Non, rien de rien
Non, je ne regrette rien
Ni le bien, qu'on m'a fait
Ni le mal, tout ça m'est bien égal…
No, nothing at all
No, I do not regret anything
Not the good, that was done to me
Neither evil, I don't care at all...
“Je Ne Regrette Rien” Charles Dumont, composer. Édith Piaf, chanteuse.
Édith Piaf sang it, that she didn’t regret anything. And that she didn’t care. That was Paris in 1960. But there was a Girl faraway who heard her even before then. And she grew up to disagree with Piaf.
She was a girl in Detroit, not at all special in an Italian family where they all ate in the basement of the grandparents’ house—her mother’s parents—every Sunday.
The Girl didn’t like Italian things because of her families: her mother’s and her father’s family. It made her Italian instead of white. Not white enough. They spoke with accents. Actually, only her grandfathers did. Both of the Girl’s grandmothers spoke “good English.”
But none of them in either of her families were Americans like everyone else in the neat, small, box-like homes on Pelkey street off Eight Mile Road on the north border of Detroit. That’s where the Girl spent the beginnings of her life.
She and her mother and father would go to his parents’ house, too, just twelve blocks away. They would drive there in her father’s big “bittersweet orange” (its official color name) and white Buick. She didn’t know that name was more than a color. Anyway, they made that drive to Manning Street later on every Sunday. But before that, their longest family gatherings were at her mother’s “side of the family.” That’s what they called it.
They were there together on Pelkey street every day, the girl after school, the men after work—except her Dad. Her mother and Aunt Nancy and cousins were in and out all day, every day. But on Sundays everyone gathered from about noon and until past afternoon dinner. At six, though, the Girl would drive with her parents to her father’s “side” of the family on nearby Manning street.
There were thirteen of them on the Pelkey street mother’s “side” with Uncles, and an Aunt, and the cousins—all of them gathered at Grandma Mary’s and Grandpa Jack’s house, not just Sundays. Always to eat. There were fewer of them during the week because the Girl’s father Tony and her Uncle Bill worked, so the Girl’s mother and her Aunt Nancy would fill take-home pots.
Those heavy cooking pots probably held enough food for many days for “white” people, for the Americans. Her mother and aunt would take food home every day and so take tradition to their own houses that were so close, but they all drove back and forth. The Girl’s mother did not cook. Only the strong and opinionated Aunt Nancy cooked—besides the grandparents—and did it well.
The Girl’s mother would avoid making meals for her by taking the Girl to her own favorite soda shop on Eight Mile. It was filled with magazines and comic book racks where the Girl would buy those colorful, scrumptious oh so early graphic novelettes. She loved Little Lulu and Donald Duck with nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie. And more realistic, maybe, she thought she learned how she should act from Archie comics—information saved for later when she would go to high school.
That soda shop was an exciting “teenager” place with all its pinball machines and a long shuffleboard table. It was called Milky Way and it was right across from the drive-in movie theater on Eight Mile, almost to Groesbeck Road. It was only, what, maybe a mile or two away from her grandparents but to the Girl it seemed far from that Eight Mile and Schoenherr grid that was so familiar.
What a treat, this foreign land so close, to sit at the Milky Way’s low counter with its round-seat, red-topped stools the Girl made spin around and around. No one cared that she did it. In fact, the Girl was indulged because her mother seemed to be friends with the pale, round, always smiling young counter woman.
But if they didn’t go there, her mother’s favorite soda shop, her mother would drive them downtown to the J.L. Hudson Company department store. And sometimes to its new store in the Eastland shopping mall. Was that the first mall in Detroit? It was in the other direction from the soda shop on Eight Mile, east, near to rich Grosse Pointe.
At Eastland her mother would take them to eat upstairs in Hudson’s dining room. It was so special and hushed. It had one wall recessed into faux terraces to look like you were on a ship, eating and looking out at the sea. It felt fancy. The Girl always had banana splits and chicken pot pies at those places, respectively, while her mother always talked. . .
About what? Clothes, shopping, and repeated criticism of everyone in the families. But only her father’s side.
And so, the Girl spent little time at home—at her own parent’s home. Her mother and father’s top-floor brick duplex was just around the corner on busier Schoenherr Road from Grandma Mary and Grandpa Jack’s small house with white siding. That was a real house, not a duplex. A duplex could never be as good because it was a rental.
Her grandparents’ house was a real house and it was a real home for the Girl. And it was even more so for her brother because he lived there on that quiet block around the corner with their grandparents.
The Girl never knew why he didn’t live with her and their parents in the upper floor duplex that was so close. She never questioned it, and neither did anyone else that she could see. It was simply an accepted fact that her brother did not live with the Girl and their parents. Just around the corner.
Almost as close to that Pelkey street hub, were her generous and no-nonsense Aunt Nancy and amiable Uncle Bill. They lived six short-ends of blocks away with their sons Joe and Jack. And little Wags, the white and brown-spotted dog.
It was food, the rite of food, that was the symbol and the attraction of the basement in the small house on Pelkey street. But it was more.
More than all of the tradition and boisterous familiarity, that house was where handsome Uncle Bob lived above it all, upstairs in his smooth, white plaster-walled rectangle. So special to the Girl, it was the celestial attic that was Uncle Bob’s room. . .