We were careless. We always forgot to open the jars. The lightning bugs would be there in the morning, their yellow tails dim in the white light of the summer sun, their feet pathetic as they lay on their backs, dead as anything. We were always surprised and a bit horrified by what we had done, or had failed to do. As night fell we shook them out and caught more.
This is why I had children: to offer them a perfect dream of childhood that can fill their souls as they grow older, even as they know that it is only one bone from a sometimes troubled body. And to fill my own soul, too, so that I can relive the magic of the yellow light without the bright white of hindsight, to see only the glow and not the dark. Mommy, it’s magic, those little flares in the darkness, a distillation of the kind of life we think we had, we wish we had, we want again.
A PAUL GIRL
I was a Paul girl. Still am, I suppose, at the core. It was one of four choices you had, in 1964, when I was on the cusp of adolescence: a Paul girl, a John girl, a George girl, or a Ringo girl, with all the attendant Beatle buttons, glossy color pictures, and daydreams. Little did we know that in some broad way we were defining the sort of people we were on our way to becoming.
The girls who picked George as their favorite Beatle were self-contained, serious, with a touch of the wallflower and a bit of the mystic. The ones who picked John were aggressive, irreverent, the smart mouths, the wisecrackers. Ringo got anyone who was really determined to distinguish herself, the kind of girl who would wear wax fangs or weird clothes to get attention, who would choose the one at the back of the band, with the big nose and the strange looks. And Paul got the little ladies like me. He was cute in a mainstream way, funny in a mainstream way, a public persona not much different from the most popular boys in the class. He was for girls who were traditional, predictable, who played by the rules.
Who knew what John might do? We Paul girls were not in the least surprised when John blurted out that line about being more popular than Jesus, or when he married Yoko. Paul, on the other hand, was sure to marry a Paul girl and have lots of pretty children, which is precisely what he did. He’s even aged wonderfully. Nowadays he looks like one of those computer-generated pictures of someone twenty-five years later, the ones that add only lines and gray hair and overlook the usual accumulation of fat and jowls and rapidly enlarging forehead.
Over the years I’ve sometimes tried to escape being a Paul girl, but it’s never worked for long. I once made an attempt in high school, taking a crack at a hefty blonde who’d made fun of me in the cafeteria and missing her substantial jaw by a good six inches because of bad eye-hand coordination. And once or twice, particularly in convent school, I’ve had friends so good-natured and conformist that they made me seem like Irma La Douce for a time. When the going got tough, however, I always wound up a Paul girl again. I’d had lots of practice. One of the most satisfying things about growing up Catholic during the 1950s were the rules, which were not then, as we say now, flexible. The only questions were of degree: If you inadvertently ate baloney at lunch on Friday, would you go to hell if you were hit by a car during recess afterward? If you sucked on a cough drop in the car on the way to nine o’clock mass, had you violated the Communion fast requirements? And which was worse: to leave a piece of Host stuck to the roof of your mouth during breakfast, or to move it with your finger in direct violation of what the nuns had told you about stuck Hosts?
Is it any wonder I became accustomed to the letter of the law? Rules were a relief. They were like basic tap-dance combinations: you could set them up any way you pleased, add the stray shuffle or heel-and-toe, but at least you didn’t have to improvise everything. Of course there were always the people who seemed not to need rules—the John girls, as it were. My last year in high school I nursed a secret admiration for them, even while I scrambled each morning to match kilt and crew neck, circle pin and earrings, knee socks and Weejuns. In Indian-print dresses and sandals, the John girls skipped pep rallies, asked the history teacher whether Richard Nixon wasn’t as bad as Adolf Hitler, and applied to alternative schools.
I got to know them better in college, and realized that they had their own set of rules, and that they distrusted deviation and liked conformity as much as I did. Talk about how high you got even if you didn’t; look bored; disdain all academic disciplines except for philosophy and creative writing; use rhyme in poetry only on pain of death; and affect a writing style as close as possible to that of Franny and Zooey. That was how their game was played.
We’ve all changed a good bit since then, although when I wear dinner-plate earrings just because everyone else is wearing dinner-plate earrings, I sometimes have my doubts. More of my life now is about character building than image making. While there aren’t quite as many rules as there once were (you can pull a piece of baloney out of your purse in church on Friday and nobody seems to mind as long as you show up) I distrust them more. They just don’t work as well for human relationships as we might like. I wouldn’t insult either my husband or myself by reading one of those one-minute marriage manager books. And as far as kids are concerned, the rules are just plain silly, as you find out the first time you try to give a baby his every-four-hour nurse and discover that an hour-and-a-half later he’s hungry again.
I guess I can tap-dance better now—more improvising, fewer set pieces. I think of the Paul girl as a bit like an illustration in a coloring book: black outlines, no fill-in. It was useful in its time, in its place. It made it easier to believe in God, to hate certain people passionately, to choose Paul without thinking twice about any of the other three. Of course, I now understand the bits of those three that were attractive to others; I understand the gestalt, which was a concept, not to mention a word, that was beyond me at the time.
I saw Paul on television the other day. He seemed to have changed less than I had. He doesn’t appeal to me as much anymore; neither does the safety he once personified.
