The Scary Basement

I've been thinking of things in my past lately. More specifically, I've been thinking of writing things about my family. I've written a lot about my parents, but not so much about my siblings. How can this be? And no, it isn't like my family says and that I wish I had been an only child. I really only wished to be an only child when we lived in the house with one bathroom. Luckily I had to wake very early in the morning anyway to attend seminary, so I had the bathroom to myself - mostly. I often wondered why my parents didn't cordon off the toilet. But that would have been too easy. Instead they did what only truly insane people do - they put another toilet, and a shower stall in the basement. Not only just a basement, but the scariest basement in the universe. I wish I had the ability to post my mental images, because then you'd have to agree with me.

The basement in our house in Salem was a horror. And except for the month when my sister and I braved the demons - and rats - to sleep there in order to push out the rotten window frame and sneak out of the house at all hours, we tried never to go down there. It was large, cavernous really. It was as large as the footprint of the house. To access it, you went down a very rickety set of stairs from the central hallway on the main floor, or (unimaginably) from the door at the back of the house. But to do that you had to be legally insane. There was no way on this planet that you'd dare walk through the rest of the basement to get to the back door. And if you were outside there was not a chance in Hades that you'd willingly leave the relative safety of the outdoors to brave traversing the rest of the basement. Well, unless it was broad daylight and an adult was following you very close behind. There was a fruit cellar. What some (obviously) demonic family might have tried at one point to have used as a family room. There was a workroom, an office, which for some reason was nicely carpeted and had a door. There was a laundry area, the lonely, unused toilet and shower stall, and the worst part, a coal cellar. It was a Tim Burton wonderland down there. The floor was concrete, with patches of old fashioned linoleum that someone at some point hadn't thought scary enough and had tried to peel off in spots. There was really only the light of one solitary 60 watt bare lightbulb and the shadows it cast were such that if you thought about it, you'd be awake for weeks on end.

As my mother was/is stringent about laundry, we'd find ourselves in the basement far more often that we liked. It was a mad dash. I like to think that I developed a certain athleticism as I opened the door at the top of the stairs, slid and slipped my way down the worn wooden stairs, rounded the corner into the laundry room at Kentucky Derby speeds, flung open the dryer, scooped out dry laundry into a basket, moved wet laundry with the strength of a hefty Swedish laundress from washer to dryer, performed the quickest- on-record laundry sorting into the washing machine, all but threw detergent into the machine (who needs to measure), started both appliances, grabbed the full laundry basket and bolted back upstairs, all in under 2 minutes. I'm not kidding. My heart would beat in my chest like a drum. I just knew that if I spent one second longer in that basement that all of my nightmares would come rushing out of the dark, shadowy places and I would fall victim to them while tangled in a pile of my bothers' dirty underwear.

Usually my sister, S. would know exactly when I would go down to do laundry and she would be waiting there at the top of the stairs, she'd wait for me to start up the stairs, laundry basket straining my puny arms, and she'd smile this angelic smile, and for a second I'd think she was going to reach out and grab the laundry basket, or maybe pull me to safety. But no, she'd smile this beatific smile and then when I was a few steps from the top, she'd slam the door shut and lock it. And the problem with this is, that it didn't just happen once, it happened several times. Or several hundred. I used to think myself quite clever, but my sister had not only the beauty, she got a lion's share of the brains, and I'd fall for that cherubic face peering down at my own terrified, sweaty one, and I'd think she was really going to help me. And get this, rather than go through the basement and let myself out the back door, I'd wait until someone took pity on me and unlocked the door. I once sat there for over half an hour. It was at that point that I really regretted making S. walk to the bus stop 10 paces behind me. Although it did give me pause when I heard her cackling like a drunken chicken while she leaned against the locked door.

Eventually some smart soul (it wasn't me) either pushed hard enough to splinter the wood around the hasp of the lock, or they were making a good plan in case an older sister decided to get revenge, I don't know which. More than likely it was the twins, who we figured out early on that we could blame for pretty much any and all destructive behavior - because, well, they were destructive.

The last memory I have of the basement is the day we moved from that house, I was emptying the fruit cellar and only felt safe because someone had finagled the Boy Scout Troop from church to come over and help us move. I figured if something were to finally get me, it would be mighty handy to have 10 or so fifteen-year-old boys who all knew basic first aid - that and how to light themselves on fire with white gas. If nothing else, I'd go out in a blaze of glory.