Basement Blessings

They Invade

I think it was the summer I was fourteen . . . or was it fifteen . . . but that’s not really important. What is important was that was the summer my Uncle and Aunt got their divorce. Things back then were different than they are now; there were no mandatory year long separations before a divorce became final . . . no community property either. All you needed was a judge, a court date, a little amiability, some give and take – the judge would say his words, make his decree and it was done . . . unless the divorce was contested. Their divorce was contested. It was a mean and nasty affair from the word ‘go’. They had both been screwing around on one another for years. It was a family joke, really. Yet, when it finally came out, both were mortally offended, hurt and betrayed and neither understood why the other couldn’t see that ‘their’ affair was a necessary, understandable and forgivable thing. Quite honestly, even at that age I always wonder how either had found out. They were both alcoholics and seldom sober for more than an hour after they woke in the mornings.

Still, they both wanted the house, the two cars, the property, the kids (three girls) and both especially wanted the money. There was a lot of virulence, acid and in-fighting going on in the courtroom that summer . . . but, of course, I didn’t know that at the time. I only learned most of the details later, during the years between then and now.

All I knew then was that ‘my’ home, ‘my’ privacy and ‘my’ personal bedroom and space were invaded when my aunt and cousins moved in and I found myself sleeping behind a curtain in a corner of the basement.

What made it especially difficult was that our home was really kind of small: a single floor home with a full basement . . . there were already five of us, Mom, Dad, my two brothers and me. Yes, it was a three-bedroom home, but the two us boys had grown up in were postage stamp size: no longer than they were wide and just wide enough for a twin bed to fit. Neither were bigger than the bathroom and there was only one of those . . . Hell, we had bathroom problems before before they moved in, when there were just the five of us (and the dog . . . mustn’t forget the family dog – a big old pampered brown and white thing that was a people in his own right). Can you imagine the bathroom problems that summer when four more women moved in? My brothers and I spent most of that summer using a toilet at the gas station down the road.

My twin brother and I had shared a bedroom our whole lives . . . up until a few months before when I was given permission to move into the basement, gaining a room of my own. When I did, I had the biggest bedroom in the house (even bigger than mom and dad’s) . . . for a couple of months at least, until they came. Then my cousins got my room (the only finished portion of the basement and a room unto itself) and I got a curtain and space for a bunk next to the furnace fuel tank, under the dining room. Mom and Dad kept their room, of course, and my brothers doubled up in one small bedroom . . . a real inconveniece for our little brother since he’d always had a room alone . . . Aunt Connie got the other one.

It didn’t bother me at the time, since such things didn’t matter at that age, but later I was to wonder ‘why’ Aunt Connie and the girls moved in with us. It’s something that was never explained. You see, Uncle Bud was mom’s brother. Aunt Connie was no relation until they got married and her family was much more well to do than ours. She had two sisters living only blocks from her and they had huge houses by comparison . . . and smaller families too. Still, Connie moved in with us and Uncle Bud was persona non-gratta that summer.

The night they moved in was a mad house. The phone call came first and mom answered it. She was crying when she hung up and told dad and us kids that Aunt Connie and the girls were coming in a little bit to spend the night. Then she and dad went into their bedroom to talk. What I most remember about that moment was the feeling of elation at staying up late. It was bedtime but mom and dad said we should all stay up and help when they arrived.

When their car pulled into the front yard and stopped we all rushed outside to help. It was a warm early June night just after school ended. Us boys were all barefoot and wearing only our pajamas. Everyone came back into the house with arms full of bedding or suitcases and soon everyone was gathered in the living room. The girls were all nervous, crying, and Aunt Connie had a black eye forming. Her lip was split too and she was having trouble with one of her shoulders. Things were really confused then for a while, with mom, dad and Aunt Connie talking at the kitchen table and us boys trying to understand what was going on while trying to get our cousins to stop crying. Then dad came into the room and said, “Boys, go to bed. Girls, you’ll have to sleep on the living room floor tonight, your mama’s going to get the big couch. One of you can have the little couch if you want, but if there is any fighting you will all sleep on the floor. You have five minutes to use the bathroom and get in bed, then I’m turning off the lights.”

That was the first night . . . things got worse the next day . . . or so I thought then.

I didn’t sleep too good that night, what with my cousins all crying and upset, Aunt Connie hurt. I was confused and nervous myself, spending most of the night tossing and turning in my bed. When I did finally fall asleep I had a nightmare and woke up early.

