The Room With the Dying Fan
/By Dartinia Hull
Charlotte, North Carolina
In the summer, Great-grandma Lavinia’s house — with its gleaming hardwoods and Lemon Pledge scent — felt cool and comfortable only from maybe 10 or 11 p.m. until about 9 a.m. We didn’t have central air in this house, where I lived with Lavinia and my mother. Many of my friends didn’t have central air, but their window-unit air conditioners worked, or their houses had enough trees to protect them from the sun, or they had deep porches complete with double-seat gliders. Sometimes, their attic fans did the trick of cooling their houses, with a big “woosh” when the fan started.
We had several helpful trees, two medium-sized porches, and a stoop (1950s ranch). No attic, so no attic fan. Two floor fans we dragged from room to room. The window-unit air conditioner we bought from my Uncle Dub over at the Sears cooled one room — the dining room at the front of the house. We used it during Sunday dinner and for five minutes a day the rest of the week, “to knock the heat down.” The rest of the time, we sweltered.
The window fan ran constantly.
The fan in my back-of-the-house bedroom was a 1950s-era, window-mounted metal clunker that began losing steam somewhere around the Summer of Love and slowed yearly through Vietnam and Watergate, disco and Marvin Gaye’s shooting, until finally, around the time Mom gave up her green satin party pants, the fan refused to do anything but hum.
Every summer until then, however, Great-grandma Lavinia would ponder getting the fan serviced.
“It WORKS,” she’d say, fanning herself and watching the blades as though staring them down would convince them to work. She’d coax the window open and click the fan’s power button, then flip the blades’ directional button. Reverse, forward, reverse, forward, as though changing the fan’s theoretical purpose would help. As the years passed, the window fan needed more coaxing, It grew slower in starting, sometimes humming for half a day before It got the idea and turnEd its blades haltingly, starting and stopping, as though it needed to catch its breath.
Finally, the fan only hummed.
Then, it plain didn’t work.
“Perhaps we could get Old Man Barber to look at it,” Lavinia said. Old Man Barber, a hybrid handyman/Fred Sanford, shook his gray head, wiped the sweat from his face, and told us to ditch the fan.
Now that I am a mom, I would allow no fan like that one. The worn plug exposed wires that shocked when touched with sweaty fingers. The motor, a cup-sized collection of fraying wires and mesh, began to spark, which didn’t worry Lavinia. If the fan eventually cranked, it had to be OK. That was her reasoning, though I would stay awake nights, picking out constellations through the spinning blades, worrying about sparks. I’d sit on the bed with its old-fashioned counterpane and watch the fireflies’ silent calls and listen to night sounds: cars, whippoorwills, crickets, the teenagers’ party laughter from across the street. If you’ve never heard the outside world through a spinning window fan, you’re missing out. The blades distort sound, giving cars and crickets and birds and voices a mechanical sputter. The fan taught me as much about science as anything else: As the blades sped up, they became a transparent sheet or appeared as an impenetrable wall, depending on your source of light.
The fan, however well intentioned, didn’t help in summer’s worst heat and humidity. It pushed hot, wet air into the hot house, or, when reversed, pulled it from the open door at the front of the house. To stay cool, I slept on the hardwood floor at a spot where the window fan’s attempts mingled with the floor fans’ breeze. I tried to get comfortable on the back porch, which had a cement floor. Or Lavinia would allow us to turn on the air conditioner for 15 whole minutes, complaining the entire time about her light bill. On following mornings, we sliced chilled cantaloupe and garden-fresh tomatoes for breakfast, and whipped up a cold tuna salad (no boiled eggs — too hot to cook) and cucumbers for lunch and dinner. We stuck to anything we sat on for more than five minutes. I sweated out my hair as fast as the hairdresser styled it. My family argued more than usual on these hottest days, yelling at each other until Mom drove away, or Lavinia, pouring sweat, smashed dishes.
My friends and I, victims of boredom, heat, and “go outside and play,” connected long water hoses to our individual spigots, dragged them to where our back yards all met in the center of the block, turned on each house’s spigots and started water fights — which flooded the collective backyard, drew mosquitoes, got the girls in trouble for messing up our hair if it wasn’t braided down, and ran up water bills.
The best daytime escapes from the heat were the library, where I could read all the books I wanted, or the downtown book stand, where I discovered The New York Times and Marvel comics. If we had money, my friends and I would go to the theater and watch monster flicks from the time the theater opened until unsupervised children got evicted. I wandered the mall, standing beside the air conditioner display inside the Sears.
In the evenings, the neighborhood families would linger on somebody’s porch.
