CHAPTER 13

Hill Street Blues

Me in front of Hill Street House, 1973

When Dad showed up one Thursday night after work with two dozen Coney Island hot dogs we should have been suspicious. My parents had never brought home takeout, much less famously unhealthy takeout.

Coney Island hot dogs are a variation on a chili dog topped with onions and mustard, something of a regional delicacy in Michigan. Their only relation to the amusement park in New York is that they originated from the sausages sold in buns there, first known as red hots, and later entering the American lexicon as hot dogs.

Dad came into the house with white bags full of the foil-wrapped Coney Island dogs and two six-packs of M&S soda pop, which stood for Michigan Supreme, six grape and six “red pop,” a cherry-strawberry flavor combination. We never got pop, except at family reunion–type picnics, and then were limited to one each of the inexpensive local brand, Faygo, which could be had for ten cents a can. After everyone loaded their plates with chili dogs and picked out a pop, my parents called us in to a meeting in the living room.

“Big news!” Dad declared. “We’re moving!” After all those years we’d be leaving the farm, just two months before the end of the school year.

“It’s a great place,” my dad started, trying to sell us on the spacious new ranch house they found on West Hill Street near downtown Davison. “We’ll have so much more space, and hey, there are two bathrooms. Isn’t this great? We’ll be close to the high school, and there’s an elementary school within walking distance for Kathleen.”

My brothers and sister stared in disbelief. My parents had never even mentioned looking at houses in town, much less buying one.

My sister protested first. “But this is our house! We can’t just move.” The idea was unthinkable.

My brother Miltie would have none of it. He’d repeated first grade when they’d arrived from California since the curriculums from the two states varied so much. So although he was eighteen, he was just finishing his junior year alongside my brother Doug. “I’m an adult now. I don’t have to move with you. I could stay here and live in the barn.”

Doug stood up. “If Milt stays, I’m staying, too.”

Mom and Dad exchanged glances. They weren’t naïve enough to think that the new house would be a slam dunk, but they didn’t expect flat-out revolt. After all, Mom says, they had endured years of complaints about the farmhouse. It had been cozy when the kids were little, but with two adults, four teens, and a seven-year-old sharing one bathroom, mornings were chaos. Afternoons and evenings didn’t fare much better, as my four strong-willed and busy siblings required being shuttled back and forth to the high school, which was a half-hour drive away, for Mike’s band rehearsals, Sandy’s baton lessons, Milt’s track practice, and Doug’s football schedule.

Things might have been different if there was a public bus line that came anywhere near the farm, but there wasn’t.

After nearly seven years of struggling, Mom and Dad had finally paid off the debts stemming from Century Products. At the same time, Dad got promoted to general foreman, a step up in the ultrahierarchal GM management system. Suddenly, they felt flush. They wanted a place where the kids could be proud to invite their friends over. After all those lean years, Mom felt like she’d earned a dishwasher.

Dad stood up. The discussion portion of the evening was over. “We’re all going to meet the Realtor at the new house on Saturday morning. Wait and see. You’re going to love it.”

As promised, Mom and the boys loaded into the station wagon and Sandy and I rode with Dad in his pickup truck. On the drive over, Sandy said she would go along with the whole new house idea if she could have a pony for her fifteenth birthday.

“There’s a shed behind the house, we could probably keep a pony there,” Dad said quickly. “We’ll take a look.”

The drive from the farm to the new house took about twenty minutes. Davison is often considered a bedroom community to Flint, one of the oldest continually inhabited areas in the state. It was Chippewa territory when a white man named Jacob Smith married into the tribe and started a trading post in Flint in 1819. The woods and fields of Davison were hunting grounds for the Chippewa and fur traders. In 1842, a man named Eleazer Thurston settled there, and Davison became an official village in 1889. Its pioneering roots are reflected in its downtown area; with a bit of work, it could pass for a Hollywood western set.

The new house was at the dead end of West Hill Street. Covered in white siding with black trim and faux shutters, it had a stately look for a modest ranch-style home. By comparison to the farmhouse, though, the place felt huge, an oversized rectangle with an attached garage. We pulled up and parked in the driveway. Dad got out and waved to Milt, who pulled the station wagon up behind him. Sandy helped me down from the truck. “It looks like a rich person’s house,” she observed.

Once inside, it had a classic Midwest rancher layout. The first room we entered was the small living room that extended into a dining room with sedate avocado-colored carpeting. “This is the formal living room,” Dad said enthusiastically. Then he led us to an oversized family room with blood-orange shag carpeting and wood-paneled walls with a door that shut it off from the rest of the house. It even had a window air conditioner. “Isn’t this great? You kids can entertain your friends in here.”

