9th
chapter 2 : SAFE HOME
Before we moved to a newly built house with a spacious backyard in the bucolic, insular town of Pound Ridge, we resided in a tiny apartment on the third floor of a long beige building. The first seven years of my life I grew up in Yonkers, New York, a city with a high crime rate and noisy aggressive residents. When I was 3, the idea of lying alone in a pitch black room frightened me; isolated in the dark, I felt vulnerable to the murderous monsters and other various forms of evil. One sleepless night I walked past my mom’s bedroom and could hear her crying. She had just found that out her mother in the Philippines had passed away. This was the first time I saw my mom cry, her sad wet eyes, and I vowed to never be the cause of her grief. During my early years in Yonkers I took up praying, not really understanding the concept of religion. Paranoia took over my dreams and I’d lay in the dark begging God to make sure that no one in my family would ever die.
Sometimes my mother would lie in bed with me until the aggressive lullaby of car alarms would serenade me into my dreams. Other times, Pete offered me the left side of his queen-sized bed, and I felt safe in his fluffy blankets decorated with football helmets and field goals. He caught me every time I was seconds away from falling off the bed. A true hero. In the mornings when he went off to elementary school, I would lay on my parent’s bed watching Nickelodeon while my mother folded the laundry on the other side of the room. Three stories high, I felt so much taller than the rest of the world. The city may have been threatening, but at home, with my family and neighbors, I was safe. On weekends, my brother and I would play in the halls with other kids in the building. We’d run up and down the stairwell, and finally settle on the first floor to play school with Tracy Tully. She taught me how to spell my middle name.
Sometimes after school, I would visit my father at his tire business. I’d play in the stacks of tires, fearless of germs, and draw pictures of our family that he would hang up in his office. In the back hall there was a big black door, which he’d always point at and claim, “The boogeyman lives there!” I’d reply with a frown and he’d playfully laugh at my gullibility. I enjoyed my personal playground at VP Tires, but not as much as I loved all the campaign parties. My father was city councilman, running for Mayor. My mom, brother and I would often accompany my father to political dinners that had seemed like celebrations. I don’t even know what we were celebrating, in a city plagued by hardships of violence, prejudice and poverty. Still I would revel in the limelight, sitting next to my daddy the politician, the man everyone wanted to know, the man who fathered the pretty little girl in the flowery dress, the man who could single handedly change the world.
My parents moved us up to Pound Ridge, New York when my brother was entering high school. That’s what they had been saving up all their money for. They wanted to get us away from all the delinquency and hate that had increasingly infiltrated the Yonkers city streets. So my father dropped out of the race for Mayor. Instead of sheltered play, we needed a backyard, a long driveway, a large cozy home in the middle of the woods. The air was fresher and the school system far superior, so it was worth the sky rocketing tax money. The warm, wealthy citizens of Pound Ridge, the beautiful reservations and horse farms and reservoirs, it was all meant to make us feel safe.
