As a child, unaware that my winter was no winter at all, I became completely and utterly obsessed with the heater. Wait, no. It deserves a more stately title. Please make that: The Heater. Since my mom and stepdad remodeled while I was away at college, it is the thing I miss most about the old version of our home on Gillespie Place. I didn’t know anyone else with a heater like ours, and I haven’t seen one since. How odd, the things a child will latch onto.
But then again, maybe I was not a normal child. My earliest memory is of bawling my eyes out on the front stoop. Why? Because Sears deliverymen were about to install a new ceiling fan in my bedroom. What about the old fan? What had it done wrong? I’d watched its blade circulate above my crib during the best (two) years of my life (so far). Who would love that fan like I did? Why, God, did life always have to go and change? My toddler tears were merely a prelude to my passion for The Heater.
I come from a family of, let’s say, underwhelming consumers. Growing up, we shopped at thrift stores before they were trendy, my neon coullottes were home sewn, and my grandfather publicly complimented my mother on washing and reusing Ziploc bags. Correspondingly, I never thought to complain that my family didn’t have the latest gadgets and appliances, either. (The new fan was an anomaly. I realize now the old one must have completely given out for my mom to replace it.) We were late to the microwave, the VCR, and today’s Texas essential—central air. As I got older, I witnessed the shock and awe of friends and strangers alike upon hearing that we cooled our 1½ story house with noisy, drippy and—need I add?—less than effective window units. In Austin, Texas, a town where 100-degree days are no surprise in summer, I could have made a case for uber-A/C at least; could’ve told Mom I’d skip new toys for ten Christmases if we could just stop sweating in our sleep. (Christmas Day at 90 degrees was never out of the question.)
But I was oblivious about my options. As far as I knew, Texas equaled hot. What could you do? So conditioned was I to live without effective air conditioning that even when the A/C went out in my Volkswagen and my boyfriend’s Volvo one sweltering summer, I just drove with the windows down, melting all over town (and occasionally going home to shower off the sweat during my lunch break).
I didn’t care about A/C. I was just biding my time anyway. Waiting for my turn with The Heater.
Once a cool front finally blew into town—and believe me, we stood on the driveway and watched it blow in, mouths agape, like the air-show-style novelty that it was—I could take a seat in front of my old friend, squeezing as close as I could without burning my backside. I would never beg for central air because no matter how nice it would be to cool off in the summer, I couldn’t stand to sacrifice the warm, fuzzy feeling—on my skin and in my soul—that came from The Heater. Its invisible, airy brew cast its spell on me every December. Better than Santa, it was. I spent many of my formative years begging my mother to reset the thermostat so The Heater would kick on sooner and stay blowing longer. Sixty-five degrees is frigid, didn’t she know? How I rejoiced the day I was finally tall enough to reach the dial and sabotage our heating bills all by myself.
Picture, if you will, my house on a hill (the one with prime vistas of Interstate 35 and a steep, secluded entrance most drivers briefly mistook for a speedier, alternate route through the neighborhood). Built in the 1940s and remodeled by drunken maze enthusiasts somewhere along the way, its layout could best described as deranged by the time my family bought it in 1977. We rented out the downstairs, which left us the main floor – including one tiny bathroom, one very short hallway, and a den at the back of the house that you had to tiptoe through not one but two bedrooms to reach.
On the upside, though, thanks to the somewhat circular floor plan, all roads led past The Heater. It was a loud, brown, metal gadget, the approximate size and shape of a closet door, running from the caramel-carpeted floor to the surely asbestos-flecked ceiling. It was the centerpiece of that one and only hallway. On the bottom half of The Heater, air blasted out of a grid-like grate with a force that instantly toasted anyone within two feet (and only within two feet, since after that, you hit the other side of the hallway wall and the heat bounced back in your face). On the top half of The Heater, my little sister Meg and I had slapped extra, unsightly stickers from McDonald’s “Buckle Up and Make It Click” promotional campaign. (Ah, the glory days of the 1980s. We kids actually got free French fries for filling up a sticker book with a record of the number of times we used our seat belts in our wood-paneled station wagon. And if we secretly unbuckled in the rear-facing bucket seats of the “way-way back”—who was to know?)
How I wished I could buckle myself to The Heater! The minute Meg and I felt the slightest chill, we would settle ourselves in front of the grate for our annual battle. Who will get that extra fiber of well-worn carpeting, that millimeter of positioning that meant ever so slightly more hot air singed your spine and NOT hers? (You’d each earned that hot air. You’d been putting up with the other one’s crap all year!)
Our alarms went off for school each winter morn, presenting us with a torturous decision — spring up and race to The Heater or stay in bed, cozy under the covers, risking that the other sister had already made it to the hall for prime positioning. Usually I’d stay in bed, ears perked for even the faintest sounds of rustling in the other bedroom. Then I’d fling off the covers and make a run for it, recklessly hurling my awkward, unatheletic body toward the scorching metal grate.
Once in front of The Heater, we always blew plenty of our own hot air at each other. “Hey! Move! You’ve got more room than me!”
“Do not! You do!”
“MOVE!”
“MOM!”
Much pushing and elbowing always ensued before our mother finally showed up to referee. (Mom hated to referee, still does, but unless she wanted to drive us to the ER instead of elementary school, she had no choice. The Heater was both our post-bath hairdryer of choice and our kid version of an Ultimate Fighting ring.)
“You each have half,” Mom would say, ever the exasperated diplomat. “But it doesn’t matter. It’s time for school.”
Please. Who needs school when you have The Heater? It taught me some of life’s most useful lessons:
1. Share and share alike. Squabbles over heater rights are my first memory battling for equality. Now that I think about it, it’s possible that seeds of activism – civil rights, feminism, you name it – were inadvertently planted by my passion for my place at The Heater.
2. Math matters. How would Meg and I know if we were sharing The Heater equally? By counting the lines in the great grid behind us, of course. Aiming for symmetry behind our shoulders is my earliest, most heartfelt memory of addition, subtraction, and geometry.
3. The grass is always greener. No matter what Mom or careful counting told us, my sister and I were always convinced the other one was getting more of the grid. I can still conjure the sense of outrage and deprivation over unequal heat.
4. Keep your hands to yourself. Meg and I bickered enthusiastically growing up, mostly over who got the front seat of our Dad’s truck and which show to watch on TV. We both loved Murder, She Wrote, but after-school arguments often boiled down to her Full House versus my 21 Jump Street. Our house had one TV, and you did not come between Johnny Depp and me. Ditto for my sister and the toddling Olson twins. We never came to blows, certainly not in winter, because whoever lost the struggle of the enormous remote control could stalk off to The Heater to exhale her anger in warmth and comfort.
Of course, if one sister decided to follow and spitefully claim her half of The Heater, the other would have no choice but to scooch over and share the love. Those were the rules, and we adhered to the Heater Code as some nations do the Geneva Convention. We would simply have to fume shoulder-to-shoulder until it was time for our bedtime story, and it was impossible to sit so close and stay mad for so long. I guess, in hindsight, The Heater taught me a rather grown-up lesson, too: Don’t go to bed angry. Central air was never so educational.
