CONTINENTAL

1 0 8 Y C O N T I N E N T A L T E R E S E S V O B O D A I lived in twelve houses in 1932. The Depression was all opportunity for my father, one house on the prairie foreclosed after another , the more for my father to fix up and resell. People had to live somewhere while they slid into poverty. The houses sometimes still had butter in the icebox – not butter exactly, but fake butter, the kind that made you wish you had lard instead – and torn clothes wadded in the backs of bureaus, and spilled salt everywhere . For luck? To poison my father’s opportunity. My mother scrubbed those floors clean of the salt, my father painted them over, we ate sandwiches my mother made out of whatever was left in the cupboard with that so-called butter darkening the slices, and sometimes she sewed the torn clothes into short trousers for me. I was small and remember best being lost in houses I didn’t quite live in. I would peer from window to window of a row very much like those in the last one, crying because I couldn’t find a door. My mother usually worked in whatever parlor sat behind the porch; she never left me alone in those houses, but she wouldn’t budge, hearing me – I had to run to her. My stu√ed rabbit or wooden pistol, I left it behind, I sobbed. My sister, always at me, yelled Stupid. She always knew what really happened to the toy, 1 0 9 R and would my mother even suspect her? Here, my mother said, you have sunshine flooding in, it’s so cheerful. I wanted to escape to my father, who worked outside, putting in those shiny windows. He would come through the door, wipe away my tears, and pick me up in the crook of his arm, putty knife in hand. His other hand usually ended in the next house contract he’d just signed. He would say, with the German accent he never lost – with a lot of excitement – This new one is not worth a Continental. He meant he got it cheap, the currency after the Revolutionary War worthless , the war that he said won the country freedom. Freedom, he’d repeat, and shake his head as if he couldn’t get enough of it. Then he’d peel o√ a swag of putty from his knife for me to play with, but not eat. Almost all the money he made went into land. A family needed only one house to live in, but to feed us required land that bore crops. It was a simple enough plan, and in two years he acquired enough acreage in the same spot to make a go of it. My sister, eight by then, lectured me about how important having a farm was for our family. She had Shirley Temple curls that I pulled in retaliation , but she could talk me down in five seconds because she had words for everything: tractor, field, sorghum. She stuck out her tongue. My mother said she couldn’t scrub out another house without laying down a carpet and going into labor, we had to actually move to the farm before the new baby arrived; my father couldn’t just rent the land out and buy another house. My sister told me real labor wasn’t just scrubbing, and her eyes got wide because of our mother, so I felt afraid about not going to the farm, about the numerous ‘‘touch-ups’’ my father had to make before loading the car again. They were at the actual end of finishing when a Marjorie woman – that’s what my mother called her – walked up the steps and inside and lowered herself to the floor, threw her arms across the planks and wept. My mother had just swept the floor so you could do that. I had just done it. You’ve stolen my home, she cried. I don’t have anything else. My mother didn’t stop peeling the paint o√ a closet wall, my mother...