In 1969 I convinced my parents to let me throw a party in our basement. A short-haired, square-looking eighth-grader, I went about transforming the space into what I believed might be a credible hippie pad. A neighbor kid helped me paint the gray cinderblock walls in Day-Glo orange, yellow, and green. We drew peace symbols and wrote “Peace” and “Love” and “Stop the War” in the pillowy, crowded-together letters we used on our three-ring binders. My dad drew the line at names of cigarette brands. When we turned on the black lights, it was a counterculture spectacle.
I handed out invitations at school: Saturday night, 7:30 to a rather adult 10:30. Before the party I placed quilts and pillows around the basement floor, left half the room open for dancing, and made it painstakingly clear to my dad that the basement was, at all costs, an adult-free zone. No, you cannot come down and take Polaroids.
Thirty people came. Thirty! My little record player quickly proved inadequate, so a neighbor saved the evening by lugging over his parents’ stereo. We danced to “Cecilia” by Simon & Garfunkel, “Everyday People” by Sly & the Family Stone, and “Something” by the Beatles. In one corner we played spin the bottle, and several couples held a contest to see who could French-kiss the longest. Perhaps most scandalously, one guest brought a pack of Marlboros and handed them out. My dad, disregarding my edict, brought down more Cokes and saw us smoking, but he didn’t interfere.
I wasn’t exactly setting the social world ablaze at that age, so I was delighted when my party gained a reputation for debauchery quite beyond the mild transgressions that actually took place. Those Day-Glo messages remained until I painted over them before I left home ten years later.
Ron Teeter
Arlington, Virginia
One afternoon, while my mother washed clothes in the basement, a ring slipped from her finger and rolled into a crack beneath the bottom step of the stairs. She’d bought the ring, which had diamond and ruby chips, for herself as a working woman before she married. She fished frantically for it, but it was beyond her reach.
When my father came home from work, she prevailed upon him for help. He reasoned that they’d have to take out the staircase to get to it, and, not being a handyman, he didn’t want to tackle it.
Hearing this story as an adult, I urgently desired to return my mother’s ring to her as a surprise. I wrote a letter addressed to the present owners of the house, relating the story and expressing hope that after thirty-five years the ring would still be there. I drove to the house and deposited the letter in the mailbox.
The next day the current owner called and said, “When can you come take a look?” Anxious for a happy ending himself, he had already popped off the bottom stair but was waiting for me to get there to sift through decades of dirt and dust.
We hooked up a utility light and scraped and dug and examined each clump until all of the dirt was swept away and removed. It took about a half hour, and by the end of our excavation, our hair and clothes were black with soot. The ring wasn’t there.
After we’d cleaned up, the owner said, “I have something for you.” He pulled from his shirt pocket a faded black-and-white photograph of the house circa 1920—so new it was almost unrecognizable: a fresh coat of paint, a wide porch, a canvas swing, and a leafy elm to shade it all.
Best of all, there were people in the picture. The old gentleman standing by the porch railing had to be my great-grandfather, who’d built the house, and the boy hanging off the porch was my grandfather. “It’s not what you wanted to find,” the owner said, “but perhaps this might be as precious to your mother as any diamond ring.”
Julia Van Buskirk
North Aurora, Illinois
When I was thirteen, my mother’s mother, my aunt, and two uncles came from Hong Kong to live in the basement of our row house. I wasn’t told they were coming, and I resented the arrangement. We were already bursting at the seams with my three siblings, my parents, and my paternal grandmother. What would my friends think?
Before their arrival, whenever there had been a dispute over the TV, the loser would be banished to the basement to watch there, but now my relatives crowded the place with cots, their belongings spilling out of open suitcases. One uncle joined my father at the Chinese restaurant, learning to be a sous-chef. Another, only a few years older than me, attended high school in an ESL program. My aunt worked as a seamstress in a garment factory with my mother. They had difficulty adjusting, but I was too busy with my eighth-grade life to help them learn the culture or language. After a few months they returned to Hong Kong.
