“Oh, shit!” I said, jumping up as if the house were made of glass and we were suddenly visible up in the air, floating.
“Who is it?”
We scrambled to the side window, which gave us a steep angle on the driveway. It wasn't someone pulling in to make a U-turn. The headlights extinguished and the door opened.
“We gotta get out of here,” I said. I was having an action-flick moment, quoting the hero after he discovers the ticking time bomb.
“This sucks!” she said.
I unlatched the windows. She said, “Are you crazy?”
“No, look—the roof.” I saw her frown at me. “It's totally safe.” Then whispering: “Me and Reggie used to go out here all time.”
We heard the front door creak open. That creak! I threw a leg outside and pulled my body through. Melanie banged her head on the frame and said, “Ow!”
“Shh!”
“Ooh!”
“Shh!”
We stepped over the twigs and acorns lobbed from the trees. I led her to the side of the porch away from the driveway. “Now what?” she whispered, looking over.
“We gotta jump for it,” I said. More action-flick dialogue. The edge of the canyon, the mercenaries' jeep bouncing closer. The kissing had jostled something loose, some he-man narrative.
“I'm not doing that.” A hand downstairs discovered the lamp in my parents' former bedroom, throwing light onto the grass.
“We have to,” and I jumped. It really wasn't that far, and my legs knew what to do after so many rehearsals. I'd seen myself jumping off the porch to escape a raging fire or a mass of zombies moaning up the stairs, but never thought I'd be looking up at a girl, saying, “I'll catch you.”
I didn't. She knocked me into the dirt like an Acme anvil. She yelped. Loud enough for the person inside to hear. Then we ran. Along the side of the house, dashing across the front yard and into the street. I heard someone yell after us, and snuck a glance back to see a silhouette on the front stoop. But we were around the corner with a quickness.
• • •
THE NEXT DAY I SAW MELANIE through the window of the grill. I took my break. She sat on one of the benches, rubbing her sandals in the dirt, pretty toes poking out. She watched me walk over. A limousine prowled up the lane between us, a slow black shark, and I waited for it to pass. Her expression did not change. I gave her the ice cream I'd scooped for her. Mint Chocolate Chip in a Waffle Cone with Rainbow Sprinkles, what I'd heard her ask for all those times when she came in to see Nick while my head was down in the vats. She said, “Oh, thanks,” and extended her soft tongue to the ice cream. “It's hot out today.”
I told her that my aunt had let one of her employees use the house for the weekend. She said, “That's okay,” and looked past me and Nick materialized and slid up next to her, circling his arm around her and slipping his fingers into the tight pocket of her jeans. He didn't ask about the cone. That was that.
My aunt sold the house a few years later. When I asked her why she'd do such a thing, she told me, “I never went out there. What was the point of holding on to it?” I was appalled, but you know me. I was nostalgic for everything big and small. Nostalgic for what never happened and nostalgic about what will be, looking forward to looking back on a time when things got easier.
She sold the house to that brand who keep it up, diligently mailing checks to the lawn guy and the guy who turns on the water at the start of the season, but who never seem to come out. They haven't done a thing to it, repainted it or anything, so it looks like it always did. When I walk by there now, I could be staring at a photograph of when my grandparents just finished it, them stepping out into the street to admire what they'd accomplished. Or the first time I saw it when I was a baby, aloft in my mother's arms. Far away, then getting bigger and more real the closer we get to it.
It looks like it's waiting.
THE BOYS LINED UP TO RACE. THEY DOUBLE-KNOTTED their shoelaces, the sad noodles gone gray from a summer of tramping, and pulled up their tube socks, which slowly fluttered down their calves and ankles for lack of elastic. They nosed their sneakers as close to the line as possible, newly gung ho about millimeters and the small advantages that get us through life. The red chalk disappeared over the busy day as feet treated it like the dust it was, sweeping it away into the beyond, but for now it was a respected border, cordoning off the picnic tables and red-and-white coolers and spectators from the playing field in the middle of the street. The anticipation. The boys unwrapped their favorite scowls and glares to psych out their competitors. Any second now. And then the false start, from that kid who was you and me. Eager to begin and nervous with everybody's eyes on him and then fucking up. “Dag,” the other boys groaned, shaking their legs and gathering themselves anew. Angry as if the whole summer were at stake.
