Mom’s Underwear

Every Sunday, there was a line of (mostly) men underneath our second story bay window in line for food stamps from the neighborhood corner store.

Home alone, my sister and I often had our heads dangling out of the bay window from the large Victorian house on the corner of Page and Divisadero in San Francisco—the house that some of the kids in the fancy middle school I went to would not visit for my birthday party. Their mother told my mother over the phone that “they didn’t allow their kids to go to that zip code.” Technically, the house was in the Western Addition neighborhood, adjacent to Height Ashbury, home of the hippie movement in the 1960s in San Francisco. The house was a three story building, and we were on the floor sandwiched between the produce market on the ground floor and the top floor where a young, desperate looking couple would go in and out at odd hours. It was 1982 and I was in third grade.

Breathing in the soot on the ledge of the huge wooden frame, we would peer down below at the tops of the heads of all the passers by. On Sundays it was always the men. And like kids do, we evaluated distance and possibilities. We rummaged through our mom’s underwear drawer to find some good stuff. “Ten cents!” we hollered from above in our squeaky kid voices, my little sister following my lead. “Ten cents! Is that all?” the men hollered back. Woo-wee! Look at those! Their thick hands reached for the lacy delicate things.

We had my mom’s lingerie on a bent metal hanger lowered down with some string so that the men could get a closer look—but not too close since they needed to buy it if they wanted to keep it. I was instructing my sister not to barter too low; ten cents was the absolute lowest price I had told her before we opened the window and propped it up with volume ‘M’ of the red leather-bound Encyclopedia Britannica. Our old house had lost its functional window pulley mechanism many years ago and according to today’s habitability laws it was entirely illegal.

“Girls!” My mom was home and her eyes were wide. Behind us on the floor were piles of bras and lacy underpants.

“We sold two already!” My sister jumped up, proud to report.

It was then my mom made the connection to the line of men below the window, in line for food stamps—and apparently her bras. “Close that window immediately and bring these things inside!” She was yanking at the encyclopedia that was really jammed in the heavy single hung window frame.

*

According to historical building records, the house on Page Street was built in 1886 by a builder named Alexander H. Baily, Jr., appearing to have survived the 1906 earthquake and fire. The original owners are listed as “B and Margaret Daniels,” I wonder who B Daniels was, and why the rest of his name is not spelled out. Assuming it’s a he and not simply a typo on the San Francisco Planning Department’s website. And who was Margaret Daniels? And was the house built for her or her husband? It was a very large house in the Italianate style with ten foot ceilings and gorgeous mosaic inlay floors in the rooms. The house was obviously built for someone with prominence or at least money back in the late 1800s, but now, to the modern elite, it was in the wrong zip code.

But at eight years old, the house seemed to be a container for my sadness, nothing more. I had just changed schools and I missed my old school deeply. At my old school, we would sit on bright orange and red meditation cushions and sing songs like De Colores and Sunnyside of the Street while our music teacher Doug would play the guitar or the piano in his rubber flip flops, full of the joy of music. I would run freely around the playground with my wavy curls in their mis-matched plastic barrettes and my bright corduroy overalls, waiting for Fran to call us over to the wooden deck for snack time. Everything had an earthy smell that was even stronger when we took field trips to Green Gulch Zen Center, taking naps in the geodesic dome and eating homemade bread the teachers packed from Tassajara Bakery.

My new school was cold and stern and everyone was quiet; it was missing earthy smells and vibrant song. We had to wear dark green plaid uniform dresses with brown penny loafers (with the socks rolled up) and march the flag down the cement corridor to the formal auditorium in the mornings. Everyone was called Mr. or Mrs. or Ms., and we were expected to know the difference between Mrs., Ms., and Miss. and not to use the wrong one when addressing our teachers.There was a parent roster with most kids’ parents listed as ‘Mr. and Mrs.’ or ‘Dr. and Mrs.’ commonly, and then the father’s name to follow, like Mr. and Mrs. Martin Andrews. I wondered where the mother’s name was. My parents took up two lines on the school roster instead of one because they had different last names. Also, I was told, their names were weird, and why didn’t we all have one last name?

My sister got to stay in the other school. My parents told me that this new school would be better for me—I would have more opportunity, I remember my mother saying. I wasn’t sure what that meant.

In the new school all the kids were girls and I missed boys. Boys could be annoying and mess up things but they were also a lot of fun to play with. At my old school all the boys and girls did a lot of running and climbing but at the new school running was reprimanded. The only times we were allowed to run was during gym class or later on team sports.

The girls in the new school had a lot of things I hadn’t seen before. They wore bows in their perfectly ironed hair and had mechanical pencils and a colorful pencil grippers. I didn’t understand why they needed pencil grippers but they were pretty colors and I wanted my stuff to be the same so I asked my mom to buy me some. She laughed and said, “What on earth for?” and that was that.

I started to cry a lot by myself in my room. I told my mother that I had a stomach ache on school days and didn’t really like my new school but I didn’t share all the things that were too hard to say, like how certain girls always shoved my stuff off my desk or told me I was ugly like my mom or asked me why my dad had a weird accent. I did not know my father had an accent.

My mom was tired, and told me that if I continued to cry in the mornings before school she would have to take me to a psychologist. I didn’t know what a psychologist was, but I found out that they are very quiet and mostly just watch you do things. The psychologist had me do a test where I had to look at weird pictures of drawings and say what I thought they were. I took a long time to think and they said “just whatever comes into your mind first.” I also had to solve some puzzles that seemed to be insolvable and I remember being scared to make a mistake because the psychologist was watching me. At the end of the visit the psychologist told my mother a few things, but the word I remembered was ‘perfectionist.’ I thought about the word perfectionist. I knew that if something was perfect that was a good thing, but none of this felt like a good thing.

At home, with my sister, I forgot about the psychologist and about the dread of school. As sisters who had spent our youngest years without a TV at home, we had always found ways to find and create our own fun. We would sing and shout to our mom’s Rod Stewart album, Blondes Have More Fun… Or Do They? and leap around on the green velvet couch in big room my mom had painted blood red with gold trim because she wanted it that way.

*

I’m not sure what Margaret Daniels had spent her time doing in this big house—whether she and her supposed husband had lived where we lived or throughout all the floors—but this was the fourth house we had lived in as a family, watching my father remove windows and build stairs. This was the fourth house with sheets of plastic taped up at the entry to the kitchen and only certain times when we could go in and eat—after the loud guys with drills and hammers had left for the day. This was the fourth house where I would hear the arguments about why something hadn’t been paid “when I told you about it for weeks now” and the fourth house where I would hear my father say things like, Just write the damn letter how I want you to write it, Cynthia. And the fourth house where she would cry when he shouted too much and storm off to the bedroom declaring she wasn’t his secretary.

And we would move in a few years to the fifth house.

But before we did, I learned to keep my crying to myself and distract myself through little bits of mischievousness like selling our mom’s underwear from the bay window of Margaret Daniels’ old Victorian house on Sundays, when the men would line up below.