Clotheslines

I remember a time when there seemed to be a giant network of clotheslines connecting every building in Brooklyn. We had a washer/dryer, in the sixties my parents were considered affluent newcomers to a Brooklyn Heights that would be unrecognizable today. There were boarded-up buildings on every street for one thing, though many had recently undergone renovations by new middle-class families. Real Estate had not yet turned into the pastime of choice for New Yorkers, and the other partners at Dad's law firm were mildly shocked at his choice of residence. "It's wonderfully close to the office, Arthur, but really....... Brooklyn?" Anyway, the clotheslines swept the skyline, and pieces of the most intimate information about other people's lives were flying like flags, all kinds of announcing inside information to passersby. 

The neighbors down the street had one that went across two rows of backyards to the building on the street behind us, and there was a network of these stretching from various windows in the various houses you could see from our own top floor windows. In the middle of the day, housewives in curlers would lean out , smoking and calling to their neighbors, and the pulleys would creak like birdsong as the wash was gathered in. You would see gigantic baffling undergarments with clips and elastic and all kinds of armor and boning, looming beige and immense, inspiring awe and fear. Surely nothing human wore these plated structures. You might see the rows of undershirts and boxers, slips, stockings and panties, supernaturally large bras which were as bewildering as the girdles, and rows of flowered house-dresses and work shirts. The women themselves, leaning on their elbows from the windowsills as they called down to their children in the street, were plated in their rows of curlers, like armadillos. There was one woman in the building across the street whom we'd never seen without her helmet of bristly gray curlers; she sat outside every day on a webbed folding aluminum chair, in a housedress from her clothesline, surveying the street. At night when she leaned from her window to call her kids to dinner or bedtime, her head was still covered in its curlers. We imagined a moment in each day, perhaps when her husband stepped through the front door of their apartment with his  lunch bucket in hand, when she would unwind her hair from the spools, and stand in rapunzel-like glory for her husband's admiration for a golden moment, then inevitably, solemnly, rewound her hair into its armored shroud.  Her face, though was as forbidding as the curlers, so they seemed a part of her as firmly attached as her square jaw or her large reddened hands.

Those aluminum chairs were a fixture of the street as much as the clotheslines, women sat and sunned themselves and watched each other's children learn to roller skate, jump double dutch, play stoop ball with pink spaldeens. The streets were always full of kids playing after school and before dinner, drawing hopscotch and skully squares in chalk on the slate, games of tag, chants and clapping games. There was also a bit of shoplifting from the corner store, run by a short friendly spanish man named Pepe who nevertheless watched every kid like a hawk when they neared the candy. comics,  and soda. Anyone caught by Pepe would get his ass kicked in the store, then most likely a slap from each mother from the stoops as he passed on the way home to get another whupping from first Mom then Dad. The shoplifting was pretty minimal, needless to say, mostly the Irish family with the thirteen kids and most of them were such delinquents it didn't surprise any of us when we heard about it. Each of the older sisters usually was saddled with three or four little ones to watch; those girls seemed overwhelmed and belligerently independent at the same time. Their mother seemed perpetually pregnant, exhausted in her folding chair as her laundry loomed above, countless cloth diapers and toddler's britches, her husband's work clothes, rattling like a rosary counting off a litany of pleas.

Those clotheslines sketched details about our neighbors and we knew each others most intimate secrets. Today I stroll down the empty sidewalks on the street where we used to live and the windows are all closed, there are no old folks sunning themselves and chatting in their folding chairs, the children are all behind the brownstone walls engaging in organized activities instead of playing in the street. One lonely clothesline remains, defiant, a remnant of a past when we knew our neighbors, when we socialized in front of, not behind, our houses. Many of these houses still have pulleys attached, ancient and rusting relics, in some corner of their gardens or hanging near a window frame, and the new generation doesn't notice their existence or know what they are. Those clotheslines connected us all to each other, to ourselves, a giant web encircling and embracing the lives led within it.