The Bewildered Housewife

Being with my family is like a course in opposites.  It causes one to glance from face to face, wondering exactly how many milkmen managed to frequent our neighborhood in the late 1970s.  Nobody looks like anybody else even remotely, including my twin sister and myself.  My twin is the beautiful petite actress, and I am her Amazonian counterpart. My older sister and I CERTAINLY bear no resemblance to each other; she most resembles a tiny German widow from the Hinterland.  Who knows how our genes decided to be distributed?  For longer than I can possibly recall, I have wondered aloud, Whose nose IS this, anyway?  For years I was convinced I was the wayward spawn of exotic royalty, and thereby entitled to a kingdom all my own, until I saw a picture of my grandfather and suddenly realized that my knees were, indeed, related to my family by blood.  Dammit.

There were surrogate additions to our oddly shaped family.  Chief among them were Eddie and Myrtle, the elderly couple who lived on the property next to ours.  They had no children and no substantial family left, so we all seemed to adopt each other.  My father mowed their lawn, we had their house keys and they had ours, my sisters and I raided their apple trees and they came over for dinners and to play cards with my parents – always keeping tabs on our schoolwork and athletics.  It made perfect sense when they became our god-parents, but they were actually far more like Grandparents to us than any other living people. 

Eddie and Myrtle Haley had always been old in my book.  When my sisters and I were born, I believe they were already well into their late sixties and naturally, they just kept getting older.  It was unusual that they never had children, but this was also part of their charm.  Myrtle especially, even at an advanced age, maintained an innocent girlishness that had never been tempered by the trials of motherhood.  Her heart was consistently melty and soft.  Eddie was a long, lanky old man with earlobes that reached down to his knees.  His spirit was likewise never hardened by the cold slap of fatherhood – he did feign impatience with our antics occasionally, but he always allowed us to detect the hint of a smile beneath his disdain.  The man was chronically amused. 

Eddie was a relic from the Depression era.  His was an entirely different way of looking at the world, a completely different way of being.  He worked for the railroad from the time he was 15 years old until the day he retired.  His parents came to the country amid a sweep of Irish immigrants, who apparently were not favored by the groups of Italians who had also just spoken their names at Ellis Island.  His friends were kids just like him: impoverished, playing baseball, fist-fighting the Guineas, eating rationed butter.

When I was a kid we would while away the summer hours sipping cool drinks in Eddie and Myrtle’s sunroom.  The screens served as shelter from bees and allowed just enough breeze in to cool our sweat from just sitting.  Our legs would stick to the worn vinyl chairs, leaving hideous floral patterns for a few hours, but we didn’t care.  We were there for the stories.  Eddie’s stories would come on those hot Jersey afternoons, when I wish I had been smart enough to get my tape recorder.  I always knew when he was going to open his mouth.  It was usually after we had finished a few games of checkers, or had spent an hour in the spare room listening to his ancient CB radio for the sleepy crimes about town.  Myrtle would give us each a glass of lemonade and a magazine to fan ourselves with as we gazed out onto the acreage, silent for a while. 

And then it would come like a dream; a smell, or a thought, or a sound would trigger his voice and he would begin speaking aloud from the middle of a memory, as if it he’d gone nowhere or done nothing else since it happened.  Railroad stories, boyhood stories, neighborhood stories or, if he was feeling slighty acidic that day, stories about the Great Depression.

Myrtle was often his faithful accomplice.  He told me about their courtship and how they married when she was 18 years of age and he was 21.  My sister has an old photograph of a very young-looking Myrtle hanging above her bed, and it’s clear why Eddie was relentlessly in love.  They remained in love for longer than a lot of people are alive these days, and when Eddie finally kicked the bucket at age 93, Myrtle was holding his hand.

There are few things as difficult as losing a husband, and I saw that experience through Myrtle.  The entire year that Eddie was gone was marked by her decline.  Paranoia and what I can only imagine to be a vast loneliness set into her life with the dustballs.  The day before her 90th birthday, she called me in California to say thank you for the little pink rose quartz heart I mailed to her.  I listened to her message over and over and considered her sweetness – she ended her call by saying, “I love you, Myrtle…”, as if she was signing off a letter.

And she was – my mother found her body three days later, after noticing a couple days’ worth of newspapers piling up on the porch.  In a great show of compassion from the forces that be, Myrtle passed away in her sleep and was discovered laying on her side, on what remained “her” side of the bed, a tiny rose quartz heart on the table beside.

I am sorry to say that as I grew older into my teens, I cut short my visits and stupidly grew tired of Myrtle’s kindness and Eddie’s stories.  I wanted a cigarette and independence, not morals and history.  It’s been a long time since I’ve dreamed of them, but I revisited their memory when my husband and I were back in New Jersey for a visit.  Somebody else owns their house now, but each time I return, I am still tempted to walk in the back door and open the drawer where they kept the saltines. 

Once my parents soon retire to warmer climes and greener pastures, packing up house, home and history in search of a different coastline, the Haleys will be one of the harder things to leave behind.  I’ve taken with me the sideways memory of Haley’s Comet from when I was young and my father woke me up at 3am to watch what we then joked was Eddie and Myrtle’s home planet appear on the horizon line.  There are other pieces of them that of course I’ve brought with me, but the rest is a streak of light that blazed, and then faded, against a dark sky.  You only see a show like that once a lifetime.