The Monte Carlo burred in effort.
“Nu?” my dad said in annoyed Russian to the car as its wheels seemed to slip on the flaking blacktop, flicking little rocks against the undercarriage that went off as dings against the metal. He put the gear into overdrive and we leaped forward, proceeding up the hill.
Maneuvering through some tight streets with the wide flatbed of the car, we crept along, overhanging branches scratching at the exterior and poking their heads into the open window at my side. I leaned back in my seat to give them room.
“You want me to close the window?” my dad asked.
I turned to him. “No. I like them.” For a kid accustomed to trees living in their discreet sidewalk plots of top soil, this was something I wanted to savor. Back in the City – or rather “Queens,” which wasn’t so much “City” as an immigrant’s attempt to be close to the stone and steel New York of generations of dreaming, with the compromise of settling, instead, on the grey monotones of 6-story residential boxes dotting unlit, unremarkable avenues – the most I would typically manage was a little foray into an accidental patch of grass, the opportunity to inspect the fallen leaves of trees that were too bare of lower branches to ever imagine climbing them.
He shrugged and pulled us further up the road.
Eventually we slid into a wider area that was all small cottages, a ring of wood paneled structures with darkened windows staring each other down. My dad pulled us into a spot in front of a light-blue house.
“So?”
I peered out the window and looked up at the place.
“Nice?” I offered.
We stepped outside. The sun was settling down for the day but specks of light were still coming from beyond the trees. All around me the crickets were beginning to tune for their nightly chorus of chirps. I could sense them all poised in the growing dark, big, beady eyes fixed on me.
I came around the back of the car nervously, taking my dad’s leg as he pulled stuff out of the trunk and placed it down on the ground, ready to bring it into the house.
“Here, help me with some of this.” He handed me a plastic bag with basic white bread and cold cuts and mustard.
I followed him up the set of steps as he used a free hand to open the door. When he flicked on the lights I finally got a chance to see the place where I’d be spending my summer, a replacement for the camp I might otherwise have attended at my age if not for an old-school clinging to the idea that kids should spend summers with family instead of with strangers in barracks teeming with the dangers of ticks, and taunts from emotionally imbalanced children. It was either that or the tough financial times offered by the dwindling 80s which meant the pooling of resources to allow for a shared familial experience with people of disparate ages, all crammed into one space.
But at least for this weekend it would just be my dad and I in this house with its sloping roof rising high above the floor, exposed beams crossing overhead and holding lights with dull bulbs that cast everything in soft shadows. I sat at the table in the kitchen, separated from the living room area by the simple demarcation of linoleum flooring which ended abruptly and gave way to creaky parquet.
My eyes darted towards the dark corners near the kitchen cabinets, the spots between the appliances and the walls, and I was sure I had noticed little movements, secret back and forth scurries. With the door still open and my dad still bringing items in from the car, I heard the wind outside beginning to swell and a slow but thoughtful rain began to drum against the roof of the Monte Carlo and the floor boards of the patio just beyond the kitchen windows. By the time he was finished and kicked the door shut behind him, there was the growing rumble of thunder, and whip-lash lightening sparkled the room with fireworks. My hands instinctively gripped tight around the edges of my chair.
--
We defaulted to card-playing and sandwich-eating for the evening. Our chews, echoing through the house, were interspersed with pieces of conversation about the state of the New York Rangers ice hockey team and my own ice hockey exploits, begun only a few months earlier with the encouragement of my sports-crazed dad. Growing up in Lithuania, raised on soccer, he always seemed to have a little regret in his voice when he spoke about his own lack of opportunity to play hockey back in the Old Country. Outside, the storm rolled through the little community of rickety houses.
“You couldn’t find skates in Lithuania,” he told me, shaking his head.
This exercise in War wasn’t going so well for me, and I watched his pile of cards rise taller as mine continued to diminish
“Sometimes,” he began again, “I would just go on the ice in shoes.
I imagined him as a boy, running around on a frozen pond, a big, over-sized Russian beaver-skin hat pressed down on top of his head, tipping forward and obscuring his eyes if he shifted his body too abruptly. The only thing keeping it mostly steady were the released earflaps and the bit of leather string tied snugly under his chin.