It was about five-thirty when I came upstairs. The front door was standing open and mom and dad were both outside. Dad was leaving for work and mom was talking to the milk man. I guess she told him then that Aunt Connie and the girls were going to stay for a while. He brought a second milk house the next day and we started getting six half gallons of milk and three quarts of orange juice every other day instead of just three and one like we had been. That created problems in itself – they drank only two-percent milk and we preferred homoganized. Grab the wrong bottle and a bowl of cereal was ruined. Dad was getting into the car but I heard him call out to mom that he’d get off early and be home right after lunch.

I was still sleepy, mostly asleep really and my not quite awake mind had forgotten about our guests. I was on my way to the bathroom, off of the living room, and I was busy rubbing the sleep from my eyes as I walked. The basement stairs let into the dining room, right next to the front door. I had to walk through the kitchen and pass the door to Carl’s, my little brother’s, room to reach the living room. In the living room, the first door on the left was the bathroom, the second was my twin brother Phil’s room, and then there was mom and dad’s room. I stepped into the living room and the first thing I did was trip over my cousin Alivia, the youngest, and fall on top of my cousin Raquel, the oldest. I yelled, Raquel yelled and Alivia screamed. Suddenly everyone in the room was awake and mom had rushed back into the house.

Alivia was screaming and crying, rubbing her side where I’d accidently kicked her, while Raquel rubbed her boob and kept yelling that I’d grabbed it and tried to feel her up. I was curled in a ball on the floor, trying to figure out what was going on – what I’d done wrong, all the while trying to protect myself because Raquel and her sister Pat, the next in line, were both hitting me. My brothers slept through it all.

Alivia got picked up, hugged and comforted by Aunt Connie while mom extricated me and moved me out of reach. Everyone was assured that it had only been an accident and things calmed down a bit, though Raquel kept rubbing her boob and Alivia kept rubbing her side, complaining that it hurt. Me, I got a spanking . . . for scaring and hurting my cousins, and for not being more careful. I also found I was suddenly last in line to use the bathroom and I really had to go. I finally had to go outside, between our house and the neighbor’s, and use a tree. Thankfully, they were only part-time and summer residents and had yet to arrive for the season.

Breakfast was a disaster. Everyone was up and dressed by then, and all of the extra bedding and the suitcases were put in mom and dad’s bedroom. Still, there simply wasn’t enough room at the table for everyone and they didn’t like any of our cereal. We had Corn Flakes, Frosted Flakes, Corn Chex, and both Quaker Puffed Rice and Puffed Wheat in the house, but the girls wouldn’t eat any of them. Mom finally had to make oatmeal – which us boys hated – and cooked up all of the eggs and the last of our bacon before everyone was satisfied. Us boys ate our cereal. Roy, the two oldest girls and I ate at the kitchen table, while Carl and Alicia ate in the living room at a card table that mom had set up. She and Aunt Connie had coffee and toast.

After breakfast, there came the fights over the television. My brothers and I usually watched cartoons right after breakfast, Crusader Rabbit and Yogi Bear, while the girls liked to watch Captain Kangaroo. They didn’t like our television either . . . televisions really, we had two . . . a big one on the bottom that got a good picture but no sound and a little one atop that which got no picture but the sound was good. They hated having to turn two dials to make the stations match – there were no remote controls back then. It was the picture though that they really hated . . . too snowy for them, though we had no problems with it – it was what we normally watched after all. In truth though, looking back on it, we were thirty miles further from the broadcasting stations than they had been at their home, so the signal was weaker, plus: the antenna on our roof was an old one – it wasn’t in very good condition. Then there was the fact that we only received six stations, four vhf or ‘front’ channels, and two uhf or ‘side’ channels, while they were used to getting nine at home. Apparently something they liked to watch daily was only available on a station we couldn’t get.

Things were rough for us boys that first morning as we had to give up everything we normally liked to do for our ‘guests’. We were secretly looking forward to their going home – which we thought would be that afternoon . . . weren’t we surprised . . . things got a lot worse for us later that day.

Dad came home right after lunch, and shortly after all our uncles showed up too. There was Uncle Lenny and Uncle Luke, Dad’s brothers, and Uncle Lenny’s boy, our cousin Chad . . . he was eighteen and all grown up, so he couldn’t be bothered with the rest of us ‘kids’. There was also Uncle Gene, Mom and Uncle Bud’s brother. All of the adults gathered together in the living room and us kids were sent outside to play while they talked, with Phil and I being told to ‘take care’ of our cousins. This pissed Raquel off because she was really the oldest, being ten months older than Phil and I, but she was also the smallest of all of us, being a full three inches shorter than her baby sister Alivia – who was really big for her age (I think Alivia was thirteen at the time).

