A SENSE OF DEPRIVATION

By Gayle Portnow

“Okay to use this bathroom?” my friend Sarah asked Joanie when we were teenagers.

“Sure,” answered Joanie, “You’d better because it’s the only one we have.”

Sarah disappeared down the hall, and Joanie and I laughed about her dumb question. What other bathroom could she use? Every apartment we’d ever been in had one, and only one, bathroom. It never occurred to either of us that there were apartments that had several.

All my friends lived in smaller apartments than mine, and while it wasn’t big, I had my own room. They all shared with their sisters, and one even had to sleep in the same bed as her grandmother. Another had only one bedroom, and her parents slept on a Castro-convertible in the living room. We had no idea that everybody wasn’t just like us, until we visited Sarah. She was the first person I’d ever met who lived in Manhattan. All the people I knew were from Brooklyn, where everyone was the same—nobody very rich, nobody very poor.

Sarah was different. She lived in a huge apartment on Fifth Avenue, with very large rooms, a dining room, and at least three bathrooms. I didn’t know anyone who had a dining room. I knew that Sharon was richer and lived in a bigger apartment, although I never noticed if there was more than one bathroom, but she was not from my neighborhood. She was a summer friend from the bungalow colony we went to, not an everyday friend. I never knew that my family was, if not poor, then pretty close. If anything, we seemed more well off than most of my friends. I always had everything I wanted, except for a dog.

My school friends had fathers who worked as taxi drivers, delivery men, factory workers, or salesmen, like daddy, (who was a lawyer but never practiced). His brother Sam lived in a private house. Almost every Sunday after my piano lesson, the five of us from the third floor walk-up in Crown Heights took the IRT to visit Aunt Anna and Uncle Sam in Flatbush. Their house had a big backyard with lilac trees and pansies and lilies of the valley. Before we went home, Aunt Anna always picked a big bunch of flowers for me. I loved going there, even though my two boy cousins ignored me and only played with my brothers. I didn’t care because I got to play with their beautiful blonde cocker spaniel, whom I adored. We all wanted a dog more than anything, but we lived on the third floor, which was why we couldn’t have one. It made no sense, but Mom promised that if we ever moved to a low floor, we would get a puppy.

I always thought that my aunt and uncle were rich because they had a big private house. I never knew that they rented the first floor, which had just one bathroom, and that someone else owned it. I assumed that if you lived in a private house, it was yours, not rented like an apartment. Mom and Dad must have known that Uncle Sam didn’t own that house, but they never told us.   

 

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