“But I was great in soccer.” He had played goalie on his local soccer team in Vilna at a time when Nikita Khrushchev was pounding his fist on a podium somewhere in Moscow. “I was the second best goalie in my age group, in the entire Soviet Union.”
I had no information to confirm or deny this statement, but I nodded repeatedly, reminding him that I agreed as much this time as I had the first hundred times I heard him tell me the exact same story. I nibbled away at the edges of my sandwich and held my breath momentarily as I placed down my next card, hoping to reclaim some ground in the game. My feet dangled from the chair as I watched my dad scoop up my eight after bringing out a ten. He smiled to himself.
“Why am I losing?” I demanded to know.
“Bad luck,” he suggested.
I repositioned myself so that my toes touched the floor and I could lean into the table, thinking that some added poise might help my chances.
Then, from somewhere that seemed very near the house, just out back, there was a loud crash and all the lights went out. I yelped and my dad cursed under his breath. I heard him slide out from the table and shuffle along the floor. As he passed between me and the windows, I saw his figure with arms outstretched, trying to orient itself.
“Where are you going!?”
By now he was by the door and unlatching it.
“I need to go check the fuse. I think it blew out.”
“The fuse?”
“It controls the electricity in the house.”
“I want to go!”
He pulled the door open and the previously distant sound of the rain and wind flooded in. I saw the water lapping at the entryway, dispersing into splatters that gleamed on the floorboards.
“It’s too rainy,” he told me as he looked down at his sandals and shorts and seemed to contemplate his lack of an umbrella and windbreaker. “You’ll get soaked.”
“Don’t leave me here!” I jumped away from the table and ran to the side of the door. “I’ll go outside. I’ll help you with the fuse.”
“Fine,” he sighed, and leaned down so I could hop onto his back. I leapt on and my arms locked themselves across his neck. I stuck my chin flat against his shoulder to give myself a good vantage point. As he turned and brought us out into the rain, everything exploded around us and I pressed my face against his scruff, trying to bury myself in the protection I felt in its sharp roughness.
The violence of the storm was new to me. I’d experienced thunder and lightening before, I’d run screaming in the middle of the night and launching myself into my parents’ bed when things got particularly rough outside. But this was another level. Here, in the countryside, we were open and exposed, and nature became one vast, dangerous place. There wasn’t anywhere to hide, there were no colossuses of stone protecting us and redirecting the movement of the wind, obscuring the white claw of fire against the black sky. Even inside the house everything had felt shaky and insecure, the way it seemed to sway and shift and tremble in response to every one of the storm’s jolts.
My dad yelled something and I couldn’t hear him, his sound traveled out in front and was swept up in the wind.
“What?” I shouted into his ear.
He twisted his head towards me. “Are you OK?”
“Yes.” I answered abruptly, not wanting him to think I couldn’t handle being out here. Underfoot I heard the wet slapping of his sandals against the pavement.
“There,” he said, pointing to a little shed attached to the house. “The fuse box is inside of that.”
“It’s a box?” I was trying to imagine what it was exactly that we were going to check on, but I didn’t really understand what we were looking for.
Now off of the pavement, there was the spongy sound of water bubbling up from the soil and grass that extended from the back of the house. Trudging forward, he finally stopped in front of the shed and, momentarily, we watched its door make little flitting pops of opening and closing as the wind punched at it. It was a short-circuited machine, uncertain about what it should do, stuck in a mindless cycle of moving back and forth without committing to any one direction.
He reached for the handle and pulled at the door, releasing it from its confused loop. Just at that moment, as it swung open, there was another massive lightning strike that illuminated the fluorescent eyes of a raccoon perched on the inside wall of the shed. It hissed at us.
“What the fu-”
My dad smacked the door shut in the raccoon’s face and turned to run. I screamed into his ear and pressed my eyes shut. He came back onto the driveway, up the stairs, and back inside the house, tracking a mess onto the floor and quickly re-bolting the latches.
He had to pry my arms apart to pull me off his back. I stood next to the trail of mud and looked up at him, breathing heavily in that way that kids do when they’re fluttering between the point of crying or calming down but aren’t exactly sure of what to do.
“Well,” he said, “I guess its bedtime.”
