Frumpy Mom: Remembering my first white room

When I was a little girl, I had a friend named Janie who seemed infinitely glamorous to me. She lived a few blocks from us in a house that actually had a room that no one was ever allowed to use.

In those days, that seemed to my young mind like the epitome of elegance: Having a house so big that you had a room just for company, with thick white carpeting and a white sofa.

Until then I didn’t even know white couches existed. Janie’s pretty, stylish mother, who was so glamorous she was even from England (a place I’d only read about in books) kept this room for visiting with friends, and it was instant painful death for any child to ever set one toe inside it.

I certainly never dared to step onto that thick, furry white carpet, but I admired it from afar. Janie’s younger brother, John, had a Beatles haircut which was quite daring in our dusty little town in the San Joaquin Valley. It created a stir at our elementary school, before the principal decided to allow it — probably because he was an Anglophile himself and owned a classic Triumph.

Over the white fireplace in Janie’s white living room hung gilt-framed oil paintings of the entire family. I didn’t even know anyone who owned an oil painting, let alone a portrait of their family..

They had a massive sheepdog that wasn’t allowed in the house and was as tall as a bear when he jumped on the screen door on his hind legs. He terrified me.

Janie and I enjoyed spending time together, and it was my first taste of the exotic life that could be lived outside of our little town. In those years, my dad was a sergeant in the Air Force and we made so little money that it was always a stretch to make it to payday.

Even though we were always broke, my dad wouldn’t allow my mother to work, so she spent her days obsessively vacuuming the hardwood floors and snatching glasses from the coffee table while you were still drinking them. We learned you had to hold onto your beverage if you wanted to keep it. I’m still leery about putting my drink down anywhere.

My mom had grown up as a dirt poor orphan in hardscrabble Texas and she had very clear ideas about what made a person “trashy” — including having a dirty house and watching daytime TV.

Little did she know I would grow up later to have both of those traits.

Until I went away to college, though, I had never seen daytime television — except the day I came home unexpectedly and announced that President Kennedy had just been shot so they closed the school and sent everyone home. Mom turned on the TV to see if I was lying.

My parents had managed to scrape up enough money to buy a respectable 3-bedroom, 1-bath house. It was in a somewhat downtrodden neighborhood, but it was walking distance to the grade school, public library, tiny downtown, the Foster’s Freeze and municipal swimming pool, so it was heaven to me.

Usually, just when the cash started getting low close to payday, one of the neighbors would come over and ask to borrow money to feed her kids. My mom would always give her our last lonely five-dollar-bill, and then my dad would get mad when he came home and discovered we were eating potato pancakes for dinner. Again. I would drop over to the neighbor’s house, where she would heat up hand-made tortillas on the stove burner and feed them to us for dinner.

Janie’s family never ate potato pancakes or tortillas, and they had a real dining room too. As a child, I was too ignorant to be envious. It would have been like envying the Royal Family.

We had one small living room, like almost everyone I knew, and one bathroom that became a battleground daily. Today, I really don’t think my children have the slightest appreciation for the drama they were spared simply because they had an extra toilet while growing up.

Even though I had little experience of life outside our little town, I read everything I could get my hands on. There was nothing else to do. I worked my way through the entire children’s section of the branch library, and had to get special permission to check books out of the adult area. It was my window onto a world I could only imagine.

Then, I’d go visit Janie, who lived on a park near the library, and gaze at her empty lviing room with the oil paintings. Today, I have lovely oil paintings of myself and other loved ones, painted by expert hands. I tried the white sofa thing, too, but managed to spill red wine on it instantly. I’ll never have carpet because, ugh, all that dirt. And my dog whines if he’s left outside more than 10 minutes.

I know I’ll never have any rooms saved just for company, because no one lives like that anymore unless you’re rich. If you are, let me know what it’s like.

I wish I could find Janie now and find out what became of her. We moved away when I was in middle school. Meanwhile, I’ll keep thinking about her family with its alliterative names and oil portraits, and remembering when that was the height of class to me.

Janie, if you’re out there, hit me up.