Summer Crush

I huffed in agitation at the wetness in the air and flipped over on the mattress. Clad only in tighty whiteys, my bare legs tangled in the sweaty sheets, I kicked them down to the foot of the bed. My eyes searched the room and came to rest at the window I was lying next to, with its droplets of condensation beading down onto the sill of chipped white paint. I flipped back onto my other side and saw the dim shape of my snoring great-grandmother, the cause of my waking at this muddled, near-morning time of sinking darkness. Her bed was only a foot from mine and she was turned towards the opposite wall, just a white and gray tussle of hair on a pillow, sucking at the thick air and blowing out a wheeze that occasionally climbed into a rumble that shook everything. Down at the other end, encased in the glow from the He-Man nightlight near the door, was the tiny yellow bed of my baby brother gracing the narrow width of this closet of a bedroom.

I wanted to scream into the fog, wake everyone up, complain of the injustice of shutting me up in here with these two bodies that stole whatever scant oxygen was available. My family – my brother, my parents, two grandparents, and a great-grandmother – had just moved into our rented summer house that day and I was presented with the “by the way” information that I would be sharing a room with both the oldest and the youngest members of our clan.

“No!” I complained to my mom when I learned the news. She scrubbed at the kitchen counter which seemed as if it hadn’t been cleaned for a few seasons. I watched as she passed the green, wiry part of a sponge back and forth over caked terrains of old spills and splatters, her hair coming undone from under her headband, falling onto her forehead and into her eyes.

“She makes loud noises when she sleeps!” I knew this from long childhood afternoons spent with her back in Queens when she would randomly fall asleep while listening to Russian radio.

“Shhh!” My mom glared at me and glanced behind her to make sure my great-grandmother wasn’t around. “How can you speak like this?”

I looked down at my bare feet and used the right one to scratch the left. I kept silent. “You share a room with her,” I wanted to say.

Back in the room, I kept staring straight up, eventually noticing an infiltrating glow begin to spread itself out along the ceiling. My great-grandmother responded to the approaching morning with a mild gurgle that gave way to something that sounded like a hiccup. I tried deciphering the hidden messages in the sounds, but only managed to understand them as what I could expect from old age.

The next morning I stood in the bathroom brushing my teeth and snarling at myself in the mirror. I gnashed with the white Colgate foam that dribbled out from the corners of my mouth and dropped into the porcelain sink. Some errant saliva landed on my chest and slid down into my bellybutton, but I ignored it and kept moving the brush back and forth in an effort to generate even more of the rabid animal look.

I stared at my tired face with its little dark bags creasing the spaces under my eyes. In my stomach I felt the dread of having to spend an entire summer in the stuffy little room, with its dead air, its smell of baby powder and dried urine locked in a diaper vacuum and mixed with the homely, sharp tang of old person’s perfume.

I rinsed, I spit, I shook my head at the world and ran into the living room hoping to find some escape in TV, in the treasure chest of channels I had only recently discovered thanks to the introduction of cable back in our Queens apartment. The living room was outfitted with a run-down pale blue couch and a tan wood-colored “entertainment center” with a Panasonic TV set placed neatly within it. But then my heart sunk at the sight of the bunny ears sticking up from the top. They surely meant a limited set of basic channels and I just hadn’t banked on surviving the summer without Nickelodeon.

Switching on PBS, the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood characters only interacted on-screen momentarily before disappearing behind pixilated squiggles of spotty reception. I muttered second-grade profanities to myself as my body sank deep into the quicksand of the worn couch cushions. Off in the kitchen, I heard my mom on the phone, pacing back and forth in front of the stove and refrigerator, dragging the long telephone cord along the floor and winding it into her fingers. It made a lulling rasping sound against the tiles and I felt my eyelids begin to grow heavy. My whole body began to be pulled by sleep, by the warm cradling of the collapsing cushions. Wanting so much for this summer to be over just as soon as it had started, I let the couch swallow me down into its coils.

---

She had red hair like Annie, except her name was Nora.