“Nu?” my dad said in annoyed Russian to the car as its wheels seemed to slip on the flaking blacktop, flicking little rocks against the undercarriage that went off as dings against the metal. He put the gear into overdrive and we leaped forward, proceeding up the hill.
Maneuvering through some tight streets with the wide flatbed of the car, we crept along, overhanging branches scratching at the exterior and poking their heads into the open window at my side. I leaned back in my seat to give them room.
“You want me to close the window?” my dad asked.
I turned to him. “No. I like them.” For a kid accustomed to trees living in their discreet sidewalk plots of top soil, this was something I wanted to savor. Back in the City – or rather “Queens,” which wasn’t so much “City” as an immigrant’s attempt to be close to the stone and steel New York of generations of dreaming, with the compromise of settling, instead, on the grey monotones of 6-story residential boxes dotting unlit, unremarkable avenues – the most I would typically manage was a little foray into an accidental patch of grass, the opportunity to inspect the fallen leaves of trees that were too bare of lower branches to ever imagine climbing them.
He shrugged and pulled us further up the road.
Eventually we slid into a wider area that was all small cottages, a ring of wood paneled structures with darkened windows staring each other down. My dad pulled us into a spot in front of a light-blue house.
“So?”
I peered out the window and looked up at the place.
“Nice?” I offered.
We stepped outside. The sun was settling down for the day but specks of light were still coming from beyond the trees. All around me the crickets were beginning to tune for their nightly chorus of chirps. I could sense them all poised in the growing dark, big, beady eyes fixed on me.
I came around the back of the car nervously, taking my dad’s leg as he pulled stuff out of the trunk and placed it down on the ground, ready to bring it into the house.
“Here, help me with some of this.” He handed me a plastic bag with basic white bread and cold cuts and mustard.
I followed him up the set of steps as he used a free hand to open the door. When he flicked on the lights I finally got a chance to see the place where I’d be spending my summer, a replacement for the camp I might otherwise have attended at my age if not for an old-school clinging to the idea that kids should spend summers with family instead of with strangers in barracks teeming with the dangers of ticks, and taunts from emotionally imbalanced children. It was either that or the tough financial times offered by the dwindling 80s which meant the pooling of resources to allow for a shared familial experience with people of disparate ages, all crammed into one space.
But at least for this weekend it would just be my dad and I in this house with its sloping roof rising high above the floor, exposed beams crossing overhead and holding lights with dull bulbs that cast everything in soft shadows. I sat at the table in the kitchen, separated from the living room area by the simple demarcation of linoleum flooring which ended abruptly and gave way to creaky parquet.
My eyes darted towards the dark corners near the kitchen cabinets, the spots between the appliances and the walls, and I was sure I had noticed little movements, secret back and forth scurries. With the door still open and my dad still bringing items in from the car, I heard the wind outside beginning to swell and a slow but thoughtful rain began to drum against the roof of the Monte Carlo and the floor boards of the patio just beyond the kitchen windows. By the time he was finished and kicked the door shut behind him, there was the growing rumble of thunder, and whip-lash lightening sparkled the room with fireworks. My hands instinctively gripped tight around the edges of my chair.
--
We defaulted to card-playing and sandwich-eating for the evening. Our chews, echoing through the house, were interspersed with pieces of conversation about the state of the New York Rangers ice hockey team and my own ice hockey exploits, begun only a few months earlier with the encouragement of my sports-crazed dad. Growing up in Lithuania, raised on soccer, he always seemed to have a little regret in his voice when he spoke about his own lack of opportunity to play hockey back in the Old Country. Outside, the storm rolled through the little community of rickety houses.
“You couldn’t find skates in Lithuania,” he told me, shaking his head.
This exercise in War wasn’t going so well for me, and I watched his pile of cards rise taller as mine continued to diminish
“Sometimes,” he began again, “I would just go on the ice in shoes.
I imagined him as a boy, running around on a frozen pond, a big, over-sized Russian beaver-skin hat pressed down on top of his head, tipping forward and obscuring his eyes if he shifted his body too abruptly. The only thing keeping it mostly steady were the released earflaps and the bit of leather string tied snugly under his chin.
