The Summer Before Boys

by Nora Raleigh Baskin

  six

  When we got back, it was nearly dark—but Aunt Louisa wasn’t mad at us. She told me my mother had called, just two seconds earlier. I wish it had been an hour ago, or even twenty minutes. But two seconds? How can you miss something so important by two seconds?

  My mother can call pretty much anytime she wants. She is a nurse and so she got to go right into the service as an officer, and now she’s a first lieutenant so she gets to use the phone and computer whenever she wants. But because of the time difference she only calls once a day, if that. She must have been up very early. It must have been dark in Iraq, too—just an entirely different dark.

  “She said she thought you’d be expecting her call at five,” Aunt Louisa told me.

  And then I remembered. I remembered that I forgot, and I realized this was the first time I had ever forgotten. Sometimes I would wait for her call that didn’t come, she would tell me later what had happened. Incoming wounded, power surges or outages. Sandstorms that affected reception. Dead zones or red alerts. But I had never forgotten to wait.

  And that was so much worse than missing her call.

  “It’s okay, sweetie,” Aunt Louisa said. “Everything’s fine. She just wanted to say hello and see how you were. I told her you were still up at the hotel, you’d be back soon. I told her how tan you were getting.”

  “It’s okay, Julia,” Eliza said. “She’ll probably call tomorrow.”

  “I’m fine,” I told them both. I saw them looking at each other. “I think I’ll get washed up now.”

  When I looked in the mirror above the bathroom sink, I was surprised by how dirty my face was. There was a new tiny, red cut on my forehead and a nice smudge of dirt across my cheek, up near my eye. I wondered how long it had been there. It could have been from the lake, a piece of leaf or mud that dried there. Or from hiding in the bushes near the parking attendants’ booth, where Eliza and I waited to see if those two boys from the van would come out of the hotel.

  They did, but by then we had lost interest in them completely. I don’t think Eliza was interested in spying on them in the first place, but she did it for me. The boys headed down to the tennis courts but neither Eliza nor I felt like following them. A few moments later the parents came out.

  They were tall and short. The mom was tall and the dad was short. They were dark and light, sullen and fuming. He was sullen. She was fuming. You can always tell when grown-ups have been fighting with each other.

  Right before my mother left for active duty in Iraq we all started fighting with each other. Me with my mom, my mom with my dad. My dad with me. It started about a month before, actually. It got gradually worse and worse until three days before, and then it got really bad.

  My mom picked Oliver up from my floor and threw him across the room. He landed with a soft plunk by my bed. She hadn’t even knocked on my door before she came in.

  “Now look what you did,” I screamed. I mean I really screamed. Oliver was my stuffed unidentifiable creature. I had had him since I was two. He had only one eye, assuming those had been eyes, and almost all the felt of his face was worn away. His legs and arms dangled from a big square body. He slept with me every night. “You broke him!”

  “Well, maybe then you should clean your room like I’ve asked you to do for six days now.” My mother never yells. She was yelling.

  So many things crossed my mind, and of all the stupid things to say, the worst one just flew out of my mouth. “Why should I?” I shouted back.

  I was so angry. My room? She was upset with me about cleaning my room, or not cleaning my room. And it wasn’t that messy or anything. We had both seen it much worse and never fought about it before. Nothing made sense. The war certainly didn’t make sense. What did they need my mother for? Why did there have to be a war at all? Weren’t there other nurses in the world, nurses who had joined the real army?

  Nurses who didn’t have children at home who needed their mothers. Children like me.

  So who cares about a couple pairs of jeans on the floor, a few socks, and my math workbook. And yesterday’s lunch bag—it was pretty much empty.

  “So why should I?” I think I even said it twice.

  If I’d ever seen autumn turn to winter in a split second, or tall buildings that once stood crumble before my eyes, that’s how my mother’s face looked. She went from up to down, rage to sorrow, dark to empty. My dad had come in at that point to see what all the yelling was about. He stood in the doorway right behind my mom. He put his hands on her shoulders and we were like dominos in a row about to fall.