“That’s the woman’s name in Pete’s Dragon,” I told her. Pete’s Dragon was, hands-down, one of my favorite movies at the time. “Have you ever seen it?” I asked her outside of her house at the top of the wooden steps that led down to the beach. They continued endlessly, cutting and twisting their way towards the base of the rocks, towards the sand.

“No,” she said curtly. Her father loomed over us.

Our friendship was struck up moments earlier when her dog attracted my attention. I approached and started petting him. In response I got a lick to the face and a humping of the leg. Nora raced over to quiet him down.

“He’s rubbing his penis on me!” I observed with only mild amusement.

Her father looked at me as if I had just tarnished his daughter’s purity. Nora laughed and covered her mouth with her hands in a way you only ever see kids do in the movies.

That’s all it took. I was smitten.

She was pale-skinned, a little chubby in a cherubim-like way, and her hair lashed brightly against her features, a red fissure, an opening in my universe.

“She’s chubby,” my grandmother offered nonchalantly when Nora visited me at the house.

I rolled my eyes and tried ignoring her.

“What do they feed her at home?” she continued in Russian when Nora was out of ear-shot.

“Shhh, she’ll hear you.” Not that Nora would have understood Russian anyway.

My little brother stared at us while we sat out on the patio eating watermelon slices and spitting the seeds at each other. His eyes tracked Nora as she bounced around in a white undershirt, her small belly of baby fat adding a little Buddha accent to her stature. He expressed his mesmerization in a much more overtly physical way than me, but there was something about his slightly open mouth, his hanging lower lip with the bubbling spittle slinkying its way down to his bib, that seemed to encapsulate what was going on in my own head when I looked at her.

---

When my great-grandmother’s snoring woke me around the same pre-dawn hour, I no longer tossed around in my bed trying to make enough noise to rouse her into an unconscious, momentary pause. Instead, I stared up at the ceiling wondered about Nora. It all felt so impossible, so fragile, and yet she was real. Here was this teddy bear of a girl who liked running with me through the woods and slapping at the leaves with fallen branches, throwing rocks at imaginary enemies hiding behind the trees. When we weren’t swashbuckling our way through the kingdom we had created, we caught frogs for just long enough to name them and run our fingers over their bumpy skin. Back down at our feet, they stood motionless for a moment, twisting their stubby necks to look around before hoping away.

She was playful and fun and my mind quickly found itself trying to arrange opportunities without adults around in order to seal our relationship with a kiss or maybe just a chance to hold her hand in a way that suggested I thought of her as something more than a slightly rotund play-pal. But for every strand of silence that fell over our adventures and instilled them with a pre-pubescent sexual tension, there was a torrent of tomboyishness from her, a loud laugh or sudden turning away and descending further into the woods with her back to me and her long red hair extending its fingers towards my disappointed figure, beckoning it to follow without another word.

I wasn’t confident enough in my own charm and wooing abilities to change the status quo, and I didn’t seem to have all that many tricks up my sleeve. When my attempt at writing her a poem failed with my inability to find a proper rhyme for “beautifulness,” the one thing I could think to do was to try to impress her. But the gift I tried to make of the especially agile frog I caught by way of a smack-to-the-head with my yellow Wiffle Bat, failed miserably when the little guy’s eye fell out just as I held him out to her. She screamed and ran away, didn’t speak with me for two days, and years later I still wondered how love sick I must have been to practice animal cruelty as a way to get a girl to like me.

Regardless of what I tried, Nora didn’t budge, and I had to keep myself satisfied with pining, dreaming, imagining what might be, one day, when she finally realized that I was so much more than just a thoughtful co-conspirator in our missions through the haunted woods. Sometimes when wondering whether something was wrong with me, whether I was totally missing the point, I would go to my grandmother for advice. I tried to be all cryptic about it, not wanting to expose myself as the real answer-seeker, replacing my own role in the story with that of a friend she didn’t know, who happened to like some girl, who didn’t seem to like him back.

All she ever offered in response was reassurance that I was “the best boy in the world,” that “any girl would be lucky to have me,” and that “the ones who don’t realize it are crazy.”

