Page 23 - Philly Girl

Philly Girl 7

The House is Burning Down

There were the usual rules about not playing with matches,
but the day I watched my mother almost burn the house
down is seared in my memory. I was seven. Esther methodi-
cally and hypnotically lit a match to photo after photo and
burned each one to ash. I screeched, “We need a fireman!”
I screamed at her to stop. There was no evidence that she
heard me. I watched her cry hysterically and then finally
soften into a trance.
Much later, I came to understand the roots of my mother’s
pain. One tragedy after another, beginning with the death
of her beloved younger sister, Bernice, nicknamed “Bubbles.”
My mother was 33 and pregnant with my sister Faye when
Bubbles died. Over the course of her illness, Bubbles deterio-
rated even as she got through nursing school. She attended
her June 1947 graduation in a wheelchair and then died that
same year, in October. My mother had diapered her as a
baby, had cared for her as a child, had loved her intensely. It
was an unsustainable loss. Forever after, my mother believed
her sister died from falling off a horse.
There was another sibling, Norman. My mother’s brother
was the only one who went to college. Norman studied to
become a dentist; then he had a psychotic break and spent
the next 30 years in Norristown State Hospital. He died on
the streets, schizophrenic and homeless at the end of his life.
My mother’s mother—my grandmother—was mur-
dered in Philadelphia. My mother had to identify her body
at the morgue. (She took me with her.)