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 local market on the corner.

Home alone, my sister and I often had our heads dangling out of the bay window from the huge 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 weren’t allowed to visit for my birthday party because it was in a ‘bad neighborhood'. We were on the second floor above the produce market and below the top floor where a young unhappy looking couple were in and out. Breathing in the soot on the ledge of the huge frames and peering down below at the tops of the heads of all the passers by, on Sundays it was at the tops of the heads of the men.

And like kids do, we evaluated distance and possibilities. We rummaged through our mom’s underwear drawer to find some good stuff to sell to the men below. “Ten cents!” we hollered from above in our squeaky 5- and 8-year-old voices. “Ten cents! Is that all?” the men hollered back. “Whoo-wee! Look at those!” We had my mom’s lingeré 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 had learned what it meant to be a very good salesperson I thought and 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 Encyclopedia Britannica. Our old house had lost its functional 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.

“The men really like this one, mom!” My sister was proud.

It was then my mom realized there was a line of men below the window – in line for food stamps. “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.