The Carpet

  

It is conventional wisdom that when you are a child in a poor but loving family, you never realize just how impoverished you are.  At least that is what my mother always tells me whenever I visit her apartment in my sister’s basement in Estes Park.

“We were poor Jimmy, but we never acted like we were poor.”

That is always my cue to nod my head in slow and steady agreement.

“Well that’s just because you worked so hard and I never really needed anything.”  That response never fails to make my mother’s eyes sparkle and her lips just perceptibly purse in assurance of her triumphs at single-parenthood.

She wasn’t completely single.  It is true that she left my father back in Illinois while she, her four children, her sister, and her mother resettled in Colorado.  But technically she was not alone.  My aunt was with us.  My grandmother, an Illinois saloon keeper, champion arm wrestler, and basic Jack of all trades, was also there to take care of the kids—my little brother and I—while my mom, aunt, and two sisters went out to make a living.  So like I said, she was not alone; she was just husbandless.

But my fatherless state, just like my poverty, wasn’t something on which I dwelled.  He was just a vague memory.  I could, for instance, remember Sunday mornings when the rest of my family went to ten o’clock mass.  I would be exempt because of my recent bout with and year long recovery from rheumatic fever; my father would be exempt by virtue of his professed atheism.  On those mornings he would make fried egg and tomato sandwiches on white bread with the tomatoes cold and crisp and the hot yolk of the eggs mixing with the pulp of the tomato and the plastic doughiness of Wonder Bread.  It was our own secular communion.  Now, sometimes on Sunday mornings I whip up those egg and tomato sandwiches and think about my father.

My father’s child support for the four of us was a court ordered $25 a week which he dutifully sent, minus ten cents for postage.  I remember that check for $24.90 every week.  I can still see the pink tint behind the numbers and the pink and blue line running from the twenty-four to the ninety on the face of the check.  There was never any note and the check didn’t even have my father’s signature

Of course, when my mother talks about us being poor but not noticing it, I don’t bring up my father’s checks.  I also don’t bring up the carpet.

* * * * * * * * * * *

After an initial stay in a ratty one bedroom shack on highway seven, my mother and aunt somehow managed to buy a two bedroom home with a sun porch and full unfinished 

basement on highway thirty-six right across from Lake Estes.  It was in an old reclamation project created to house the workers and engineers who built the Lake Estes Dam twenty years earlier.  It had a nice living room and a tiny dining room with an even tinier kitchen.  (We had some memorable Thanksgiving dinners in that tiny dining room, although one wonders how it was possible to make a twenty pound turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and beans and pumpkin pie in a kitchen barely big enough to turn around in.  And how did we get as many as fifteen people around a table that could barely seat six.)  Mom and her sister shared a bedroom; my sisters slept on the sun porch.  My grandmother had her own room.

My brother and I slept in a room built in the basement next to the coal burning furnace it was my job to stoke every day.  Once a week a local coal delivery truck would pull up to our backyard, place the chute from the truck into the coal bin and deliver our week’s supply.  Those were the worst days to be in the basement because the dust from the coal exchange hung everywhere.  I had a punching bag in the basement that my mother gave me one Christmas in a half-hearted attempt to get me to learn self-defense. I always avoided working the bag on coal delivery days because I would come upstairs streaked with black lines of sweat pouring down my face and I would have a hard time breathing.  And when I dusted our room once a week, the rag would come up nearly black with the week’s worth of coal dust hanging in the air.  If I contract emphysema in old age I will at least know the cause.

Coal miner’s lung not withstanding, the real problem with the house as my mother saw it was that the house was carpetless with hardwood floors throughout.  I know that in this day and age most house shoppers actively look for places with hardwood floors.  Real estate advertisements list hardwood floors as selling points.  But for my family, who had just left a three-story Victorian with hardwood floors in Freeport, Illinois, they meant drudgery and cold feet.  The hardwood floors also were a sign that we were poor and my mother saw it as her mission in life to weed out from around the house the tell-tale signs of our economic woes.

The solution came to her, like so many others, right out of the pages of READER’S DIGEST.  The whole family was gathered around our Zenith watching GUNSMOKE when my mother found it wedged somewhere between “Laughter Is the Best Medicine” and “Life in these United States.”  It was a quarter page ad from some carpet maker in Duluth asking my mother if she was tired of the feel of bare feet on cold, bare floors? if she was tired of getting on hands and knees to wash floors? if she was longing for the warmth and comfort that only wall-to-wall carpeting could bring?  The answer to all of those questions was a decided yes.