The kitchen was decked out in the latest fashion: bisque appliances and robin’s egg blue cabinets with gold-speckled Formica counters. “Look, Sandy! A dishwasher!” Mom said, pulling down the creaking door. “Plus drawers! Six of them!”

The place had three bedrooms, including a generous master with its own bathroom. The kids looked on dubiously. Sandy had hoped to get her own room out of the situation.

“We thought the boys will have the master for now, and you girls can share,” Dad said. “At least until the boys graduate next year, and then we’ll move the arrangements around.” The kids looked on without comment. Dad took it as agreement. “Okay! Let’s look at the backyard!”

The backyard was big, about a half acre, but it felt tiny compared to the farm. “It’s a good size for being in town,” Dad explained. “There’s still space for a garden.”

“Where are we going to put the chickens?” Mike asked.

“Well, we’ve had chickens long enough,” Dad said reassuringly. “We’ll find good homes for them.”

“Plus,” Sandy interjected, “we’re getting a pony.” Mom and Dad didn’t say anything.

After everyone had looked around, we piled back into the cars. Then we did something incredible. They took us out to dinner.

We never ate out. On the rare instances we got burgers at the A&W or fifteen-cent hamburgers at McDonald’s in Flint, we all ate in the car. That day, Mom and Dad casually walked into a fish-and-chips place. We got menus. Dad told us we could get anything we wanted. Sandy ordered fried frog’s legs. My brothers selected the fried whitefish with fries. I ordered the chopped steak, a dish in which a piece of cooked sirloin is chopped and tossed with onions and mushrooms. Mom and Dad both ordered surf and turf, steak with grilled shrimp. Mom ordered a glass of red wine.

It was as if we’d gone undercover to invade some enemy territory. Rich people bought new houses. Rich people ate in restaurants. If there was one thing we embraced about our collective identity growing up, it was that we were poor farm kids, the ones who sat in the brown bag lunch ghetto at school with the awkward sandwiches made from homemade bread and cheap olive loaf. My brothers still joke that they spent most of their school years wearing underwear with someone else’s name written inside, the result of Mom’s thrift store shopping. But we didn’t mind. There was always plenty to eat and we never wanted for anything.

In the next month, more odd things happened. Dad came home one day in a new red Chevrolet Vega. Plastic-wrapped furniture showed up, including a faux leather La-Z-Boy recliner. Mom brought home a set of matching dinnerware—the first new set of dishes we’d ever had, aside from the collect-a-plate china she procured after years of shopping at Hamady’s. The most startling acquisition: a twenty-two-inch Magnavox color television in its own massive wood cabinet that came with a heavy, black padded remote.

Dad packed up the last few chickens into a crate and sold them for cheap to a farmer in Lapeer, a thirty-minute drive away. No one around us kept chickens anymore. Mom left all of her canning jars in the cellar. I can still recall the smell, a musty mix of mildew, earth, and dust, as Sandy and I helped her carry the last few to store beneath the house. “We won’t need these where we’re going,” she explained cheerily. I watched as she closed the cellar door the last time.

The kids took some adjusting to the new house. It was far from the friends they’d made over the years out at the farm. Aunt Mel and her family were now seven miles away, not far, but far enough that it felt like we rarely saw them.

A neighboring teen, a Cher-style hippie with waist-length shiny brown hair, showed my sister and brothers the bus stop just down the street for the high school. She barely spoke, and when she did, it was in a hushed, theatrical whisper.

When the bus arrived, to my siblings’ horror, it was “the short bus.”

There’s no politically correct way to describe their reaction to the short bus. Simply put, the small buses were famously used to ferry special needs kids to schools. Whenever a short bus would show up at school, kids would crane their necks to see what souls would descend from the motorized lift.

In the case of the Hill Street bus, there was no need for such hysterics. The county had few students who lived in the small two-mile radius from school and hence put a smaller capacity bus on the route. Rationally, people should understand that. But teens are not rational people. Mike was a freshman, Sandy a sophomore, Milt and Doug juniors. When the bus pulled up in front of the high school, they’d flee from it as if it were on fire. Their teenage fears weren’t completely unwarranted. After two weeks of trying to avoid letting anyone know they were short bus riders, my brother Milt saw a few students nodding their heads in their direction, smiling and obviously mocking them.

