The apartment

When I think back on the apartment what comes to mind isn't the two small rooms or the fact that we only moved in there because my mom was mad at my grandmother and felt like we had to get her own place. When I think of the aprtment, I don't think of the inside at all actually. I never spent much time in our apartment. Instead, I spent time in Bea's apartment. Bea was Elly's babysitter. She was a heavy set balck woman with three daughters. Wendy was my brothers' age. Xamara was somewhere in between. I would say about four year's older than me

and kerri was only a year or two older than me. Bea wasn't just a babysitter. She spent a lot of time with us even when she wasn't getting paid. Elly was just a baby and she would often send her daughters over just to bring me and Elly over because she missed us. We ate dinner atBea's house a few nights a week. We played at Bea's house all day when we weren't in school.

The thing is, Bea wasn't really there, it was mostly just us kid. Wendy, Xamara, and Kerri were probably the first people to intoroduce me to the world outside of my house. Sure, my siblings and I were always tramping through the woods, but Bea's kids knew everything. They taught me about love, and told me more about sex. I hadn't even heard of anal sex until they told me that you could get pregnant from it! Of course, they didn't tell me that stuff until years later. In fact, I remained friends with Bea's children for most of my life. We lost touch after five or six years. The last time I saw them I was a teen and we went over to stay the night.

No, there isn't much I can tell you about the apartment. It was small and sparse. My mother was still wroking all the time, and Steve was too. We lived in that place for about a year before we moved on. All I can say is that in the time that my bunkbed sat in that little room in the apartment, my home was Bea's house. I still think about her and her kids to this day.

Dear apartment,

Remember when Wendy, Xamara, Kerri and I used to look out at the building next door and talk about how nice it looked and how we thought life was much better over there? I think maybe we were wrong.

Love,

Robin