The Summer Before Boys

“Are you sure she’s not here now?”

  “She’s gone,” Eliza said to me. “She’s always at the lunch service.”

  We liked it down there because it was empty. We would never encounter someone smelling of suntan lotion, wearing a pair of Juicy shorts, iPod earphones, or hoodies. We would never hear the modern voices of swearing teenagers or whining children.

  It was the end of July and hot outside. I had talked to my mother last night and she told me she’d be home soon. She couldn’t tell me the exact date because she didn’t know or they wouldn’t let her say. But soon, she promised. A month from now. Four weeks. Five, tops.

  By the end of August.

  She promised.

  Meanwhile young ladies had to stay indoors in such hot weather as this, so they wouldn’t glisten. Eliza told me that’s what they called sweating in the olden days and we shouldn’t do it. It’s unbecoming of a lady, Eliza said.

  I should know—or I should pretend I know—what “unbecoming” means and if things were working like they used to, it wouldn’t matter. Eliza and I would be playing together and inside that world, we would both know. But now its like there’s a tiny part of me that is standing outside, in the real world, with one foot holding the door open. When I am all sweaty, from summer, and from running—do boys think it’s “unbecoming”? Would Michael?

  So I have to figure out what unbecoming means, and I decide it’s not pretty. It’s not attractive to be sweating. Not on your face, or behind your knees, or down your back, and certainly not under your arms. I tried to walk more slowly so I wouldn’t work up a sweat.

  There were more old photographs hanging here in this hall than anywhere else all over the hotel. Silent faces in black and white staring out of the frames. Barely anyone smiled. If there was more than one person in the picture, they were either standing or sitting upright or a combination. Sometimes a man and woman together. She was sitting. He was standing. There were grown men with long sideburns, and women always wearing white. There were only a few photographs of children.

  As we walked farther down the hall the photographs got newer, if you could call them that. Some were even in color, but most of them still formal and posed.

  “Look at this one.” Eliza stopped and pointed.

  “Who’s that?”

  “I don’t know. But she’s really pretty, isn’t she?”

  I looked closely at the face, wondering what makes someone pretty or not. Was I pretty? I mean, my dad always said so, but that didn’t really count. My mom counted even less. I looked at Eliza. She looked okay. She looked fine. There was nothing unpretty about her.

  Was she pretty?

  I knew there were some girls who got told they were pretty all the time. By teachers, by other grown-ups. By strangers. Like Jody Reynolds. Jody had really long, curly blond hair and a round face. She was tiny. What a pretty girl you are, people were always saying. I heard it all the time, because I’d ridden the bus with her since kindergarten. You look so pretty today, Jody. You are such a pretty girl.

  I don’t remember anyone other than family saying that about Eliza. Or me.

  I looked back at the girl in the photograph. She must have been about fourteen or fifteen years old. She was standing in front of an old car like from the drive-in movie days. She was wearing a full skirt and a tight sweater tucked neatly inside. Her hair was dark and her lips were smiling. You could even see the thick curl of her eyelashes in the picture. Are those the things that make someone pretty?

  “Do you think I’m pretty?”

  “What?” Eliza asked.

  It surprised me, too. But what I really wanted to know, I suppose, was if Michael thought I was pretty. As if suddenly, that’s all that mattered.

  Does Michael whatever-his-last-name-is think that I’m pretty?

  “Nothing,” I told Eliza. “Forget it.”

  Worrying if a boy thinks you are pretty or not is like standing on the beach and realizing you are wearing nothing but your underwear.

  There isn’t much you can do about it.

  fourteen

  One woman was killed during the three-day battle at Gettysburg in the Civil War. She was in her house baking bread when a stray bullet from one of the soldiers shot through the side of her house and hit her in the back. Mohawk would have just begun to be built. The foundation poured. The quarries dug. The long road just being cut through the thick woods heading straight up the mountain.

