A Place to Rest My Head

My family lived in 2-bedroom apartment in the Bronx. Two bedrooms should have been an issue in that there were five of us in the family. My two older sisters got to have the master-bedroom. I guess my parents felt that my sisters, as growing teenagers, needed more room and a private bathroom more than they did. My parents took the remaining bedroom and that left me. I was 5 years old when we moved into that apartment. I recently talked about our apartment with one of my sisters and she wanted to know if I felt deprived as child not having my own room or privacy. I assured her that I didn’t. The benefits that I got by where my bed was placed well out-weighed any deprivation I might have felt.
To understand any of these benefits you have to get a better picture of what our apartment looked like. As you walked into our apartment you came to a small hallway. There was a kitchen/dining area immediately to the right. A narrow kitchen being the first part with stove on one side as you walked in and the sink on the other. As you got further into the room it widened a little bit to leave the dining area. In this area we had the refrigerator, dining table, our extension phone, some storage wardrobe/cabinets and my mother’s sewing machine. It’s also where we kept our pet turtle.
Going back to our hallway and continuing forward was our foyer. The main thing in that room was our piano. It was an old converted upright player piano. All of the player parts had been removed and it had been made into a regular piano. At the end of the foyer was a step down into our living room, to the right, the hallway leading to the two bedrooms and the main bathroom.
If you looked into our living room you would find our black and white console television set centered against the right wall and a couch which we sat on to watch television on the left wall. There was other furniture in the living room but for the purposes of the perks of my placement in the house that is all you really have to know.
For all of my pre-teen childhood, my bed was placed in the foyer to the left and butted up against the piano. The major advantage of having bed so placed was that at night when my parents were watching TV, I could watch also. The TV was visible from where I slept and because of the positioning of the piano, anyone sitting on the couch watching TV couldn’t see me. Periodically I was caught, but I usually had enough warning to fake sleeping before someone would actually see me watching.
The only downside of having a bed there was when there was when my parents had company over. I would be put into my parent’s bed to sleep and then would be woken up and moved to my own bed after everyone left.
As I got older and reached my teens it became obvious that my bed placement was not viable. With each of us getting older and larger family gatherings, the dining area of the kitchen was too small. In addition, just as my sisters’ needed a bigger room and privacy, so did I. To solve the larger eating space and my room issue, I was moved.
The dining area was moved to the foyer and the room next to the kitchen, which had been our dining area, became my room. A full-length curtain was placed between the kitchen and what was now my room. A dresser was added to the room, as was my bed. The wardrobe/cabinets, my mother’s sewing machine, phone, and refrigerator remained, as did our turtle, which only lasted another year or so. Having a full sized refrigerator in my room and the extension phone was definitely a plus. With the curtains closed it was easy to access food when necessary. Being next to the kitchen helped also.
I was 15 years old when my sisters finally moved out of our apartment. I finally got my own real room. My parents decided to retake the master bedroom that my sisters had had and I got to move into their old room. It stayed that way until after college when I moved out and my room became the guest bedroom.
Did I ever feel deprived? Not really. Having the advantages of the placement of my bed made me feel special, since I could do things that even my sisters couldn’t do. I had the best rooms in the house.