The first is a white farmhouse, cold floors where my mother stubs her toes on the nursing-rocker in the dark. I hang by a spring in the kitchen doorway, sit on the cement steps in a patchwork jumpsuit, dig dirt between the knees of Jeri, who will be my sister's godmother, later, when I have a sister. Westie, who owns the house, lets me name a calico kitten Pajeemee, my word for pajamas. This house lasts only a few minutes, though I lived in it three years.
Weeks before my sister's arrival we move into town, the double-decker yellow house on the corner of Second and Fremont. My parents buy the house from the Heberts, Fred and Valera, who are moving to a trailer in Arizona where they will have white rocks and roses instead of a lawn. Mother ate dinner with them once, when the house was theirs. They didn't open the curtains, the room stayed dark, and something looked like oatmeal, I don't remember if it were the food or the curtains. Later, at a cocktail party in Europe, my mother will encounter a drunk Russian who asks her where she lives. "America," she will tell him. "Oh? Where?" "Idaho," she specifies. "Oh? What city?" She doesn't explain that Idaho really doesn't have cities. "On the corner of Second and Fremont, in Aberdeen," she answers, amused or exasperated. Aberdeen is a potato-growing town of a few hundred people--if you count the farmers who pick up their mail there. "Ah." He reflects. "I thought the Heberts lived there." He once ate dinner with the Heberts. I imagine him eating oatmeal.
Men with mustaches help us move, and drink Budweiser on the lawn afterwards. Mother feeds them sandwiches and they hang my swing from the Dutch Elm in front. One of them is Differntbob. I've given him this name to distinguish him from Daddy, whose grownup name is also Bob. Differentbob lives in a squash-colored house with his wife, Charlie, and teases me for how hard I swing my arms when I walk. Moving day is the only time I see him at the yellow house.
In this house I will learn to remember, but my first two memories happen in other houses, friends of my parents, honorary "aunts and uncles" whom I don't distinguish from my parents' actual siblings.
Int he trailer-house of Guff and Katink Mother is singing to me, to comfort me, "you are my sunshine," a song I'll love years later, once its excruciating sadness has been separated from it. At this moment I'm not comforted, because she is crying. It's nearly dark in the room, and something has crashed and shattered her head. A mirror, I remember; a lamp, she tells me later. Or maybe the other way around. I am afraid. If Mother is crying, how can I be safe? I think for many years that it was a dream, until an accidental story begins to piece together and I realize it's actually a memory. But until then, I'll not figure out why the wind-up musical bear ("Singing Toots," to distinguish him from Toots, the Main Bear) makes me anxious. He plays "You are my Sunshine."
Bill and Jeri's mountain ranch-house (I know from photographs) has a water pump at the kitchen sink, and gas lighting, and I bathe in a copper washboiler. They have stuffed animals made of sheepskin, including a dog I take home and call Pughy. Uncle Bill lifts me into his blue two-seater airplane, and he and my parents push it around the meadow so I can fly. Aunt Jeri teaches me to milk a cow, and leads a horse uphill while I slide farther and farther back on its bare rump. But the first memory, corroborated by my Mother: under the apple tree in back, Jeri's dollhouse. My mother will tell me several years later that Jeri was amazed how careful I was, not quite three years old, with the tiny furniture. I will be unreasonably proud of this.
The yellow house, eight years' remembering. The L-shaped stairs I fall down with my record player, with its carpeted ledge where Igor the plant presides under his fluorescent light. The bifold door at the bottom that I push open after bedtime to announce I don't feel like sleeping. The Redroom, red shag carpet and black-covered daybed with its lip-shaped pillow, and a black tree painted on the wall by my artist-Uncle Tom (another un-uncle). The smiling frog under the toilet lid in the downstairs bath, the Littlehouse under the stairs where we hang our doll clothes and sit on a miniature plastic couch and I cut off my best friend's braids. The third drawer in the upstairs bath, filled with boats and bath toys (including my favorite, the yellow plastic clamshell with a pink squeezable clam inside) that we cart outside on irrigation nights when the yard floods. Sometimes we wade before bed, holding our nighties above the water and coming indoors with grass cuttings sticking to our feet.
Summers and Christmas we spend at Grandma and Grandpa's house in Colorado. "Teh Blue Boulder House," we call the first one, with the stairs my sister sleds down, the golf course over the back fence, the frowning wooden gargoyle over the basement door. We watch Sesame Street in the family room (with orange or turquoise plastic cups of raisins) and open Christmas packages in the Living Room (its only known use) and all of my mother's childhood stories are set (in my mind) on this stage, though she never lived here. Grandpa pitches plastic baseballs for me to whack with my plastic bat, and when he knows the neighbors are out on their patio, he lobs the ball over their roof and trots around their house to pick it up, pretending I hit it there.
