Part two: Up in the attic

There was nothing mysterious about the back yard when you were out in it. 

You had to view it from the forbidden vantage point of my parents' bedroom for its 
magical properties to become apparent. Here is my father posing
 by the back fence in 1960 or 1961. 

His caption for this picture was "the big fat man from Hibbing." 

I am not sure that he ever visited Hibbing in his lifetime; 
he just liked the sound of the word

My parents' bedroom was off limits, which automatically made it a place I wanted to be. It was just an ordinary bedroom, not even the biggest in the house (that was the girls' room, where I slept with three of my sisters). The walls were painted denim blue, a color my mother chose but subsequently did not like. It was too dark, she said, but she was too busy running the house and taking care of the 10 of us to take the time to repaint.

A big framed picture of her as a three-year-old, hair curled winsomely, ankles crossed, hung on the wall. She always said she hated that picture. She said that about most pictures of herself even though, in truth, she was beautiful and photographed well, even in her haphazard outfits of car coats and bobby socks.

She kept an old wooden jewelry box on her dresser; inside were luminous pearls and a pair of ruby earrings that had been her mother's, along with gold costume jewelry that she thought "classy." I never took any of them out of the box--I was a cautious, if sneaky, child--but I opened the lid and touched them every chance I got. I thought they were classy, too.

Sweet-smelling beige face powder dusted the top of her dresser, along with random tubes of magenta lipstick and, usually, a few coins, which I always found tempting.

My father's desk was against the far wall, his black manual typewriter centered firmly on a thick hairy mat that kept it from migrating when he returned the carriage. Screwed to one corner of the maple desk was a black plastic nameplate with his name, and mine, in white letters: L.J. HERTZEL. Above the desk, on the left-hand side, hung a Playboy calendar. When I asked him about it, he told me he had to display it because it was a present from his father.

The bedroom windows looked out on the back yard. Although I spent part of nearly every day in that yard, it took on mystical properties from the vantage point of their room, and I would sneak in to peer through the matchstick blinds at the unfamiliar high branches of the birch tree. Just a little closer, I thought, and I could jump.

The best feature of their room, though, was the closet, which had a wooden ladder that led to a trapdoor to the attic, the most magic and forbidden place of all. The rungs of the ladder were flat and splintery and too far apart for my short legs to handle comfortably. Still, I climbed it in secret many times, though I was never strong enough to get the trapdoor open; I pushed and pushed with the flat of my head, my hands, my shoulder, but never managed more than an inch or two. So I would climb back down again--always much scarier than the ascent--and run find my mother. Usually she said no, because if we went up in the attic she had to go with us, but every once in a while she would sigh and say, "All right."

The attic smelled hot and musty, like dried newspaper that was about to burst into flames. It was stiflingly hot, and airless, and each time my mother warned us that the floor was only half finished and not to step wrong or we would fall through the ceiling. We had to balance on the joists and avoid the uncovered fiberglass insulation that lay between them. We knew that the insulation was made of real spun glass and would cut our little feet to ribbons should we step in it, and then, after that, we would plummet with a crash into their bedroom. So we were careful.

There was nothing of much interest in the attic--no trunks of old clothes, no velocipedes, no one-eyed teddy bears or boxes of love letters. There were boxes of books, as there were all over our house, and, after my brother John Patrick died, one or two boxes of his things which we were forbidden to touch.

But it had a window, high up, so much higher than any other window in the house. Through its dirty, cobwebby glass you could see the Church Across the Street, the Allens' Woods, and, in the distance, the Lake, which you could not see from anywhere else.

This was my favorite thing, to kneel on the rough joists and peer out over the treetops. Everything looked different up here--farther away, and smaller, and more remote. I was not part of the world when I was in the attic; I was floating above it, looking down. Cars and dogwalkers and bicyclists passed, unaware of my small face peering down at them through the glass. No one saw me; no one knew I was there. From up on high, I--I could see everything. And nothing could see me. In those years, at that time, in that house, that was the best feeling of all.