That weekend, Milt cashed in money from strawberry picking and lawn mowing and bought a used Ford Mustang—an act of independence against the bus and against my folks, knowing how much a Ford parked in the driveway would irk my GM loyalist father.

For reasons unknown, I thought the best way to get to know my new urban neighbors was to dress in my cowgirl outfit and wander the neighborhood ringing doorbells to disperse treats.

Mom had made a comment about “calling on” the neighbors. A week after we moved to Hill Street, my parents went out to dinner in Flint. Milt was off somewhere in his Mustang. My sister was at her friends’ house, twin girls named Pam and Tam.

In theory, my brothers Mike and Doug were supposed to be watching me. Instead, they were glued to the new color TV in the family room watching Karl Malden and a young Michael Douglas in The Streets of San Francisco. The new house came with an automatic antenna. You could turn a beige dial on a box and the antenna would automatically turn in the direction requested. We could hear the metal antenna pole lurching and screeching outside the window. Suddenly, TV viewing became something that the boys could do without fear of being sent outside for “pole duty.”

I got dressed in my teal cowgirl vest and skirt, both attractively finished with a white leatherette fringe. I pulled on my matching white cowgirl boots and topped it all with my blue felt cowgirl hat. I set off into the neighborhood with a basket in hand, my mother’s banana spice cookies inside.

The first neighbors I called on had a puzzling reaction. The man across the street operated a television repair shop out of his home. I knocked and, despite my hearing noise inside that would indicate they were there, they didn’t come to the door.

I moved on to a tiny brick house with a young newlywed couple. “Who are you? What are you doing?” the husband asked. I tried to explain. “Honey, go get the camera,” he yelled over his shoulder. They took my picture, then some cookies. I could hear them laughing behind the door. The Cher-style hippie girl’s home was next. She was brushing her long hair when she answered the door. She took a cookie, whispered, “Thank you,” and closed the door, all the while brushing her hair.

A sweet elderly couple explained that neither of them could eat sugar, but thanked me and welcomed us to the neighborhood. The woman gave me a dime. At another house, a woman answered, a baby in her arms. She chuckled as she helped herself to a cookie. “Okay, nice to meet you, candy girl.”

The brown house on the corner looked run-down, the backyard enclosed by a sagging aluminum fence. The doorbell didn’t work, so I knocked. A small girl with delicate features opened the door. She must have been three. I gave her several cookies. She never said a word, and just kept staring at me with big brown eyes as I made my retreat.

I left the biggest house on the block for last, a white two-story number with an immaculate yard. A flock of young girls answered the door. Ah! Kids my age! I thought. The dark-haired father pushed the girls aside. “Who are you? What are you selling? We don’t want any.” Before I could explain, he slammed the door in my face.

I turned away. I thought I might cry. But, then, how else would I meet the nice girls inside? I squared my shoulders. Cowgirls don’t cry, I thought.

The next evening, I put my cowgirl outfit back on. That night, I emptied the cookie jar of Mom’s oatmeal raisin cookies and repeated the endeavor of the previous night. The man across the street pulled aside the curtain but didn’t open the door. The young couple took another photo of me. The old lady gave me another dime. The woman with the baby smiled broadly. “Hey, candy girl! What do you have tonight?” She took two cookies.

Steeling my little cowgirl will, I returned to the big white house and rang the doorbell. The front door was open, with only a screen door in place. The girls, all clad in long cotton nightgowns, clamored from up and down the split-level entry stairs to the front door. “Hey, it’s you! Don’t worry, our dad isn’t home. You can come in.”

That’s how I met my closest childhood friends. Katie was the nearest in age to me and became my best friend. She starred in my first short stories. The oldest was Margaret, a dark-haired beauty who always got to wear new clothes before they were handed down to her sisters. Ann was younger, and could be a wicked tattletale. Carol was a toddler when I met her. Their mother gave birth to a fifth girl, Cindy, shortly after we arrived. They had Barbie dolls, including the three-story penthouse (with a pink elevator) and the pink Corvette, not to mention shoeboxes filled with clothes in various states of repair. I tasted my first Popsicle at their house—a cold, mouth-numbing, joyous moment. I watched in fascination as their mother unveiled the process of heating up a frozen supermarket pizza; given their restaurant history, my parents always made pizzas from scratch. Once baked, the frozen pie tasted both bland and sweetly spicy, like the soft, doughy pizza we had at the elementary school cafeteria. I marveled at the strangely synthetic nature of the cheese topping. As they were the only Catholic family I knew, I quickly assumed that everyone of that faith ate frozen fish sticks for dinner on Fridays. Baked until slightly crunchy, the fish itself tasted bland and mushy compared to the fresh variety we caught, yet the salty beige coating captivated my taste buds when combined with the sweet-and-sour tang of the store-bought tartar sauce. I begged my mother to buy fish sticks, but she would never give in.