Actually, most of our summer time is at Grandma's pool. They've belonged to the same country club since my mom was a kid on the swim team, and swimming lessons are the purported reason for our extended summer stays. Mother sews matching swimsuits for the three of us, except Karin's and mine have our names embroidered on the front. Morning lessons, then lunch from the snack bar, with Cheetohs and grape slushies, then pool-play till the daily thunderclouds roll in. When we get too chilly, we lie on the hot cement and let Mother cover us with sheet-sized towels from Ixtapa, and we get up with nubbly imprints on our arms and legs and jump back in the pool. At home Grandma strings a low clothesline for our swimsuits. Bailing from the backseat of her pastel Mercedes, we race each other to the line, then scamper into the house sporting only swimsuit-shaped tans.
Their second house (their three-dozenth house, but the second in my experience) is the red-tiled ranch-style on Four Rivers Road with the steep back yard perfect for the yellow Slip'n'Slide. Here my plastic baseball becomes embedded in my plastic bat after a mighty swing on my first day's visit. The front door opens into an expanse of tile and a ceiling-high, room-wide arch leading down a step into the Living Room where we will only sit to open Christmas packages. The Grownups also sit there in the role of audience when we appropriate the front hall to stage plays, most memorably a production of Snow White and the One Dwarf, in which my sister plays Snow White while I am witch, dwarf, and prince; and after which Karin cracks her chin open on the coffee table.
For half of my tenth year, "home" is a violent-green VW bus, which we asininely christen "Schotzie"--the German word for sweetie. We always name cars (Grandpa's Bumpycar, Benny, The Prune). We name everything. Schotzie has become Home Base because my father is on sabbatical and we are driving around Europe, eighteen countries in five months. Every evening we trace the day's route in orange highlighter ona map of Europe. Mother has outfitted the bus with a clothes rack and plastic drawers under the seats, and a Bookbox on the seat between us (she has shipped ahead caches of books in English). She has sewn each of us a wardrobe in red-white-and-blue (everything to mix-and-match), with the same set of clothes for our two dolls. If she loses one of us, she figures she can point to the other and pantomime "One Just Like This." If she loses both of us, maybe she can use a doll.
We don't sleep in the bus. We sleep in funny hotels and bed-and-breakfasts and with my father's international set of friends. Fritz and Hannah with immense feather-beds and salami at breakfast. Doctor Bertram and his grownup daughter who serve us Yorkshire pudding and know James Herriot, whose country-vet stories we used to see on Masterpiece Theatre. Norman and Shirley (a Girl Guide friend of my grandmother's) who show us their century-old dairy farm, stinging nettle, and a hidden staircase to the kitchen. Stan and Helena and their son Przemek who take us blueberry-picking near Warsaw; Gudrun and Julia who lend us bikes for our stay in Germany; the Van Loons who take us sailing and the Van der Zaags who politely attend our coronation of The Queen of Idaho, in their living room with their heirloom doilies on our heads. Siert and Luz, who lose a bet to us and pay up in Toblerone chocolate triangles. And our Great-Aunt Barbara and Great-Uncle Clarke, who meet us in Paris to celebrate Karin's seventh birthday and his, a day later. He teases her that he's younger, by a day. They give Karin hand puppets that look like themselves, and we give him a beret. Karin asks him if this isn't one of the places in A Tale of Two Cities. She has run out of reading material and started on mine.
When we return to the States, we leave our Aberdeen house for Moscow, where my motehr can go to law school. We rent, for a semester, the Finleys' House, a smoke-stained split level with an organ we are not allowed to touch. For the first time I sleep in a different part of the house from my parents, so for the first time we have a family fire drill. We will meet in front of the house next to the streetlight. This will prevent silly accidents, Daddy explains, like someone (him, I realize) going into the house to get me if I've already gotten out. I'm suddenly terrified of house-fire. At the Finleys' House we discover yogurt-covered raisins and get the chicken pox.
House-shopping, Karin and I take our contributing role as judges seriously. I think of shuttered yellow house for years afterward as the-house-we-almost-bought; the house I hope for, I won't be able to remember at all. We move into the mustard house on Blaine Street, with (to quote my mother) the monkey-vomit-green door. It's two blocks from Mother's Minnesota-college roommate, Katink, and her husband Guff, who has a Ph.D. in plant physiology and paints houses. First thing, Guff paints our house grey-blue, and Daddy, helping him, falls off the roof and breaks two ribs on the driveway. Karin--who is afraid of everything from geese to pumpkin pie--calls the ambulance. There are no house numbers because of the painting, and she doesn't yet know the address. Mother and I return from Pizza Hut to find the house surrounded by flashing lights, and I am frightened by her fright. When she cries out his name, which she never uses, I think he's surely dead. Karin will call the ambulance for him again, fifteen years later, when his failing heart will let his lungs fill with water, and she will wait with him while he drowns on the couch.
Mother said once that after a few days back in Boulder, she started signing checks Anne Zier instead of Anne Dwelle. Today I signed a credit card receipt Janna Dwelle--a five-year-gone name. My sleepy reflection, hair half-in a braid, baggy grey pajamas, fumbling at the dresser-top (makeup, bracelet, birth control pills) for my blue orthodontic retainer... Here in my parents' house I am perpetually adolescent. Never mind that I am nearly 30, chair of a small English department. Never mind that my luggage included the two-year-old boy asleep in the next room. For a decade I have had two homes--the place where I live, and this house on Blaine Street. Home.