“But I was great in soccer.” He had played goalie on his local soccer team in Vilna at a time when Nikita Khrushchev was pounding his fist on a podium somewhere in Moscow. “I was the second best goalie in my age group, in the entire Soviet Union.”
I had no information to confirm or deny this statement, but I nodded repeatedly, reminding him that I agreed as much this time as I had the first hundred times I heard him tell me the exact same story. I nibbled away at the edges of my sandwich and held my breath momentarily as I placed down my next card, hoping to reclaim some ground in the game. My feet dangled from the chair as I watched my dad scoop up my eight after bringing out a ten. He smiled to himself.
“Why am I losing?” I demanded to know.
“Bad luck,” he suggested.
I repositioned myself so that my toes touched the floor and I could lean into the table, thinking that some added poise might help my chances.
Then, from somewhere that seemed very near the house, just out back, there was a loud crash and all the lights went out. I yelped and my dad cursed under his breath. I heard him slide out from the table and shuffle along the floor. As he passed between me and the windows, I saw his figure with arms outstretched, trying to orient itself.
“Where are you going!?”
By now he was by the door and unlatching it.
“I need to go check the fuse. I think it blew out.”
“The fuse?”
“It controls the electricity in the house.”
“I want to go!”
He pulled the door open and the previously distant sound of the rain and wind flooded in. I saw the water lapping at the entryway, dispersing into splatters that gleamed on the floorboards.
“It’s too rainy,” he told me as he looked down at his sandals and shorts and seemed to contemplate his lack of an umbrella and windbreaker. “You’ll get soaked.”
“Don’t leave me here!” I jumped away from the table and ran to the side of the door. “I’ll go outside. I’ll help you with the fuse.”
“Fine,” he sighed, and leaned down so I could hop onto his back. I leapt on and my arms locked themselves across his neck. I stuck my chin flat against his shoulder to give myself a good vantage point. As he turned and brought us out into the rain, everything exploded around us and I pressed my face against his scruff, trying to bury myself in the protection I felt in its sharp roughness.
The violence of the storm was new to me. I’d experienced thunder and lightening before, I’d run screaming in the middle of the night and launching myself into my parents’ bed when things got particularly rough outside. But this was another level. Here, in the countryside, we were open and exposed, and nature became one vast, dangerous place. There wasn’t anywhere to hide, there were no colossuses of stone protecting us and redirecting the movement of the wind, obscuring the white claw of fire against the black sky. Even inside the house everything had felt shaky and insecure, the way it seemed to sway and shift and tremble in response to every one of the storm’s jolts.
My dad yelled something and I couldn’t hear him, his sound traveled out in front and was swept up in the wind.
“What?” I shouted into his ear.
He twisted his head towards me. “Are you OK?”
“Yes.” I answered abruptly, not wanting him to think I couldn’t handle being out here. Underfoot I heard the wet slapping of his sandals against the pavement.
“There,” he said, pointing to a little shed attached to the house. “The fuse box is inside of that.”
“It’s a box?” I was trying to imagine what it was exactly that we were going to check on, but I didn’t really understand what we were looking for.
Now off of the pavement, there was the spongy sound of water bubbling up from the soil and grass that extended from the back of the house. Trudging forward, he finally stopped in front of the shed and, momentarily, we watched its door make little flitting pops of opening and closing as the wind punched at it. It was a short-circuited machine, uncertain about what it should do, stuck in a mindless cycle of moving back and forth without committing to any one direction.
He reached for the handle and pulled at the door, releasing it from its confused loop. Just at that moment, as it swung open, there was another massive lightning strike that illuminated the fluorescent eyes of a raccoon perched on the inside wall of the shed. It hissed at us.
“What the fu-”
My dad smacked the door shut in the raccoon’s face and turned to run. I screamed into his ear and pressed my eyes shut. He came back onto the driveway, up the stairs, and back inside the house, tracking a mess onto the floor and quickly re-bolting the latches.
He had to pry my arms apart to pull me off his back. I stood next to the trail of mud and looked up at him, breathing heavily in that way that kids do when they’re fluttering between the point of crying or calming down but aren’t exactly sure of what to do.
“Well,” he said, “I guess its bedtime.”
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