  “Because,” she said in a voice that wasn’t hers, “I’m not always going to be here to do it for you.”

  That was our worst night but at least it was over. We stopped fighting then, and every day after that until we said good-bye in the gym in Newburgh.

  seven

  Uncle Bruce said a heat wave is defined as more than four consecutive days of weather ninety degrees or higher. We were at day six. The air conditioners in the house had not been turned off and Aunt Louisa was worried about the electric bill but she worried more about the horrible hot weather. Even inside the house, the air blasting, her skin glistened.

  “Hot enough for you girls?” she said several times a day, every time she changed into another sleeveless shirt even though we weren’t going anywhere.

  Eliza and I hadn’t walked up to the hotel since last week. We mostly stayed in the house, watching soap operas with Aunt Louisa or reading. I was nearly finished with Eight Cousins.

  “I’m bored,” Eliza announced. She put down her book, facedown, spread open—the spine ached. The blinds were pulled and the lights were off because of the heat, so it was too dark to read inside anyway. The only light came and went as the characters on Days of Our Lives moved from the bright hospital to the dark jailhouse.

  Aunt Louisa turned from the television set. “There is no such thing as boredom.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Eliza said. “Well, I’m bored.”

  We had already made cookies three times in as many days, but the no-baking kind since Aunt Louisa didn’t want us to turn on the oven. We organized Eliza’s closet. We filled up the bathtub and dropped in various objects to see which would float and which would sink. We played with our village of dolls, D’Ville, and had three doll contests.

  I wanted to say, “Me too. I’m bored too.” But it sounded rude and ungrateful and I wasn’t really Aunt Louisa’s daughter or her niece. I was her sister and sometimes that just felt plain weird.

  “There’s too much life to be lived to be bored,” Aunt Louisa told us but she had her eyes back on the twenty-four-hour soap opera channel.

  Eliza rolled her eyes. “There’s too much time,” she moaned. “And there’s nothing to do.” It was all of eight fifteen in the morning.

  The woman on the show had just told her fiancé that she had a son she had given up for adoption twenty years ago who had just come back into her life. So she couldn’t possibly get married now, she told him, weeping.

  “If we were Indian captives we’d have to walk in the heat,” I told Eliza. “They would have scalped our whole family and forced us to march for days without food back to their camp.”

  Eliza just shrugged.

  I looked over at Aunt Louisa who was just trying to watch her shows and I felt like I should do something. I wanted to seem more useful.

  “We’d only find out what happened to our mother and father when we saw our mother’s bright red hair lying by the side of the road,” I tried.

  That got her.

  “That’s gross. That’s disgusting. That’s horrible. You read too many books.”

  “But we were used to walking a lot and hard work from growing up in the new settlement.” I kept it up. It was working. “Our dad is away on a hunting expedition. We haven’t had fresh meat or milk or cheese in weeks.”

  “Or eggs.”

  “Or coffee.”

  “Our mom is sick,” Eliza started. “She
caught the summer fever. The grippe.”

  Neither one of us really knew what the grippe was, but we had heard it somewhere and we knew it was really bad, like an old-fashioned sickness that they didn’t have medicine for in those days.

  “So we’ve had to carry water and boil the last of our potatoes to eat.”

  “We are down to only two meals a day.”

  I said, “Potatoes and potatoes.”

  The scalping was forgotten, as was the long, hard walk back to the Indian camp. Now we were on a journey to find medicine for our mother. It was her only chance. It was our only chance. We had to make the trek in one day, all the way to Doc Miller’s and back before the precious liquid could get too warm and lose its power. Before our mother’s fever overtook her mind like it had her wasting body.

  “That’s the magic,” Doc Miller told us as he pressed the small brown bottle into my hands and wrapped my fingers around it. “Don’t lose it. It’s the only batch I have left.”

