The Broom Closet by Andrea Dolloff

Volume 31
Spring-Summer
2005

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When the door shut, you’d hear the latch fall into place, and you’d know that the next thirty seconds, or two minutes, or half hour would feel like the rest of your life.

Andrea Dolloff is a writer and photographer; she works as an assisant librarian at Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City. Steve Zeitlin is the director of City Lore.

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The Broom Closet by Andrea Dolloff, Introduction by Steve Zeitlin, Photographs by Martha Cooper

When my wife, folklorist Amanda Dargan, and I moved to New York City in 1981 we were struck by the passion with which so many New Yorkers reminisced about the games of their childhoods. Men, in particular, lit up when they talked about stickball, the street iteration of baseball played with a broomstick for a bat, the fire hydrant for first base, and a manhole cover for second. It occurred to us that, as a game that evolved in the alleyways and streets of New York, stickball could not be understood without a grasp of the built environment. For instance, you need to understand “sewers” or manhole covers—how far apart they are set—to understand what it meant for Joe Dimaggio to be, according to legend, a “four-sewer hitter” as a boy on the streets. Similarly, you couldn’t understand stoopball without understanding the configuration of the city’s stoops, originally brought to New Amsterdam by the Dutch. In the end, we realized that it’s impossible to understand stickball without understanding the city—or to understand the city without understanding stickball.

In our book City Play, Amanda and I explored the relationship between play and the built environment. In a sense, we broke with folkloristic tradition by placing as much emphasis on improvised play that incorporated the built environment as on traditional games and rhymes. Historically, folklorists from William Wells Newell (who published Games and Songs of American Children in 1883) to Bess Hawes and Simon Bronner explored the games and rhymes that reoccur across the country: rhymes and games that can essentially be extracted from their local contexts and compared with other rhymes and games across the U.S. and around the world. Bess Hawes once told us that if you stretched a jump rope across the U.S., children would be jumping to the same half dozen rhymes.

Our exploration of play and the built environment let us to explore ways in which children establish “house rules.” These often have to do with how traditional games are fit into the spaces where children are playing. In many cases, children’s games are as much about establishing the rules as playing the games. And establishing the rules is often about children asserting their power and dominance over one another. “The Broom Closet,” by Andrea Dolloff, is all about the confluence of cruelty and pleasure in children’s play. In their work, folklorists have tended to emphasize outdoor rather than indoor play, despite the fact that play is increasingly moving indoors. Beginning with the advent of the automobile, and accelerating with fears of crime, the breakdown of neighborhood street life, and air-conditioning in the summer, parents have tended to keep children in the home, and many kids now prefer to play indoors. Electronic video games have contributed to this movement, but not all indoor play is sedentary. In the Dolloff home in Massachusetts, with thirteen children growing up together, the broom closet was an important play space. The story speaks to the way interior spaces are adapted for play and the way games express power relations and give children a chance to flaunt their courage to themselves and their playmates—if only to avoid exhibiting “sissiness.”

I don’t remember what the objective was; come to think of it, I don’t even remember the game. I just remember the consequence when you lost.

Surrendering and volunteering to enter calmly with your breath relatively intact—pretending that you were in control—probably was the wiser choice. But kicking and screaming, and crying and begging, and biting and fighting like a mad, wild, rabid raccoon while your older brothers and sisters stuffed you into a dark wooden broom closet was usually the explosive response. The broom closet wasn’t much bigger than your eight-year-old-frame: if laid on its back, it could have served nicely as a coffin on Little House on the Prairie.

When the door shut, you’d hear the latch fall into place, and you’d know that the next thirty seconds, or two minutes, or half hour would feel like the rest of your life.

Thick blackness with tiny slivers of light penetrating the aging casket would be all that you could see through your glassy burning eyes, while musty cedar mixed with Lestoil and dirt singed the inside of your dripping nose. Your nose that was pressed up against the door so closely had to watch out for microscopic, razor-sharp splinters. And with the exception of your sweating violent heart and frantic gasps for air, the sound of putting an oversized conch to your swollen head was all you could hear.

You’d push and bang and thrust your tiny body back and forth, trying to gain momentum, but with nowhere to go. Your arms would swing furiously above your head or out in front of you, scraping, scratching, and pounding until you could feel the sting of white-scaling rawness emerging from your knuckles. Your knees found themselves trembling, buckling, and trying to cross to keep yourself from peeing. Your drenched clothing glued to your skin added a tightening to your chest that felt like a rope wrapped around your torso being pulled in a fierce game of tug-of-war, intensifying your state of delirium to near-collapse. Your recurring fantasized fear of the house catching fire and you being forgotten while everyone ran for safety played over and over again in your boiling brain. You’d scream louder and louder for someone to show mercy. But to show mercy from the other side of the door pretty much guaranteed a person’s demise. You’d know that even your twin had walked away.

You’d start to pray: praying to God that your mother miraculously would come home early from work. That she’d forgotten her pocketbook, or that someone had a dentist appointment or needed a vaccination shot, or that it was a Holy Day of Obligation and church was waiting, or—not at all likely—that she’d return with the surprise invitation for all of us to pile up in the seatless van and head to the town pool: something, anything to make her drive up that driveway and walk through that back door.

Besides exhaustion, hate would fill your senses. Hate for your brothers for being so brutishly ruthless. Hate for your sisters for their self-preserving abandonment. Hate for your parents for their dependable absence. Hate for the world for its mere existence. Hate for God for creating it all.

And just when dizzy lifelessness convinced you that you were going to suffocate in that little wooden broom closet, sure that you’d be eaten by spiders and ants and flies and maggots, the door would swing wide open to faded tan corduroys, multicolored thickly striped jerseys, muddied white and blue Adidas sneakers, long dirty-blonde or redheaded bangs covering booming smiling eyes, and outrageous laughter with someone calling out, “Okay, who wants to play again?” And YOUR hand would enthusiastically shoot straight up in the air as you screamed, “I do! I do!”

“The Broom Closet” by Andrea Dolloff, with introduction by Steve Zeitlin and photographs by Martha Cooper, was published in Voices Vol. 31, Spring-Summer 2005. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society now.