The World Turned Upside Down

The summer after my fifth birthday—the summer of 1941—my idyllic life collapsed around me. One day I lived with my parents and little brother. The next day they’d gotten into a car and driven away. They left me behind with the next-door neighbors. I stood crying, waving good-bye to the car. The neighbors took my hand and shooed me inside their house.

            I remember little about those neighbors. Did they have children? What did they do when I had an asthma attack? Did they accompany me to my first day of kindergarten? Did they like my crayon scribbles? I don't know. Mommy and Daddy and my baby brother, who was two, were nowhere to be found. I was alone. And lonely for them. My world was upside down.

          Why would such loving parents leave their child behind?

           Years later, Mom told me Dad got a better-paying job in a munitions factory in Parsons. They’d had to live in a refurbished chicken coop.

            “That would have been the death of you,” she explained. And she was right, it would have been. I had asthma and was allergic to all but nine things the doctors had tested me for.

            Did she explain before they left? I don’t know. I remember only that I was without the world I’d always known. My family. The movies. The bedtime songs. The porridge for breakfast. Our visits to the zoo.

            For the first time in my life, I was without my parents. Totally confused. My head dizzy with questions: Didn’t they love me anymore? What had I done? Were they ever coming back? Would I ever sing to my little brother again? Why did they take him and not me?

            Once a week during the following year, I walked the three blocks to my grandma’s house for tea and shortbread cookies. Grandma always said the same thing. She hammered it into me.
           “Your shanty Irish mother made him move,” she complained. “He’d never have left me if she hadn’t gotten her hooks in him.”

            I remember the tone of shanty Irish and hooks. Why was she so mad? Why did she look at me that way?

            It was Grandma who taught me the words abandoned and deserted.

            “They’ve abandoned you, Dodo. Just like your father abandoned me.”

            Her words sounded mean and I wanted to go home. Where was that? Mommy and Daddy and my little brother were home. Where were they?

            “Well say something! They’ve deserted you. Left you here with those no-accounts next door. Probably your mother’s doing.”

            “What does desert mean, Grandma?”

            “It means you’ll never see your Mommy and Daddy again. They’re never coming back.”

             Tears trickled down my cubby cheeks.

            “Stop that crying! I'm only telling you the truth. They love your brother more than you."

             I loved my brother too. He had curly yellow hair.

             "Do you want to know why?” she asked. "Why they love him more than you?"            

            “Why, Grandma?” I managed to ask.

            “You’re naughty, Dodo. You’ve a naughty little girl and no one loves you.”

            I sat silent as we drank our tea and ate our cookies. “I’m going to take a nap now,” she said when we’d finished. “You'd best go on home.”           

            I left. I didn’t cry. Maybe crying was why they’d left me behind. Maybe that’s why they’d deserted me. Maybe it was because I giggled. Maybe it was because I didn't have yellow curls. 
             Once I’d used crayons to draw in the book Mommy was reading. Maybe that was why they’d deserted me. Once I hid Daddy’s lunchbox. Maybe that was why.

            Three blocks. At one end was Grandma’s house and she was always mad. At the other end was the neighbors’ house and they sent me away to school each day and didn’t look at my drawings. Deserted. Abandoned. That’s what happens to naughty little girls.

                                                                        (to be continued on Saturday . . .)