Maybe she had a point, maybe Nora was just crazy and had no idea what she was missing. My self-esteem reinforced, I tried putting up a strong front, nodding away to myself with a tight-lipped focus that served as a physical manifestation of the confidence I was trying to exude. From his high chair, my brother gave me a gap-toothed smile and proceeded to slap his two mashed-potato-laced hands together. At night I returned to my frustration with the rooming arrangements and lopped on the additional baggage of a lovelorn mind.

There eventually came the day that, for one reason or another, the entire family needed to return to the City for a whole week. This, of course, became a catastrophe in my mind. An entire week!? I couldn’t possibly be away from Nora for so long. There was yet so much to do and uncover and explore.

“It’s only a week,” my mom reassured me. “It’s nothing. Seven days. And you have your own room at home. I thought you missed it.”

She had a point, and both air conditioning and cable TV weren’t bad incentives either. But still, the week-long absence from Nora seemed insurmountable.

I visited her to communicate the impending departure, all the while nervous that the news would upset her. I treaded carefully over the subject, trying to use just the right words, ones that could serve as a balance between the subtlety with which I wanted to deliver the message and the necessity of clinging faithfully to the truth.

“OK,” she said in response while standing on her porch. “Have fun.”

I lingered for a moment longer, twisting my neck to look around me in search of the words that had escaped her. And then she stepped back and slid the door closed, leaving me alone with the sound of her retreating steps and sending me on a lonely walk up the hill, towards our idling Monte Carlo being loaded with some final provisions.

---

By the time we were streaming back from the grayness of Queens towards the eerie quiet of the Long Island Expressway past exit 60, I was convinced that I’d been gone for years.

As we drove into the neighborhood of summer houses, I was expecting to see rubble and decay, a sure sign that during our time away war and famine and a myriad of other disasters had managed to undo the coils of civilization. But Nora’s house was still there, still standing silently at the top of the stairs leading to the beach. And, perhaps unfortunately, our house was still there too.

After dropping all my stuff on the bed, I raced to Nora’s with the present I bought her during my time at home. Unsure of what a girl might want, I recruited my mom for suggestions.

“Girls like pretty things,” she told me. “Maybe something sweet.”

I wrestled with the idea of chocolate, but remembering Nora’s proportions, independently decided that maybe that wasn’t the best idea. Ultimately, I settled on a miniature pink purse with a glittery butterfly on the side.

“Cute,” my mom said as the cashier rang us up at Macys.

But when I got to Nora’s house it seemed abandoned. I tapped at the glass of the sliding patio doors and peeked in. When no one answered, I jumped back to thoughts of the plague and pestilence that had surely struck during our absence. Nora was gone, they were all gone. I sat down in one of the patio chairs and stared at my feet. I caught sight of a single caterpillar contracting and stretching its body while it traveled along the handle of a fallen broom.

Just as I was about to walk off, the door slid open and I found Nora’s dad staring sleepily at me.

“Oh, it’s you,” he realized. He rubbed his eyes and looked around. “Why don’t you ever use the front door? Why’re you always creeping around on the porch?” Without waiting for an answer, he continued, “She’s not here.” He pointed out past the street, to one of the large houses on the other side.

I looked at him. I tilted my head.

He shrugged. “Good luck.”

With a twang of anxiety, I stepped towards the stone house I thought he had indicated. It stared me down with its bay windows and lacquered faux-shutters. The small balcony jutting out of the second floor pointed an accusing finger. As I approached the wrap-around driveway, an ominous air washed over everything, flooding the street with a thick quiet. A stray cat that hissed at nothing in particular. I wanted to yell Nora’s name, to not have to get any closer to the house and just watch her come racing out from its side, happy to see me and glad that I had come to get her as soon as I got back. But I wanted to maintain my composure, to approach the matter, whatever it may be, with poise and maturity. Nora, of all people, would probably appreciate that.

I searched for the doorbell but decided instead on a knock, a concentrated, confident knock that, as soon as my fist hit the door, sent a hollow wave of sound deep into the house and filled it so completely that I stepped back, imagining that the entire frame was liable to break free from the face and come flying out at me. But then it fizzled, and as I stood there waiting for someone to answer, I began to hear voices coming from somewhere behind the house.

