It was beautiful, much more so than the house I live in now, especially in the fall, when the Japanese maple trees and the bushes seperating us from our neighbors all turned bright red. I climbed in the trees, as high as I would dare without the branches breaking, and crawled through the bushes or peeked through the fence to spy on my neighbors, despite the fact that they never did anything interesting. In the back yard we had a swing set with a slide, but I had much more fun making elephant noses out of maple seeds or collecting acorns for my "pet" squirrels.
We had four floors. The basement had the laundry room, where we were allowed to play ball and where my brother set up a clothes line to hold on to while he learned to ride his unicycle. (He failed--it still sits in our garage.) My dad had a woodshop down there, with really big tools, and Chris would help him make things like the hutch that the movers couldn't get out of the door, while I took the scraps of wood and pretended I knew how to make things out of them. I think the only thing I actually succeeded in making was a mess. The woodshop itself was a horrid room which always smelled like sawdust, probably because it was full of sawdust, but the room behind it where all the small pieces were thrown to get them out of the way--that was my room. Once in a while the boys came up with something I could do to help, such as grabbing a hammer from the workbench or putting wood into the vice, but I usually discovered that I was just in the way, and ran away to cry in the last of the basement rooms. I don't really know what to call this room. It wasn't anything originally, but we remodeled it, put in a bar, and replaced the logs on the walls with plain wood paneling, and we had parties down there on the rare occasions when we had parties, but then I was too young to stay up much longer than to say hello and goodnight. My dad also kept his keyboard in there, and I had fun finding all the different patterns that were programmed into it, but other than that the room was empty, and a good place for pouting. A place where I was never found. I thought I could sit down in that room all day, waiting for somebody to miss me and come searching, but I always ventured out long before that.
The first floor was our family project, so, although it ended up as the least personal part of the house, it is also the part I remember and miss most strongly. After we had lived in the house for a few years, we had an ongoing joke about the complete lack of taste of the people who had lived there before us and had covered the beautiful wooden floors with hideous green carpet. I actually rather liked the green carpet because it allowed me to have my annual "Summer in December" birthday party where we dressed in shorts and had a picnic in the living room while it snowed outside the window, but of course I had no say in the decision, and the carpet was gone.
A man came in to replace the fireplace, but the rest we did together, as a family, including me to the extent that I was able to help. In sanding the white paint off the wooden bookcases, we discovered that underneath they were actually teal, and, to our complete amazement, we had actually made the situation worse. And the teal, of course, was much harder to remove. I was in charge of reomoving the staples that had held down the green carpet. My dad bought the molding and we stained it, although my recollection is that I did not help with that. We did the same things in the downstairs family room, and after all the furniture, the grand piano, the books had been returned to their rightful places, there was no more playing in those rooms. They were formal rooms, and I rarely even ventured inside them except to practice the piano, which was rare enough to be an anomaly in itself.
The exception to this was Christmas, the best time of the year for a young child. We had a family rule that nobody could go downstairs and see the presents under the tree until everybody was awake and we went down together, and as Chris got older his excitement waned, he slept later, and I became more anxious. Christmas Eve I vowed to stay up and watch outside the window until Santa came, despite the all too practical advice of my parents that the sooner I went to sleep the sooner it would be morning, but I would inevitably wake up around five and wonder what had happened and why I hadn't seen Santa. Then I would remember that the important thing was that at that moment the tree was surrounded by presents, and some of them belonged to me, and I would long to go down and see them, but nobody was awake yet. We had motion detectors on our security system, and it was simply impossible to get downstairs without setting them off, or to turn the system off without waking my parents, but I always tested my luck, seeing how far down the stairs I would dare to go, not really knowing which step the sensor could see, but quite aware that I would not get far enough to see the tree without chickening out and turning back. Once my parents woke up I spent a few hours trying to convince them to force Chris to get up and not torture me anymore, but then, at long last, my mother would take a picture of the three of us coming down and getting our first look at the tree on Christmas morning, and then, finally, I would get to open my presents, after which I would have to wait until next year to have another excuse to go into the downstairs family room.