In my midtwenties I flew to Hong Kong with a friend and visited some of my mother’s brothers in their apartment, which was only slightly larger than our row-house basement. It had a couch, a TV, and bunk beds, one of which served as clothes storage. A false wall partitioned off an area with a single bed. I was offered a lower bunk, and my friend slept on the couch. To make room, one uncle stayed at the garment factory where he worked, sleeping on an industrial-sized ironing board. Another uncle and his girlfriend spent much of their free time showing my friend and me around. They held no grudge against the selfish teenager I’d once been. I wish now I’d been less concerned about myself and more concerned about their struggle to start a life in a new country.
Judy Chow
Medford, New Jersey
“She’s back again,” my seven-year-old whimpered in the night. “She wants me out of my room. And not in the basement, either.”
I asked her who.
“Sarah. She makes it all dark and cold.”
This went on for the next ten years. Playing in the basement, my daughter would feel the walls closing in, her airway restricting. When she asked her brother if he felt it, he said she was crazy. Once, in high school, she had some friends over. While she was out of the room, one of them confessed to kissing my daughter’s boyfriend. That night “Sarah” told my daughter. Her friends couldn’t believe how she knew.
My daughter’s problems continued even after she left for college. One day she called and told me she needed a psychiatrist. I dialed every number on my insurance’s list, finally convincing a social worker to take her in. He ruled out certain diagnoses and explained some people were open to making these connections, and my daughter was one of them. Over the years she received messages from dying relatives and nasty entities that gave her bad thoughts. With time she figured out how to block them.
Then a woman who used to live in my house knocked on my door. I invited her in, and she and a friend who had lived next door roamed from room to room, reminiscing. The woman cursed her stepmother and told me how she would escape through a window to hide in the woods. “This place is filled with negative juju,” she said. “I wouldn’t live here if I were you.” I was about to usher them out when she asked if she could see her old room—my daughter’s room.
This gave me a thought. “Did anyone named Sarah ever live here?” I asked.
“It was her room after mine. She hung herself in the basement,” the woman said, pointing straight down.
J.D.
Greenlawn, New York
When I was growing up, the basement was a playroom. My siblings and I had a ping-pong table, a foosball table, and an old pinball machine down there. I did all my crafts in the basement, including plaster-of-Paris statues that my best friend and I tried to sell door-to-door in the neighborhood.
As a teenager I saw the basement as a great place to have a little privacy. When I was dating a college boy named Pete, I’d tell my mom, “We’re going to play some ping-pong.” And we did play, but we also made out.
One day when Pete and I were enjoying our privacy, my dad yelled down, “I don’t hear that ping-pong ball!” Pete and I flew apart as my dad descended the steps. After that, the basement became a place for games and crafts again.
Lynne Taetzsch
Ithaca, New York
When my husband, Bruce, and I moved to Walla Walla, Washington, two of our cats chose to mark the basement cabinets as their territories. The corrosive urine softened the particleboard and blistered the paint. Diluted white vinegar mitigated the odor—kind of. We stopped using the basement as much.
A few months after our move, my husband died unexpectedly. One of the things Bruce and I had planned to do was explore the hundred-plus wineries in the area. As part of my new life without him, I started going to tastings, sometimes purchasing better vintages than the grocery-store varieties we used to drink. I acquired a dozen special bottles to share with guests and proudly stowed them on a rack in the kitchen.
Then came COVID. The wineries pivoted to tastings by appointment only. I continued to go, practicing social distancing and masking between sips. Because I had virtually no visitors at home, my collection of special wines doubled.
In this same period three of the cats and my dog, all elderly, died. Without competition, the remaining cat stopped spraying. Worried my wine collection had spent too much time in the kitchen’s temperatures, I moved it to the basement.