  The dark floral carpet would have not yet have been laid. The stone watchtower not yet finished. There is a picture in the hall of little five-year old Clara Sidney Smith, Mrs. Smith’s grandmother, standing in the center of the deep concrete well before it was opened and water flooded it to the top. She is wearing a white sailor suit and matching hat, white stockings and white boots and staring into the camera without a care in the world. The date on the photograph says May 15, 1869—just four years after the end of the Civil War. The last war to be fought on United States soil.

  When my mother first went away to Iraq, I cried every single night. My stomach hurt and I couldn’t eat. I went to bed really early, but I couldn’t sleep and I would get up in the middle of the night and go on my computer. Even my dad didn’t know. It was dark in my room but the glow from my computer was like a little heartbeat.

  I would go online hoping to see an e-mail from my mother. And then I would log off and on again a second later because I knew it was daytime in Iraq and she might have written just at that second. Or maybe it took a little while in cyberspace to get here and if I signed on and off it would appear. But when it didn’t it would make my stomach hurt even more.

  And sometimes while I was waiting to see if an e-mail would suddenly appear I would search online. I would plug in keywords like “Women in war,” “nurses,” and “wartime.” “History of women in the military.” Maybe it took a while for e-mail to travel across time zones, and over oceans and across nighttime skies.

  But my mother still wouldn’t be there in the morning to make my breakfast. And I knew she wouldn’t be there when I got dressed and left for school. And she wouldn’t be there when I got home again.

  Those first few months were horrible. It was like being homesick but worse. I didn’t do my homework but nobody said anything. I spent all day in school trying not to think about where my mom was, what she might be doing or seeing.

  My dad and I did everything we could to avoid the news but sometimes there would be a commercial for it while we were watching our sitcom. Breaking news. Or stay tuned for News at Ten, as if hearing about people getting killed or hurt would make you want to watch it. Then we’d hear something about a roadside bomb or the number of casualities since the war started, before we could find the controller and change the channel. They might even break it down by number of men, women, civilians, and army personnel.

  Three hundred and thirty. Four hundred and two. Seven hundred and sixty-four dead.

  Then one day I just forgot. I was watching my shows and my dad and I were eating dinner in front of the TV. I had a forkful of my chicken potpie all the way up to my mouth and it was funny. It was so funny, something that happened in the show was funny and I laughed. We both laughed. Not just a smile or a little chuckle but me and Dad were laughing out loud so when the commercial came on, at first, we didn’t hear it. We were still laughing.

  I think I remember. Someone had fallen down, hit on the head with a plank of wood, slipped and fell into a hole, that kind of funny. The funny you shouldn’t be laughing at in the first place, but you do. Partly because you are so glad it’s not you, and then because people look so funny when they fall down.

  “The number of American casualties since the start of the war has reached one thousand,” the reporter said. She was looking right at me, out of the TV. It was a milestone. Like an important birthday or anniversary. Like all the others were child’s play. They didn’t really count. This is the big one. One thousand Americans have been killed in Iraq. They are dead and will never come
back home to watch TV with their kids, or their mom, or their brother. It was newsworthy.

  And we were laughing.

  When I think about that lady who got shot in the battle of Gettysburg I wonder if she had any kids. I mean, who else would she be baking that bread for? What a way to die. But it doesn’t matter now. Nobody has even heard of her. Nobody even knows her name.

  fifteen

  Lester and Lynette belonged to a long line of other “Villiators,” dolls who lived in the doll village or “D’Ville.” D’Ville was really a huge plastic bin filled to the top with all sorts of dolls in all degrees of newness, from brand-new to downright legless and armless, even headless, stages. But every single one of them, collected over all the years Eliza and I had been playing together, had a name. Not only a first but also a last name, a family, a hobby, and a talent.

  When we were really little we used to line them all up, or divide them into groups. There was the hair color camp, where they had talent shows divided into teams by the color of their hair. There was the tease-y group that used to mean girls but now it was just the older kids, not quite grown-up dolls, the ones we didn’t know where else to put. The tease-y group got to do the most things, go to camp. Go to college. Have singing contests. Usually I got to be the dolls in the tease-y group.

