Telling the Truth

It’s September 1965. We’re moving into our first apartment! We knock on the door of the first-floor apartment. The managers live here. It’s lovely. Plenty of space on the first floor, plus a bedroom in the finished basement.

I can’t wait to see ours. It’s on the second floor. A smaller apartment on the top floor is for singles. The apartments are furnished and come with basic utilities.

We turn the key; D unexpectedly picks me up and carries me through our living room door! Nice touch! I look around. Not as lovely as downstairs. The furniture is worn, but usable. Kitchen appliances old but functional. The wood floors, when covered, have grass mats.

The living room faces a busy city street and has a large window. So does the adjacent small kitchen. Looking out the kitchen window I see a busy auto shop and garage directly across the street.

The most outstanding feature in the living room is a nonfunctional fireplace with a mantelpiece. A great place for our new clock and other wedding gifts.

We walk from the living room through a closet-like area with no doors. It has built-in drawers on one side, and space for a small desk and chair on the other side. This becomes D’s ‘office.’ He puts up book shelves (concrete block and lumber) on the back side of the desk.

Our bedroom is just beyond this area. It has one closet, one dresser, and a large window looking out to the back yard. Just off the bedroom there’s a large bathroom with a large window overlooking the back yard.

The view from the bathroom is limited by a flat asphalt-covered roof just beneath the window. A fire escape ladder comes up to the flat roof. Another ladder extends up to the attic apartment. The fire escape plan is simple. Out the bathroom window and down the ladder!

Or we can exit through a second bathroom door that opens into the hallway at the top of the stairs. Or the fourth bedroom door that opens into the same hallway. Or our third living room door that opens into the very same hallway! We put locks inside all hallway doors.

Sometimes we hear traffic up the stairs, through the hallway beside our apartment, and up the stairs to the third floor. A graduate student plus his friend. The building isn’t very sound-proof, especially at night. Things can get noisy above our bedroom. I’m grateful our bedroom is two floors above the managers’ basement bedroom.

The windows have pull-down shades. Street lights are on all night. So are lights at the 24/7 auto body garage across the street. The street outside our building stays busy most of the night. Sirens scream, wrecked autos get towed in with lots of shouting about where to put them, cars race by, people outside on a warm evening sing, party and shout at each other.

We buy inexpensive oriental scroll art, hang it with several wedding gifts on the walls, and use gift money to buy a new record player and radio.

It’s beginning to look like ‘us.’ Brand new linens and blankets on the bed, towels in the bathroom, dish cloths in the kitchen, table mats on the tiny table in the living room. Candles everywhere. And beautiful music playing on our new record player.

The best feature is a huge old porcelain tub with claw feet! Wondrous for soaking. Just make sure the bathroom shade is down. You never know who might be out on the roof at night.

Because the radiator pumps too much heat and isn’t regulated by us, we sometimes open our bedroom and bathroom windows. One night I woke up suddenly to the sound of feet coming up the ladder just outside our bathroom.

I froze. I could hear men’s voices. I peeked out the bedroom window. Yes, they were coming up the ladder. They had a flashlight. I woke D up.

Within seconds, bright light came through the window into our bathroom. I was terrified. I can’t remember what happened next, but somehow we discovered the intruders were the police! Someone complained about a suspicious looking person in the neighborhood, and they were just checking things out.

It never happened again. For months if I woke up at night and forgot to shade my eyes from the bright street lights, my heart pounded as though  it were happening again.

© Elouise Renich Fraser, 29 March 2015