GIRL NEXT DOOR: A Coming-of-Age Memoir of Early Loss tells an uplifting story of inner strength that helps an eleven-year-old Chicago girl survive the loss of her (my) mother. This is an omitted, didn’t-fit-in excerpt. I’m posting it in response to the
post about National Handwriting day, where she expressed interest in people’s efforts to write with their nondominant hand.When Dani was grounded, I campaigned for a new friend to go trespassing with on the sly. Dani’s classmate and friend Colleen intrigued me. She was in fifth grade — a year younger than I was — but I'd heard she could and would kick your ass if you provoked her.
I met her one day when I showed up as usual at Dani’s house after school. The two of them were seated at Dani’s dining room table, drawing. Hunched and curled lefthandedly over a sketch pad, Colleen turned only her head to gaze sideways at me, unsmiling, as I sat down. She had blue eyes and Irish features, delicate and tough-looking at the same time. Her blonde hair was just long enough to part in the middle and feather. Her short hair and her worn corduroy jeans made her look capable and boyish: a girl after my own heart. As Dani sketched lightly in pencil on typing paper, Colleen drew cartoon dogs and cats with confidence in felt-tip marker.
I thought I’d never seen anything as cool as the way she curled her whole left arm above and around her work. I’d never watched anyone draw with such skill and fluency -- let alone upside down. When she wrote, she drew her o’s and even her small a’s and e’s clockwise, forming them from the bottom up. Could I learn to do that? I was so fascinated that I could have fallen face first into her drawing.
Colleen remained almost silent until I left. She didn’t like me, or maybe she wanted Dani to herself. But I couldn’t get her out of my head. I decided I would draw until I was good at it, and I would train myself to be ambidextrous by writing in my journal with my left hand.
One way or another, Colleen eventually came to my house after school instead of to Dani's. She tossed her windbreaker over a chair and we ate some Oreos.
“Want to see a secret hideout?” I asked.
“Where?”
“In the alley down by Schreiber Park. There’s, like, a jungle.” I felt great about knowing something she didn’t.
My older friend Janice and I had found the jungle and the hideout a couple of years ago, when I was nine. Running half a block along the alley between Arthur and Schreiber Avenues, it was a strip of vacant lots grown up in trees and brush alongside a huge brick warehouse, still called a streetcar barn though there were no streetcars left in Chicago in the 1970s.
You could walk along Ravenswood Avenue, turn left alongside the brick wall, and submerge into foliage. Deep inside, a certain spot under the ailanthus and cottonwood jungle was clear of undergrowth, and a couple of fallen limbs made convenient places to sit. The dark brick wall of the car barn formed the back wall of the hideout.
One time, Janice and I had found a stack of Penthouse in the hideout. We later described some of the pictures to her mom and to my mom.
“In practically every picture, a woman had a man’s thing in her mouth!” I exclaimed.
“I think you and Janice are using somebody else’s hideout,” my mom had said. “Don’t go in there any more. And don’t tell your dad what you saw.”
That was a long time ago. I had traipsed through that alley more recently, but not because I was looking for the hideout. I liked to look at the green tops of the trees, swaying slightly on a warm summer day, against the blackish brick warehouse and the blue sky. It was a peaceful sight.
Prowling with Colleen on this gray day, I stepped out of the paved alley and into the foliage as if off the edge of a swimming pool. The jungle wasn’t as deep as I remembered, and we easily found the old hideout. A few beer cans rusted on the dirt, which was black with spring dampness under the trees and bushes. Boring.
I looked straight up into the new leaves. They weren’t as cheerful with the gray sky. I scrutinized the broken view of the sky for any hint of blue.
Colleen was already five steps up a ladder of pitted iron rungs bolted into the brick wall of the warehouse. They led all the way to the roof.
“Get off there,” I said, not sure whether I meant it, or whether I wanted to follow her.
“No,” she said, climbing. I followed her. Big iron hoops at the top acted as handles to let us clamber over the lip, and we were on the roof. It was so easy. We looked at each other and smiled. From behind the knee-high parapet wall, I looked down past the jungle and across the alley at the backyards of the houses on Arthur, at their garages and their rusty metal trash barrels. The yards were quiet. I wondered what was happening in each house. My parents had almost bought a house on that block, but my mom changed her mind because there were no big trees.
Looking toward the train tracks, running along Ravenswood perpendicular to the alley, I saw the distant, bright headlight of a train coming from the north. And I could see the signal structures above the tracks. I liked this perspective.
Colleen was already clambering back down into the jungle, so I followed. She pushed through the bushes along the wall until she found a door. Shoving it hard, we were able to crack it open about six inches and squeeze inside.
Light seeped in through filthy skylights and flowed in through the opening of the stuck door. I looked at the cloudy daylight where it lit the ground inside the warehouse: heavily cracked cement, gravel. I could smell dust and oil. We waited for our eyes to adjust to the dark and then went exploring. Massive garbage trucks were parked end to end, blocky and shadowed, along this side. Beyond them, a vaguely yellow loader machine hunkered down by a mountain of road salt a story high.
We walked forward in the dark between the trucks and the salt mountain, down the length of the building. Far away, light streamed in and shrunk my pupils as a door opened. Its squeak echoed. Was Colleen sneaking out?
No. Men were talking, far away.
“Is somebody in here?”
“You see something?”
We froze, then tiptoed between the trucks to the wall. I glanced back and saw a man walking towards us with a flashlight. Colleen tore off as if running from an axe murderer, her Converse pulverizing the gravel, and darted out through the door we’d entered by. I was right behind her.
“You kids stay out of here,” the man said, the width of three trucks between us. I squeezed out the door and we ran through the jungle to the alley. Several seconds later, I heard the door slam as he pushed it shut from the inside. I’d registered that he didn’t sound angry, but my journal shows I was thrilled to have had a close call with cool Colleen.
Me and Colleen nearly got caught in that building with the big garage door. (There’s a side door.) Well we were in there and we heard footsteps so we hid behind a garbage truck and then sneaked around the side. Because we were trapped near the end of the building. So we sneaked around the side of the truck and up towards our door a little way then we RAN!! We got out and I swear I had never run so fast.
My emulation of lefthanded Colleen never completely left me. When I print by hand, I still start my small-letter “e” at the bottom and draw it and the “o” clockwise. It’s a private souvenir of my admiration for that girl who could draw.