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Marilyn Mornings / By Marcia Bockelman The chat driveway led to the front door of the converted two-car garage that was our new home. Stuccoed and plain, the tiny house was adorned only by the faded cotton print curtains in the window. Each successive move over the last three years - and there had been several - brought us to a more humble dwelling. Bud was in school and we were trying to make it on my salary alone. This little house would test our commitment to poverty. The interior was bleak. There were two rooms, a living room with a kitchen alcove comprising one side of the garage, a tiny bedroom and bath on the other. The bath had the shortest tub I have ever seen requiring the six-foot man of the house to bathe with his knees under his chin. It was just one step above the old galvanized tubs. There were no closets, just a hanging rod in the bedroom. Cloth curtains hung between the rooms; there were no doors. I didn't realize the significance of this absence until I was stalking off following a quarrel and realized that there were no doors to slam to accentuate my huffy departure. No door, that is, except the one leading outside and that wasn't what I had in mind. Cold took on a whole new meaning, its presence constant. The floor was concrete with linoleum for a covering. A chill radiating from that floor permeated bed, bathtub and clothes. Before crawling out from under the covers in the morning we would give a few puffs to see if we could see our breath. If we could, there would be a dash to our only source of warmth, a small gas radiant heater in the living room. That heater was a mixed blessing. We were afraid of it because it was not vented and thereby consumed the air as it burned. Caution dictated that we not leave it burning while we slept but one bitterly cold night we abandoned that caution. I aroused sometime during the night to an unfamiliar odor, a hot, over-heated smell tinged with the odor of raw gas. I couldn't quite get awake but my subconscious wouldn't let me ignore the danger. "Wake up, Bud, something's wrong." But I got no response. Then I realized there was a sound with the smell. "Get up! The heater's sputtering." That catapulted him out of bed. "God! It's only burning from a few of the jets. I don't think we had very long before the fire would have gone completely out then there would have been trouble--straight gas." We shivered through a few more nights before finding out that his mother had a feather bed stored in the attic. It became a cherished possession as we snuggled in the warm down billows the rest of that winter. To add to the interest of our sleeping arrangement, the ceiling plaster fell one night. The gaping hole fit the rest of the décor but we continued to be pelted with falling particles. To remedy this Bud taped a mosaic of Life magazine pages over the abyss. I never quite got use to gazing up at Marilyn Monroe each morning, but for some reason it didn't seem to bother him. To the contrary, he bragged about going to bed with the starlet each night. I accepted this as part of the foolish male ego I was just learning about. Besides the plague of the cold there was the problem of food, specifically that it was in short supply. My salary as an office worker was meager and Bud found |