I followed them to the entrance of a fenced-in back yard, where they were joined with trickles of laughter, and as I stepped through the open gate I found myself facing one of the greatest engineering miracles I had ever witnessed in my life – a complete, free-floating, expansive tree house. It was perched in a massive Ent of a tree, with a long rope ladder hanging down from an opening in the floor, windows carved out from the sides, large branches seamlessly sliding in through one end and emerging from neatly carved holes on the other. And lost somewhere amidst the rustling and creaking wood, I spotted the red round flash of Nora and the conniving smile of another boy.

I went into a psychological freefall and I felt myself swoon, my knees getting gelatinous before correcting themselves.

They noticed me, my miniature figure standing alone on the grass below.

“Nora?” I questioned, a part of me hoping it wasn’t actually her but some other red-haired girl in an extra-small white Hanes t-shirt.

“Nice bag,” the boy said, and for the first time since leaving my own house I realized I was still clutching the pink butterfly purse I had brought for Nora.

“No, no,” I corrected, and without thinking, added, “this is for Nora.” I held it out to her expectantly, imagining for a moment that this was going to be the redeeming move that would make her jump down from the tree and run to me with open, grateful arms.

But she just looked down and blushed, her face flashing a lighter shade of red than her usual, default tone. With her backside still perched on a thick, supportive branch, she widened her eyes and froze. The boy glanced at her and we both waited for a response.

“I–,” she stammered. “I don’t want it.”

The hinge in my neck gave way and my chin dropped down against my chest. The little purse suddenly felt very heavy in my hand and all I wanted was for it to vanish into a puff of glitter. I had the sudden urge to turn and run and have this entire summer erased from my mind.

When I finally lifted my head again, the two of them were still up in the tree, unmoved, waiting for something else to happen. I felt a light trickle of what I wanted to believe was salty sweat glide down the side of my cheek and into my mouth. My mind kept expelling the same idea, repeating it with the continuous static clicking of a record player needle at the end of the line – “this is the worst thing that could possibly happen in your entire life. Ever.” And in response my face burned with the heat of a thousand suns, my shoulders bore the cumulative weight of millennia of broken hearts.

The next thing I knew, I was hurling small rocks at them, the ones I managed to find scattered on the sides of the lawn surrounding the tree. They kept yelling at me, shouting something that I couldn’t form into coherent words. Eventually I found myself heaving in exhaustion, totally spent from the pure expelling of emotion. But with one last burst of fury I launched the butterfly purse into the air, watching it flutter for a moment before sinking melancholically back down to the ground in front of the tree.

“Fuck!” I yelled, surprised at myself for finding this foreign word in my limited vocabulary of curses, and then, bubbling in the shame of my lost control, I turned and ran all the way back home.

---

The rest of the summer crept along at the pace of a boy counting through the remainder of his time at a place he didn’t want to be. The forest with its hidden villains and danger lurking under every rock in the form of pernicious potato bugs lost much of its magical sheen and became what it had likely always been, just a space of trees wide enough to obstruct the view of houses at the other end.

“You’re so pale, come with me to the beach,” my grandmother would casually request. But I made sure to avoid most trips that would take me past Nora’s house on my way down the long set of winding stairs. On the few occasions where I was grudgingly convinced to get some sun because of the purported long-term negative health effects of paleness, I would hide behind the breadth of my grandmother’s hips and peek out curiously. All I ever saw was Nora’s abandoned patio, left to acknowledge the comings and going of the summer sun without a single piece of furniture, and the occasional sway of the long Venetian blinds that lined the inside of the patio doors.

The vast majority of my time, however, was spent indoors, playing cards with my great-grandmother or colluding imaginary action figure battles with my unresponsive baby brother. Perhaps this was one of the defining moments of my life, my first real entry into a mode of monastic quiet and introspection that would come to characterize my personality and launch me into my decade-long exploration of the world of Legos. My brother, despite being at the pre-verbal age, was incredibly approving, clapping his hands in response to every outcome I imagined, regardless of whether the forces of good or evil were the ones coming out on top. Sometimes, lost in the intensity of swinging plastic swords and the simulated firing of guns, he would tip over onto his side. On a few occasions, potentially as an expression of his frustration with the battle’s outcome, he proceeded to chew on the head of one of the triumphant characters. The addition of small tooth marks to the acrylic painted faces of the figures added a level of ferocity to their personas. It made them more real, it made it seem as if they had actually been through all of the clashes I had devised. These were their battle scars. These were my battle scars.