My wine cellar isn’t fancy: just a few wooden racks in a dark corner. But the temperature is cooler than the house on hot days. The cabinet doors have been replaced. The surviving cat is happier. I’m happier. And though I still prefer to share with friends, sometimes I’ll open a bottle of the good stuff for myself.
Susan Matley
Walla Walla, Washington
In abnormal psychology some classmates and I begged our teacher, a trained hypnotherapist, to hypnotize us “just a little” so we could experience it. A week before the final, she gave in. “Imagine you are at the top of a stairwell,” she began, then slowly had us descend, one step at a time.
I was surprised when my childhood basement blossomed into view: Brown carpet. Beige walls. Racks of my father’s dietary supplements. A punching bag with a smiley face. Shelves of canned cherries brought out only on special occasions. A novelty wooden paddle that read, “Board of Education.”
“As you descend this stairwell,” the teacher said, “you’ll breathe more slowly and feel very relaxed.”
But as I descended, I could hear my parents fighting upstairs—so loud I would bang on pipes to quiet them. Off the main room was my older brother’s bedroom, which became mine after the divorce. I spent my angsty teenage years there, listening to Janet Jackson and immersing myself in books.
“Imagine you’re starting back up the stairs,” the teacher said, sounding a little rushed.
Next thing I knew, my eyes were open. I glanced around at the sleepy faces of my classmates. I thought maybe thirty minutes had passed. We were all shocked to learn the experience had lasted less than five.
Over the next week I had flashbacks and dreams of that basement. I felt unsettled, “off.” Was this normal? Nearly half the class emailed the teacher about similar feelings.
She responded with an apology and told us the final exam was canceled and a colleague of hers would come bring us fully out of hypnosis. Turned out our teacher wasn’t a trained hypnotherapist after all.
L.K.
Seattle, Washington
When Mom’s father gifted her ten acres, Dad set to building her dream home at the top of a wooded hill. He’d never built a house before, but he was smart and had read all about it. He dug a foundation and had a well drilled.
Meanwhile Mom was sick and getting sicker. She drove our Willys Jeep all the way from southern Illinois to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota to see if they could fix her kidney. Sometimes she stayed overnight in the hospital. She still read to my brothers and me every night before bedtime, though, and I have photos of her planting in the rich furrows of the garden, grinning in the sun. She wasn’t like anybody else’s mom. She wore jeans, cussed a little, and helped my brother collect snakes.
One day, with the house still unfinished, Dad said we were moving into the basement. Within a week we were sleeping on cots in the huge, cold room. “Isn’t camping the best fun?” Mom said. She told us a ghost story in the dark, and we squealed and laughed.
She went to the doctor a lot. One night she moaned and whispered to Dad, “Oh, God, I can’t breathe!” He helped her get dressed for a trip to the hospital. “You’re the adult here,” he told me. “I’ll be back as soon as I can, maybe before daylight.” There were no neighbors nearby. I told myself Mom would want me to protect my brothers. I told myself I was tough, like her.
Mom came back that night, but her hospital stays grew longer while Dad hurried to finish the house. Whenever we went to see her, she tried to be cheery, but she scared me. After we got home from one visit, Dad told me she was dying. I called him a liar. I figured he’d wallop me for talking back, but he didn’t. That’s when I knew.
Annie Garcia
Hillsboro, Oregon
The basement had no windows. In the lamplight I could see some rifles leaning against a wall, a plastic sheet covering the dirt floor. I shivered in the cold.
My kidnapper, Taj, and several other men touched my body. As I ran from one, another would grab me, tearing my clothes as I tried to escape. When I refused to touch Taj’s penis, they forced me to the ground. I screamed, but if anyone heard, they didn’t come to rescue me.
I was a fifteen-year-old girl, raised Muslim. To be groped and grabbed, to have my clothes ripped off, to have these strange men violate me—it was the worst thing imaginable. But even worse was that they made a video to share with my relatives later.
