My first memory of Sissy is at the big house on California Avenue in San Pablo. As I look back, I have to laugh at the idea of it being a big house. I suppose that was in comparison to the one-room cottage on the beach in Florida. This house was two stories tall, so it had to be big.
But, we rented only the bottom half. and although it was larger than the cottage, it was really just one big room.
The big wooden front door was on a porch about four steps up from a ten-foot-long narrow cement path from the sidewalk. Stairs from that porch lead to the upper story. The door had a small window inset through which occasionally a monster would peer through. My mom explained that the monster was just the landlady who lived upstairs coming home after getting drunk. I guess it seemed a reasonable expectation except for the hairy face, red eyes, and gnarly teeth. Landladies probably come in all shapes and sizes though.
Through the door was an entryway with a bench that opened to store rubber rain boots and gloves. Pegs protruded out of the wall to hang up coats. A staircase ran up to the ceiling. It was like the Winchester Mystery House. Under the staircase had been another storage space, but it wasn’t finished, so the “potato bugs” took it over. On occasion, a hideous potato bug would come out into the living space, and my dad would yell at me to get it. They were huge (as long as my palm), translucent, and squishy. I had to get toilet paper to cover it, but the squishiness could be felt through the paper until I threw it in the toilet in the small bathroom next to the fake staircase.
There was a bedroom next to the toilet room (which had no shower or bathtub), but you entered it through a wide doorway that had no door. While we lived there, we usually had beads covering it or a blanket after grandpa said only hippies had strings of beads for a doorway. This was 1966, but my family strongly disapproved of hippies.
I’ll bet our neighbour, Kamala Harris, had a family that approved more of hippies. I understand one or both of her parents were students at Berkeley at the time. Yeah, I’m talking about the current Vice President of the United States and possibly the future president. When she was running for Vice President, she mentioned that she lived on California Avenue in 1970 when she was only three years old. We may have missed each other since we moved away (at least my mom and us kids moved away—we left dad) in 1970. But, if we didn’t miss each other in time (us moving away before she moved there), we had to be close to each other in space. California Avenue ended one house and a bar in one direction and three or four houses the other direction. So, she had to live close by.
In fact, I remember a little brown girl although only once. She was walking with her parents and a dog that looked very familiar. Sissy and I ran up to the dog and scratched it until it rolled over on its back. We saw the pattern on his belly and yelled to our mom that we found “Patches.”
My mom denied that it was Patches and awkwardly apologized to the family. As we walked back home, we protested that,
“But it was Patches.”
After pouting and thinking about it for a while, I explained the situation to Sissy. Patches often got outside and stole newspapers… and clothes off neighbors’ clothes lines. One day, Patches was hit by a car. We nursed him back to health, but then he ran away again. He never came back. That is what we were told by mom. I explained to Sissy that I thought mom was a liar. I had caught her in many, many lies. She actually gave Patches to a neighbour and told us that Patches ran away and never came back.
Sometime later, there was another car/dog accident. A neighbor told my mom who ran to where it was. We followed. It was Patches. He was dead. My mom went back to the house and knelt by the bed and cried for hours. I had never seen her cry. She hasn’t since.
So… Maybe I met Kamala Harris. And maybe she is a dog thief. I’ll never know. I suppose it doesn’t matter either way now. I’m unlikely to be able to vote for or against her. Most people I hear arguing about politics use some of the strangest reasons to justify their support or opposition for her. Somehow, I doubt they would change their vote if they knew about her shenanigans at three years old on California Avenue in San Pablo, California.
Next to that semi-official bedroom, along the back wall, was my room, a cubby-hole, my mom called it. It was about six feet by six feet and had only three walls. Later, when it became a shared room for both Sissy and me, a sheet with Barbie and Baseball themes was sewn together and hung to become the fourth wall. A bunk bed had a similar sheet with baseball art attached to the ceiling and run down to my top bunk, under my mattress, and converted to Barbie there on one side of the bottom bunk before being attached to Sissy’s mattress.
So, we each had our own room. Grandma came down from North Sacramento to sew it all together for us. After they were done, they played Pinochle and Rummy on the new maple table dad bought by playing the system. Sissy… I mean Ruby, my sister, now owns that maple table. She won it from mom after dad died by “playing the system.” She has all the weird prizes they collected over those years.
They hid Sissy in the room with the beads covering the doorway. I wasn’t allowed in there. I tried to figure out the strange new sounds from the blanket on the floor of the cubby hole. I knew it was serious though. They kept saying she would probably die. Sometimes mom would come through the beads, she would look at me accusingly and say,
“As far as being your fault, it is going to strictly be your fault.”
I got the faint idea that the secret in the room was a child… like me. I heard things like,
“Don’t get her so close to my boobs. It’s not proper.”
Or sometimes…
“She’s allergic to milk.”
I thought about the milk cans I had to clean off and pack. Were they in there? Did I clean them wrong? Is she going to die because I cleaned the milk cans wrong?
But I also heard about how tiny she was. It was important that her feet not touch the floor because she would get a cold and die. That couldn’t be my fault. But, mom kept saying it would be my fault if she died.
So… in my mind, I thought of Sissy as being a smaller version of me, but somehow different. The strange sounds started to sound a bit like crying. I wanted to help her.
This excerpt comes from the memoirs of James D. Brausch who can be contracted by postal mail at PO Box 1502, Carmichael, CA 95609-1502.