East of Troost by Ellen Barker

Author:Ellen Barker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press

CHAPTER 23

For the rest of the week, I work in the back and Jimmy paints, sands, and paints again in the grow room. I’ve chosen a dark olive green for the floor, with light sage green for the walls and the same ceiling white as in the living room. He finishes the painting and starts the floor sanding. When the floors are sanded, we agree that paint is still the best option for the grow room but that the oak in the other rooms isn’t too badly damaged and can just be varnished. He tells me about a low-odor varnish and says that he’ll pick it up and bring the receipt. By now he’s fully aware of my aversion to dust and odors, although I haven’t confessed to the nasty headaches they give me.

I figure out that I’m spending my entire take-home pay this week, and am rather proud of the fact that it doesn’t bother me very much.

Our first eighty-degree day is predicted, so I make sure I’m up and out early with the dog. I haven’t gone south past Gregory and I want to take a look, to see if anything is left of Fairyland, the old amusement park on 75th Street.

You bought Fairyland tickets at a ticket booth and spent them on rides: maybe one ticket for a kiddie ride and two for the teeter-dip and three for the roller coaster. We went there to ride the rides exactly once a year, on Suburban Bank day in August. When Suburban Bank day started, a bank customer could get free tickets every time he or she did business at the bank during the several weeks prior to the big day. Mother would go as often as possible and collect enough tickets for my brother and me to ride as much, or almost as much, as we wanted. In later years, you just had to show up at the bank once and get a sticker. As long as you had the sticker on your shirt, you could ride anything. By then we were tall enough to ride everything and made sure we did. We loved it all indiscriminately: the Caterpillar, the Whip, the bumper cars, the funhouses, everything. We even rode the kiddie rides late in the day when there weren’t any lines in Kiddieland. I can still picture the place, with its gravel surface and shade trees and shooting galleries.

The rest of the summer, we went there to swim. The park had an Olympic-size swimming pool, with a ten-foot deep end and diving boards at its far end. Mother signed us up for swimming lessons as soon as we were old enough. After the early-morning lesson, we could stay there for the rest of the day without paying. It was much closer than the nearest public pool in Swope Park, which was important since our dad took our only car to work, and pool admission was only fifty cents. From the time I was eight, Mother let me go there pretty much as often as I liked.

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