Amidst the horror a man rushed downstairs, yelling that helicopters were above. I never found out why; it’s possible the US occupying forces were involved in some training or surveillance activity. All I know is my Taliban captors finally left me alone, huddled and bleeding. I wiped my tears and wondered how I could escape.
At one point an old woman came in with tea and food. I refused both because I was afraid they’d been drugged. I asked her, “If you had a daughter, do you think she would eat after what they did?” She shrugged and left.
By then I’d gotten my period, and it is taboo among men in my culture to touch a menstruating woman. Perhaps that’s why the men didn’t rape me again. Eventually Taj arrived and called my father and told him he would never see me again unless he went to a former commander of the police—a warlord notorious for his cruelty—and agreed to have me marry Taj.
My father said all right, if Taj let me come home first. Then Taj handed me the phone and put a gun to my head. “You must do what Taj says,” I told my father.
Taj hung up and said, “If we let you go home, you have to show your family you’re happy with us. You have to hide your bruises.”
After two days of negotiations the men took me home—on the condition that I return to become Taj’s second wife. If my father had been a typical Afghan father, that’s exactly what would’ve happened, but instead, while I was being held, he’d gone to the US Army base and met a captain who helped negotiate my release from the marriage contract.
Taj wasn’t willing to let me go, though. He threatened my family regularly. To escape, I went to work as a translator for the US Army and lived on the base. When the Taliban took over in 2021, I was one of the last Afghans to make it out. Most of my family are still there.
Zamzama Safi
St. Peters, Missouri
My stepdaughter and I stood at the table, paddles in hand, bodies rocking back and forth to the metronomic click of the ping-pong ball: 307 . . . 308 . . . 309.
Normally Tiffany and I were happy with twenty-five volleys without a miss. The only question now was how far we could take it. If we stayed in the zone and kept feeding each other softballs, there was no telling: 436 . . . 437 . . . 438.
It made me happy for us to be in sync again, like when I had first come into the picture and she, just seven, would beg me to do stuff with her. After school she’d ride on my back at the apartment pool. On Sundays I’d take her to a parking lot to ride her purple Huffy. And every night, after her mother tucked her in, I’d read to her from The Chronicles of Narnia.
Five hundred! . . . 501 . . . 502.
Thank goodness my parents had transported this ping-pong table to their retirement home in the Adirondacks, where we vacationed each summer. Tiffany enjoyed hiking and swimming during the day, but there wasn’t much to do at night, so we’d scamper down to the basement: 844 . . . 845 . . . 846.
I felt wounded by how distant she’d been lately, now eleven, on the cusp of adolescence. It had never occurred to me that someday things between us might change: 1,066 . . . 1,067—
The ball hit the net.
Tiffany and I exhaled, bodies trembling with the release of tension.
The road was often bumpy between us in the years that followed, but whenever we visited my parents, I’d see the makeshift cardboard plaque I’d hung above the table to commemorate our achievement and remember when Tiffany and I were allies.
Scott Fleming
Eugene, Oregon
The basement I grew up with had a stylist’s chair that rotated 360 degrees, a black shampoo sink beneath an oversize mirror, a row of glass cylinders filled with blue liquid, and a sign that read, “Wilma’s Beauty Shop.”
Wilma was my mother. Her choice of shop instead of salon was intentional; a child of the Great Depression, she lacked pretense. She wore short-sleeved dresses whose starched fabric repelled the dye preferred by her blue-haired customers. Support hose corralled the varicose veins that snaked around her calves. White leather shoes supported her arches.
In my mother’s shop I learned the upside of the adage “Children should be seen and not heard”: if I remained silent, my mother and her customers forgot I was there, and I could learn a lot.
For example, one of my stepsister’s friends had a baby outside of marriage, and these women loved her anyway. A woman they knew had a son who committed suicide, and these women believed God’s forgiveness was great. Many mothers had lost sons to the war Huntley and Brinkley covered on TV, and they all needed to talk and remember. I also learned it was important for women to have a source of income because some husbands cheated and some husbands drank.
