When I arrived at Ash's the next day she was sitting on the bricked front porch waiting for me with a bed-headed Terry by her side wearing a small blue velour track suit and bright orange and yellow slippers, one Ernie, one Bert. I waved and hurried up the walk when I saw them, shifting my bookbag.
"I'm glad you're here." she said.
"Me too. What's on tap today?"
"Ha!" she cackled. "I wish!"
"Oh and those are how those slippers came. It's a pair." She explained.
She stood up to go inside, held the door aloft, and Terry shuffled along as I followed. Evvie, Ash reported, was asleep in her crib.
I took off my jacket and hung it on their hall tree along with my bag while she unabashedly looked me up and down.
"I need to exercise." she said, grabbing both sweater and belly with both hands and jiggling them around.
"Well you live in the right place." I said. "The YMCA is wonderful here."
Excitedly, I prepped her on the pool, the classes, and most notably a ladies' afternoon aerobics group, hugely popular. I knew about it because I'd handed them their towels and keys and we bought our family home from the celebrated instructor who'd been teaching for 20 years.
"What kind of music?" she asked.
"Well, I think it's mostly synthesized pop, but it's ok. Mostly you'll hear Susan counting down from 10 to 1 over and over throughout the hour."
Ash raised an eyebrow at me as though this suggestion were less than ideal, but she groaned and reluctantly said she'd probably give it a try someday, assuming I was prepared to stay alone with the kids while she was there.
"Of course." I said. "I'm used to babysitting multiple kids at once" and went on to explain how when I was ten, I babysat five kids under the age of 7; they were children of family members who knew how responsible I was. Ash raised her eyebrow again and said, "I have no doubt."
Terry was in the living room looking for companionship, waving and vocalizing while he pushed a toy train engine through the dense white carpet. I bent down to help him, scanning the room for any remaining train cars so we could hook them up.
"Ash," I said, "do you have a finished basement?"
"Yes, why?"
"Well, we could take all of these toys and bring them down there so that your living room can be, ummm, tidied. Then, when people come to your door it'll look nice in here when you open it." I was taking a chance critiquing her cleaning skills, but she had walked me through this room the day before indicating she was living "in a shit hole mess" and wanting to clean it up.
"I have to keep an eye on Terry when he plays and I'm always upstairs" she explained.
"Well, now I'm here, and I can watch him downstairs, so should we try moving his toys?"
She shrugged in a half-decided fashion and bent down to pick up an Oscar the Grouch hand puppet. She put her fist in the trash can bottom and made him whine "But I loooove trash!"
Eventually, we got to work grabbing toys by the armload. Metal Tonka trucks, a floppy Dapper Dan doll, a xylophone, a soft gray rabbit missing an eye, and a wheeled dome with a long blue handle with which to push and pull. It held little brightly colored plastic balls which popped like they were being heated from beneath when I dragged it along.
Ash yelled, "Oh, God! I hate that fucking thing. Terry's jagoff Uncle gave it to him."
I lifted the wheels, "Does he live around here?"
"No, " Ash said. "Pittsburgh. And that's fine. We don't need any annoying toys or relatives right now."
We shuttled hard cover books, the rest of the train cars, a golden horsehead on a mop handle with a tangled yarn mane, and a Fisher Price farm which showcased a door bellowing "MOOOO" that Terry reluctantly passed to us after opening it over and over. He scouted Ash under his long eyelashes every time he did it, making sure it was okay to keep breaking the seal.
"It's ok buddy." I said. "Do you hear the cow?"
"Moooo." Terry giggled.
"That kid and his farm." Ash scoffed, waving her arm. "There's a hideous See and Say in the closet in Evvie's bedroom if you want to go grab it. Chickens, horses, pigs, and the whole damn barnyard makes a racket when you pull the string. The only sound it doesn't make is the farmer's wife running out the door screaming and losing her mind."
She stepped into the kitchen, opened the drawer next to the back door and swiped her cigarettes. Then she walked out onto the deck, closing the door abruptly behind her.
Terry shadowed me as I continued up and down, lugging toys until I had cleared the living room of all things childlike. In the sparsely furnished basement there was a lime colored rough and tumble beanbag chair, a small sized tv and lots of worn but clean carpeted surface upon which to play. Terry seemed eager to explore the newness of the space and I went to work lining up toys in rows on the floor since there were no shelves or toybox. As I organized, I flicked the television on and turned it to MTV. Teddy's eyes lit up and he gingerly touched the screen. Then, bending his knees over and over in a mini squat to the music, he peeked sideways at me with big wide eyes, looking for approval. I clapped and nodded enthusiastically. He, too, then clapped and grinned.
When Ash had finished her smoke, she appeared at the top of the stairs with Evvie and the See and Say precariously tucked under her arm. Terry saw it and squealed with joy flexing his knees and stretching his arms out. Coming down and presenting the toy to him, she then passed the baby to me, and pointed at Def Leppard's Joe Eliot in his white scarf and mullet, squinting and paying homage to Marilyn Monroe as she lay in a chalk outline.
"You like this?" she signaled.
"Um, yes, totally. I love it." I admitted.
"Mmmmmm." She wiped damp hands on her jeans and bent down to look closer. "I don't watch MTV anymore but I liked it BTK."
