When we are little, we tell ourselves we are invincible. We can do and be anything we set our minds to. I was always an imaginative child and teen. I could create impenetrable impossibilities…until I woke up to the real world. My childhood home on Bella Street is where I dreamt wide awake. Floors were lava there, and bicycles were just rocket ships in disguise. Today, I have had to suffocate this wild energy inside me, be “more appropriate for my age.” I can only let it out when I sit down to write.
I can’t conjure up any bad memories from that house, whether by honed skills of intentional forgetfulness or otherwise; so, I’ve always allowed my childhood to take residence there, making the house on Bella the nucleus of my joyous youth. The house was built with a wall down its middle, cutting it in half. We Parkers were nestled into the left side and adopted the street number with the “½” attached to it. Across the street was a Sheetz, since Hollidaysburg, my hometown, was just a few minutes outside of Altoona, the birthplace of the Sheetz industry. This Sheetz was the same one my father ran to one morning to get a coffee, while my mom waited, in agony and disbelief, for him to drive her to the hospital because she was in labor with my brother.
If you looked directly at the front of the house back then, you’d see a porch with green flooring and a small yard along the left-hand side, our side of the house. There was a small gate that used to block off the yard from the outside world, but it has since been removed. On the road in front of the house, a red car was always parked. It belonged to our neighbor, a curmudgeonly old lady who always banged on the wall shared between the two halves whenever Dad’s videogames got too loud or we kids got too rowdy. I recall that she would always wear tacky red lipstick. I’m pretty sure she still lives there.
The yard was not big whatsoever, and there was a sliver of cement separating the house from the grass, a small walkway to the back door. I would give Jaran, my little brother, a ride on the back of my red Radio Flyer tricycle, him balancing on my training wheels, as we flew up and down the thin patch of sidewalk. It was more work to pick up the trike and turn it around at the end of the path than it was to tow Jaran back and forth, since the path wasn’t wide enough to turn around naturally on. If Mom was in a good mood, we were allowed to ride around the Sheetz parking lot under her supervision.
The front and back doors were similar: both had metal door knobs painted black that creaked when you twisted them; both had a pane of glass positioned at the top to see in and out of; but both led to different places. The front door led to a poor excuse of a foyer, where you were met with three options: stairs leading to the second floor, a left turn into the living room, or down the hall to the kitchen at the back of the house. The back door led directly into a mudroom for coats and dirty snow boots; then, it opened into the kitchen with a tiny dining room on your right that connected to the same living room from before. Very quaint.
I remember Mom and Dad chasing me around and around in circles in the kitchen as my tricycle sped along the floor, tires leaving behind streak marks. Bubbly giggles erupted from my soul in those days, the world seeming to revolve around my happiness.
In the hallway leading to the kitchen, there was a door under the stairwell going down to a basement I can’t remember. I had to text my mother to fill in some portions missing from my memory:
mom. the door under the staircase. was that a closet or a stairwell leading down to a basement?
Basement. Attic was upstairs.
yes, I remember the attic. just didn’t remember the basement.
Remember there was a door connecting to the neighbor’s house? Washer and dryer down along the wall.
yeah, none of that rings a bell to me.
Oh. Why are you asking? Writing a scary story?
- just was writing about that house. have a lot of good memories there.
I’m glad. I tried to make it a happy place for you.
I’d never stopped to consider that maybe everything wasn’t as simple as I’d imagined. It never even crossed my mind that maybe, just maybe, I’d never had a “perfect,” healthy, and happy childhood. I never wanted, nor want, to believe that things weren’t amazing in my family from the get-go.
On the second floor was the room my brother and I shared, a spare room used as a voice studio for Mom, my parents’ room, and a small bathroom. Mom’s voice studio doubled as a room for Dad to detox in. He’s always needed alone time after work, alone time that doesn’t ever end. He was never the type to rejoin the family once his stressful day had worn off. Because of this being who he was (and is), most of my memories, the good ones, don’t include him. Anytime something bad was happening, he was involved. He never wanted to know what was going on, unless it was “important.” Importance was only weighed by his standards not ours; what was important to us was never even remotely important in his eyes. Do I hold any resentment toward him for it? Not really, because I think he doesn’t care how I feel about the matter.