I grew up to become a sociologist. My lessons began in that basement.
Jeanne Cameron
Cortland, New York
When I was nine, my sisters and I would go down to the basement and help my dad tally the day’s sales from his gas station. But before we began, he’d cue up his favorite artists on the turntable: Johnny Mathis, Ray Charles, the Shirelles, the Four Tops. As he sipped his Scotch and milk (he said it was the only way he could stomach milk), he’d count the bills while we counted, recounted, and rolled the coins. Then he’d punch numbers into an adding machine that spit out a curled piece of tape. After he’d written the totals in a notebook and prepared a bank deposit for the next day, he’d pour a little more Scotch in his tumbler, put his feet on the desk, light a cigar, and send us to bed.
Lying in my room, I’d smell the cigar drifting up the stairs—a literal smoke signal that this was his time.
As the night went on and the music and Scotch and cigar went to his head, I’d hear him sing or whistle along to the strings and horns. Then he’d raise the volume on the stereo, drawing the ire of one of my sisters or me.
“Daddy!”
“What?”
“Can you turn it down?”
“Go to sleep!”
My parents divorced in 1972, and Dad moved to an apartment, taking his stereo and most of the albums. The house was quiet. Nothing was the same.
My father died in 2015. Every now and then I withdraw from family matters and escape to my home office, pour myself a glass of wine (it’s the only way I can stomach grapes), pull up a playlist on one of my devices, and put my feet up on my desk. No cigar, though. Some nights, when I’m singing or whistling along to the strings and horns, it’s as if Dad is sitting next to me.
Stan Sellers
Porter Ranch, California
We’d lived next door to each other for years but never really talked until the summer we were fourteen: A July 4 party in my parents’ backyard. A swim in his parents’ aboveground pool. A bit of witty banter. My bikini. His hooded eyes and kid’s grin.
I was going into tenth grade, and he into ninth. We must’ve made the plan in the pool: He knocked on the basement door after my parents were asleep, and we sat on the couch and pretended to watch TV. Our thighs fell against each other. He placed my hand on his swelling crotch. I shivered.
I didn’t know what it meant to want him. I only wanted him to want me. That summer the tweed couch in the basement became my life raft, carrying me away from my fears of being an unlovable spinster. He explained what men needed, told me I was beautiful.
I didn’t know that, come fall, he would refuse to acknowledge me in the school hallways. I didn’t know I was beautiful only in the basement.
Kristin Collins
Raleigh, North Carolina
My father was the fifth of ten children born to poor Italian immigrants. After serving in the army and living with my mother and her parents for twelve years, he bought a house and set to work refinishing the basement. He covered the floor with checkerboard linoleum, hung wood paneling, and added a workbench, which he kept as neat and clean as my mother’s kitchen. He even installed a bathroom so he could shower before heading to work without waking us—and also, I think, to savor the privacy he’d never had.
Dad’s biggest pride and joy was the bar, built from discount lumber and black vinyl remnants “rescued” by a neighbor who worked in a textile factory. Looking at the sleek mahogany railing, you would’ve thought he’d bought that bar at a restaurant-supply store in Manhattan.
The basement was the center of all social life at home. At family celebrations everyone ended up downstairs, my cousins and I racing our tricycles around on the linoleum. Guys from the neighborhood dropped by to watch the game, any game. On weekend nights neighbors came over to drink and tell stories.
I didn’t hang out there much as a teen, but I remember the sounds of happy adults floating up the stairs, crowd noise from the games on TV, neighbors having a laugh, Dad sawing or hammering something to make our home more comfortable, more beautiful.
In 2012, during Hurricane Sandy, the Raritan Bay rose up and battered the house. My parents were both gone by then, and I rode out the storm a few miles away. When I went to check on our family home, it appeared unscathed. The outside, fortified by my father over thirty-five years, had barely lost a shingle. Then I opened the basement door. The water reached halfway up the stairs. The washer, dryer, and stereo were submerged. Dad’s handmade bookcase bobbed on the surface. None of it could be saved.