Mom first introduced us to the ad during a commercial.  Imagine what it would be like, she said, to be watching Matt and Miss Kitty while curled up on a floor covered with plush carpeting.  Imagine what it would be like to sit on that floor, back propped against the couch, a bowl of popcorn in easy reach.  Imagine what it would be like to invite friends home from school so they could see and revel in our new floor covering.  Why we would be just like the Bartletts who had shag carpeting in every room of their house.  You could be sure that June Bartlett didn’t get down on hands and knees to clean the floor.  All she had to do was plug in her Kirby vacuum cleaner and stand there offering minimal guidance and it would do all the work.

She painted a compelling picture and I spent a goodly portion of that night dreaming about the rewards wall-to-wall carpeting would bring.  Friends would come running after word of our largesse got out.  I would stop going through so many pairs of socks because I would be frolicking barefoot on our luxurious floors instead of sliding across the unadorned wood in stocking feet.  My mother would be happier and my grandmother’s back would not hurt so much from scrubbing the floor.  (We all knew that it was really my grandmother who did the heavy lifting in the house cleaning department.)  Well, we all got caught up in my mother’s excitement and encouraged her to send off to the Duluth Carpet Mills for more information.

The week waiting for the response from the carpet gods in Duluth was a great one for my mom.  She always felt so good about herself when she scored a victory in the family war against squalor.  On those rare evenings when we would have a really nice cut of meat for dinner, for instance, my mother would be so proud of what she had provided.  No meat loaf tonight, her face would proclaim.  Kiss that tuna casserole goodbye.  I remember one glorious day at Moorehead’s Super Market when my mother bought a prime rib.  (In my mom’s eyes prime rib was the holy grail of foodstuffs.  In her taxonomy of taste a shrimp cocktail, prime rib medium rare, a baked potato, and a bottle of Lancers was the meal that all people of taste—Cary Grant, say, in all those Doris Day movies—were ordering at the Brown Derby or Chasen’s.)  Her eyes widened and her head shook as she weighed the rich marbling of the beef against the price.  She stowed it safely in the cart and then did the unthinkable:  She picked up a pound of shrimp.

“Jimmy, get a bottle of that cocktail sauce down there.  This will go so well with the prime.”

I liked the way she said “prime” like we ate it every day.

But the prospect of a carpet was better than the prime rib.  It lasted longer and the anticipation was twice as sweet.  Most importantly, as my mother explained at dinner the day the people from Duluth sent more information, we would all have a kind of stake in the carpet.

The major selling point of the original ad in READER’S DIGEST was price.  Where a traditional approach to carpeting our home might cost $1200, the Duluth approach was something like $179.99.  Of course, that did not include installation.  Mom was quick to point out that if we just made our measurements exact, we could do the installation ourselves. 

The brochure stressed that the carpet would be made from the fibers of old coats and sweaters and throw rugs we had lying around the house.  Just gather up the items—the more items, obviously, the larger the carpet—and ship them to Duluth.  Specify the dominant shade you would like in the final product, provide measurements for each room and hallway, and before you know it the United States Postal Service WILL DELIVER YOUR NEW CARPET TO YOUR DOORSTEP!  

It was at this point that, contrary to my mother’s injunction, I began to feel poor.  The blithe comment about old sweaters and coats lying around the house did not apply to our household.  I had a brown wool sport coat and gray wool slacks I wore to mass on Sundays.  I also had a corduroy winter coat with a red flannel liner, a couple of wool stocking caps, and my first communion suit.  On the wall above my bed hung a Navajo rug I dyed in a crafts class one summer when I was still in Illinois.  I loved that rug.  

My brother, who was only six at the time, didn’t have much to worry about.  True, he did have a first communion suit, but he needed it.  The only other item with any potential was his blanket which I figured he should lose if I had to give up my rug.  He was too old for a blanket anyway, both of my sisters insisted, especially when they saw boxes of old school sweaters go out their door.  But even my mother’s wistful dreams of running her bare feet through the thick pile of our carpet were not strong enough to endanger Stevie’s ratty blanket.

