GUEST COLUMN – INFECTIOUS

All of the houses on the street where I grew up were built of not much more than cardboard and flour paste. At the beginning of World War II, people came in droves from all over the country to this ship channel community to work at Shell and Sinclair oil refineries or Todd Shipyard. The house standing catty-cornered across the street from ours looked pretty much like all the others from the outside. I always wondered what it looked like inside, though. It surely could not be as clean as our
house was, since my mother spent hours every day making sure ours was presentable. On sunny days, even in the winter, Mrs. Necessary sat from morning til night in a metal lawn chair in her front yard. I remember giggling with my playmates about whether she owned only one dress, or had several made from the same material, because she always had on one made from
the same flower print.
My mother warned me, over and over, I was never to go inside the neighbor’s house or even set foot in their yard. All of the children in the neighborhood must have received the same warning, for no one ever played with Mrs. Necessary’s son, Darrell.
More than once I overheard my mother and her friends discuss how contagious the whole family might be, and how easy it might be for us to catch it. They spoke in hushed tones about ‘TB,’ which to six and seven years old, wasn’t much different than when they talked about someone being ‘PG.’ But I was always careful to walk on the opposite side of the street
whenever I went to play at a friend’s house a few doors down.
As I grew older, I paid less and less attention to the woman in the yard across the street, but out of the corner of my eye as I rode past on my bicycle or in the car, I was aware she was always alone. I don’t recall ever seeing her with a book, a magazine, or a even a newspaper. She just sat there, most times barefoot, watching the comings and goings in the neighborhood. The
only time I saw Mr. Necessary was when he carried out the trash or mowed their grass on Saturdays. One day when I arrived home from school, I noticed the metal lawn chair was vacant, and then remembered I hadn’t seen Darrell in school or on the bus that day.
“Mom, do you know Mrs. Necessary isn’t in her yard today?” I asked. “I know,” was her reply. “She died last night.”
After the funeral, my mother sent over some food for Darrell and his father but was careful to use dishes she
no longer wanted. The next week i learned the Necessary had moved away. I’m sure no one in the neighborhood even bothered to ask where they were going. Their house was put up for sale, but as far as I know, not even the realtor went inside. Today the house still stands, but is dilapidated and vacant. Whenever I drive past now, I think of how lonely Mrs. Necessary must have been. In the 1940’s and 1950’s little was understood about the tragic disease of tuberculosis from which she suffered, but I can’t help wondering if things would