Millie's House

It was the same thing every day for years after my mom went back to work. I awoke to the alarm's siren-like, screeching monotone at the ungodly hour of 5:30 A.M. I then got ready for the long day ahead. I ate breakfast, usually a bowl of raisin bran, while my mom shuffled around the kitchen in her large, zip-front bathrobe like a barge drifting out of port. She'd drink black coffee, chain smoke long, skinny, brown menthol More cigarettes, and read some sort of Mystery or Science fiction novel, holding the tightly bound paperback with her bony fingers and yellowed fingernails.
At 6:30 we'd pile in the Cadillac Coupe De Ville and she'd stop in front of Millie Cohen's house around the corner. I'd run up their front lawn, enter through the unlocked front door and pull the screen door, against its will, quietly and quickly closed. Once inside I was greeted by the aroma of a house that was not my own. All houses, and the families that carry on inside them, seem to collect their own unique scent.
I still recall how dark and still it was inside while everyone was still sleeping. Sometimes I'd sit on the recliner in their den and watch cartoons with the volume turned low, my eyes growing heavier as I tried not to fall asleep. The house was so quiet I could hear the ticking of the kitchen's wall clock. Their dog, a huge Great Dane called Malka, would lay beside my chair, breathing heavily and licking her drooping, wet chops as she continuously shifted position.
As I grew more accustomed to this morning routine, I started going upstairs and stealthily entering my friend Valerie's bedroom. She was the youngest of Millie's three daughters. There was Marlena, the oldest and most crass in her daily choice of words and volume of delivering them; Stacey, a soft-spoken, slight young woman with a constant expression of surprise plastered to her flattened face; and finally, Valerie, one year younger, but in her attitude one year older and wiser than me.
As I padded into her bedroom, I envied her still wrapped in the safe, warm cocoon of sleep under covers and on top of a soft, yielding mattress. I'd shuffle across the shag carpeting and sit across from her bed, leaning my back against Stacey's bed and simply close my eyes and wait for time to pass.
When the sun began peeking in the bedroom window, Valerie would wake up and find her outfit for the day which had been laid out for her by her mommy at the end of the bed the night before. I remember being so envious of this simple ritual, thinking it was so cool to have a mom with nothing more important to do than make sure your matching sweatpants and sweatjacket had a coordinating top and pair of socks.
In fact, I thought this was so cool that one Saturday, when my best friend Beth arrived early one Saturday morning, on her dad's way to work, I pretended to still be asleep. I had laid an outfit, much like one that Valerie would wear, at the end of MY bed, imagining my mom had picked it out for me and placed it there, just so, for my convenience and comfort.
Millie's house became more than just a safe place for me to go in the morning before school. Over time, its memory has become its own unique and separate entity; pieces of another family's life frozen in time. It was their early morning ritual of frozen solid New York style bagels, popped into one of the first microwave ovens I'd ever seen, until they became hot and rubbery. Then they were slathered with cream cheese and baked salmon procured from a deli in Manhattan on their Dad, Phil the Plumber's way home from work once a month.
Millie's had perfected a recipe for Chicken A La King made from a series of ingredients all of which came out of a can. My mother once tried to replicate it, from scratch she says, and somehow the canned and preservative laden version beat her out in my book. She's never let me live that one down!
Millie was the quintessential housewife and mother. Straightening the house, bossing the kids, and wrapping gifts for the birthday parties they would attend on some weekends. I specifically recall watching her wrap a box so perfectly that this image is always at the forefront of my mind, to this day, whenever I am required to wrap gifts. While my mom perfected the art of covering gifts in tin foil, Millie would fold proper wrapping paper neatly at the corners and tape them up flawlessly. Although I shun tin foil and try to emulate Millie, the homemaking goddess, my ends always seem to be too long and end up smashed and wrinkled under the folded paper like a big mistake I must cover over every time.
While she would go about her homemaking, she would often confide in me; talk to me as if I were her friend and co-conspirator in all things home, while her daughters flitted about, needing things and requesting entertainment, like the children they ought to be. In her house dress, worn thin with washing and snapped all the way up the front, she would put one leg up on a kitchen chair, drag heavily on her Marlboro Reds, and complain about the kids, many of her sentences beginning with only four words..."Son of a bitch..." and ending - due to an inevitable interruption mid sentence by one of her charges - with a "You bastard!" pronounced as if she were spitting watermelon pits, her lips tight with frustration.
Thirty years later, I am a stay-at-home mom. For now, at least. Just like I always envied Millie's children and desired to emulate Millie. I do many of the same things she did on a daily basis and they don't seem as glamorous or grown-up. They are just what I do. But, let me assure you I DO NOT wear house dresses. Anymore. Although I must admit to a brief stint with them while nursing my second baby, Sadie. They were just so easy to snap and unsnap for feedings, which were frequent and left me feeling like a walking udder half the time. I do not know how to make, nor do I desire to try my hand at making Chicken A La King. I don't even know if there is such a thing anymore. But, I have my tried and true recipes that my family will probably remember years from now, many of which come from a box or get popped into a new and improved microwave. I still have not perfected the art of gift-wrapping, although Millie sits beside me, it seems, every time I try. Maybe when she gets frustrated with my half-assed folding and tucking, she might even be shouting at me...."Son of a bitch!!!"