The cousins who’d raced tricycles with me sent their children to help. They broke apart Dad’s recliner and carried it out in pieces. They tore up the linoleum and stripped the paneling from the walls. The bar was last to go. I made sure I wasn’t there when they carried the remnants of it to the curb.
Ann Marie Antenucci
Staten Island, New York
When my father’s company transferred him from Upstate New York to a small town in East Tennessee, my family became strangers in a strange land. I was a self-conscious young girl who didn’t make friends easily, and my schoolmates made fun of my Northern accent. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, either.
A few years later we moved back to New York, leaving my father behind. Now I was an awkward fifth-grader with a bald spot from the stress of my parents’ divorce. I was mocked incessantly—for my Southern accent. The school sent me home frequently.
I found solace roller-skating in our large basement, accompanied by the music of Neil Diamond, ELO, and Journey. No helmet, no pads, but safe from pain and constant negative thoughts. I did make one friend, whose parents were much less attentive than mine. We’d rummage through drawers, slide down the stairs on mattresses, and sip alcohol left over from the adults’ parties the night before. Those sips made me feel at one with the universe.
When that friend moved on to a private school, I went back into the basement—but not to roller-skate. I drank before phone calls, before parties, before dates. The basement was still a magical place that stopped unwanted thoughts.
Years later, in a church basement, I found sobriety, friendship, and connection. I even started roller-skating again.
M.A.
Seattle, Washington
In the early days of our marriage my husband and I lived in an apartment so small we could hear each other from the farthest corners. A few years later we moved to a big house. For the first couple of months I insisted our baby sleep with us because his room down the hall felt too far away. I hated being on the second floor when my husband was on the first or, God forbid, the basement.
“I know. I hate it too,” he’d reply. And he meant it. The three of us moved through the house together as much as we could. “Don’t go downstairs without us!” I’d shout.
A few months after our third child was born, my husband started sleeping in the basement. He had a bad back and needed to be surrounded by pillows. He was waking the baby and me. It made sense.
Then he started showering down there. “I’m just going to move my dresser to the basement,” he said one day. “It’s easier if I get dressed down there.” This, too, made sense.
Then the coffee maker went down. And a toaster. He worked from his home office in the basement. We’d briefly connect when he came up for lunch, but soon my old dorm fridge was stocked with milk and sandwich supplies.
The basement had an outside door, which he used to come and go. When he went outside, our children wouldn’t be able to ask if they could go with him. Suddenly the arrangement didn’t make sense anymore. I didn’t know how he spent his time. I didn’t even know when he was home. I started feeling my chest tighten at the sound of his footsteps coming up the stairs. I didn’t even want to be in the same house with him anymore.
Now the children and I live in a small home, where we bask in our togetherness.
C.G.
Crozet, Virginia
In Queens, New York, if your basement had tiles, you could host a game of skully during an afternoon snowstorm: You and a half dozen of your friends numbered the tiles with masking tape and flicked bottle caps (some filled with melted crayon wax to give them heft) across the floor. The first to land a shot in each tile won.
We were nine or ten. Most of us flicked the caps lying down. After your turn, you got up to make room for the next guy. One time, as I dragged my prone body along the floor, my penis pressed into the hard tile, and a mystifying tingle bathed my entire body. Then it shot to my brain and briefly sent me into another dimension. I was left with a sense of yearning—but for what, I hadn’t the faintest clue.
A few years later our basement activities evolved into make-out parties with girls. I was kissing my crush the only way I knew how—mashing my dry lips into hers—when I felt her tongue seeking entry into my mouth. This was new and shocking, but I parted my lips. When the moist tips of our tongues touched, my penis surged, and I abruptly excused myself, thinking I was about to pee my pants. I finally discovered what had been going on when I’d dragged myself across the tile floor.
