The Yellow House by John Maki
In 1965 my parents bought a new house, their first, in Vancouver, Washington for $17,000. It was a north-facing daylight split-level adjacent to a few acres of string-lined land on the outskirts of town. I was seven and my brother was ten. My GI-bill-educated father was an accountant at a chemical plant and my mother a housewife. Like other couples of their era, they had married young and were ill-prepared to deal with the cultural and economic forces arrayed against them. The house was yellow.
Coming from apartments, the yellow house felt huge. The left split descended into a kitchen, dining room, and roughed-in area with plenty of room to play. The right ascended to the living room, bathroom, bedrooms, and a deck overlooking a lumpy dirt yard. The middle landing opened onto a small garage that would hold everything male: cars, bikes, lawn equipment, and later my father’s grief. Popcorn ceilings, hollow core doors, and single pane sliders attested to the cheapness of the day, and abandoned construction debris to the carelessness. One afternoon, not long after we had moved in, I found a shiny spring outside, pulled it, and watched in horror as a lethal metal shaving ripped open my index finger.
For the first couple years, my brother and I shared a bedroom where we waged rolled sock wars, discussed comic books, and exchanged boyish secrets late into the night. Later, alone in my own bedroom, I slept on a rubber mattress to combat my allergies. Our parents took up the master and feigned happiness. On nights when their angry voices rose through the furnace vents, I missed my brother’s comforting presence terribly.
We tried to adopt the American dream. My father mowed the crabgrass moraines and my mother bought purple shag carpet. We got a dog and got rid of the dog. We frequented Noni’s ice cream parlor and swam in Lacamas Lake. We bought a small above-ground pool that quickly began to leak. Then, because my parents were in debt, my father got a second job and my mother began to go out at night with her girlfriends. Left alone, my brother and I ate frozen TV dinners and were usually asleep before either parent got home.
Sometimes, extended family provided a welcome interruption. My uncle Edgar moved in to help finish the lower level. He was a heavy man, almost four hundred pounds, and laughed in a way that made everyone else laugh. I liked him. A couple weeks in, he and my mother argued and he quit, leaving us to stare at misaligned drywall and black screw heads for a couple of years. My Finnish grandmothers from northern Wisconsin visited and commandeered the kitchen. They baked sourdough bread, steamed cabbage rolls, and served steaming bowls of mojakka, a watery concoction my father loved but the rest of us hated. To my grandmothers, the yellow house was a mansion and upon departing they crushed me against their soft country smocks and whispered tearful Finnish in my ear. It was the last time I saw either of them.
I could write more about the woods where I played and the blacktop I biked down and the Christmases my family shared in an effort to convey how the yellow house helped us overcome obstacles and balance pain with love. But I won’t, because it didn’t. When we moved out seven years later, over a hundred similar box-like dwellings had invaded the neighborhood, latchkey kids were running amok, and my parents’ marriage was unofficially over. My brother was in high school and horribly bullied. I was in junior high and had friends but enemies too, a truth reinforced one day upon discovering a hole in my bedroom window and a golf ball under my bed inscribed with the words Fuck You John. My memory of the mournful wind whistling through the broken window that night is only eclipsed by that of my father smashing a glass milk jug one night and of my mother punching him and of my brother sobbing.
In 1989, my wife and I bought a 1947 Cape Cod house in Seattle and raised our two daughters in the shadow of a huge red oak tree. We didn’t move for seventeen years. Once on vacation we drove through the old neighborhood in Vancouver. It looked pretty much the same. I parked in front of the yellow house, and after a long pause, one of my daughters whispered, "It looks shabby." I didn't disagree.
