Summer Child: An Essay by Lisa Renee
Kathe and I are Olympic swimmers, passing the summer days in her tiny blue above-ground pool. We score each other (9.7!, 8.9!, 10!!) after magnificent flips and dives and she almost always wins because she’s older and a little bit mean. We are absolutely convinced of our superior skills. We are quite possibly the best at everything.
Kathe is my neighbor; when you’re a child, the most important quality in a summer friend is proximity. She’s a little older, she has a pool, and her father takes us to the 7–Eleven for Coke Slurpees when the afternoon gets so hot that we begin to melt and complain. On Tuesday evenings, her parents take us to Rustler Steak House and I get a rib-eye, well-done because of the crusty black char that we now know causes death. She’s my very best friend, until school swallows and separates us in the fall.
We spend the summer almost exclusively at her house because she’s sort of an only child and I’m the oldest of four. Her house is bigger, quieter, and cooler, in both temperature and amenities. She has access to endless soda, the best of 70’s junk food, and a servile mother. She also has a basement where her much older brother’s record collection awaits with bean bag chairs and a vaguely dangerous, psychedelic vibe. It is there I learn about the Beatles and Ringo is my crush, to my enduring quiet shame. We listen to “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” on a near endless loop and I still wonder what that did to me.
Upstairs, we playact Cher — Half-Breed Cher, not Sonny and Cher Cher — and I always have to be Cher’s little sister because I’m younger. I ask every time if I can be Cher and the answer is always no. Kathe tries to convince me that this little sister is cool, maybe even cooler than Half-Breed Cher, but I never buy it. We dress in a child’s found version of the befeathered diva and parade down stairs and out the front door to stand on two tree stumps and sing made-up songs in our best full-throated approximation of the half-breed amazon.
We walk into town carrying a small bag of dog shit for the veterinarian (“stool samples,” my mother says, and she has somehow convinced me this is normal). After dropping off the parcel, we head to the drug store where we pool our change and purchase one package of fake nails. Later, we lie in the lush grass, each of us admiring one elegant long-nailed hand. I feel very beautiful and womanly with these nails and I brush them on my cheeks and drag them through my hair, gently.
We sit on fence rails under the mulberry trees and pick the ripe fruit, stuffing our mouths, staining every exposed bit of ourselves and all of our clothing. My mother will yell at me later about my purple feet and ruined shorts. We sit on the fat pony in the field and chatter about nothing and everything. The pony is so warm and alive and I love the way it smells. Sometimes it kicks, shrugging both of us off in one swift gesture, one of us flying over the pony’s head, the other over the tail. We bruise but we laugh in our shock and surprise, infused with the power that comes with cheating death.
We cross the lilac-choked gardens, where we half-heartedly pretend to be brides, to visit Kathe’s ancient grandmother. She has great bowls of hard lemon candies in her living room and she leans imperiously in her chair to fart. Our mad glee is barely contained. We sit in the barn loft and wonder when we’ll die.
We play Monopoly for hours when it rains. One game lasts for days in an effort to break the Guinness World Record. Eventually, we tire of the challenge and spend hours scouring last year’s thick Sears catalogue, building our Christmas lists, fantasizing about all the things that will make us happy and beautiful and popular.
We make butter, mustard and sugar sandwiches and marvel at our culinary genius. We eat baloney and neon cheese and bags of snacks that are vaguely like packing material and we drink gallons of soda.
In the upstairs bathroom, her father keeps a stack of Playboy magazines by the toilet, right there in the open. I make excuses to go to the bathroom sometimes because it’s the most incredible, scandalous thing I’ve ever seen and I can’t believe I can just sit there and look. I feel fevered and weird about it, a thing like thrilling shame, and I snap the magazines shut and force my confused self back downstairs for the next game, afraid that my absence is suspicious.
I cut my finger on a corn stalk in the back field and, while cleaning it in Kathe’s bathroom, I look at the white cream mixing with the red blood and I faint at the vision of pink, smashing my head on the washing machine. Later, in our profound boredom, we sprawl on the kitchen floor with knitting needles, scraping the dirt out of the swirling designs in the linoleum. This is a mesmerizing and oddly satisfying endeavor.
All summer, I run the yard back and forth between her house and mine, my mood dependent on the hour and the direction. Off to Kathe’s in the morning, eager for a summer day of purple feet and ponies, swimming and Slurpees, dreamy Ringo and furtive glances at impossible naked ladies. Silver medals, chasing records, catalog shopping and forbidden food. Home in the evening, anxious antennae alert to snakes in the yard, a tangle of little people, and the tepid drama of my own house with its buried thread of menace. The low waning days of summer.
Author’s Note: "Summer Child" was published by The Hairpin sometime in 2017, when the publication was a presence on Medium. Silvia Killingsworth published a few of my essays there that year and her previous affiliation with The New Yorker (and her kind editing) made it feel that the sun was briefly shining on me.