Bob Klein
Santa Rosa, California
While skating the frozen Ottawa River one cold fall morning, I found a mallard with a damaged wing. I figured she must have been left behind when her friends had headed south. Wanting to help, I picked the duck up and tucked her under my jacket.
I called her Quack and built a nest for her in the basement out of a cardboard box and a towel. I was unclear on how to care for an ailing duck, but my parents were supportive. I put out water and lettuce. Quack showed no interest in either.
I checked on her every day, and every day she got weaker. After a while my father took me aside and said Quack wasn’t getting better. “It’s suffering. We need to put it out of its misery.” When I asked what that meant, he said, “We need to kill it.”
I cried, but I knew he was right. I asked him how.
“I guess it’s like with a chicken. You cut off its head.”
I cried some more.
My father got a hatchet and a block of wood. My two younger brothers, John and Rick, stood wide-eyed in the corner of the basement while I held the mallard’s head on the wooden block as instructed. Then Dad swung the hatchet. It’s over, I thought.
But it wasn’t. As soon as her head was separated from her body, the duck tried to get away. Her legs scrambled like crazy, and blood spurted from her neck while I held her and screamed, “What am I supposed to do?”
“Whatever you do,” my father shouted, “don’t let go!”
Of course I dropped her. She hit the floor running, spraying blood and banging into things. There were feathers, duck shit, and blood everywhere. Meanwhile John had picked up the duck’s head and showed it to Rick, who screamed in terror. It was pandemonium. Mom yelled from the top of the stairs, “What in God’s name is going on down there?”
“Do not come down here, Olive,” Dad warned.
After the chaos had ended, a question remained: What to do with a dead duck? My father, ever practical, suggested it could be dinner. “I had duck once,” he said. “It was pretty good.”
“Quack was my pet,” I cried. “We’re not going to eat her!” So my father agreed to give her a proper burial in the backyard next to Squeaky, my hamster, who Mom had sat on a few years earlier. I never had a pet again.
James Gregory
Ottawa, Ontario
Canada
When our apartment needed heat, my mother would bang a wooden spoon on the radiator. Soon we’d hear other tenants striking theirs in solidarity. If no heat came, that meant someone had to go complain to the super. At six years old, I was that someone.
Mr. O’Malley often hung out on the stoop of our Bronx, New York, apartment building, smoking and looking mean. His shirts, dirty and stained with beer, barely covered his stomach. His face was puffy and unshaven, and he didn’t like anyone who wasn’t Irish. I was scared of him. He lived alone in the basement, a place that scared me too. But I was more afraid of not obeying my mother. When I didn’t find Mr. O’Malley on the stoop, I crept down the stairs, heart pounding, and knocked on his door.
“Who’s there?” he said through the crack.
“It’s me,” I said in a shaky voice. “From apartment fifteen.”
He opened the door and asked what I wanted.
“My mother says we need some heat,” I mumbled.
“Just a minute,” he said.
In the furnace room—a gloomy, cave-like space—he took a shovel from the wall and pushed the blade into a stack of coal in the corner. He heaved chunks into the open furnace, then struck a match and tossed it in. The coals turned bright red, and I could feel the heat from across the room. As I backed away toward the door, he put down the shovel and stared blankly at me. He’s going to kill me now, I thought. He’s going to throw me in the furnace, and no one will know what happened to me.
His shoes crunched on the chips of coal scattered on the floor. “Don’t be afraid,” he said as he walked toward me. “I won’t hurt you.” His body odor surrounded me. I couldn’t move.
When he unzipped his pants, I thought he might be reaching for a knife. Instead he took out his penis. I’d never seen a penis before. I was just relieved he wasn’t going to kill me. Then he made me touch it. It felt soft, like Play-Doh. Just as quickly, he put his penis back in his pants and zipped up his fly.
After we left the furnace room, he pulled a Hershey bar from his pocket and gave me a couple of squares. The chocolate was warm, sweet, and gooey.