The girls went first. The 5-to-7-year-olds who believed the secret of speed was in the face, in the fierce, scrunched expressions they pushed ahead of their bodies, and then the 8 to ios, quicksilver in ponytails, and finally the gawky and glorious 11 to 12s, racing for the last time, sprinting desperately into teenage preoccupations and fleeing the girls they had been. Mr. Grady raised his starter pistol, his other hand cupping the black stopwatch bobbing on his chest. Mr. Grady, year after year. With his brown-and-red skin—half Cherokee, so he claimed—and skinny arms and legs and potbelly. He was a notorious drinker among unapologetic drinkers, legendary for his annual pass-out in the driver's seat of his dark Cadillac, as the radio played and the motor hummed, too out of it to walk up to his front door. This was his one sober afternoon of the season. He had a duty. His son had been a natural athlete and everybody said he could have been in the Olympics if he'd wanted to, he was that good. But then he fell in with the wrong crowd. After the races, Mr. Grady hit the rum punch in front of the Delaneys' with a quickness, to close the distance. Mr. Grady with his trembling arm sticking up in the air an authority only kids were stupid enough to obey.
They ran to prove who was the fastest, the most worthy, to settle three months of scores, they ran for their parents, who did or did not watch from the sidelines and did or did not cheer them on. First, Second, and Third Place got medals. Mr. Gordon, the chairman of the Sag Harbor Hills Improvement Association, knew a guy in Wainscott who knocked them out at a reasonable price. The winners wore the medals all day, pinned to their cotton-poly shirts, looking down to marvel at them when a cloud passed the sun or they shivered from some internal tremor, lifting them up for grown-ups to examine after admiring remarks. Clive always came in First when the mess of us used to pell-mell down the street, except for the year when he twisted his ankle, and he still had them up on the wall of his room, a blue row roused by the draft whenever you opened the door. I never won, but I never expected to. It was okay.
We were the big kids at the Labor Day party now that Elena and her group were off. Watching from the sidelines, jawing, disdainful. We were down to a skeleton crew. Me and Reggie. NP and Nick, who was staying out in Sag in his weird exile after the rest of us picked up our stakes. Time was, we never missed this day. But other things were more important now. Clive and Bobby and Marcus were already in the city. We were growing into those who went away.
When Reggie and me made it over to Sag Harbor Hills, NP and Nick were talking to a tall boy with hazel eyes and rusty curls. His name was Barry David. He wore gray Lee jeans, crossing his arms over a striped blue-and-crimson Le Tigre polo. Also, a constant smirk. He looked familiar and I figured him for someone's city buddy out for the big day, or a Southern relative up for his annual dose of bourgiefication. Labor Day, all sorts of strangers left their mark.
We were learning that it wasn't as much fun watching the races when you weren't running. If the girls were still out, we would've been diverted by social performance, but Devon and Erica had already gone back to New Jersey, and Melanie and her mom's rental was over. Rent your house out for August, sure, but you'd be a fool to give up Labor Day. Watching the little girls tackle t
he street, it was clear that our group's gender disparity was only a statistical blip—the next group was well stocked. Elena's group had been well balanced, too, and with them no longer coming out, the poverty of our situation was even more apparent. There would be no fashion show this year, and maybe the next few, until the next crop of girls transferred their interests from hopscotch to runways.
“They better have a good DJ this time,” Nick said.
“That last guy was illin' with all that Motown shit,” Reggie said.
NP said there wasn't going to be a DJ this year. Nick didn't believe it, but my mother had told us the same thing that morning, offering the hypothesis that there wasn't enough money in the budget “because they spent so much on those new Sag Harbor Hills signs of theirs.” They were quite natty, the signs, standing at the highway entrances of all the development streets, the jaunty black whale with its come-hither look. Now Azurest would have to get its act together and get new signs, too. It was a cold war, but harmless. “That's messed up,” Nick said.
