Food and Shelter
Mom gave birth to me, her second child, just two months after turning seventeen. She continued to live with her parents for a short while, but a second child sounded the final closing of her childhood and the end of their protective shelter. Her parents had two more children at home; twelve-year old Johnny and fourteen year-old Susan, for whom I was named. They could not continue with the conjugal visits of Mom’s husband and unending pregnancies under foot. Mom had endured a miscarriage after a four month pregnancy between Jennie and me. She would have one more baby girl fourteen months later and name her Elizabeth, after herself. We were all born Cesarian, as Mom was too small at fifteen for childbirth and stopped growing with the advent of four pregnancies.
Dad was in Covington working in a Kroger store meat department when his little family joined him. He is two years older than Mom and had graduated high school just before they married. We lived in the projects on Scott Street and then in a two room apartment on Third Street, the latter in a condemnable Victorian building for which Dad had saved his money and bought for $1500. We shared a bathroom with six one-room apartments. Ours had a kitchen, so we had two rooms as the landlord family. Mom didn’t let us girls use the bathroom in the hall. We used a white enamelware pot with a red lined rim for a potty and bathed in a large galvanized tub. I remember watching my mother bathe, standing in that shiny gray tub in our kitchen. She was beautiful, but it was only in this moment that anyone could have taken time to notice. We kids slept three to the sofa or one in the double bed with Mom and Dad if it wasn’t too hot. We had a coffee table made from the base of an old wood burning stove that was painted bright pink with gold trim. We had steam radiators, which made the room smaller in the winter. Too close meant burned. There was a bare bulb overhead, and the light was either harsh from that or eerie blue from the t.v.
We had an old wrought iron Victorian fence with finials on every other vertical rail and half circle wire on the others. Winos would stop and piss through the fence into our play yard while we watched, stopping with our toys and staring. At the other end of the yard were ferocious hunting dogs that Dad kept chained to dog houses. (They each got their own bedroom.) We tried to play in the middle ground, but it was not possible to lose oneself in play in that place. “Beppie”, (our version of “Elizabeth”) got impetigo so often that Dad mixed and poured and leveled cement until he had filled in the whole yard. It wasn’t very big, just the a narrow space between two narrow buildings, which is probably why the winos thought that it was okay to stop there. All of the buildings were packed in tight in that German town built for workers to supply Cincinnati across the river. There were no luxuries of space.
There was a bar on every corner of our part of town. I would ask Dad what a bar was, and he would reply, “Well, which kind? A red one? A blue one? Why, there’s all kinds of bars..” and repeat this answer until I stopped asking. We would all ride around in his old car to cool off on summer nights. He would sing along with the radio and he knew all the words to all the songs. He looked and sounded a lot like Elvis. He loved it when they played “Blue Suede Shoes”. His voice would get stronger, he would get into character and he would rock that car. Dad went out to those bars, and at least once he brought home a badly beaten friend.
When I was six, my family moved to a two bedroom ranch house on five acres in the country, near the Licking River. We had our own bedroom for us three girls and an entire bathroom for our family. The house was new and felt palatial. It has to be all of 1000 square feet. The living room and dining room were “combined”. We already knew all about that. We had two twin beds in our room. Beppie and I shared one and Jennie got the other. My parents bought new furniture when I was eight years old, right around the time that President John F. Kennedy was killed. It was delivered the day of President Kennedy’s funeral. Mom sobbed so much and gestured toward the new t.v. that nobody could understand what she was saying and the movers had to guess as to where to put the stuff. I was in third grade.
We had four years of childhood there in that little house. It was like a member of the family, like a pretty princess who came to visit after the wicked witch had gone. We could play outside in the yard without a care in the whole world. I loved to climb the little maples planted out front and sway in the breeze for what seemed like hours. We loved best of all to run way up to the old apple tree on the hill behind our house. We felt far, far away and it was peaceful. There was always a breeze and a view, and sometimes there were apples. We were left to roam the fields; the world was safe then and nobody was watching or worried.
Dad put in a big garden, maybe half an acre or more, and we children were put to work in it. He would get us up at dawn and take us out to pick bugs off the potatoes or beans, giving us a coffee can with some kerosene in it and telling us to put the bugs in there. We would also be made to pull weeds, to plant the larger seeds for things like corn and beans and peas, to hoe and to work as hard and as long as we were physically able to do so. We knew better than to “make a peep”. We were already afraid of Dad. When he raised his voice, there was a threat in it that he never had to clarify. We learned to hate living in the country, to hate the garden, and to absolutely hate green beans. Dad grew 14 half-acre rows of green beans, which Mom dutifully canned, and I was in my 30s before I could eat them again.
Dad went hunting and fishing for all of our meat. Though he worked at Kroger in the meat department, he did not bring meat home to us. He kept a dozen or so hunting dogs in a pen out back and brought home a greasy box full of half rotten meat every night. He would cook this up on the stove and add dog food and water, and then haul the large bucket out to the pens. What we ate was what Dad caught. We spit buckshot out on our plates without knowing that everybody in the world did not do this. We liked squirrel, rabbit, pheasant, quail, frog legs, every kind of fish, and venison. I would sit on the step and watch Dad skin every kind of animal in our garage. I can’t remember now if you’re supposed to take the guts out first or after. Mom learned to cook whatever he brought through the door. She liked making things from scratch. We ate a lot of roe, wondering what the big deal was about caviar.