  It was only a couple of years ago that we stopped needing the dolls themselves to play. It was almost as if we ourselves had become characters in D’Ville. We carried them within us. Lester and Lynette were the only two characters that weren’t real dolls. They lived in D’Ville but they were us.

  Eliza and I were Lester and Lynette.

  Or at least we used to be.

  Before I used them, like I did today, to get Eliza to stay up at the hotel with me.

  I kept hoping we would see Michael, but I never told Eliza that. Instead I told Eliza I wanted to play Lester and Lynette so we could hang around a little longer. We never did “bump” into Michael or his brother, but we missed our ride home with Uncle Bruce and by the time we started walking home I just didn’t feel like even pretending to pretend anymore.

  “You never wanted to play Lester and Lynette, did you?” Eliza accused me after about half a mile.

  “Yes, I did,” I defended myself, because I wasn’t really lying, was I? I did like playing. I thought I did. I sometimes did. So why not now? But Eliza could feel it. “I’m just tired now. From walking.”

  “It was your idea to walk,” Eliza said. “Now I have this huge blister on my foot. And it hurts.”

  “That’s not my fault.”

  “Well, it’s sure not my fault. We wouldn’t be walking if we had left when I wanted to,” Eliza said.

  “Oh, you had that blister a long time ago,” I said, because I felt guilty.

  “No, I didn’t,” Eliza said. “I just got. I’m just getting it now because we are walking so much and my sock has a hole in it.”

  “Well, jeez, it’s sure not my fault you put on hole-ly socks.” And I made myself feel better.

  When we got home, Eliza had to wash her feet and then put a big Band-Aid on her heel and a little blood even soaked right through that. Now Aunt Louisa was snoring again but Eliza was fast asleep and I wasn’t. Far away I could hear the roll of thunder like the earth letting us know it was unhappy. Then the room was alive in a flash of warm light with no sound at all. Heat lightning my mother would call that. I slipped out of bed.

  Back in our house in town, when a storm was coming, my mother and I would go out and sit on the screened-in porch, waiting for the rain, counting the seconds between the bolt of light and the scary thunder. One thousand one. One thousand two. One thousand three and when the moment between the light and the sound was indistinguishable, we knew the storm was right on top of us. Hard rain would pummel the roof of our house, and the lightning would shake the floor and walls when it hit, so close.

  We were safe inside, only the warm, wet wind could touch us, blow our hair and dampen our faces. I would sit on my mother’s lap, holding her tight, pretending to be scared.

  But now I was alone. I stood in the grass looking up at the night. And I was afraid. The storm was coming closer, I could hear it. When the lightning came, it lit up the whole world completely, so for a split second it was daylight. Like it was in Iraq right now.

  And I couldn’t say for sure, at that very moment, if my mother was alive or dead. Wounded or working. Or resting. Or getting ready for her day. She said she felt like she could never get all the sand out of her hair.

  I lifted my arms and tried to glide like an angel. The wind was picking up. I could hear, even in the dark, the way the trees sounded different, leaves brushing up against one another in warning. A musky smell rose up from the ground.

  I should go inside, I thought. But I didn’t want to.

  “It’s beautiful right before a storm, isn’t it, Julia?” Uncle Bruce’s voice was so distinct, like the sound of his truck over the gravel driveway, rough and familiar.

  He stood next to me on the grass and looked up. He didn’t ask me what I was doing out here in the middle of the night.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  I wondered if he knew Eliza was mad at me. He must have noticed that neither one of us had spoken one word all through dinner.

  “We sure need the rain,” he said.

  I looked up again at the sky and I felt like I was about to cry. Uncle Bruce took one step toward me and put his arm around my shoulders.

