1925, Chicago, Illinois

By Rhoda Curtis

We lived on Millard Avenue, near Twelfth Street, on the West Side of Chicago during the first 12 years of my life.

Millard was a long street with leafy elm trees, and it was home to Jewish and Polish immigrants. The Jews lived on the northern half of the street, the Polish Catholics on the southern half, and they mixed only on the playground of Delano elementary school.

In 1925, I was 7 years old and walked six blocks to Delano. Sometimes, I cut through alleys and backyards to get to school, and sometimes I walked along Twelfth Street. I always took shortcuts to get home for lunch and then back to school, but I took the long way back after school.

On a day in late April, the week before Easter, I passed a florist on my way home. There in the window were about 100 fuzzy little yellow chicks, chirping madly. I stood watching them, mesmerized. The sign said, “Fifty cents each.” I fingered the two quarters in my pocket, milk money for the week, and sighed.

I knew my mother was adamantly opposed to pets of all kinds. A city was no place for animals, she asserted. I knew a cat or a dog was out of the question, but maybe she would accept a chicken. After all, it wouldn’t require much food, and it wouldn’t take up much space…. I palmed my quarters and went into the shop.

Our flat was on the second floor of a red-brick duplex. It had a pillared porch and a foyer with two doors. The door on the left opened to stairs, and the one on the right opened to the landlord’s apartment.

I went up the stairs, holding my chick inside my coat, feeling its heart beating against my hand, and opened the door to the flat quietly, not flinging it open in my usual exuberant way.

Calling out to my mother, I announced that I was home and walked down the corridor to the kitchen at the back of the flat, hiding the chick in the pocket of my sweater. But nothing escaped my mother’s vigilant eye.

“What have you got there?” she asked, suspiciously. I opened my hand, and there sat my chick, blinking in the light. “What? A chicken? What are you going to do with a chicken? This is not a farm we live in!”

I hastened to explain that I would put the chick in a box in the bathroom, where it wouldn’t bother anyone; I would feed it and take care of it; that she didn’t have to worry about the chicken upsetting the family routine.

Talking very fast, I kept stroking the soft feathers of my chick. My mother shrugged and turned back to the stove, stirring whatever it was she was cooking. She said, over her shoulder, “Look in the pantry. Maybe you’ll find a good box in there. And if that chicken makes any noise or any fuss….” She left the rest of the sentence up in the air.

I set up the box in the bathroom, lining it with crumpled-up newspaper, put some cornmeal in one corner and water in the other. The name Bettina suddenly came to me, and I was proud of the way my chicken adapted to her new home.

I didn’t know whether I had a female or male chicken, but remembered something about roosters having a set of red feathers on their heads. Bettina was all golden and soft, so I decided she was female.

The only problem was that as Bettina grew, she learned to hop out of her box, which she especially liked to do when my mother took a bath. For some reason, Bettina was entranced by my mother’s feet, and as soon as those feet came into view, Bettina was out of the box, investigating the toes.

The first time that happened, my mother yelled for me, and I rushed in, picked up Bettina and scolded her. After that, I made an excuse to take the box out of the bathroom whenever I saw my mother heading that way in the evening.

Bettina seemed to recognize me when I came into the bathroom after school; I thought her chirping was different, and she would stop whatever she was doing and hop over to my side of the box, cocking her head to one side, her beady eye fixed on me.

I wondered whether chickens had intelligence we didn’t know about and decided to try an experiment. We had a salt shaker in the shape of a chicken that someone had given us, and I put the porcelain chicken into a corner of Bettina’s box.

She eyed the false chicken warily, then hopped over to it, stopped, cocked her head, hopped all around it, pecked at it, and gave up. She turned her back on the fake bird, scratched at the crumpled-up newspaper and paid fierce attention to the cornmeal in her corner of the box.

Fridays were house-cleaning days, and my mother hired a Czech woman named Mrs. Varshing to help her with the cleaning of our apartment. Mrs. Varshing was a tall, bony woman who always sat at our table for lunch and who responded with grunts to all my attempts at conversation.

I wondered what language my mother used in conversing with Mrs. Varshing. Was it Romanian? French? Each one’s version of English? Mrs. Varshing and my mother always ate lunch together and seemed to communicate as well as they needed to.

It really didn’t matter to me. I usually ate as fast as I could, and after lunch, I paused in the bathroom to say good-bye to my beautiful, plump and healthy pet before running down the steps, back to school.

That same afternoon, as I opened the door to the flat, I sensed an ominous quiet, and when I opened the door to the bathroom, I found a scrubbed, clean, empty space. No box, no Bettina.

“What happened to my chicken?” I demanded of my mother, who was sitting at the kitchen table, peeling and dicing carrots.

“I gave her to Mrs. Varshing,” my mother said calmly. “It will make a nice soup for her dinner. That chicken was getting too big for the apartment, anyway.” She kept her eyes fixed on the carrot in her hand, examining it carefully for any black spots.

I stood there, stunned; it was one of those moments that burns itself into your heart.

Rhoda Curtis’ memoir, Rhoda: Her First Ninety Years, is available at Amazon.com and at Cody’s Books on Fourth Street in Berkeley, California. It covers her six careers, as well as life with three husbands and many lovers. For more, visit her Web site.

Posted by Common Ties on Monday, October 1st, 2007 | Email This Post

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