Puppies and Kittens
Residents’ Committee rules round here are pretty strict.
F’rinstance, don’t you be tryna paint your shingles any colour but blue, ‘cos Mr Sullivan, he walks the district first Monday of the month with his notepad, checking. If’n he catches you out, he puts that chit through the door an’ you got yourself three days to repaint ‘em, or else you’re gonna know about it.
Committee rules been fiercer round here since Mr S took it over three years since, but he says it’s for the good of all to keep the place – squared away, he calls it. So lawns on Salt Air Lane gotta be mowed every week on a Wednesday. But it ain’t nearly as Stepford as it sounds. That’s only when school’s out for summer. So, early June through early September, say. Mostly. Oh, and Spring Break too, course, then the rest of the year, it’s Saturdays. Me ‘n Mikey, we been doing it coupla years now. Takes the whole day up, but what else you got to do when school’s out and all the prettiest girls gone south to the Hamptons for the summer?
‘Sides, they all got they ways, to mix it up a bit.
Colonel Rettmann’s now, it’s just like he sounds, straight up and down. That lawn’s done longer service than my uncle Kevin – an’ just between us, he done it deliberate-like. I heard daddy tellin’ old Mr. Pedersen how Kevin’d heard amputees get more sympathy fucks than they know how to handle, and Kevin was always a bit wantin’. In the brainsdepartment, ya know?
The Dettweilers, well, they only summer incomers, so as long as it looks tidy come June, they don’t care none. And they pay me extra to fill up all the planters with bright flowers and suchlike.
Old Man Gumbie just has me cut a swathe through from the back porch to as he calls it, the perimeter fence, then along it both ways. Mikey says he patrols it every night in case of a zombie apocalypse, or some such. Swears up and down he got a bunker down there, stocked with guns and ammo.
But Mikey’s full of it. He tells everyone he felt up Bambi-Ann Maguire’s titties out on Seagull Beach last Labor Day. Which’d be fine, if he wasn’t with me eating the burger ‘n fries holiday special at Dinetti’s Diner at the very same time, whinin’ over how he was never gonna get up the nerve to speak to her.
The Carlsen-Lunds are new this year. I heard from Miss Ceecee, who got it from Miz Joan in the library, who overheard it when they brought they kids in to register, that they come over from San Francisco, some place. Hate-Ashberry, was it? All free love and burning brassieres, she said. They ain’t married. Hippies, Miz Joan said. Hussies, Miss Ceesee reckons. All I know is, they got ole Mikey doing fancy curves all around the edges, making little paths here and there, and it takes him three times longer than any other two gardens together.
Anyways, me and Mikey, we got Salt Air sewn up between us. He takes seaward, I get the north run. No special reason, ‘ceptin’ it makes more sense to keep to your own side. That’s what we say, anyhow. At the end of summer Mikey says he’s gonna buy a fancy navy blue Schwinn, finest in the store. My daddy says I can have ten dollars for fritterin’ come September, but the rest of it gotta go in the Young Savers account he opened for me down at the bank. For my college fund. He’s the guidance counsellor at our school, says I gotta set a good example.
Works out fine, mostly: I get the Colonel, but he’s first cab off the rank, no sweat, and then I’m just working my way down towards the Fischmanns, and their pool.
Mikey always starts with Miss Ceecee. She makes the best breakfast biscuits in West Yarmouth, so I gotta hand it to him, he lucked out there. One Wednesday morning she got flustered and made double her grammy’s special recipe by mistake, called me over to get some. Man, those biscuits are good!
Don’t envy him the Hoozenhowers, but he’s sweet on their second-youngest, Dianne, so he don’t mind none. He don’t got a hope in hell, though. Lance, their second-eldest, he’s a jock with a short fuse, eagle eyes and a haymaker straight outta the playbook. And he takes his brotherly responsibilities real serious. Mikey’s gonna spend another Labor Day drinking cherry milkshakes, if Lance got anything to say about it.
End of the day, Mikey mows his own lawn last, takin’ it easy cos his daddy gets home late, when it’s too dark to check it over. My daddy says he’s over at the Bide a Wee Tavern most nights after work. I wadn’t supposed to hear that. I snuck down for a sandwich and I heard them talkin’ ‘bout it. Mama made that sound she makes when you’re supposed to think she’s disapproving, but really, she wants to hear it all.