“That's some bullshit right there,” Barry David said. “I thought you said this was a real party.”
“There's the bonfire,” I offered.
“Wack-ass bonfire,” he said. “I'm gonna get me some iced tea.” He walked away and I asked Nick, “Who's that?” “That's NP's cousin.” He shrugged. “He came out for the day.” Out in Sag Harbor, it was good policy to wave at everyone you passed, whether you happened on them as they were removing groceries from the trunk or as they stood in the middle of their lawns with hedge clippers and a vacant expression on their faces, wherever, because there was a good chance you were related. Cousins like crab-grass out there. You never knew how close you were to those you passed. This day, that rule was in abeyance. You'd spend all day bowing and saluting, it was ridiculous. Labor Day, the population was at its highest, with one-weekenders out for their annual visitation, relatives caravanning like Okies to break in the new convertible bed, and the scattered alumni coming around again to see if it was as they remembered. The Sunday of Labor Day weekend we crowded into this one street to see one another and say good-bye.
Ninevah Place, the dead end to the beach the rest of the year, was today the dead end of summer. We could go no further. The next day we'd close up our houses, pulling in the lawn furniture, winding hoses around forearms in messy loops, leaning on faucets with all our might for that extra bit that meant peace of mind for nine months. School, work, autumn. As if autumn was not already here. Nights we zipped jackets to the neck, and days gooseflesh popped on our legs as we tried to squeeze one more use out of shorts we'd never wear again.
But forget all those city intimations. Today was the Sag Harbor Hills Labor Day Party. Card tables replaced the cars outside of houses, set a-wobble by pitchers and Tupperware. We camped out, sharing our food and drink and stories. Mayo glued globs of potato salad to spoons, you had to shake hard to plop it into the compartment on the blue plastic plate. Potato salad, where would we be without potato salad clumped with yellow ladybugs of yolk, potato salad by the bushel and crinkled aluminum tins of greens steaming over Sterno cans of murmuring fire.
Bucket Webers and flat hibachis unfurled magnificent banners of gray smoke. With a plate in your hand, you mixed and matched from experience. There was Mr. Jackson and his grilled chicken. He'd made a name for himself with his Labor Day chicken, the parts marinated overnight in some handed-down Tennessee concoction. He had a long line waiting for a piece. He could hardly keep up. A few houses down, Mr. Turner prodded franks, looking forlornly down the street at Mr. Jackson and his followers and resolving to step up his game, although next year he'd be out with the hot dogs again, jealous again. We plotted and planned and next year came around and we were in the same place. Old reliable. And how could I forget Mrs. French and her cupcakes, soft as the ticking that angels stuff in their pillows. The cupcakes went before three o'clock and her brownies disappeared like that, reduced to smears at the corners of mouths and fingernails and the dirty shirts of dirty kids with no home training. The big bowls of rum punch were refilled punctiliously, in less-regulated proportions as time went on. You knew who to hit up for what.
At any given moment someone was playing “Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now.” Labor Day, we cornered the worldwide market on people playing “Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now.” It was the black national anthem. The disco version of “We Shall Overcome,” courtesy of Mr. McFadden & Mr. Whitehead. It came out of our cars as we drove to the store for last-minute paper plates and ketchup, issued triumphantly from sand-flecked boom boxes on threadbare beach towels, blared out of backyard patios from ancient amps plugged into bright orange extension cords uncoiled for annual duty. There've been so many things that held us down—check. But now it looks like things are finally coming around—check. We're on the move!—check. Whether the association was civil rights triumph, busting through glass ceilings in corporate towers, or merely the silly joy of gliding around a roller rink as you chased your friends and occasionally held hands with someone, aloft in a polyurethane heaven, the song addressed the generations. No stoppin'.