I bounced Evvie, wearing a pink shirt and matching pink and white plaid leggings, on my hip in time to the beat. Her little head bobbed up and down and swayed like she was riding a mule. She looked at me, trying to decipher who had a hold of her, trying to poke my eyelid with her thumb.
"Why can't you watch it with the kids?"
"I...I don't know." Ash stammered. "I feel like...actually I have no idea what I feel."
She stood upright, gesturing at the toys lined up in rows.
"Do you think a big cardboard box would be okay until we figure out how to contain this?" she asked.
"Yeah, maybe."
She went to the dark far left corner of the room and lugged over a sizable box. It looked like it held an appliance at one time. The only contents in it now were a few framed pictures, which she mistakenly upturned onto the floor. As I bent down to retrieve them, I saw that the largest was of her and someone who I assumed was her husband, presumably BTK.
"That's Rob," Ash tapped at the glass "when he had hair."
It was a great photo of two young, attractive, and freewheeling people. I'd not heard his name before that minute but he looked like a Rob or a Robbie, with an inviting smile, cocoa brown curls, and a cornflower blue vneck sweater low enough to showcase ample chest hair and a gold cross.
"Daddy" Teddy announced, nudging the image with the See and Say while he danced.
"Yes and Mommy" I said jutting my chin toward Ash in the frame. Teddy looked blankly at the photo and went back to pulling the string without making the connection. Ash was about 50 pounds thinner then with long straight hair and a tight black turtleneck. She smirked in the picture, suggesting mischief, and her hands were casually placed on Rob's shoulders as they posed for the photographer. Her head dipped toward his torso like they were in love.
Evvie's little legs started kicking as she spit and babbled, clearly digging the tempo of the Papa Don't Preach video. A newly buff and white blonde pixie'd Madonna argued with Danny Aiello on the tube. Ash said, "She looks like that because she's never really been pregnant." She then flopped down into the bean bag and told me about how having two babies in a span of two and a half years had levelled her body. She lifted one denim leg up and pointed her toe, complaining about flabby thighs, a fleshy derrière, and then, lightly cupping her breasts, declared they were like balloons with no air in them.
"No one tells you this" she simpered, "but let me be the one to tell you! Breast feeding ruins your rack."
Not knowing how to follow her pronouncement, I said, "Do you want me to vacuum? Feed the kids? Get things cleaned up upstairs?" She didn't answer me. Instead, she leaned forward, her eyes scrunched up, closely inspecting Madonna bopping around on the screen.
"Okay. How about if you let Terry play with stuff and I'll take Evvie up and vacuum? Where is it?"
"Yes. Please. Hall closet" she flapped her hand at the stairs, eyes fixated.
I went up with the baby and got out the Hoover. We made big sweeps up and down the white grain as it perked up a bit. I'd vacuumed my way out of the living room by the time they came back upstairs and was wrapping the cord. Ash made a noise which seemed like approval of the rug's condition. We all went into the kitchen where she poured Terry some milk and sat him in his chair. Flipping on another small countertop TV in the kitchen which I had not noticed the day before, she tuned in a show for Teddy, took a bottle out of the fridge for Evvie, and secured it in electric bottle warmer which looked ancient and had a picture of a doggy and a duck on it. I made a mental note of everything she did, hoping I'd be doing it someday while she was at exercise class.
As I checked the temperature of the bottle, and bumped Evvie up and down on my hip, Ash held the framed photograph up to a variety of spots on the living room wall.
"I think Rob would like me to hang this." she said.
"Do you have a hammer and nail?"
"Yeah, somewhere in the garage but we don't need to do this now."
"Why not?" I asked. "I've got them; go find it and we'll hang it."
She went and fetched the hardware. It was good to see her enthusiasm for things that led to accomplishment. After we hung the picture together, she shifted a corner, leveled it, and smiled.
For the rest of my time that day, Ash loaded laundry into the washer and dryer and I gave Evvie her bottle, chubby baby digits grasping mine as we sat at the kitchen table. Tracing her tiny fingernails I saw it was dark outside.
"Tomorrow's Thursday" Ash said, folding socks on the kitchen table. "Do you have any plans?"
"Not really," I said, "why do you need me to stay longer?"
"Yeah, Rob's working late and I would really like to have a glass of wine when the kids go to sleep."
She stopped talking, looked me in the eye, hedged for a moment, and then continued.
"And I'm afraid once I start, it'll be hard to stop at one glass."
"And you want me here in case the kids need something before Rob gets home?"
"Yes." she nodded.
So I conceded. I'd come back the next afternoon and stay into the evening as long as she needed me to. Unsure about getting back to my Mom's late at night, I pictured myself walking miles in the dark or maybe balding Rob could drive me.
Ash pushed a large wad of crumpled dollars into my hand and thanked me as I stood up to leave. I grabbed my jacket and hearing the noisiness of MTV still lingering, I looked back, stuffing them in my pocket. Ash stared in the direction of the basement door as she folded and I wondered if she would go back down and watch some more.
Walking, I considered her disclosure. I'd seen a sizable wrought iron wine rack in the adjacent dining area when we were cleaning up the toys and I wondered how our night would go.
I looked forward to finding out.
#1970s #1980s #defleppardphotograph #papadontpreach #mushroomtumbler
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