In the summers, I spent most of my waking life with their family, at least until their father got home from work on the line at the Fisher Body assembly plant. Often, an awkward chill descended on the household when he gruffly announced his return by slamming the front door and pounding upstairs to his room. Their parents sometimes went days without talking to each other, an unthinkable scenario in my own household. I scurried away when he arrived home.

I learned that the residents of the brown house were a down-on-their-luck family with five kids. They were all older than me except for Anna, the sweet, tiny girl who answered the door. She’d run after my mother’s car when she saw her coming home from work. Mom would feed her cookies and pamper her. “Aren’t you just such a pretty little girl?” Mom would say. Sometimes she’d sit on our porch and brush Anna’s hair until it gleamed. “Would you like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?” Anna would nod. She always seemed hungry.

Other than Margaret, Katie and her sisters always complained about hand-me-downs. I didn’t have anyone to give my clothes to when I outgrew them. By Hill Street, I knew that I’d never have a younger sibling, no matter how hard I prayed.

So every so often, I’d invite Anna over and doll her up in one of the dresses that I’d outgrown. I’d fix up her soft brown hair with bows and barrettes. One year, I did this every day before Vacation Bible School. A church member volunteering as a teacher remarked that doing such niceties was sure to get me into heaven.

“No, ma’am,” I replied. “It’s my sunshine work. You’re not supposed to expect anything back in return, not even from God. That’s what my grandma Inez says.”

One positive about Hill Street was the arrival of a new family member: Dad’s first powerboat. Now that we were no longer neighbors with Uncle Bert, it was unseemly to borrow his boat. But my parents were not the kind of people who would buy something on credit. So for six months, they set aside money from Dad’s paycheck. When they started shopping, everything they found was too expensive.

One Saturday, Mom got up early to go to Hamady’s. On her way home, she noticed a FOR SALE sign on a nice-looking blue boat in a front yard. It hadn’t been there on her way to the grocery store. She stopped and took a look.

It had everything they were looking for: a walk-through windshield, a ladder in the back, enough seating for the family. Plus it was half the price of similar boats they’d seen. Just then, the owner emerged. He’d just put it out that morning after a fight with his wife.

“So, here’s the deal,” he started in a conspiratorial tone. “I’m selling it really cheap because I’ve bought this new boat, but I haven’t sold this one yet and my wife is giving me all kinds of grief about it. How much I sell it to you for, she doesn’t need to know. She just needs to know that it’s not here anymore.”

Mom bit her lip. It was just what they wanted and it was a fantastic deal. But it was a big purchase to make without Dad seeing it first. She gave the guy a check for one hundred dollars to hold it for her and said she’d be back with her husband to look at it.

“You tell him I’ll throw in all the life jackets, the skis, everything,” he said. “It’s complete.”

Mom rushed home. “Honey, there’s this guy down the street who is selling his boat. I think we should go look at it,” she said.

Dad was reading the paper. He was giving up hope of finding anything they wanted at a reasonable price. Grudgingly, he got dressed. Eventually, they headed over to take a look.

As they pulled up, Dad got excited. He jumped out of the car immediately.

“Oh, my God! I love this boat, this looks perfect!” Dad exclaimed. He stepped up inside the immaculate interior. He hopped down as he saw the guy walking toward him from the house. “Hey, how much are you selling this for?” The guy told him the price. “Sold. I want it,” Dad said quickly. “I can write you a check right now.”

The guy scratched his head. “Well, here’s the problem. I can’t do that. It’s been sold.”

Dad had the look of someone who had a winning lotto ticket just snatched out of his hand by a gust of wind, lost forever. “Oh, no,” he said, his voice weak with disappointment.

“Yeah, I sold it to that lady over there,” the man said, pointing toward Mom, now just getting out of the car.

“That lady?” Dad said. Then it dawned on him. “That’s my wife! That’s my wife! That means it’s our boat!” He jumped up and down. He went over, put his arms around Mom’s waist, and lifted her up, spinning her around. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Well, I just gave him one hundred dollars to hold it in case you didn’t like it,” she said.

“In case I didn’t like it?” he said, surprised. “I love it! I’ve got the smartest wife in the world!”