Erin Sproul
Summer
It happened in that time right when the days were beginning to get hot; this was
a terrible, sticky, full-fledged hot. It wasn't an accident or even a mishap.
The first time I had sex, I mean. It wasn't bad or frightening-it just didn't
feel right.
His house was too hot. It was an upstairs apartment; he only had a couch to
sleep on; his roommates had the two bedrooms. He had held my hand up the
stairway, past the melted-looking stained glass window on the landing, fumbling
for his door key. My stomach was squirming inside my sweaty belly. It was so
damn hot in that hallway and in that dark room where his couch was.
My tank top was white with blue flowers; his shirt was the black one all the
bartenders at the King's Pub had to wear. Everything after the door swung open
(the door that was swollen squeaky with the season's humidity) was all
confusion. Night, heat, smoke, stars, heavy breathing (his and mine), vague
discomfort-silence.
I remember how the pale light came in from the half-shaded window, close to
where I was on the couch (the couch with the sweaty sheets and hard buttons that
dug into my tailbone). It illuminated my blue-flowered tank top, now crumpled on
the floor, and I decided to focus on the few stars I could see through the
condensation on the glass. Through the small crack in the window came the
distinctive, acrid odor of fresh cut grass and lawn mower oil. My head was
spinning and numb. The stars looked cool, like the blue flowers on my tank top,
the only cool things in the sweaty room. I felt dirty, sullied. He (the boy,
because it takes a boy) said cigarettes were good after sex, and I smoked one,
trying to pretend it didn't make me sick. I remember the only thing I could
think was, it's too hot and I'm not a virgin anymore. I thought the fault lay in
the season. That summer was steaming and fermented, and I wondered if it was
corrupting the world from the inside out. My brain felt like one of those summer
puddles of water you stumble on in the middle of the woods on a hot
day-stagnant, full of spiders and dead leaves, smelling like it came deep from
the bowels of some earthbound monster.
That summer I asked my mother if I could mow the lawn, mow the claustrophobic
grass that tangled around the edges of the house, the oppressively tall grass. I
asked her in the afternoon, just before she took her daily dose of Buspirone,
500mg to anti her depression. She looked at me through her driving glasses that
she hadn't taken off since going to the store; the doctors told her to flush Dad
through and through with cranberry juice, so she was constantly at the store
buying four liter bottles of what she thought was the best brand; Ocean Spray.
There was disgust, disbelief and something like fear on her face. Undressing the
bottles from their static plastic bags, she snapped, "There's no need for that!
Your father will be up soon enough. You know I wouldn't let you mow it." She
wouldn't look at me.
My dad was diagnosed with cancer of the lymph nodes; I wasn't clear on what they
were, but I knew the word cancer well enough. Corruption of the internal organs
and muscular/skeletal structure by some evil cells, and my dad had caught it. It
was unusually humid for a summer in the mountains of New Hampshire and unusually
dark around our farm. The forest seemed to have thickened around our house,
pines looming like grim reapers and the grass grew tall without my dad to mow
it.
I asked Mom many times during that summer if I could mow the lawn that choked
the house. I remember once she hollered, "Why the hell are you so worried about
the damn lawn? Your father will mow it soon!" But all the hot summer my dad lay
in the bed that my parents shared and the moaning in the night was my dad's pain
and my mother's worry, not the familiar spring-squeaking-moan-slapping-happy
noise that came before an announcement of a new sibling on the way. Dad didn't
have the strength to get up in the humid night and relieve his aching bladder,
let alone fight with the monster our lawn had become, our out-of-date push mower
his only weapon. I couldn't fully comprehend why I wanted the lawn mown, why Mom
didn't want me to, why that indefatigable head of the Trinity, the Father, God
with a capitol G, who Mom and Dad loved had let Dad struggle with the cancer
monster, why the summer was so hot, when it usually was too chilly around the
edges to leave shoes inside. I felt akin to the season, to the summer-used up,
trampled on by tourists.
