High Summer. The cicadas scream in the trees. It was July, many years ago now.
All that month, information seemed to crackle through the air, blowing like the wind through the house. The house itself was like a sailboat on a sea of grass atop the hill.
It was all very secretive.Word had come from down the coast that our cousins, Anna and Edward, would be coming to stay. We weren't supposed to know why, but of course we did - anyone who thinks they can hide things from children is a fool - so of course we knew their parents, along with our other aunts and uncles, would be attending to Serious Family Business. We just had to pretend not to know.
This sounds much darker than we felt at the time. For once, there was no trace of anything ominous in the air. School was out, the weather was fine, our parents were otherwise occupied. What wasn't to love? Our family drama had become part of the background by then, just another thing we weren't allowed to talk about. There was nothing to do but carry on.
At Grandmother's house in the next county, all the family had arrived. If our own house was like a sailboat, grandmother's house was like a tall ship in a storm. The adults sat around the kitchen table and whispered while the rest of us cousins (how many by then, 20? 24?) ran about like wild things, playing with Anna's little dog or swapping cassette tapes and comic books. At nightfall, Anna and Edward would be coming home with us, dog included. The dog! Over mother's hysterical protestations, the dog had to come too, there was no way around it. She tried to insist it be kept in cardboard box for the duration, a plan that fell apart within the hour. Score one for us.
That night, at the Sac-n-Pac on the edge of town, we raided the candy aisle for packets of Razzles and those cheap wax bottles with kool-aid inside.When mother didn't give us the death glare but simply paid up, it occurred to me that the rules were different for cousins. We sat in the back of the station wagon with the dog and our candy, the night wind whipping our faces. For the moment, adult tribulations had given us free pass.
...
I'd never thought our house was mysterious, or not very, or at least not for a long time. With Anna in it, it became mysterious. I suppose it was seeing it through someone else's eyes, but then again I'm inclined to say it was because Anna herself was mysterious. A curious sense of anticipation bubbled up in the corners when she was there. As we sat on the floor of my bedroom, Anna unpacked her belongings, full of arcane things like Blondie records and old issues of Punk magazine. Our ages weren't even in the double digits yet, so how the girl had laid hands on Punk magazine I can't imagine, but there they were. We put the magazines in the stack along with my collection of Nancy Drews. We did not find this even slightly ironic at the time.
Anna had brought her piano music, too, so we could play duets and she could keep up with her lessons while she was away. What this really meant was that we played duets while making up rude lyrics to every song in the Leila Fletcher piano course, books two and three.
All around the neighborhood we ranged that month. This was a new thing for me - I'd never previously been allowed to wander, but again, rules were different with cousins. Besides, we had to walk the dog. While our brothers exploded leftover fireworks in the yard, Anna and I clattered down the hills in our Dr Scholls, plotting and scheming while her little dog nosed around in the sweet-smelling grass. Once, we walked to the river with mother, who gossiped with the neighbors on the way. Mr. Jonas next door said how much I looked like Lady Diana. Anna snorted at this, but I recognized it as the compliment it was meant to be, maybe the first compliment I'd ever had. Anna twirled her Jordache purse with studied casualness, and said she'd rather look like Debbie Harry anyway.
Inside the house, we were up to no good. When we weren't watching The Facts of Life and eating Chef Boyardee pizza, we were inventing secret codes and signals. Surveillance was gleefully carried out with tape recorders, messages passed through windows. All sightlines in the house and yard were carefully noted, as well as the silhouette of mother in her studio, where she spent hours on the phone.
One afternoon, the house seemed unusually empty. The brothers must have been out somewhere, and Anna was nowhere in evidence. She wasn't spying through the fence out back or in the ash tree out front. Nor was she at the piano, the utility room or the shed. She wasn't even in the bathroom, where the curtain flapped (in a certain lonely way) in the breeze. Clouds were billowing up in the west and the wind chimes were just beginning to ring when I finally found her around the corner of the house. She had a secretive smile on her face.
"Look at this" she whispered, pulling out a book from behind her back. "It was in the bathroom." She tried to stifle a laugh. I didn't get the joke - it was just one of my brother's sci-fi /fantasy books that propagated like mushrooms around the house. I'd seen this one a thousand times. It was called "A Feast Unknown" by Philip Jose Farmer.
"Well, did you ever look at it?"
"Of course not. Why would I read my brother's books? Especially if it's been in the bathroom. Ugh."
Anna looked around surreptitiously then thrust the book in my hands. "you mean to tell me there's dirty books lying around the house and you don't even notice!"
Indeed. I looked at the text and saw with alarm that it seemed to describe some kind of naked wrestling match. One of the naked wrestlers may have been Tarzan. And my brother had left it in plain sight, so sure that no one in the house would pick it up. Well, he was right, but he hadn't bargained for Anna.
Of course, after that, we went into our brothers' room and scoured through the rest of their books. That's how we found out that sci-fi was surprisingly filthy. We were the picture of innocence when they came home, scoffing and mocking the way they usually did. We were untroubled, content in our superiority. We knew their secret. They read dirty books.
It was August by then, and the corn was being harvested in the fields below town. A lone corn husk, blown by some updraft, sailed into the neighborhood and into the yard. I knew then that summer was almost over.
The night before my cousins had to leave, I dreamt that we were searching for Anna's dog, lost in the dark. I stumbled into a secret passage behind the fence, a tunnel of wild brush and flowers all limned with the most beautiful light. I crawled along in this mysterious place, where I found the dog playing with luminous moths that fluttered in the grass. I woke to the sound of Anna calling her dog and the sharp slam of the car door. I knew from the cold look in my mother's eye that my reprieve was over, the fun was all over. A rumble of thunder in the distance added the finishing touch.
The memories would remain, though, in places the adults couldn't reach.
Cicadas in the trees, moths in the grass, a bend in the road, the rustle of corn fields at the end of summer.
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