I spent most of my time on the second floor of the house. That is where my room was, with the lavendar walls and the walk-in closet. It was messy back then, too. I actually don't miss much about that room, because it was less mine than the one I have now--my mom set up all the things on the shelves, and most of them were hers, whereas now I have my own possessions to place in position of respective importance--but, nevertheless, there were certain aspects of it that were distinctly me. I recall "cleaning" my room by stuffing the mess under my bed and in the closet, and getting away with staying up past my bedtime by shutting the door in the closet and turning on the light in there, which could not be seen from the hallway, either because I had homework I had not yet done, or just to be defiant, because I was too old to have a bedtime. And I do miss waking up on my birthday to balloons hanging from the ceiling fan.
When my brother was left to babysit me, I spent the time in the upstairs family room, watching the TV, which, at that time, was bigger than I was, until Chris decided he wanted to watch it, and of course, he would change the channel from Full House to McGyver, which scared me to death because I was always convinced that this time he was going to die, and I would run away screaming and crying and hating my brother.
On the fairly rare occasions that my father was home when I was not asleep, he would be doing some sort of work in his office, which was attached via a bathroom to the TV room, and had crease marks in the carpet from the waterbed the former owners had. There was a large reclining chair that I would sit in while he worked, and if he wasn't too involved in what he was doing, I would read to him from Jay Leno's Headlines, or The 776 Stupidest Things Ever Said. Sometimes there was even a job for me, like sorting checks or helping him type his music collection into a database, but even if he was very busy and I couldn't make a sound, I would still sit in the chair and read to myself, just to be in the same room with him.
My playroom was on the third floor, and this was my haven. The ceiling was slanted because it was right under the roof, but I was small enough to fit in the lowest places, so I felt that I had an exclusive right to the room. All my games, toys, puzzles, and everything that I used to amuse myself or did with my friends when they came over was in this room. I also believed that I ought to have the right to keep it as messy as I pleased, and mostly this was okay, although there was occasionally a time when I was forced to organize things, or decided to take on the Herculean task myself, but it was never truly done. Next to the playroom was the bathroom that had the tub with the feet, which I remember being afraid of because in the dark I thought it was a monster, and then the guest bedroom, usually inhabited by my grandmother around the holidays. I generally avoided this room because it had that old-people smell, and there was nothing interesting in it except a lot of bibles and books in Hebrew. When we bought the Apple II GS (an amazing improvement over the Apple II+ on which I had played Lemonade Stand and Circles From Lines) we put it in that room, but it was mostly for my brother, who spent all his time on billboards, before the world wide web existed, and I didn't get much of a chance to use the machine, nor did I have much of a reason to use it. Across the hall was Chris's room, which presented the greatest mystery for me because I was rarely allowed inside it. On the few chances that I got to be in there, mostly when I followed my dad and he said I had to be allowed in, I looked around and touched everything, which is probably the reason I was not often permitted to be there. I was very jealous of Chris because he lived on the third floor away from my parents, because he had fish and a lizard when I was never allowed any type of pet, and because he had a whole extra room at the back of his, filled with junk that I wanted to own. He had posters on his walls, trophies on the shelves, and books I couldn't read on his desk. I always thought that someday I would get that room.
My brother went off to Cornell, and shortly thereafter my father moved out as well. I remember Chris leaning against the tall, central maple tree in the back yard the last summer we spent in that house. It was the only time I've ever seen him cry. We packed up all our things and moved to Sussex, where I made a new life with my mother, but Chris has come to stay there only once, and hasn't been back since he moved to California. When we happen to drive down Sedgewick for any reason, I wonder if they feel the same way about our taste as we did about the family before us, and I recall climbing the Japanese maple trees and crawling through the bushes. I think about my neighbors and I look at each window and see in my mind the room that was there. Most of all, I remember that when we lived in that house, we were a real family.