In our church, a picture of Jesus hung over the altar. I used to stare at it
while the preacher's words droned on and on in my ears. The face of Jesus looked
so gentle, so kind, and attractive in a way that I was sure was sacrilegious.
How was this nice looking young man connected with my fate or with my dad's
life, as my parents believed? My mother would lead Dad up to the altar to be
touched, prayed over, possibly healed by the "blood of Christ," through the
preacher and a few "anointed ones." "Laying on of hands" they called it-but it
didn't make any difference to Dad, as far as I could tell. Besides, who wanted
sweaty hands laid on them in the slim chance they could be cured, especially
when it was already way too hot in the small, square oven of a church? The
communion wine, the blood, was cheap and bitter. It was the color of the
cranberry juice the doctors had prescribed. "By his stripes we are healed, by
the blood of the Lamb." Blood, wine, cranberry juice, it was all the same, and
it none of it worked. I would keep my arms tight at my sides in hopes that the
huge sweat stains and indecent smell emanating from them would be kept hidden.
Mom commented once that I always looked so sedate and spiritual in church, with
my arms at my sides and my eyes raised towards the heavens. The entire
congregation may as well have been aliens distorted by the humidity for all I
felt akin to them. Jesus' face looked like a mirage, and I constantly had to
squint to see him through the shimmering heat.
The roads melted on the edges. The tar, so someone said (though I tried it and
it didn't work) was hot enough to fry an egg. Dad's car didn't like being
handled by my unskilled hands; when I was trying to pay attention to Dad
throwing up from the chemo forced on him by the doctors, the Volvo listed over
to the side of the road and sank a little into the squishy edges. The air
conditioner didn't work because Dad was going to fix it that summer. This made
the vomit that he couldn't get up with old napkins leftover from going to
McDonalds, smell stronger than any vomit I had ever smelled. The radio came in
fuzzy but it was better than the sound of my dad's heaving.
I had begged Mom not to make me pick Dad up from treatment after I got out of
work. It wasn't that I barely knew how to drive the stick-shift of the Volvo, or
that I hated the scary stinging-bleach-and-sour-pharmaceutical smell and
chemical lights of hospitals, but that I didn't want to be brave. I didn't want
to find my dad resting, dazed, in the antiseptic waiting room and help him out
and into the passenger side seat of the car. He was supposed to be picking me up
from work, confidently shifting the car in and out of the gears, listening to
NPR, alert and interested and smooth and strong. Instead I found a skin of a
father, as if, snakelike, Dad had shed a layer in the heat and taken his real
body and mind elsewhere. This empty husk of Dad threw up five or six times
during the half-hour drive home through the hot hills. He wouldn't let me pull
over; he kept saying the whole time I'm sorry, just get me home, it's so hot.
The weight of the heat, of lost virginity, and of a father diseased dragged on
me, and I felt useless, powerless. I had been reading Moll Flanders that summer,
and in it she said, a woman is a hole.
O
I did feel that the world was pouring through me to a certain extent, but I also
felt like a sponge soaking out of the air all the futility and misery there is.
Mom kept sponges under the sink; some of them were clean, but most of them were
damp and coated with hair, lint and dust, all balled and stringy. I think Mom
used them to clean up Dad's vomit too-more than once. When I opened the doors
under the sink to take the garbage out, I could smell the sponges. They smelled
like death-dank and decaying. I suddenly realized my body and brain and
everything inside were just like those sponges. I felt like I was absorbing
everything for everyone around me. Mom would wipe the sponges over the
juice-stained counter or the vomit-stained rug, and I knew what it was to be
wiped over life.
I remember the darkness of that time-driving my vomiting father home on the
melting road-leaving the house of a boy I barely knew at 2 A.M., sweaty and
confused-watching the trees hang heavy in the windless air, standing alone in
the hot, moist woods for hours, letting mosquitoes scream in my ears.