  “She’s going to be all right, Julia, and so are you,” he said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

  The thunder rumbling in the distance began to sound closer. I let myself lean against Uncle Bruce. His body blocked the wind and we stood that way until he said we should go in. And then, just after I crawled back into bed next to Eliza, who was still fast asleep, the rain began and when it did, it poured.

  sixteen

  All during breakast, Eliza kept her focus on her Fruity Pebbles, so I knew she was still upset with me, although Aunt Louisa didn’t seem to notice. She kept chatting away like nobody’s business.

  “Did it rain last night? It must have rained all night. Did anyone else hear that rain last night?”

  Aunt Louisa got up from the table to start her chores. Five loads of laundry, she said. That’s a lot of dirty clothes. Then she sat down to watch TV. Uncle Bruce had long since left for work.

  A part of me didn’t want anything to do with Eliza right now. She didn’t have to pout like this and let everybody know. And besides, I was tired of always being grouped together, always and forever. Julia and Eliza. Eliza and Julia.

  And another part of me was lonely. For Eliza and for when I used to be nice. I remembered when we were both little, Eliza couldn’t tell the difference between animation and living characters on the TV. She couldn’t tell you if SpongeBob was real or a cartoon. Or if Lizzy McGuire was animated or alive. At first no one would believe me.

  “She doesn’t know. She really doesn’t,” I would say. And then everyone started grilling her with names.

  “Power Rangers?” Uncle Bruce asked her.

  “Living?” Eliza would try and she was serious.

  I gave her one. “Lilo and Stitch.”

  “Living?”

  And we would all laugh, especially Eliza. I think she loved the attention but I knew she really couldn’t tell the difference.

  “Harry Potter?” my mother would ask.

  “Animated?”

  I was lonely for Eliza. So out of the blue I just said, “Shrek.”

  Nothing.

  “Raven,” I tried another one. That’s So Raven was one of Eliza’s favorite shows.

  She looked up. I saw a little smile, the tiniest smile showing.

  “Animated?”

  I knew she was playing with me. I knew it was going to be okay.

  seventeen

  And Peter’s father did come back, just before the end of school—only a couple of months after he had left for his second tour.
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  “Do you want to talk about it?” Mrs. Jaffe was asking.

  No, I thought. Why would he want to talk about it? He hasn’t talked all year.

  But he did.

  Nonstop. All of a sudden Peter Vos was a virtual chatterbox.

  “They sent him home early,” Peter told us.

  It was just the three of us in the room, like always. It was a half-day kindergarten room, the room we used when the half-day kindergarten kids all got to go home. I felt huge sitting in those tiny chairs at that tiny table. There were gigantic colorful pictures of the alphabet all around the room. Colors, and numbers, and the seasons—winter, spring, summer, fall. And faces of the clock, faces, real faces all pointing to different times. The hour and the half hour. All smiling. All cartoons, nothing real.

  “He got hurt but not really hurt. Not hurt in his body, anyway,” Peter went on. “He didn’t get his face blown off, or his brains blown out, or anything like that, either.”

  I shuddered, all the way from my shoulders to my toes. No one ever talked that way. But Mrs. Jaffe was nodding her head and listening, sitting right under the ridiculously gleeful face whose nose had hands pointing to twelve noon.

  “He’s different now. My dad is different.”

  “How so?” Mrs. Jaffe asked him.

  “He’s angry all the time,” Peter said. “He yells. He likes it quiet in the house. When my baby sister started running around the kitchen, making all this noise, he slammed his fist down on the counter. He told her to shut up.”

  I saw that Peter wasn’t looking at Mrs. Jaffe when he was talking. He wasn’t looking at me, either. His head was turned and his eyes were looking up at the ceiling. It was like he didn’t want anyone to connect him to what he was saying.

  “Kaley’s two and a half,” Peter said. “She doesn’t understand. And he screams. At night. In his sleep, I guess.”

  I felt bad for Peter, I did. But in that moment all I could think of was my mom. My mom crying or screaming. Or coming home so different. Did that happen to everyone?