Older folks sunk down in beach chairs and did not stir the whole afternoon, watching it all, waiting for people to come over and pay respect. They were the only ones able to savor or rue the small jokes of time. Like, isn't that Sammy Parkerson and James Norton Jr. playing with each other? Their grandparents were pals, the parents couldn't stand each other, and then the grandkids found each other one dead afternoon and became buddies for life. The seasons set everything right again. My parents' generation made the rounds, popping in for a drink at one of the houses, making carefully timed appearances at the functions they'd promised all week to attend, hot on the trail of lost friends rumored to be out after so long. They checked on their children only occasionally. Why worry today? It was Labor Day. Nothing bad could happen. They got a break from us. We got a break from them. Tomorrow it was back to the apartments and we'd be all over each other for nine months. We'd had all summer to sew up the tears and push the stuffing back inside, but it was over. The little kids zoomed. Me and my friends stood with our arms crossed, shaking our heads.
When was the first Labor Day party? The Last Chance Dance. Spur-of-the-moment thing one summer in the early '50s, a nice idea, some friends getting together, then becoming official as it became a hit, people looked forward to it, with a planning committee and folks jockeying for their little visions. Foot races for the kids appearing one year. The fashion show, which I never understood. Was this the handiwork of famous designers the girls strutted around in, previews from Parisian runways? The girls were game, mimicking poses from magazines. Throw a kiss to the crowd like I told you, dear. At dusk the dance party began, on the wooden stage erected the Monday before and sitting in the street all week, teasing, beckoning.
Jump on it to test its solidity. For a few summers we bused in a group of Alvin Ailey dancers—somebody had connections—and they moved delicately in their beige leotards, a slow exquisite display. They used Clive's basement as a changing room, and we crowded around the little window for a glimpse of nip or muff and were run off by Clive's mother. Always, always run off. That was our whole story. The bonfires started again around when the dancers stopped coming.
It was time for the last race. A woman snatched her toddler from the track. Everybody was ready, but Mr. Grady was having a problem with his stopwatch. At the end of each race, he checked the stack of paper in his hand, different colors and stocks from many years, to see if any new records had been set, if the legendary times of yore still stood. “And Stacy Carter maintains the record for girls' 11 to 12s, set Labor Day 1976,” he'd announce for the people in the stands. We looked around for Stacy Carter, now in her early twenties, a child on her shoulder, smiling at the mention of her long-ago feat, those next to her slapping her on the back. She ran this street, too, back in the day.
We waited. There was this new gang of kids, boys and girls I hadn't seen all summer. Where did they come from,
these cocky little shits, acting like they owned the street? As if these were not our races they were running. Where had they been hiding? Biding their time all these months, on Azurest Beach while we tried to claim the ocean beach, spinning the comics racks at the Ideal now that we had abandoned them. They prowled around on their bicycles looking for the next caper or disappointment, floating above the seat, assaulting the pedals for a few seconds and then gliding for a while, savoring this process. Ditching their half-eaten slices at Conca D'Oro when their lookout finger-whistled of our approach. They bristled at the line while Mr. Grady dicked around reciting the rules they already knew. Our replacements.
“I should get in there and win that medal,” Barry David said. “Take that shit.”
“You're too old,” Reggie said. He didn't like this kid.
“I know that, shit. I was just saying.” He poked the last bit of hamburger bun in his mouth and licked his lips.
Mr. Grady took his time. We grew impatient. Let's get this show on the road. We were all there. It was where we mingled with who we had been and who we would be. Sharing space with our echoes out in the sun. The shy kid we used to be and were growing away from, the confident or hard-luck men we would become in our impending seasons, the elderly survivors we'd grow into if we were lucky, with gray stubble and green sun visors. The generations replacing and replenishing each other. Every summer this shifting-over took place in small degrees as you moved closer to the person who was waiting for you to catch up and some younger version of yourself elbowed you out of the way.
Where was my replacement, then? Which boy was it, standing with the others at the starting line. Waiting for it to begin. Probably that knock-kneed creature in the green mesh T-shirt, with the scabbed knees and telltale messed-up Afro. Just looking at him, you knew he wasn't going to win. It was in the way he carried himself, last place before he'd taken a step. But he'd give it a good try. Like he always did. They hadn't beaten that out of him yet.