The Summer Before Boys (4 page)

“My dad's a hero,” Peter said. “He's really brave and there's nothing I want to talk about.”

“He certainly is, Peter. No one is ever going to say differently. I just thought you might want to talk a little bit about how you feel these days, alone in the house with your mom and sister. It must be hard sometimes.”

Peter shot the lady a look—but it didn't seem to stop her. It was like she was expecting that.

“You don't live on a military base. Neither of you.” Mrs. Jaffe looked at me. “You don't have the support system. Most of these kids don't even know there's a war going on.”

I was relieved when the bell rang. And so was Peter. He wiped his eyes and darted out the door.

Nothing is different in the world,
Eliza had said.

But even though Eliza was wrong and Mrs. Jaffe was right, I let Eliza's white and faded jean shorts turn to muslin. I watched her messy, long hair collect under a make-believe wide-brimmed hat. If we had a parasol, I saw that, too. If I could feel the
laced-up knickers under my dress, then maybe nothing in the world would be different.

“Father says exercise is good for the mind,” Eliza said, “and body. Healthful living.”

“A wise man, indeed,” I said, because in the old days people said things like that, like “indeed.” We stepped out of the gazebo and continued upward. The sun was now well above the trees, clinging to one spot, it felt, burning right above our heads.

“Mother will reprimand us if our dresses are so dirty,” Eliza said.

I looked down at the eyelet hem of my white skirt, splattered with damp mud and specks of shale, my flat ballet slippers nearly filthy.

“Oh, who cares?” I shouted. “We are free!”

“We are free. No tutoring for a month. No sewing lessons all summer. No dance lessons. We can swim today if we want.”

“Or take out a rowboat.”

“Or sneak into the kitchen.”

We were nearly at the top, the highest point of all Mohawk Mountain, where you could see those four states. The very top, where the stone watchtower reached straight up into the sky, where you could climb the winding stairs, and then walk out on the stone terrace, lean your body out into the world and fly.

That summer before boys, I knew I could fly if I had to. I knew
my legs would work, my arms would move, my chest would fill with air. My skin could bear the bites of a million mosquitoes, splinters, and sunburns. My body never let me down.

“Julia, there's something I have to tell you. I've wanted to tell you.”

We were out of breath from taking the stairs two at a time.

“Mother says it's time for me to devote myself to my studies and housework.” Eliza placed her hands on the cold stone wall, but didn't stretch any farther. “She's says it's time for me to become a young lady.”

“What does that mean?” I asked. A million real and make-believe thoughts jumped into my head. It was impossible to tell them apart. No more games? No more hikes? No more running outside in our nightclothes and holding fireflies in our cupped hands?

“I think she wants me to start entertaining suitors.” Eliza hung her head.

“No,” I said in disbelief.

“It isn't up to me, Julia. You know that. If you had a mother it would be the same for you. We are nearly thirteen years old. You are free. I am not.”

“Then we shall make a pact,” I said. I pulled Eliza away from the wall. I took her two hands in mine and brought them to my chest. “We will be friends forever. Never will any boy come
between us. You will turn down every suitor until your mother and father give up.”

“Oh, Julia—do you think that could work? Do you?”

I loved the smile I saw come back into her eyes.

“It has to,” I said.

“Then it will.”

W
hen 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.

U
ncle 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.

W
e 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.