First loves

In the summer, the heart runs wild.

Do you remember your summer romances?

Most summers, my grandparents would hook the trailer up to the tan Suburban and pile their three oldest grandkids into the back seat for a week or two at the camp grounds attached to the military base at Solomon’s. It had  the best playground ever, and a rollerskating rink, and a swimming pool and I don’t remember what else.  There was even a place to go fishing.  We’d help with the chores around the campsite, and wash dishes, fish for supper, bask in the sun. Nights, my cousin Mike would sleep on a cot in the aisle and Mel and I would share the pullout, where the dinner table became a bed.  The grandfolks slept in back in the double bed, a curtain drawn between us.  When all the lights were off, we kids would whisper a bit, and Grandpa would always tell us, “You kids be quiet there, now.”  But we could hear them whispering and laughing back there, the transistor radio slung low to some country station. It was never too hot on those hot summer nights. It was all just so perfect, even without air conditioning and television.

One summer, of course towards the end of our stay, I saw this boy in the rollerskating rink.  Black hair in one of those bowl cuts so popular at the end of the 70’s, only somehow, it looked good on him, with his hair so straight and long and thick.  He was just a boy, but he smelled good, clean, like lemons and spring and the odor of good earth between your fingers.

I have this awful habit of falling in love at first sight, and had it even then; some inner compass for beauty, grace, the curve of a limb bent in full skate flight, a wild grin on a hairpin turn, the way his fingers brushed the wall as he went flying by. We were bird-spirits, flightwinged and heart’s-fluttering, and I thought he was the most wonderful thing I had ever seen.

What can I say of tween courtship back then, before MTV and sexual saturation? The fascination is there, oh yes, but no earthly knowledge of why or what it’s for. He just was, perfectly and wholly was… was himself, was a sympathetic vibration in my own heart’s path, was this wild, pure creature unbeaten by media and hype.  I was in heaven every time he sped past me on his skates, whiplash incarnate.

He must have bumped into me, or me into him. First contact. Now we knew we had each others’ attentions.  At some level, courtship in tween years is like Roller Derby, like Thunderdome, with an undercurrent of competition and potential violence.  If I could have, I would have slammed him into the boards.  Instead, we began a wordless competition, skating faster around the rink, dodging slower skaters, flipping backwards and careening around corners.

I remember wrangling the usual machinations, using my cousin Mike as a go-between.  At least like could speak to like; those with matching plumbing speak the same language.  My cousin’s mission?  To ascertain whether this midnight haired boy might enter into our little familial tribe, might take an interest in gawky, gangly me of parts too big and parts too small, glasses and straight geeky hair and already practicing a face of studied insouciance for self-protection.  He accepted my emissary’s invitation to skate with us; then came that awkward dance of what do we do now?

When  you don’t know what it means to go anywhere but a nebulous  ‘go steady’, how far can you actually go? And me already defiant and refusing to ‘go steady’ with anyone, bristling at the idea of possession, “what does it mean, what point does it serve?” And even at such an age–I must have been no more than 11 at the time–I knew that ‘going steady’ edged dangerously towards the white spaces on the map, where monsters and the edges of the known world of childhood abide. It was not for me, this groping attitude of possession.

So we did what we could to posture and preen and prove ourselves worthy, which was skate, and swim, and play in that fantastic park.  Skating allowed some degree of physical touch that never stepped into the fringes of risque behavior. We chased each other with all the joy of young bodies charging full speed, in love with the chase and the sheer, bone-creaking speed of the thing, blurring around the track on eight wheels, laughing and calling in unnamed words for all the gods to hear and obey: young and alive and tasting for the first time what it might mean to escape the cages that our age and experience defined for us.  At night I whispered his name against my lips, I thought of him and dreamed of what might happen, were the skating rink to be deserted, should the chase suddenly end with someone caught… what would happen?  At eleven, I dreamed of holding hands, dared hope for a kiss, longed to be precious to someone else.

The night before we were to leave, my grandparents let us stay late at the rink and shooed my cousins home.  Jay escorted me back to the trailer.  Unchaperoned.  Unspeakably perfect, the air etching memory deep into the skin, a body memory of a light breeze, of a black sky of piled up clouds that hinted of rain, putting a drop of urgency into our last moments together, fitting Nature into our natures, a spare leaf skittering along the moon-flitted path.  Our feet grew heavy, our hands grew magnets and pulled together.  I knew the path by heart, knew that last possible moment before the bend that would bring us out of wonderland and back into the boring everyday sight of campers and belly-scratchers by their fires, and I desperately did not want those eyes to see this magic unfolding on the path.  Whatever it was, it had to happen, here.  He wore black Keds with the laces draggled and frayed, and they slowed to a halt just in the deepest shadow before the bend straightened and our reality claimed us once more.  Our lips touched. so lightly as to steal a breath each without the other’s knowing, and there were no words, and there was nothing to say.  What could two eleven year-olds possibly say at such a moment, without the wisdom and experience to put words to the emotions?  I ran back to the trailer, ran faster than even skates could carry me, his address folded tight into the change pocket of my jeans–hoping against hope that we might write letters to each other until the next summer, when we could recapture it all again… knowing, secretly and with a dark chocolate sort of bitter, delicious taste in my heart that such a thing would never happen.

But thirty years later, I have not forgotten his name, or the scent of him. Happy Valentine’s Day, Jay Knight.

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