In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Ranch House
  • Eileen Pollack (bio)

In 1954, my parents drove around Long Island until they found a house they liked. They wrote away to get the plans, then built a similar house in the town we lived in. Bad enough to grow up in a cookie-cutter ranch house on Long Island; how much worse to grow up in upstate New York, in a cookie-cutter copy of a cookie-cutter ranch house on Long Island.

But my parents liked the way the ranch house looked, and the rooms were considered large (“although they wouldn’t be anything now,” my mother says). The house was completely new—no one had ever died there, no one had been poor or sick. Although my father worried how he could afford the mortgage of a hundred and five a month, my mother assured him that his dental practice would only grow and the house would cost less to maintain and heat than an older, cheaper dwelling.

If you are like me and grew up comfortably middle class, you find it hard to credit the poverty and despair that drove your parents to strive to become middle class in the first place. My parents’ parents all were immigrants. My mother’s father died when she was young; her mother went to work selling hats at Macy’s, and my mother took a job as secretary for a man who kept trying to pinch her bottom. My father grew up at his parents’ shabby hotel in the Catskills, where the family spent the summer hustling to please the guests and the rest of the year huddling to keep warm in the bungalow across the street and living off whatever groceries remained in the pantry at season’s end.

My father and the other Jewish men who survived the war used their GI loans to build ranch houses on two streets carved from a pasture that until then had been owned by a farmer named Champlain. Like most fifties parents, mine viewed their role as providing their children with an orderly, hygienic home, the best medical care money could buy, and a college education. I didn’t spend much time with either parent, and, when I did, we didn’t discuss our inner lives. One of my few opportunities to feel close to my mother came when I sat outside her bathroom and watched her shave. Her body hair seemed erotic. And I coveted her electric razor, with its sleek turquoise body and the stainless steel blades you popped up with a button and cleaned with a tiny brush.

My most intimate moments with my father revolved around shaving, too. He would lean back and close his eyes while I patted his cheeks with cream, then shaved him with his double-edged chrome Gillette. I was only five, so the razor didn’t contain a blade, but I enjoyed the nearness to my father’s flesh, the Vitalis he allowed me to smooth [End Page 57] through his hair, and the way, when I was done, he would snap his fingers and chant: “Shave and a haircut [snap snap] two bits,” then hand me a quarter, which I didn’t realize at the time was “two bits.”

Then I came upon him finishing a real shave, after which he ejected something shiny and thin into a slot at the back of his medicine cabinet. “What was that?” I asked.

“What was what? The blade? You can’t shave without a blade, pussycat. That’s what cuts off the beard.”

I might have felt cheated, except that when my father showed me how sharp a blade could be, I grew dizzy and nearly fainted. I asked where the used blades went, and my father said they fell to the basement through a space in the wall, leaving me to think about the walls of our house filling up with razor blades.

I think about them still.

Whenever my parents left the house, I would open my mother’s drawers and rifle through the sachet-scented slips, underpants, brassieres, and scarves. In her closet hung immaculately laundered blouses and skirts; upside down on a rack along the floor...

pdf

Share