“Hot enough for ya?”
“If it ain’t dog days, it’s puppy days.”
“Our corn didn’t grow this year, or last.”
“It didn’t get this bad until they started sending stuff to the moon.”
They didn’t know how right they were. The old ones, the ones who had lived through the Dust Bowl and the Depression, who had worked the land for seven, eight decades, couldn’t put a name to it, but they knew in their bones something had shifted in our world.
Before my Grandma Nellie went to prison, she and I would nap together in the afternoons, the house growing warmer as the sun moved, the fan trying its best to keep up, us too hot to do anything but breathe while Nellie pushed around puffs of air with her hand-held church fans (MLK’s face on one, a praying family on another). We welcomed afternoon storms that folded into soft green evenings, even though Lavinia made us turn off the fan during the storms and huddle together - in the heat - while “the Lord did his work.”
When the temperatures dropped and the storms passed, the old fan worked magic, cooling my room and most of the house to a lovely chill, making it necessary for me to sleep with a blanket. On the following mornings, my bare feet hit cold wood floors and I rushed to the garden to pick whatever was ready, gave the upright piano a dousing of Lemon Pledge, and then sat still as possible.
Nothing soothed so much as cool evening air carried in from the back of the house. I think everything else came in with it: the scent of garden tomatoes, the sounds of the boys who still played in the dark, the flashes from lightning bugs. Heaven. Love.
On the softest of these evenings, my family quieted, Grandma taught me to cheat at cards, and the fan kept us company.
I could see both the street we lived on and the community backyard through that window fan. When on restriction, I’d look out the window, the fan blowing air through my cornrows, and see my friends play, or watch the man across the street light his cigarette, the ash glowing at all hours of the night. I would wave to him, when the bedroom light was in his favor, and wondered if he waved back.
I also could map the stars that shone in the dark spaces, and spent hours staying cool while comparing charts to what was above our house.
As an older upstart, I’d lift the other window, close the door (preventing a vacuum), and turn the fan on high so my family couldn’t hear me slide out the house to lie in the grass and watch the sky, or wander around our small town. During our inevitable, collective restrictions, the next-door friends flashed Morse Code on flashlights through their windows, and I’d message back through the fan.
The largest quirk of the fan was its ability to make its own decisions. We could only turn it off for so long before it began to hesitate, so once we convinced it to work on June 1, the only time we turned it off was for a short time during storms, and then for good on September 30. These dates were not negotiable.
One year, though, the fan hummed and did no more for several days, and we watched it, and, sadly, we knew. Lavinia didn’t even bother to call Old Man Barber. Mom gave instructions to dismantle the fan and replace it with a bright new unit, $10 of plastic power from McCrory’s dime store, which we perched in the window even though it didn’t fit. Mom also sprang for a new air conditioning unit that she said we could use for a few hours each day, because the light bill was already high. It felt delicious and sinful to use it, but when Grandma came home from prison, we started up the world’s longest two-player poker games, with both players cheating, right damn there in the blowing cold.
I spent a long afternoon loosening and unscrewing the fan’s myriad parts. The blades, wire frame and wall mounts — all rusted metal — had Sat unmoved since Mom’s childhood, and they weren’t ready, it seemed, to go. I eventually coaxed the parts loose, placed the old screws into plastic bags, put everything outside at the curb. I didn’t climb out my window that night; slept straight through, underneath a blanket. The next day, the fan was gone. The romantic in me hopes Old Man Barber got it and restored it to its pre-disco glory.
My children know Little about life without air conditioning. They believe Freon and ceiling vents, remote timers and voice-activated online settings are constitutional rights. They are nice, but I find it difficult to sit in a room of artificial air, and prefer some natural, moving air, despite the season, and especially in summer.
The kids do not understand why I will turn our ceiling fans to high yet wrap myself in a blanket, or why I open the windows on cool, dry days and give those fans a moment of glory. They do not understand why (or perhaps don’t notice) I stand at our windows or on our porch on soft evenings and wait for the Big Dipper, the Pleiades, Taurus.
The kids also don’t understand why I smile at old homes, especially the small ones. Houses with wrap-around porch, or tiny stoops, and with full-size fans built into windows, Old Man Barber’s dream.
I want to walk around in these old homes, knowing their hardwoods will sound solid to the step, and they will smell of Lemon Pledge and time, and their insides will be hot as the devil’s armpit. I want to sit with the people who live there. I know they’ve made their tea and picked their vegetables in the morning cool. I want to talk with them about everything, about families, and dog days, and counterpanes, and fireflies, and stars.