  “The magic,” we both repeated. We knew what we had to do.

  Eliza and I headed out into the brutal heat. Alas, we had no choice.

  eight

  We decided to go directly into the lake.

  We would walk up to the hotel with our bathing suits under our shorts and beeline right down to the beach. That was our plan. We were dripping hot and bugs were swarming to our sweat by the time we reached the entrance to the hotel.

  My shirt was sticking to my back right through my bathing suit and my hair was in clumps sticking to the back of my neck. We still had to walk past the spa and the platform tennis courts and the stables to get to the steep steps carved right into the cliff that led down to the beach.

  I walked holding my ponytail up for a while till my arms got tired. When my neck got too hot, I held my hair up again. Eliza told me the backs of her knees were sweating. Nothing, she said, was going to keep us out of that water when we finally got there.

  Except the cold, it turned out. The cold kept us from diving right into the lake and swimming out to the dock.

  “It’s freezing.” I put the top part of my big toe into the water. Suddenly I wasn’t so hot anymore.

  “It’s so cold.”

  We both stood, facing the lake, facing the rise of the cliffs on the other side, facing the spot where the sun was burning another hole in the sky. Waves of heat already shimmering in the air. It was still early. Only a few guests were here at the beach, and a couple of early swimmers, the ones that did laps across the width of the lake and back.

  “Chickens.” A voice seemed to come from under the stone steps.

  When I turned around no one was there.

  “What was that?” I asked Eliza.

  “Oh, that’s Michael. It’s just Michael and his brother,” Eliza told me.

  “Who?”

  “You don’t know them. They go to a different school. Their dad works here too, taking care of the horses. They’re really annoying. Don’t even look at them.”

  But I did. I mean, I attempted to look.

  “No one’s there,” I said.

  “There’s, like, a little opening, a little cave under the stairs. They’re probably in there.” Eliza took another baby step into the water. “It’s freezing.”

  “Of course it’s cold. It’s a glacier lake.” Michael popped out from the rocks and onto the sand. He was alone. No brother in sight.

  “I know what it is, Michael.” Eliza answered but she didn’t take her gaze from the water. “I’ve been here as long as you have.”

  Michael had dark hair, cut so short he looked like he was in the army. He had blue eyes. I could see that from here.

  “That makes you an even bigger chicken, then,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah? Why’s that?”

  “Because you’re acting like you’re so surprised. It was a big huge iceberg that broke off and got left behind from the Ice Age. What’d you think? An iceberg’s gonna be warm? I swim every day, not like you.”

  I just listened. I shifted my head back and forth from Eliza to Michael, who were talking to each other as if I wasn’t even there.

  “That was hundreds of years ago,” Eliza said.

  “Millions,” Michael corrected her, but I saw him looking at me. “Who’s this? You guys related to each other or friends?”

  Usually we don’t answer that question. Over the years Eliza and I have learned when to give out the truth and when not to. If you don’t want to explain anything, if you don’t want to make more conversation, then the less information the better.

  “We’re not friends,” I just blurted out. “I’m her aunt.”

  Now Eliza spun around.

  “Her what?” Michael asked. He came even closer.

  “Nothing,” Eliza answered. She narrowed her eyes and gave me a look. “Just leave us alone. We’re going to go for a swim.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re both too chicken. The water’s too cold for you.” Michael spoke in a high-pitched whine, a girl-imitation.

  He was not being very nice to us. There was nothing even all that interesting about him, except his blue eyes. But he seemed interested in us. So why then did I do what I did next?

  “Maybe it’s too cold for you,” I said. I dipped my hand into the shallow lake and scooped it up and flung it backward. I think if Michael had not been rubbing his eyes in his make-believe “girl” cry he might have seen what I was doing and ducked out of the way. But as it was, I got him right in the face with a handful of water.

  “Hey,” he shouted and he lunged at me, which I suppose I knew was going to happen. There was only one way out and that was in. I grabbed Eliza’s hand and started heading into the freezing-cold lake, because that’s what you do when you are being chased—you run.

