Other People's Houses

My Chattanooga cousin was already named Linda Jean, but my parents had already picked Linda, so they named me Linda Gayle--though nobody ever called me Linda Gayle except my daddy and the  Tennessee relatives.

Five of us cousins were born in '47 and '48. four girls and one boy.  We saw each other once or twice a year, starting at the house of our grandparents, then spreading out to the aunts'  houses since Mama Jim didn't have room for us all.  Truth was, Mama Jim wasn't effusively interested in us. Maybe she'd used up all her grandmotherly attention on the batch of older cousins. 

Tutti's house was a messy house in a downtrodden neighborhood.  Walking once, we were followed by a man in a car who slowed down and called out something and we ran back to her house through an alley.  Another time we came home from Trick-or-Treating asking the parents the meaning of a word spray-painted on a wall, a simple four letter word that started with F.  They were mortified to hear such a word spoken by their good Christian daughters. 

Tutti had Golden Books in her room, which I loved because back home we didn't have book stores or Golden Books, though we did have Bible story books and bags of books from the library. 

One of Tutti's Golden Books taught us how to cook, and I wanted that book.  She said I could have it to keep, but she forgot.  My last memory of her room--because we didn't stay there often--is being chastised for putting a book on top of the Bible. 

"Never put anything on top of the Bible," she said.  

Tutti's daddy called Tutti's mother "Mama," and vice versa. She was the mousiest aunt. She always deferred to "Daddy" even in what she might like to eat.

Linda Jean's bedroom had a cardboard box of doll house furniture. No doll house, but that was fine--I never tired arranging sinks, tables, beds and chairs all over the floor.

At breakfast one morning, her mother said, "Linda Jean and Linda Gayle, your hair turns my stomach!" I'd never heard that phrase before, but I made a mental note to say that to somebody sometime as a joke. 

Linda Jean told me Eisenhower was president and she knew how babies got made. Her older sister, a nurse, had a book that showed it all.  We looked at diagrams of uteruses, but we couldn't make heads or tails of it. Linda Jean said boys had something to do with it, but she wasn't quite sure what, so we ended our foray into nursing books. 

Dianne lived in Nashville.  Her mama, a glamorous and mischievous preacher's wife, sold cosmetics at J.C. Penney's.   She dressed fashionably, unlike the Chattanooga aunts, and had--in her words--"enough shoes to last til Jesus comes."  

Visiting the houses of other people was like reading different books. After a page or two, you caught on to the language spoken and the emotional geography there.