I climbed the five flights to our apartment, expecting my mother and father to ask why I’d been gone so long and if everything was OK. But no one even noticed I had returned.
Irene Sardanis
Oakland, California
In the winter of 1944, our backyard was a bomb crater. The crumbled top of our house filled half of it.
Fortunately most German houses had basements, and ours had been stocked with mattresses, blankets, clothes, and nonperishables at the beginning of the war. Also the government had ordered holes be cut through the walls of any adjacent basements: large enough for a body to be passed through in case of an emergency.
My family lived in the middle of a triplex. To our left lived Frau Blasberg and her two young daughters. We kids had a lot of fun telling stories through the hole in the wall, while our mothers used it to pass an extra potato, a few sticks of firewood, or a piece of clothing. To our right lived the Weyerstalls with their grown daughter. My mother kept the hole on that side tightly barricaded because Herr Weyerstall’s job was to report to the authorities anyone not glorifying the supposed accomplishments of the Nazi regime. He was the only man in our neighborhood, because all the others were either fighting, in prison camps, or dead.
Trucks regularly unloaded food and supplies for the Weyerstalls while the rest of us went hungry. But kind Frau Weyerstall knew how to help us without her husband noticing. Once a week she left a bag labeled “scraps for your chickens” at the entrance to our basement. Our chickens had long ago perished under the debris in the bomb crater, but we loved getting those “scraps,” which consisted of potatoes cut into quarters and thick chunks of bread. We might not have survived those last horrible months of the war without her.
In May 1945 word spread quickly that the war was over. While we rejoiced, Frau Weyerstall appeared at the entrance to our basement shaking and sobbing. Her husband was trying to force their daughter and her to swallow poison; he would take his own dose shortly thereafter.
My mother promised to stay with the two women and not let anything happen to them. When three British soldiers arrived at our triplex, my mother welcomed them in fluent English and explained how benevolent the Weyerstalls had been throughout the war. Then she reminisced about the beautiful English town where she’d once lived and studied. The young Englishmen were only too happy to discuss their homeland, after which they made a quick pass through the house, took nothing, and left.
Anneliese Carber
Dallas, Texas
As a nineteen-year-old single mother I lived in a basement apartment with ceilings so low that I, just five feet tall, could hide my meager savings above a ceiling tile. From the eye-level windows I could see feet along the sidewalk, bikes and lawn chairs under the porch, the dripping rain gutter. My life felt much the same: limited.
The apartment had a furnace in the middle; I had to duck under its sprawling vent arms to use my unheated bathroom. While it pushed air to the floors above, I made do with a yard-sale space heater that, halfway through winter, caught fire and melted the socket plate. The cement floors, barely camouflaged by linoleum, were cold regardless of the season.
Our furnishings were a hodgepodge: A toy box my uncle crafted, a plaid couch that doubled as my bed, a portable cassette player that ate as much tape as it played. In the kitchen was a cast-off table and bench seat from the Burger King where I rang up customer orders for a tiny paycheck.
At only $150 a month the apartment seemed like a good find—until an upstairs tenant was assaulted and raped by a former boyfriend, who also slashed the tires on the vehicles in our parking area.
At a party I overheard a woman say that if you worked at the college, you could take classes for free. I liked the idea of a college education. I especially liked the sound of “free.”
At the job interview I was asked to demonstrate my typing skills, alphabetize names and addresses, and write my name and a brief sentence. In my best handwriting I wrote, “My name is Linda and I’d like a job at the college.”
By the month’s end I was a secretary in the president’s office. Most days I felt more like an impostor than an employee, stuffing my bag with my mistyped papers to throw away at home. But I accumulated a few credits each semester, and when the envelope hidden above the ceiling tiles became four envelopes, I rented an apartment on the other side of town—on the second floor, where I could see above the treetops.
Linda Steinhoff
Bay City, Michigan