Luckily, I had a loving and supportive mother to bandage up all my booboos, mental and physical. With a bobbed haircut that always set a trend for every other female in our town, my mother did it all. She took us to and from school events. We’d accompany her on days she spent at her high school working on their musical. Back in those days, her production of Footloose was something to see, and Jaran and I always loved the McDonald’s hash browns that came our way if we complied with the tasks she’d give us throughout the day. She doesn’t do shows at her school anymore because of their lack of respect for her and her position, but I’ll never forget how fun it was to see the shows come together. Jaran, Mom, and I undoubtedly became very close because of all this quality time we shared, creating a familial subset.
The attic was one of my favorite places to spend my time in. Dark and dingy like any good attic, it was always hot up there. There was a black leather chair our cat would lounge on and a mysterious, small door at the end of the room. I felt some sort of magnetic attraction to that place. Even writing about it now, I feel a hypnosis coming over me. I can’t recall if I really spent as much time up there as I think I did, but it stands out in my memory as a place my brother and I frequented. As a child, it felt like a secret part of my house, even though the entrance to it, a green door across the hall from my parents’ bedroom, wasn’t a secret whatsoever.
“Aren’t you going to write about all the times you spent watching TV with your dad when you were little because he stayed home to take care of you? What about the time he put you in the laundry basket and had you ride it down the steps?” my mother offered after reading over my rough draft.
“Those aren’t my memories, Mum. They’re just the stories I’ve been told.”
Unfortunately, my brother passed away in 2017, a suicide that shook the world. Now I’m at a stage in my life where I crave my freedom like a baby craves attention, but I’m barred by this playpen set up around me after his death. Furthering these unfortunate circumstances, I have slowly distanced myself more and more from my parents, which isn’t so bad when it comes to my dad.
My mother, on the other hand, is a totally different story.
When one eventually leaves home, it is only natural to feel some mix of guilt and relief. Because of how things are in my house now that Jaran is gone, the moving-out part of my life has been disrupted. As days tick by following his death, I long more and more for those days on Bella Street. Petty arguments always ended with a stern “kiss and make up.” Timeouts sitting in the rocking chair always ended with a mutual understanding of wrongdoing and a hug from Mom. The end of the night always ended with taking flouride for our teeth and hopping into bed, awaiting to be tucked in by her.
So what do you do when you have to leave that all behind? What do you do when there aren’t any more blow-up Mcdonald’s playhouses in the attic or Sundays at church or little brothers falling asleep behind the baby gate at the top of the staircase or scavenger hunts with old antique jewelry? What do you do when you have to be an adult now? What does it mean when you have to sacrifice your own happiness to be what others expect of you? When is enough ever enough?
If anything has stayed the same from those days, it’s my imagination. These days, I find myself imagining what kind of person I’d be if I’d never been conditioned to walk on eggshells around my father. I wonder what would have happened to us as a family if Jaran were still here. If my dad had guided us with more patience, love, and understanding, would things be different? Better? Happier?
I’d like to think so.
I believe that everyone in the world has their own little house on Bella, a place where nothing goes wrong, an epitome of happiness. Some of our houses on Bella are made up, places we hide in when the world gets too tough. Some of us still get the privilege to live in our houses on Bella. Today, I wish for the day when I’ll get to be in a house on Bella again.
But until then, I will imagine.
Jaden Parker writes: “Hello! I have been writing since kindergarten. Back then, they were just stories of princesses and knights in shining armor. Today, I’ve found my voice in memoir writing. I enjoy telling my experiences in a way to help people feel emotions they may not be familiar or comfortable with. I want to create a dialogue on subjects that were once taboo.”