The waitress in the Bide a Wee has really got her hooks into Mikey’s daddy. That’s what mama said when daddy told her what he seen driving past there Friday. He was late home after his Episcopalian bible class ran over on account of old Yancy Prewitt startin’ a ruckus over the proper definition of original sin. Daddy said, if Yancy’d seen what he seen down that side alley there, he’d be happy enough with the standard definition. I wadn’t supposed to hear that, neither! I ain’t gonna tell Mikey though. I figure if it comes to somethin’, he’ll find out soon enough.
My day ends at the Fischmanns. In their pool, after I mow their square patch of scrubby grass. They’re friends with my folks, and they don’t got no kids of their own, so mama says she thinks Miz Fischmann thinks of me like her nephew. She’s nicer than my other aunties. Prettier too.
Mr. F – that’s what she calls him to me, then she wrinkles her nose up like it’s our secret and he’s an old grump tryna spoil all our fun – ain’t usually home just yet, so Miz Fischmann – Laura, she says to call her, but not aunt – Laura brings out a big pitcher of grape Kool-Aid (that’s my favourite) and after we drink it, we jump in the pool and cool off. Laura says we Kool off, but something about that water sure gets me to feeling pretty warm.
In my head I call her Fischhook, ‘cos it feels like she gots her hooks right into me. Every time she looks at me, I feel them hooks diggin’ a bit deeper in my skin, and I reckon she knows it. But I don’t dare look at her eyes when she’s standin’ close, cos they’re the colour of fresh-shucked pistachios.
Not like ice cream, but darker, like they taste when you eat ‘em with salt and Mikey’s daddy’s Schlitzes, and you shudder ‘cos it’s too bitter, but then you gotta take another gulp, and another, till your head’s purely swimmin’. She’ll never remark when she sees me shiver though, just picks up her towel and throws it round my shoulders, then she fusses like I was a kid.
But I don’t feel like no kinda kid when she does that. After, sometimes I can smell her cologne on me, offa that towel of hers. She smells like sweet summer peaches. Peaches wuz always my favourite.
Lawns on Salt Air Lane gotta be mowed every week on a Wednesday. But other days I go over and help her with her flower garden too.
***
So, did I win you over with my pitch-perfect mid-seventies King-esque tale of small-town Americana? Did it make you think about watching Stand By Me, sitting in your top-down, powder blue Chevy convertible at the drive-in? Could you just see that classic diner, all black-and-white tiles and gleaming chrome jugs for the milkshake machines? Perhaps you heard the raucous laughter of all those heartbreakingly innocent teens? What about the smell of those burgers and fries, more delicious than any you ever ate? That first-love summer, tremulous and tremendous in the same instant, more real than the whole forty-odd years since, all bundled into one?
But perhaps it was just a tad bit too tooth-rottingly sweet to feel real to you? Did I muff it up straight away with the temporally-accurate but oddly-jarring Stepford reference? Maybe I mixed up my Cape Cod with my Deep South? What killed it for you? Were it all them cutesy affectations? Maybe you took exception to the stereotypically hokey names? Oh, I know – it was the Schwinn, wasn’t it? I knew I shouldn’t have used Schwinn! But I couldn’t resist – I’ve been waiting all my life to slip a Schwinn into a story!
Shall I tell you what did it for me? Okay. I’ll ‘fess up: I was in perfect control, right up to the last few paragraphs. The Fischmanns. Even then. But as soon as they got into that pool, that was it for me. Drenched in memories, though more home counties than homeboy, perhaps.
It was 1973, or was it ‘74? I was on holiday with my best friend Lesley Taylor and her parents. In Perranporth in Cornwall. We were driving, and a new song came on the radio. Some American chap plaintively recalling an encounter with an older woman on a porch in a steamy southern summer. Not fifteen words in, and I was hooked! Then the car went under a bridge, the radio cutting out right before the first chorus. It was days before I heard it again.
“Summer (The First Time)”, by Bobby Goldsborough. That’s what it was called. And there I am again, the second they hit the water. Diving back into my own summer of awakenings, phosphorescent with possibility.
Flight of the dragonfly 