Mornings are chilly in Menemsha, near the sea. A sweater, my summer shorts, and knee high socks were sometimes not enough protection against the fog floating in off the Gulf stream. Every day, I’d walk down to the water’s edge, and search for flotsam kicked up by the generous ocean over night. When the sun burned through, sometimes by ten, sometimes after noon, I could lose my shoes and socks and let my toes curl into the bubbling sand, digging, excavating little ponds to trap the water as it fell back again. The end of June, all July, Mike and I exchanged letters. My handwriting was so tiny, I only could fill both sides of one sheet, a small one at that. Mike would send back what seemed to be massive missives in bulging envelopes, six or seven pages usually, in his disjointed half-printed, half written scrawl. He was writing with dark blue ink then, a blue which matched the water’s color out past the waves. I’d build a little perch in the sand, sit and listen to those waves, unfold his latest, and lose myself in memories of a boy who claimed to ache for me.
All those letters are gone now, I burned them years ago. The poems, though, remained with me, all I have to remember him (and myself) in the times we were apart. Oh, I know in general he’d tell me about his swimming jobs, first as a lifeguard sixty miles away at a park in Kentucky, then later as a swim teacher at the Norwood YMCA, three miles down Montgomery Pike from his home. He loved watching the kids get better, he said, all the kicking and splashing becoming more and more synchronized until, all at once, swimming happened. He’d respond to whatever melancholic or ecstatic feeling I’d poured out about my family, the summer days in paradise, the evening visits to music shows at the Community Center. He’d share his own emerging emotions, not just about me, but about his own fumbling attempts to understand himself better.
If he included a poem, sometimes written, sometimes typed, I’d set it aside in a separate box. He sent several each time. Two I remember, one by heart. He’d been trying so hard that spring to write haikus, but always came up one or two syllables short, or long. This one, he hit the bull’s eye:
Your hair:
The falling graces
Of its beauty
Cascading to my soul.
The other pretty much sums up what I think he was trying to tell me that first summer we spent apart: Do you know/What happiness is?/Have you felt/The joy to forgive?/Can you taste/The nectar of love?/Life is not/A search for eternal pleasure,/Or a pain to be endured./Life is/What you make it;/The fullness which you lead yourself/In a striving to be free:/Free to feel a fear,/Free to cry a tear;/Free – /To make of yourself/What you can/Or accept a helping hand./But only if you need it./Seek out life/And you’ll see its beauty;/Meditate alone,/And your soul grows rusty,/Rusted by the waters of your isolation,/Rusted until you can’t accept/What others have to offer.
Looking back, I see myself stretching beyond the bounds of what my mother had planned out for me, stretching towards a future I still couldn’t see. Something pulled me towards a partner to fill the spaces a friends like Lizzie couldn’t. If I wasn’t on the beach, I’d be in a little cove nearby, in a Sunfish sailboat on the calmer waters there. Totally alone, I could drift and bob, making sure the sail leaned with the wind, and daydream about going back home. I ticked off the reasons I was drawing closer and closer to this boy. He was fun, as well as funny. He saw the world with the same dry and jaundiced eye as me, a sceptic’s intolerance and disdain for the ordinary beat of life. Yet he came from a different world, one of Boy Scouts and church choirs, of swimming teams and ice skating. One of suburban calm, of woods behind the house, where you could play in the dirt and not care about getting your dress messy. With him I felt a fullness, and knew, just knew, he wanted the best of me, and the best for me.
The end of July, Eddie headed back to Rhode Island with Charlotte and Denise. My father arrived, spent a few days helping close up the house, then drove us back to Ohio. The end of summer dryness had arrived, turning the grass inside the new clover-leaf intersection leading up to Clifton to brittle straw. The first thing I did when I got inside was call Mike up.
“Hi, it’s Janie.”
“Oh, you’re home!” He sounded genuinely pleased.
“Do you want to come over? I’ve still got to unpack, but we can talk, maybe walk around here, or go over to the park?”
“I’ll be there in half an hour…” He made it in twenty minutes.
He paced back and forth while I took my clothes out of the suitcase, throwing most in the laundry hamper, and folding the sweaters into the chest at the foot of my bed.
“I got my room assignment from Wesleyan,” he announced. “They assign freshman roommates. Mine’s some guy from Newton, outside of Boston. Peter Martin. He was on the football team in high school.”
“What kind of rooms do you get?”
“What I saw when I was there last year was, it’s a double room, with two beds and built-in dressers in one, and then a study room with two desks in the other. Bathrooms are down the hall, maybe 20, 30 guys on a floor.”
“Do you know what classes you’re going to take yet?”
“Well, everybody has to take Humanities…”
“What’s that,” I interjected.
“I think it’s like we read all the great books. Plato, St. Augustine, Shakespeare, Newton in the first semester, then it gets more modern next year. Sounds like fun to me. That’s what I want to do, read things I never got to at Avondale.”
He’d been upset when he didn’t get into AP English. Most of his other classes were advanced placement, and he’d gotten just about the highest SAT Verbal score in his class, certainly higher than I did on the PSATs, but somehow he hadn’t impressed the teachers with his language skills.
“And foreign language, they’ve got a requirement you need two years’ college equivalent in high school. But they have a test, an interview, and if you pass, you can get out of it. That’s be great, it would free up time for other stuff I want to take, like psychology and literature classes. Then there’s math. Even though I got a 4 on the Calculus AP test, I have to take it again there. They don’t think that’s good enough. But I get credits for both histories, and biology. So I take Cell Biology right away.”
“What do you have to take to get into med school?”
“I started looking into that. There’s only five things you have to have: Biology, Inorganic and Organic Chemistry, Calculus, and Physics. So I’m doing three of those this year, get them done right away, cause I want to have time for things that make you think, not all that hard science, before I get slammed with it in medical school.”
“Sounds like you’ve got a plan.”
He frowned, and stared out my window, then glanced back at me as I shut the suitcase and stuffed it under my bed. “They say everybody who applies for medical school from Wesleyan always gets in. But that’s if you follow the requirements and don’t mess up, I think.”
“I feel the same way, about colleges.”
“Where are you going to apply. You decided yet?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s going to be mostly just Seven Sisters schools. I don’t want to stay in the Midwest, so I’ve crossed Oberlin and Carleton off the list. For sure I don’t want to go someplace big like UC. And I know I want to be in a city, like New York or Boston. So for now, it’s Barnard, Radcliffe, Wellesley, and maybe Vassar.”
“What about Lizzie?”
“She’s more of a small town girl right now. Smith and Mt. Holyoke seem to be what she’s talking about.”
“Well, either way, New York and Boston are both about 2 hours away from Middletown. We can see each other weekends, I guess.”
I kept my face blank, but inside, I wondered, “What, he’s looking that far ahead?” Here I am, getting ready to be maudlin over missing him and losing my first boyfriend going off to school leaving me forever, and he’s assuming we’ll still like each other after a year of that?
I kept that to myself, and suggested, “I’ve got to go outside, take a walk. Want to go to the Zoo? We could see some animals, and listen to the opera for free later on.”
The Cincinnati Zoo was a couple of miles from my house. In the summer, there were operas some evenings, famous for the hyenas trying to keep pace with soprano arias. As we walked down Clifton, he put his arm around my shoulder, and pulled me close. It felt warm, and friendly there, locking hips with him as we strode in step. In that cocoon, I didn’t have to think about September.