What to do without a fridge

Written on 27 April 2008
If I Knew You Were Going To Be a Writer, I Would Have Been Nicer To You

What to do without a fridge

By the time I was born, we lived in a house. When we moved to Cleveland we sold one house and bought another, I thought we traded down. In Seattle we may have been living in Rainier Valley, just up the street from the Wildwood Tavern and their weekly drive-by shootings, but at least we had a decent yard. Cleveland Heights was some sort of weird Suburbia. There were still shootings going on up the street, but not as often, no one ever got killed, it never made the news, it wasn’t the same. All the houses on our block were basically the same and only a driveway’s width apart. I thought our house made us middle class, normal, everyday, working class to be sure, peoples.
My mom being bi-polar probably has something to do with why money just disappears for them. If you listen to my sister she claims that we all have undiagnosed ADD. Except her, she got diagnosed a year or so ago, her smugness is palpable. So yes, we had a house growing up, but it didn’t always have electricity, or appliances, or food, or clothes, or shoes…
I remember the winter our refrigerator broke. My parents found another one pretty quick, not sure where, but a man and his son came by and installed it. I remember thinking he smiled too much and his son never looked at me. I would have noticed, I would have looked down had he looked up, but he never did. I know we must have appeared strange, people always thought we were Amish, and the decorations in the house were probably alien to them. They were black, like all of our neighbors who weren't religious, and the two communities never mixed. Maybe that’s why the man smiled so much, and kept looking around with big eyes, and his son kept his head down and didn’t look at anyone they had never been inside one of those homes. Not many non-religious people do. I’m suspicious though, that fridge didn’t last a month.
I don’t know if they were able to get all their money back, but they weren’t able to afford another fridge. They seemed defeated after that, and avoided looking at it. Our religion had dictated a thorough cleaning of the fridge, that’s what I was most annoyed about. That duty had fallen on me of course, and I knew I would have to do again with the next one.
I put the basic groceries we had just bought back into their plastic bags, my mom was talking about returning the milk we had bought and not opened. I slung them out the kitchen window, it faced the back of the house at least, not the sidewalk.
That actually made everyone happy, winter in Cleveland is colder than any fridge. I took the stuff that needed to be frozen and buried them in the backyard under the snow that I knew wouldn’t melt till at least April. Then my mom got worried, “what will the neighbors think if they see these bags?” I hate that refrain. As usual it was my job to calm her down, “They’re not going to look, it’s not a big thing, maybe they’ll think our fridge is too full” like that ever happened. “You can’t even see what I put in the backyard”.
Everyone used the bag system to get the everyday food and would send me into the backyard to get anything that was supposed to be frozen. Everyone else was too embarrassed to be seen foraging in the backyard for a bag of frozen peas and carrots. My mom would peek out the windows to watch the neighbors’ house to ensure I wasn’t seen. Our holy, religious neighbors, the ones with 21 or 23 kids. Not the ones on the other side with only 19 kids, the bigger family. They still had young kids living there, but the mother had seemed to finally hit menopause because the youngest was 5 or 7 or something. Holidays were horrifying. In case you’re wondering, the family across the street had 11 kids.
I wasn’t going to let our neighbors dictate my behavior though. What did I care if one of their kids was watching me? More than a few of their kids seemed a little ‘deficient’ to me. Slack jawed mouth breathers, all of them strangely thin, boney, tall, gangly with translucent skin. They were scared of our cats, thought that cats were dirty, and that we must be dirty as well, also we were Gers, dirty almost by definition. “Stop marrying your cousins!!” I wanted to shout when groups of them would sit and stare at me when I came or left my house. The father dealt in diamonds, they could afford to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ and they took it to heart. Not that unusual.
Eventually they got another fridge, probably around springtime knowing them.