Jason and his Grandmother, parts 3156 - 3159

 3156.  In the distance I  could see Jason, he was coming home from the store, just the same as the night before.  His grandmother had lied to me about his being upstairs.

 3157. Everything about my house seemed different that night, and I  saw things in a new light.  My Mom’s behavior, which I  always thought was so pointless and annoying suddenly made sense to me in a new but very dismal way. My Mom was either cleaning up, or talking about how she needed to clean up. 

 3158. I was always being given cleaning projects to do around the house. On Saturday, I  couldn’t leave the house until I  had vacuumed the stairs. Sometimes also I  had to wash the tub, or clea n the windows with windex and newspapers.

 3159. I  hated these jobs which seemed pointless to me, and yet I  felt sorry for my mother, who spent all day from morning till night washing up, cooking, ironing.  Now, for once, I  had seen the consequences of never cleaning house and so understood my mother’s overwhelming fear of squalor in all its somber implications. 

Jason and his Grandmother, parts 3152 - 3155

 3152. She went upstairs and while she was gone I  walked into the kitchen.  Right away I  noticed that the entire house had been cleaned up since the night before.

 3153. Jason’s grandmother did not come back down for a long time and I  began to feel very awkward and uncomfortable.  Everything in the house struck me in the form of a riddle to be figured out, and so I  was unable to take my eyes away from certain very ordinary things. Take for example, the handle of the refrigerator. The handle was dark brown with dirt and there was a black stain spreading out from the handle in all directions.

 3154. The side of the refrigerator facing the stove was covered with flecks of food. Most strange of all to my eye was a quart bottle of beer on the counter by the sink , nearly empty. I  did not know that beer came in quarts; there was something ominous about its shape and color. I  thought about the appliances in my Mother’s kitchen that were washed down so often the enamel was worn away in the corners.

3155. Mrs. Sweet still did not come back down, so there was nothing for me to do but leave. I opened the door. I  stood half in and half out. It seemed rude to just go away like that without saying anything but I  couldn’t stand my nervousness. Finally she started back down the stairs and I  practically shouted out, “I’ve got to go now,” and rushed out of the house.

Jason ans his Grandmother, parts 3148 - 3151

 3148. Jason’s grandmother did not have any money to buy the things to play life with, like everyone was supposed to. Since I  was a child I  had always assumed that all the things like, cars, houses, tables and chairs, silverware and plates belonged to everybody equally and came with life automatically.  But somehow I  just couldn’t feel sorry for Jason and his Grandmother.

 3149. There was something very real about Jason’s house, even if it was a dirty mess.  It’s like this. If you were a dog belonging to a very rich person, and your kennel was the very best, and your food prepared by a chef, and your collar studded with diamonds, wouldn’t you just long to be a wolf out in the wild, with burs in his fur, and lice, and laying in wait in the dirt, a gleam in your eye. 

 3150. Jason was like that, he wasn’t exactly a wild person, but he had that gleam in the eye that a wild animal has.

3151. The next day Jason didn’t come to school.  Since I  had nearly killed him the night before, after school I  went to his house and knocked on the door.  After a while someone opened the door a little and looked out.  It was a woman about my Mom’s age, a little fat with very black frizzy thick hair.  She said, “Are you Albert?”  I said that I  was. “Come in Albert and I’ll see it Jay can come down.” She said.

Jason and his Grandmother, parts 3144 - 3147

 3144. I recall my first experience of the awareness of the difference in taste manifested in the interior decoration of my relative’s homes. My Aunt and Uncle lived in  duplex in the ground floor apartment. In the driveway was parked their 1957 DeSoto. Neither the fact that my uncle drove a DeSoto, or that they lived in an apartment made any impression on me at all.

  3145. The DeSoto, and the duplex must have, for me, fallen into the normal variation in things, but in the bathroom there was a shower curtain. The shower curtain was gray, and had a large pink flamingo on it. I can remember very distinctly thinking to myself, “My mother would never put up a shower curtain like this in our bathroom.”

 3146. If, at Christmas, somebody gave my mother a pink flamingo shower curtain she would have seemed to be very pleased with it, but later she would have thrown it into the trash. But that is not exactly correct because, since my mother was always worried about money, she would have set it aside to sell for fifty-cents in a tag sale.