It works out like this; Raquel is the oldest (by about ten months) at sixteen, but also the smallest and skinniest of the bunch of us, being just five feet tall at the time and weighing only about seventy-five pounds; still, she was the most mature. She had a figure . . . hell, they all did . . . but Raquel would probably have been considered a small-petite then. She was wiry though. Next were Phil and I. We were both about five-six then and weighed about one hundred forty pounds. We were the tallest and heaviest. Thanks to all of the sports we did and the swimming (did I forget to mention that we lived on a lake?) my brothers and I were always fairly trim and in shape. Pat was next oldest, being six months younger than Phil and I and seven months older than Carl. The three of them, Carl, Pat, and Alivia, were all within an inch of the same height at about five-four. Alivia was the shortest by less than an inch. Carl was built much like Phil and I, but about fifteen pounds lighter. Pat was curvier and fuller figured than Raquel, wider hipped and heavier breasted, yet she was softer than Raquel too, so much more feminine in so many ways. Alivia was the real winner in the body department though. Alivia may be the youngest, but she was definitely not the smallest. Inheriting her sister’s hand-me-downs (some of which ‘she’ got from my brothers and I) the shirts while fitting Pat loosely were always straining to hold their contents on her. Gaping between the buttons and threatening to pop them. Her jeans, while always fitting Pat like they were sprayed on, fit looser than when Pat wore them, a little baggier in the hips and seat. She was also the real tomboy of the three of them and game for anything. Come to that though, they were all game for anything as I was to find as that summer advanced.

All of the adults left then, with Phil and I again told to take care of the others. Dad, Uncle Luke and Uncle Gene driving their pick-up trucks while Uncle Lenny and Chad rode in Lenny’s big panel van. Mom and Aunt Connie left in our family station wagon. It was’t long after they left that us kids all went across the street to ‘the field’ (just an open lot, really) and started a game of Flys and Grounders.

It’s an easy game really, a couple of baseball bats and a ball, all of the baseball mitts we had in the house, and we were playing. We only had four mitts though and we gave three to the girls. Phil and I using our bare hands to catch the ball while Carl kept the last with him at the batter’s box. Carl was first batter and the rest of us headed for the other end of the field. Carl would toss the ball up in the air and hit it towards the group of us and whoever ended up with the ball earned points. You got ten points for every ball you caught before it hit the ground (a fly ball) and five points for every ball that hit the ground before you got it (a grounder). Each time someone reached fifty points they became the new batter and we started again. We did that for maybe an hour and a-half, with new batters up quite frequently – and I really think everyone got at least one chance at bat – until eight other neighborhood kids showed up and asked about starting a real game. We were expecting it, really, having seen a few of the guys ride by on their bicycles. We knew that word we were playing baseball would spread pretty quick.

The neighborhood at the lake was a pretty rough and tumble one. Baseball, football, hockey, kick the can . . . really all of the games we played were played by all, boys and girls equally. With any of the games, you may have days when it was mostly boys on the field and others when it was mostly girls . . . usually though the odds were about even. Almost all of the neighborhood kids were pretty much on a par with one another where skill was concerned. I remember in High School, watching the school teams playing and making comment to some of the girls about their making better tackles than the one we just saw, or fielding a ball better or being faster than this guy or that one. But the girls weren’t allowed to play in ‘organized’ sports with the boys back then . . . they had to play only on the girls teams. I used to wish they’d let some of the girls on the football field . . . bet we would have won more games.

We started a game with us and our cousins against the kids that showed up, also a mixed group. Baseball mitts were traded back and forth during sides so everyone had one to use. They had eight players to our six, but Bill Klave did the catching for us when we were in the field, as long as it wasn’t his turn at bat, then Mary caught. They were fair about it, except they wouldn’t try to catch a pop-up or a foul-tip . . . but it was their team after all. I think they beat us that time, but it didn’t really matter . . . it was fun and there would be other days, other games. The game broke up when the adults came back. Every truck and car had things in it . . . dressers and disassembled beds, clothes and mattresses . . . even bags of groceries, books and toys. This was when we learned that the girls were going to be staying for a while.