile on her face. That hadn’t happened much lately; mostly there was a deep line in her forehead.

She said this flu epidemic had her worried. She and Daddy were arguing in their walk-in closet a few days ago. Why they picked there to have their “discussions,” I didn’t get. It wasn’t like I couldn’t hear them. Momma sounded really scared. She said, “Nobody’s doing anything!” He told her not to cry, something I’d never seen.

Every morning my parents got the paper as soon as they heard it slap on the front stoop. At breakfast Daddy read the sports page while Momma looked for news about a cure. This morning she read an article to him out loud. She must have forgot I was right there. She read that some doctors were upset that ‘too much fuss’ had been made about the disease and complained that all the attention it got had taken away from ‘more serious threats.’ Momma almost never raised her voice, but she sounded pretty mad about that. I was finished with my cereal, but I stayed at the table.

 “I bet if those doctors had kids, they wouldn’t feel that way,” she said. “Over two thousand children died last year, not to mention the poor souls who were affected in other ways.” Daddy looked in my direction and she stopped talking. I was old enough to understand more than they thought I could, and I saw how Michael struggled with those leg braces. It looked hard. At school Mrs. Ellis told us that some doctor was working on a vaccine.

***

I felt a yawn coming on finally. I still had a headache, but it seemed a little better. The drain didn’t make any noise this time; thanks to the washcloth trick.  Never too late to learn something new, Mrs. Ellis said. The towel was scratchy from drying on the line. Sunshine dried best my mother said, and besides we couldn’t afford a dryer. Not yet anyway. Daddy said maybe for Christmas.

After I dried myself, I wrapped the towel around my head turban style, picked up my underpants, tiptoed back into my bedroom, and closed the door.  Yep, it was still stifling. As I put on fresh baby doll pajamas from the top drawer, I made a decision: I was opening that window. I got it up high enough to set the fan on the window sill and let it pull in the outside air, and it was actually cooler.

All I had to do was remember to put it back down before Daddy saw it in the morning. I turned out the light and sat in the middle of the bed in the dark and pinned my hair into curls by feel. It was almost dry already.

Maybe I would see that new boy tomorrow. If he showed up, anyway. He hadn’t been in school for the last two days. Sick, Mrs. Ellis said. Sandra told me he had moved here from somewhere up north. Probably New York. Three absences already in only two weeks was a lot. Mrs. Ellis asked in class if anyone knew him, but no one did.

The pillow even felt cooler. Momma had said she picked up the clothes from the ironing lady. Maybe I could wear my yellow dress tomorrow if it got ironed. If not, the blue one with the full skirt. Kathy said it showed off my eyes.

Note: By the 1950s, polio had become one of the most serious communicable diseases among children in the United States. In 1952 alone, nearly 60,000 children were infected with the virus; thousands were paralyzed, and more than 3,000 died. In 1954, field trials of Salk's vaccine began with over 1.3 million children. Doctor Salk’s vaccine was distributed universally in 1955.