  Because this, apparently, this fluttering-in-the-stomach-I-have-no-idea-why-I-just-said-that kind of thing, is a whole different kind of magic than Doc Miller, pioneers, and Indian captives—but it felt like magic all the same.

  nine

  Before my mother ever went to “summer camp”—when September 11th was just the day after the 10th, a day before the 12th—and way before my mother left for Iraq—we would go away in August for a week to the college retreat in Ashokan. The three of us.

  Since my mom worked at the University Health Center we got to use a cabin, take out the boats, and borrow any camping equipment we wanted. It’s a perk, my mom said, and for the longest time I thought a “perk” was another word for a family vacation.

  The cabin was always dark and thick-smelling when we first stepped inside. It took a while for your eyes to adjust, but your nose really never did. It kind of always smelled wet, like the inside of tree would smell if I were an elf or a gnome. The start of one particular week, I was probably five or six years old. My dad was still unloading our stuff from the car but my mom and I were so hot we just couldn’t wait. Or, I didn’t want to wait.

  “But Daddy hasn’t gotten my duffel bag,” I complained. “I don’t have my bathing suit yet.” It was a long walk from the parking lot, through the woods, to the cabin. Who knew how long I would have to wait for my dad to walk all the way to the car and get back.

  “Well, we can just walk to the water and put our feet in,” my mother said. “Then we’ll go for a real swim after lunch, how about that? All three of us.”

  The lake at the college retreat was man-made. It was dug out of the land to hold water for the reservoir, to hold water for all of New York City. It was clean, no seaweed and not too many fish, and not too deep at this end, and not very cold, not in August, anyway. And in this one spot, they had brought in sand and roped off a little swimming area. No one else was here.

  My mom and I stood at the water’s edge in our shorts and T-shirts. The sun had climbed well over the tops of the trees and perched there.

  “Can’t we swim now? And after lunch?” I asked my mom.

  “Well, if we had waited for Daddy. But now you don’t have your suit on, sweetie. And neither do I.
But if you want to go in a little—not too far. I’ll watch you from here.”

  I had done it many times. I always went in our backyard blow-up pool in just my underpants. I mean, of course I knew I was a girl but it hardly mattered back then. Boys were boys because they said so, but really, there was no difference. Just the month before, Brendon Harris, my next-door neighbor, and I came back from a long playground afternoon, and our mothers stripped us down to our underwear and sprayed us both with the garden hose. No biggie.

  “Can I?” I asked my mother. The lake looked so good. It would cool me off. I wanted to put my face in the water and open my eyes. You could see the little rocks and sticks under the water in the sand, like a tiny, make-believe miniature world.

  “Of course,” my mother said. She was already pulling off my shirt and steadying my arm so I could step out of my shorts and flip-flops. “I’ll be right here.”

  The sun spread across the skin of my bare shoulders like fire, like hot fingers. The sand whispered heat on the bottom of my feet. I walked carefully forward. The water was just warm enough, moving so slowly, letting my toes sink into the sand. And everywhere it was quiet. When I looked up at the sky, it was blue. When I looked back at my mom, she was watching me. Everything was just as it should be.

  Until I heard voices. Voices talking the way you do when you think no one else is around. A family—I heard a mother and a father, and then a boy. The boy was complaining. He didn’t want to be here, not at the lake. Not in a boat. Not at the college retreat at all. He did not like it here, he was saying, over and over.

  I do not like Green Eggs and Ham.

  I do not like them, Sam-I-am.

  I froze.

  I was naked in only my underpants. I had no shirt on. I may have only been five—or was I six already?—but I was suddenly naked, or half-naked, and it was horrible.

  My body, which had just been warm and free and mine, was not anymore. I was petrified and more embarrassed than anything had ever made me feel before. And I was ashamed for having thought I could do this. Swim in my underwear. Out here in the wide world.