Mom took care of us and the house and helped Dad with his dogs and the yard. She put up all the vegetables by home canning and taught us how to do this. Dad helped the neighbors work on their farms and we got a baby raccoon out of that. “Elsie” is another story altogether. One time, she let an entire bucket of frogs loose in the garage, thinking that she was going to have a feast, I suppose. Those were going to be my birthday dinner, and Dad had worked hard enough to catch them. At one time, we had 25 dogs, nine cats, twelve quail (for training the dogs), six rabbits, a horse and a raccoon. The rabbits were going to be for eating, but Dad could not kill them by hand as easily as shooting the wild ones. They were more like pets.
Sometime in my middle childhood, Dad became a seriously violent man. I guess he didn’t have a bar nearby in which he could find a fight. There were times that I thought that he was going to kill Mom, and then he was going to kill me and my sisters. I had out-of-body experiences on nights like that. I wet the bed and sucked my thumb until Mom left him. I thought every night that the pounding of my heart was the sound of a monster coming up the basement stairs. Mom was high-strung and unable to bring a sense of serenity to the house whether Dad was home or not. Seems like he only came home long enough to beat her up and make her cook a meal. Beppie took to vomiting all the time, just out of nervousness. Jennie started to act tough. She went hunting and fishing with Dad. He showed his favor for her by kicking her across the front yard. He became a terror. He chased Mom and us with a gun, fathered other children with other women, got thrills out of pretending to shoot unsuspecting men with a blank pistol. I remember him telling another man about this in our kitchen, as though it was the best practical joke ever.
When I was ten, Mom left Dad and we moved back to Somerset. We stayed with Granny and Granddaddy for about six months until they could help Mom get an apartment. They lived in a stuccoed bungalow with three rooms upstairs. The front room, where we slept, had a dormer with the windows running floor to ceiling on the narrow end. I could sit or lay in front of that window and look straight into the trees. It helped me to not miss our trees that I had climbed at home. We only got to stay there for about six months. We moved on to a duplex owned by the Superintendent of the county schools. He and his wife were very nice and they lived next door. They had a lovely big house. Ours was a shotgun style cottage with a kitchen on the rear side. We had 3 rooms and a kitchen and a bathroom. I continued to share a bedroom with my sisters, but now we slept three to a double bed.
Mom did not have her high school diploma, having married at 15. She had three children to feed and no way to earn a living. Dad paid child support, but he fought it. it was often late and it was in no way adequate. There was no enforcement in those days. Mom went back to school. She attended the vocational school that was right across the street from where we lived. She studied secretarial skills and earned her general educational equivalent of a high school diploma. During this time, though, all we had to live on was the child support. There were no food stamps or welfare. I am sure that Granny and Granddaddy helped to some degree, though I doubt if they knew what we had to eat every night for supper. Mom was too anorexic herself during that time, what with the divorce, the chaotic and dramatic emotional state she was in, and the number of new things she was trying to do. I know now that she had post-traumatic stress disorder. In spite of this, my mother went from being a high school drop out to being an administrative assistant in the governor’s office within five years.
Since Mom was at school all day and had to study in the evenings, and since we basically had no money for groceries, she devised a rotating supper menu that we kids could help prepare. One night a week, we had spam and apple sauce. That is one can of spam and one small can of applesauce for four people. Add one can of peas and you have supper. The next night, we would have tuna, macaroni and cheese and a can of peas. No more macaroni than a four ounce hunk of Velveeta would cover. Another night was one can of Campbell’s tomato soup and one sandwich each on a hamburger bun, with one slice of Velveeta cheese and one paper thin, difficult to peel without tearing, slice of ham. Hungry still? Well, don’t drink up the milk, don’t eat the cereal that’s for breakfast, and don’t touch anything in that refrigerator. Make some toast or bread and sugar. On the weekends, Mom would make hamburgers or cook a chicken. A chicken was meant to last two or three meals. The meals were okay; we were hungry and pretty much anything tastes good when you are hungry over a long period of time. The problem was, it was never enough food and I was always hungry.
For lunches, we had one slice of American cheese product on two slices of white bread and sometimes we had bologna. Our snack, the sugar bread, was white bread with margarine spread and white sugar sprinkled on. My mother never bought a bag of chips in my entire life before I left home. We did not have fresh fruit unless one of our grandparents brought it by or we got it in our stockings for Christmas. (We always got an orange in our stockings.)
We appreciated going to our grandparents and eating nice meals there. Our best dresses were the ones that Granny made for us. As it was, we had only enough clothes for each of us to get dressed each day. We had the beige skirt, the blue skirt, the white blouse, the red sweater, and so on. We had a chest of drawers and a closet for the four of us. We were all about the same size and so we shared our clothing. Sometimes I had to wear Mom’s old panties with a big safety pin to keep them up. Usually, my socks were folded over at the toe so that my toes did not stick out. As it was, I could not get through one week without having to wear both something dirty and something twice. I can still feel the humiliation of having to wear my mother’s worn-out panties. But I always had white gloves for church, and a dress from Granny to wear only on Sundays.
Mom remarried pretty soon. She married a life-long friend, most likely at the suggestion of their respective mothers, who were best friends. We moved to Lexington to another small ranch house, this time in the suburbs, and then to an apartment. Her new husband was a social worker. Theirs was a marriage of convenience, not romance. He was very gay and an alcoholic. She needed help and was good cover.
He was not paying much attention to the food menu and our meals remained spare. His idea of breakfast was one poached egg on two saltines. It was decided that we would each have this breakfast and that I would be in charge of preparing the meal every day. I would get up before the family and set the table, put the water on to boil, crumble the saltines into cups, and poach the eggs every day at 6:00. I got some sense of accomplishment from my small chore.
I was a teenager by this time. For my adolescence, with a man in the house we at least had meat. We had one pork chop each, one small potato, and one can of green beans for four of us. We had the same mac and cheese casserole, but we had meatloaf. We did not eat Spam anymore, and we had chicken through the week.
Susie Bell, Midway KY