And then I suddenly got the news that it was time to head back to Queens, that school was to begin right after Labor Day. The same unpacking that had happened a couple of months earlier began to go in reverse, with kitchen drawers opened to remove the dishes stacked into them and boxes repacked and clothes pulled off of hangers and folded into suitcases that were pulled out of hidden attic spaces. The house began to come undone, and slowly reacquired its original emptiness.

My grandparents left a few days before us, shuttling my great-grandmother back to the City with them and leaving me in a room with only my brother at the other end. I found myself missing her snoring with its complimentary whistle of an exhale. There had been something familiar and comforting in the sound, and its absence was replaced by a lonely silence that was accented by the squeaky leaning of trees outside my window.

But as the day of my own departure approached, I began feeling a nagging of unfinished business and of regret. How had everything with Nora gone so horribly wrong? I hadn’t allowed myself time to process or understand any of it. In a matter of minutes I had gone from returning, excited would-be boyfriend, to jealous, angry, vengeful discard. I couldn’t leave the summer on such a low note.

So I gathered all the adolescent courage I could find, got a final undecipherable, but supportive-sounding mumble from my brother, and walked towards Nora’s house.

I stepped onto the patio and felt my heart erupt into a flurry of pulsation as its boards compressed loudly underfoot. But I kept moving, straight to the patio doors that I always knocked on to announce my presence, completely forgetting Nora’s dad’s request from my previous visit. After hammering out a quick and light rhythm on the glass, I waited for something to happen. Part of me just wanted Nora to suddenly show up and peer at me from between the Venetian blinds, to slide open the doors and give me one last farewell hug of closure. But another part of me was terrified by the idea of facing her, of being reminded both of how easily I had been replaced and how I had acted in response.

It was her father who, once again, came to the doors and opened them.

“She’s not here,” he began, as he had that last time, but then he corrected himself. “She’s just not feeling well today.”

I nodded understandingly. “Is she OK?” I asked, genuinely concerned.

“Yeah,” he said dryly, “she’s OK.”

I continued my nodding, dropping my gaze down to my sandaled feet.

When I eventually returned my attention to him, his expression was different. For the first time I saw his face without its usual look of annoyance, without the disdain with which he always seemed to greet me. He squinted in the light and opened his mouth to say something, but all I heard was the subtle folding of time. There was the silence that sealed us in a moment in which he and I weren’t all that different, where our gap of years was just accidental happenstance that meant nothing to the underlying reality of two boys, two men living through the finding of love and the breaking of hearts and the consistent, unwavering hope that we can have a chance to go through it all again someday, if only to remember what it feels like and know that it isn’t just a flashing of images and emotions we dreamed up.

And then he smiled. A quick, simple spiking at the edges of his mouth that happened so quickly it was possible that it hadn’t happened at all.

“Have fun,” he added, and I thought he meant at school, with the rest of the year.

“Thanks.”

I turned and walked away, retreating from Nora’s, from him, for the last time.

---

Back at our summer house, or what would soon become an empty wooden structure waiting for its next set of children and parents and grandparents, we all gave a little nod to the place and packed the remainders into the hulking Monte Carlo. I found myself sandwiched in the back between unused groceries, potted plants, and my brother in his car seat. I extended my hand, looking for a high-five, and he raised his short, chubby finger to meet it. He passed out within moments of my dad starting the car, his head falling to the side and the soft burr of the engine beckoning drool to leak onto his shoulder.

“Speed up dad,” I said as we drove down the road leading back towards the highway, the trees racing past us in the opposite direction. There was one particular spot we had identified on previous trips where, if you reached a certain velocity right before you hit it, it would feel as if the car was lifting off and you were flying for a second.

My dad glanced at my mom for approval and her silent rolling of the eyes told him that she didn’t have an opinion one way or another.

Then he looked back to the road and floored the pedal, and as we rose over the little incline I felt us launch into the sky, flying out towards home.