Mrs. Macaulay Saw
Colleen Morrissey I would often go to the Macaulay house, back in the yellow days of middle school, before the Midtown revival, before Farnam Street became this outdoor mall/condo park/night scene, back when the Mutual of Omaha building stuck out alone in a tri-part bump west of downtown like someone giving the finger. When the Midtown neighborhoods south of Dodge still belonged to middle-class Catholics who could still send their kids to the private Catholic grade schools. The Macaulay house was made of deep brown brick, and the rusty metal furniture sitting on the front porch left deep brown stains on your clothes. Inside was a shamble. The purpose of each individual room spilled out into the neighboring rooms because those rooms, like the Macaulays who lived in them, had no sense of boundaries. Light, fragile boxes of tea were stacked beneath the TV stand in the living room. A futon that essentially acted as Mr. Macaulay’s bed stayed in the sun room along with preteen Kevin Macaulay’s ten-pound hand weights. The dining room held a glassfronted hutch where Billy Macaulay’s Star Wars figurines stood alongside Mrs. Macaulay’s dusty doll collection. The Macaulay house was the one where we girls would go. It was the designated place for being thirteen and fourteen during the dilated summers made into stagnant eternities by the lack of cars and money. It was the place for eight-person boy-girl “parties.” On the crumbling front porch in the summer, smells of Mountain Dew and wet cement. In the weird, parallelogram-shaped, shag-