AT THE BEACH
The lifeguard’s girlfriend is blonde. Hasn’t it always been so? Her tan is the color of Karo syrup. Her shoulders are broader than her hips. And when she swims, her head knifes perfectly through each wave, so that she emerges sleek and shiny, a golden seal.
Here we are in the land that time forgot. It has been nearly twenty years since I last spent the summer in this seashore town. There is bad modern architecture where once there were dunes, but nothing else really has changed, except for me. On Sunday mornings the same people hold the same numbers in Jack’s Bakery; the same white wooden boats lie waiting for disaster to one side of the same white wooden lifeguard stands. And the sea, arrogant as always, rises, falls and breaks, rises, falls and breaks, silver green to the horizon. Its message is clear: “You grew up, you went away,” it says. “You married, had children, came back. Who cares? Who cares?”
I did not know it would be like this, although perhaps I should have. Life here was never what I expected. I grew up here, not just because the time passed, but because the time I passed was some of the loneliest of my life. I never understood why we did it, pulled up all our roots each June to journey to a succession of rented Cape Cod-style cottages, with not a decent knife or spaghetti pot in a one of them, to rest and relax among strangers.
My mother neither drove nor swam; despite her olive complexion she burned, and her prominent nose was a terrible shade of red all summer long. There was too much laundry and too little hot water. My fantasies of an endless summer always ended badly. I went to dances at the local firehouse, with a consuming need shining so brightly from my light eyes in my tanned face that only the boldest or blindest asked me to dance. Mostly I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.
This was called the vacation. It still is, and is still, in some ways, inexplicable. The first day here, as night began to fall, my elder son said, “We go ho
me now, Mommy.” He was appalled to find that I expected him to sleep in this strange place. And beneath the hard eye of the sun, next to the smug sea, the loneliness once again grabbed me by the throat. It had a new weapon this time. A girl who once cultivated a tan and tried ineptly to pick up boys, I was now too old to do either. The lifeguard’s girlfriend is young enough to be my daughter. “Who cares,” the water said. “Who cares?”
It is still a puzzle to me why we do this, although it becomes a little clearer every day. Amid the muddle of strange beds and new habits and sand in the sheets, a moment will blaze through: the hieroglyphics of gulls’ tracks in the salt-and-pepper sand, the long climb up the lighthouse steps, the sand crabs in the green plastic bucket, dug up every fifteen minutes or so to make sure they are still there. That is why we are here: so that our children can have these moments, or so that we can watch them have them. I do not know which.
I am here to look for someone. She might just be me—a younger me, a different me. There is something about this place that makes me aware of the Russian-doll aspect of personality, the little round papier-mâché woman in the babushka inside another, and another, and another, the child inside the girl inside the woman.
Once, when I was in my early teens, I became intrigued by a theory that time was really place, that all history is taking place in some other location. It is a profoundly dumb theory (and horrifying when applied to waiting in bank lines), but sometimes here I almost believe it. I expect to come around the right corner, past the right telephone booth, and see a vaguely familiar sixteen-year-old waiting for a call from some moron with a nice car and a letter in wrestling. What a horrible thought—the thirty-four-year-old me trying to convince her of the monumental waste of time, the sixteen-year-old me wondering why this lady with the two kids and the gray in her bangs is haranguing her. If I was so vulnerable and stupid then, can I really be so strong and smart now?
I was not surprised when the deep-sea pictures of the Titanic showed it perfectly preserved, down to the crystal chandeliers. It has happened here. Fifty years from now, if I am lucky, I will be an old lady in a rubber beach chair, staring at the water, seeing them all, all the little papier-mâché people: the little girl with the T-shirt over her bathing suit, the teenager listening to the radio and glistening with baby oil, the mother of babies, the mother of teenagers, the grandmother. “Who cares?” the water will whisper, but by then it will have lost its awful power over me, and I will no longer hear it.
REUNION
Robert called me “baby” just recently. “Same old Robert,” Donna said. The only difference was that the last time he said it I was thirteen years old and unsure whether I was supposed to be amused, offended, or flattered. He was my best boyfriend, with the emphasis on the friend. We spent hours on the phone together each night deciding which girl deserved his tie clip. I still know the telephone number at his mother’s house by heart.
I went to the twentieth reunion of my eighth grade class the other night. It was nearly a five-hour drive, there and back. Some people I know thought I was a little crazy: high school, maybe, or college, but grade school? Perhaps they went to a different kind of school.
A couple of dozen of us started out together when we were small children, and stayed together until we were just entering adolescence. Those were the people with whom I learned the alphabet and the Our Father, how to shoot from the foul line and do a cartwheel. Those were some of the most important years of my life. We know now how important the early years are, but the early years lasted longer then, and while the bedrock on which I am built came from my family, many of my first lessons in friendship, loss, loyalty, and love came from a group of people I have not seen for two decades. They have always seemed somehow more real to me than most of the people I have known since.
