Ironing in the Cellar

Funny, the things you remember about the house you grew up in. At first blush, I think I don’t remember much about 59 Thackeray Road, but then the details come seeping through the floorboards - the small, repeating tiles in the downstairs bathroom that I would study while sitting on the toilet, the sink often filled with dirty combs soaking in a solution of water and Barcolene (Google was certain I meant Barcelona); shooting baskets out the second story window at the hoop in the backyard; the wallpaper in the kitchen that featured old fashioned ladies stirring batter in big bowls; the diningroom table, with assigned seating, used only on Sundays for dinner (often potroast); my two oldest sisters’ bedroom over the garage, with a fancy, skirted kidney-shaped dressing table; the flagstone steps leading up to the front door where we would play a solo game of throwing a tennis ball into the steps, then fielding the random caroms (always a bad move if you missed the steps entirely and the ball hit the front door; the children’s telephone in the back stairwell; the porch where my parents would sit on summer evenings, their cigarettes glowing in the dark; the front hall, where we would lie on the oriental rug, the front door open to let in the winter sun; and of course the endless games of tiddly winks. The center medallion for the cup, the radiating designs serving as cheat-proof starting points for your winks.

The tiddly wink game board is now in my kitchen.

But all that is just a prelude to my focus today. The Mangle.

My mother used to spend a lot of time in the cellar with The Mangle - a machine the size of a small car that looked like an organ console without the keyboard.  It was the marvel ironing machine of the 50’s which allowed housewives to do all the ironing right at home!  

     On the other side of the cellar, my father spent Sundays listening to Live at the Met, even though he knew nothing about opera.

He was particularly attracted to the dramatic arias, for which he provided colorful play-by-play (“Oh…oh, he’s gonna get her. No, wait…she’s getting away…”) while he dictated weekly sales reports into the Grey Autograph Machine, a magical dictaphone contraption that etched his voice in concentric circles onto filmy blue disks. My father sold equipment and supplies to electroplating companies. Whenever dad sold an Automatic, he was happy and life in our house was good.   The Automatic was a huge vat that coated any object with metal - chrome, silver, gold, car bumpers, picture frames, refrigerator handles and probably an occasional gangster.

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     Mother never went to the cellar on the weekends. She tried to stay away from dad when he was working down there. We all did. We never knew when he would, egged on by either a sub-par sales week or a crappy opera, come up the cellar stairs loaded for bear, attacking any one of us who was stupid enough to be within reach of his sarcastic anger about what a mess the house was.

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Back to Mother’s Mangle.

It had a red on-off toggle switch and a five-foot padded roller which was controlled by knee-operated levers, leaving the hands free to feed it with wrinkled sheets, pillowcases, tablecloths. Mother would catch the item on the back side, fold it in half and send it through again. Over and over. She spent a lot of time in the dimly lit cellar with a sheet of white and gold-speckled linoleum the only thing that protected her from the frigid concrete floor. She loved it down there with her Mangle and her thoughts, a Belair menthol cigarette burning nearby. It was the only place in the house where she could be alone, the six of us running around upstairs like banshees.

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     In a quick cellar aside, every Christmas, mother would send me down to the back corner, past the Mangle, near the boiler, to spray toxic gold spray on everything she could think of – pinecones, wreaths, nativity scenes. She probably could have used an Automatic. I felt like the chosen one. I can still hear the rattle of the beads inside the spray can and smell the thrill of those intoxicating Holiday Fumes.

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     Steam, press, roll, fold. Ma was a master. Ironing my father’s shirts was an artform. Spray starch, collar inserted first, lower roller, steam, raise roller. Cuffs. Lower roller, steam, raise roller. The body of the shirt was the last to run the gauntlet. Mother hung the shirts on a wobbly rack.

At the end of the session, she would stub out her Belair and bring the shirts up two flights to my dad’s closet, being careful not to step on our tiddly winks in the front hall.

     I used to wonder if The Mangle was named after my older brother. The story goes that one day, when he was very little, he figured out how to turn on the red switch and work the levers.  There were no tablecloths around, so he put in his hand and lowered the roller.

   Until that day, none of us was aware that you could take skin from one part of the body and graft it onto a different part.

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