I was the big loser among the children.  My mother glommed onto my first communion suit without a second thought.  And then, in order to have enough carpet for both bedrooms, my prized Navajo blanket was added to the shipment.  I also lost one green sweater from Wards with a series of snow covered pine cones emblazoned across the chest.

My grandmother, the oldest, literally had the most baggage and thus the most to give up.  Several sheared wool coats that made her look “sharp” when she dressed for mass in the wintertime, three or four wool suits, boxes of sweaters, and her favorite stocking cap all made it into our shipment to Duluth.  When my mother ultimately added all of the throw rugs in the house to the pile, my grandmother could no longer take it and quietly disappeared.  

When it got close to dinnertime and Gram was still unaccounted for, my mother sent us out on searching expeditions.  I walked all the way to the shore of Lake Estes to see if Gram was by her favorite fishing hole.  She wasn’t.  I knocked on Carmack’s door across the street.  No Gram.  She wasn’t in her room.  She wasn’t anywhere.  Finally, right before we sat down to eat, the rattling of the stoker impelled me to go downstairs and shovel some coal.  When I opened the door to the coal bin I found Gram lurking in the corner and clutching a sheared sheepskin coat that was evidently one of her prized possessions.

“Is your mother out there?”

“No, Gram.  She’s upstairs making dinner.”

“Is she still looking for clothes to send to Duluth?”

“Not any more.  I think everything is boxed up and ready to be shipped.”

After a few more assurances, Gram lugged herself and her prized coat out of the coal and I helped her upstairs where she quietly grabbed her meatloaf and took it and her coat to her room.

“Oh, she’ll get over it when she sees the new carpet,” my mother insisted, but you could see the first shadow of doubt cloud mom’s face.

“She might get over it, but I’m never going to get over losing my letter sweater,” my sister Jeri offered right before she went to her room to brood.  

My oldest sister, Mary Jo, looked at her despondent sister in one bed, briefly contemplated following Gram into the coal bin, but instead left home the next day.  While it is true she had been planning on leaving ever since she graduated from high school, I couldn’t help but think it had a lot to do with her depleted wardrobe.

With similar sacrifices from my mother and aunt, we packed up the items, specified tone and measurement, and sent the whole thing off to Duluth.  In two to three months we would be wiggling our toes in wall-to-wall carpeting.

The house felt different in those three months.  We were no longer walking on bare, cold floors; we were imagining walking on plush carpet.  When we sat down to watch GUNSMOKE, we were no longer sitting on bare floors; we were luxuriating on the carpet we know would be ours any day now.  We became, well, middle class.  

I came home from school the second week of May and there they were:  five card board shipping tubes, each containing the precisely measured carpet for one room or hall.  My mother sat on the front porch holding the end of one opened tube on her lap as I walked up.

“Jimmy, come over here.  Look at it now.  Is that green?  We asked for green.”

“Well, it’s kinda green.  There’s some red and blue in it too.  It’s not like it is any one color.”

“I know.  I know.”

I left mom on the porch and went into the house.  My grandmother, who decided to end her brooding once the carpet arrived, was sitting in the living room looking at an old picture my grandfather had taken of her in a sheared sheepskin coat  that had since become part of the tangle of fibers composing the carpet.  She would look at her picture, then look out the window at the carpet, shake her head, and take a big pull on a Schlitz.

“I know what’s wrong,” my mother said as she staggered in off the porch.  “We are just looking at a small part of the carpet.  When we get it all down it will look fine.  You’ll see.”

We immediately launched into carpet laying mode.  We removed the furniture, laid out the surprisingly well measured carpet, tacked it down, and replaced the furniture.  Of course our job was simplified by the fact that we had no pad to worry about.

We had the carpet in by 8:30 and it did end up having an overall tone that, for want of a better term, you would have to call green.  My grandmother started popping corn and we all got into our pajamas ready to watch GUNSMOKE.

We all sat there, just as my mom had described, on our new carpet, propped up against the couch, pop corn by our side.  It was that great episode where some hot headed young man comes into town to make trouble.  Miss Kitty warns Matt of the danger he faces, as does Doc.  But Matt faces the young gun and plugs him right between the eyes.  They bury the punk on Boot Hill and all convene at the Long Branch for drinks.

We were surrounded by our new luxury when my mom came out in her bare feet to give the installation her final approval.  

“C’mon mom.  This is a great episode.”

“I’ll be right there.  I want to put some socks on.”

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