It was odd, how much the same we all looked. It would have been hard for the women to look worse, or at least worse than our graduation picture, with all of us grouped on the lawn by the convent. Most of us look younger now than we did there, our poor hair lacquered into beehives or baloney curls, our feet squeezed into pumps with pointed toes.
And it was odd how much the same we were, odd how early the raw material had been set. Robert was still the class flirt, Janet still elegant. “Refined” was how I described her in a sixth-grade composition—a funny word for an eleven-year-old girl, and yet the right one, particularly now that it suited her so. In the photograph, Alicia and Susie are sitting together; they drove down together, arrived together, were still friends. In the photograph, Donna and I are next to each other, trying not to crack up. “Still inseparable,” said Jeff, the class president, looking down at the two of us giggling on the steps. The truth was that although we had not met for fifteen years, the ice was broken within minutes.
I’m not sure that I would have done well at a tenth reunion. If the raw material is laid down in those first thirteen years, the next thirteen sometimes seem to me to have been given over fruitlessly to the art of artifice, the attempt to hide the flaws beneath a construction as false as those 1966 beehives. Now I am much more who I am, with fewer regrets, apologies, and attempts to be something else. To be honest, I am much more like 1966 than I would have been likely to admit ten years ago. Perhaps it was the beer, but some of the others seemed to be letting down their defenses, too.
Ed remembered that when he had had to think of his most embarrassing moment for a Dale Carnegie course, it was something that had happened in elementary school. (“You’re not going to put it in?” he asked plaintively, a lifetime after it happened, and so I said I would not.) And Jim, the host of the party, suddenly said as he saw Robert and me trading wisecracks, “You guys and your clique,” making me think, for the first time, really of how thoughtlessly hurtful we were then, too. I suppose in a way it was like many reunions. We talked about the time we Crazy-Foamed the gym, went on class picnics to Naylor’s Run and dared to go to the public-school canteen. There were children to discuss, and deaths and divorces. Most of the men still lived in the area. Most of the women had moved away. Most of the men came with their wives. Most of the women came alone.
And yet I felt that it was a different kind of occasion, at least for me. Steve had brought photographs from class trips and parties, and in one of them there I was in the front in a plaid dress, my bangs cut too short, my new front teeth a little too big for my face, and it was like looking at one of those photographs of an embryo. On Jim’s back porch I looked around and I saw so many prototypes: my first close friendship, my first jealousies, my first boyfriend—all the things that break you in for all the things that are yet to come. I felt like Emily in Our Town.
Robert and I talked a lot about Martha. It turned out that over the years he had never forgotten her. He was crushed that she had not been able to come up from Florida where she is a teacher. Besides, he said, she still has his tie clip. But it wasn’t really Martha he was talking about as much as a basic model he learned then. He liked her and she liked him. It was only later that he, I, and all the rest of us learned that is the basic model, but it sometimes it comes with fins and a sunroof, with games and insecurities and baggage that are just barely burgeoning when you are thirteen years old.
On the stereo was a song, a 45, that we must have played thousands of times in my living room: “She Loves You” by the Beatles. “With a love like that, you know you should be glad.” Robert played the drums. I sang. He made a grab for me, and I slipped past him. “Same old Robert,” I said to Donna.
CATS
The cats came with the house. They lived in the backyards, tiger gray, orange marmalade, calico, black. They slithered through the evergreens at the back perimeter, and during mating season their screams were terrible. Sometimes I shook black pepper along the property line, and for a night or two all was still. Then the rain came and they were back.
The cats came because of the woman next door. She and her husband, said to be bedridden, had lived on the third floor for many years. Every ev
ening after dinner she went into the alley with a foil pie plate heaped with cat food and scraps: cabbage, rice, the noodles from chicken noodle soup, whatever they had had for dinner. Before she would even get to the bottom of the stairs the cats would begin to assemble, narrowing their eyes. She would talk to them roughly in a voice like sandpaper, coarse from years of cigarette smoke. “Damn cats,” she grumbled as she bent to put the food down.
She had only two interests besides the cats: my son and her own. She and her husband had one grown child. I never heard her say a bad word about him. He had reportedly walked and talked early, been as beautiful as a child star, never given a bit of trouble. He always sent a large card on Mother’s Day, and each Christmas a poinsettia came, wrapped in green foil with a red bow. He was in the military, stationed here and there. During the time we lived next door to her, he came home once. She said it broke his heart not to see his father more. She said they had always been close when he lived at home, that he played baseball for the high school team and that his father never missed a game. He was a crack shortstop, she said, and a superior hitter.
She called my son “Bop Bop” because of the way he bounced in my arms. It was one of the first things he learned to say, and when he was in the backyard on summer evenings he would call “Bop Bop” plaintively until she came to her apartment window. As she raised the screen the cats would begin to mass in a great Pavlovian gesture at the head of the alley. “Are you being a good boy?” she would call down. Bop Bop would smile up, his eyes shining. “Cat,” he said, pointing, and the cats looked, too. Some summer nights she and my little boy would sit together companionably on the front stoop, watching the cars go by. She did not talk to him very much, and she wasn’t tender, but when he was very good and not terribly dirty she sometimes said he looked just like her own little boy, only his hair wasn’t quite as thick.