3147. But my mother, and my aunt and uncle with the duplex and the DeSoto were from the same background and economic situation. They were all children of the great depression, and were consequently branded with obsessive frugality and pessimism, the result of too many dinners consisting of only potatoes. 

Jason and his Grandmother, parts 3140 - 3143

 3140. How would it have been possible to arrive at the age of thirteen and not be aware of the differences in aesthetic sense as expressed in the choice of furniture and household items? I suppose that  up to that point I had not been made aware of it in any dramatic way. If one considered the one area where a child is exposed to the effect of class on taste it would be in observing the clothing worn by one’s classmates.

 3141. But the possible clothing choices for thirteen-year-olds in 1957 was extremely limited. In that time and in that place there was an absolute tyranny over clothing choices exercised by a uniform sense of style that was observed by everyone.

 3142. The only place you could have found less variation in clothing would have been in either a parochial school, or a private boy’s academy, where a dress code was enforced. But in our world the only purpose that would have been served by the expression of individuality in dress would have been to subject oneself to ridicule and ostracism for a simple thing such as rolling the cuffs of jeans to a size other than to three inches. 

3143. It was not in the world of the public school where one was first exposed to socially influenced variations in taste. No, rather it was in the houses and apartments of ones extended family where this distinction first crept into one's awareness and there blossomed into the fruit of cultural disdain.

Jason and his Grandmother, parts 3136 - 3139

 3136. That night I  couldn’t get the image of Jason’s house out of my mind, I  kept on thinking about it until very late. I  was in seventh grade and I  had been in school with the same children since kindergarten.  I  knew every boy and girl in my class as if we were all related. I  had been in everybody’s house at one time or other any number of times.  There were differences in the various houses.

 3137. We had a rich boy in our class, just one. He name was Peter Something-Something the Third.   He lived in a mansion.  I  had been in Peter’s house dozens of times. Their kitchen was as big as my entire house, and they had huge pots and pans in the kitchen hanging from bars with hooks on the ceilings. It seems they were prepared, in case they ever had to make dinner for an army that might be passing through town someday.

 3138. In my mind I compared Peter Something-Something’s house to Tom Whatever’s home.  In Tom’s house everything was crammed together and they ate supper in the living room because there was no room for a table in the kitchen.  Every house was different in a million ways, but on the other hand they were all basically the same in certain important respects.

3139. Every house had a living room with certain types of tables and pieces of furniture called hutches in styles called “Ethen Allen,” or “French Provincial.” Up until the day I  saw Jason’s house I  never realized that it was all bought, it was all purchased in stores.  It is impossible to explain just what I  mean.  One purchased all this furniture in stores if you had the money and then you set it all up in your house just like a stage set.

Jason and his Grandmother, parts 3132 - 3135

 3132. The situation wouldn’t allow for any other type of arrangement, so I  had to agree to adding the death to mothers into our bargain. With that I  walked him up to his house, I  wanted to see him safely inside, who knows, he might have had another attack.

 3133. Approaching his door he quickly began hurriedly explaining something to me, saying, “I live with my grandma, she’s not home right now but you can’t come into my house, I  mean even though were friends, I  can’t let you in if my grandma’s not home.” He didn’t offer any further explanation, and I  didn’t ask. I  wasn’t surprised, because everything about Jason was strange. He unlocked his door, and said, “See you tomorrow.”  Through the door I  got a glimpse of his house.

 3134. What struck me most was that you could see straight through his house to the back door and everything was a mess. On the way home I  started thinking about what I  had seen through his front door. There was a couch, but it is difficult to describe it. It was like someone built a couch some time or other and made it as ugly as possible. Then that couch was left outside in the rain and the sun till it was all gray, and coming apart in the joints.

3135. In front of the couch was a television setting on a cardboard box. The cord from the television was plugged into an extension cord that was plugged into the light in the center of the ceiling. The sight of the extension cord hanging down from the ceiling gave me the creeps. Everywhere there were plates, plastic spoons and forks, beer cans and soda cans, and the bags from potato chips.