The Summer Before Boys

by Nora Raleigh Baskin

  The van braked with a lurch, at the entrance to Mohawk Mountain Lodge, just as the rain stopped and the sun broke through the mist and clouds and the last droplets of rain. Somebody once wrote, the secret to life is good timing.

  I think they are right.

  Because bad timing stinks.

  three

  My mom joined the National Guard on August 14, 2001. It was right after my dad got laid off from IBM and just before he found another job as the manager of Lloyd’s Gas and Service station. I was nine years old.

  Bad timing.

  “I’ll only be gone one weekend a month,” my mom told me. “And two weeks in summer. Like going to summer camp.” She was kneeling down in front of me, zipping up my jacket. I had trouble with zippers then. I couldn’t get the metal thing inside the other metal thing, at least not so it could work.

  I had tears in my eyes as if I had known—but how could I have known?—that there would be a war. Because back then I just didn’t want my mother to go away. Not for one weekend. Not for one hour. Not ever.

  “It’s extra money,” she told me. “So I can buy you the things you need and maybe some things you just want. Like that Powerpuff Girls lunch box?”

  And that made me happy. How sick is that? I was suddenly all excited about getting a Powerpuff lunch box because I really wanted one for my first day of third grade.

  I knew something had changed, but I got my lunch box—and for a while it was still okay.

  Once a month my mom went to Freehold, New Jersey, for training. Lots of troops were going to Afghanistan after 9/11, but real soldiers, active duty, reservists, not National Guard. Not weekend soldiers. Not my mom.

  Plus, Dad and I got to eat at Friendly’s for dinner those Friday and Saturday nights. I actually looked forward to it. My meal came with a free ice-cream sundae, hard candy eyes, upside-down cone for a hat.

  And for the next couple of summers, my mom went to “summer camp” and I went to stay with Uncle Bruce and Aunt Louisa (and of course Eliza, who, for the longest time, I thought was my cousin) because my dad worked all day and they couldn’t leave me alone every day for two whole weeks.

  Those were the best two weeks. Back then we were too young to hang around up at the hotel by ourselves, so every morning Aunt Louisa (who, I think, was even a little fatter back then, before she went on Weight Watchers) got up and drove us down the mountain and into town, to the Elting Memorial Library.

  Eliza and I ran inside and straight to the back, to the children’s section. It was cool and musty back there. It was in the old stone house section of the library. You could see the stones from the inside, bumpy and coated white with thick shiny paint.

  Aunt Louisa waited in the car with the air conditioning blowing on her full force, while Eliza and I grabbed Little House on the Prairie, or Anne of Green Gables, or Little Women.

  And every summer my mom and I, both, would come home with stories.

  But three years later, the day she left for Iraq, everything changed. I knew it when she cried and cried the night before. When my dad cried too. When we all drove to that big gym in Newburgh and stood with all those hundreds of other crying grown-ups.

  My mom hugged us so tight I could hardly breathe and I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to be the one to let go first. So I kept my face buried in between my mom and my dad and I said to myself, over and over: Everything will be all right if she doesn’t put on her hat. If she just doesn’t put on her hat.

  I hated her hat. It was tucked into the back pocket of her fatigues, as if she knew.

  Just don’t put on that ugly hat.

  I wasn’t crazy about the whole uniform, the mixing of tan and green and gray that covered her body from her neck to her feet and was supposed to help her blend in. To hide. To protect her.

  To protect her?

  So as long as she didn’t put that little patrol cap on her head, I could still see her hair. And if I could still separate her face from the uniform—then everything would be okay.

  “I gotta go now,” my mom said.

  I couldn’t look at her face. I could hear the sadness choking her voice. I kept my head down.

  My dad whispered something to my mom and then my mom told us both, “I’m going to go now. You two turn and head out. I’m going to go now. Everything is going to be all right. Don’t turn back around.”

  And I didn’t. So I don’t know if she put that cap on her head or not. It was the last time I saw her. That was seven months ago. She will be home by the end of August, before summer is over, they promised.

  She’d be home in twelve months, by the end of that August.

  She promised.

  four

  Everyone got out of the van at the beginning of the long entrance to the hotel, by one of many gardens—the one with mini-labyrinth of tall evergreen hedges and the hundreds of baby rose bushes. Because Eliza and I were on the steps, we were the first to stand up and get out. Directly in front of us white steam from the rain hovered just above the wet grass. Overhead, the sun was filtering down through the clouds in long fingers of light and the heat was already rising again as if it had never been gone at all, only hiding. Waiting.

  And then there was the hotel.

  It loomed too high and too far on each end to take it in completely from so close. There was the wooden section and the hundreds of green shuttered windows, which were the guests’ rooms, but all you could really see, standing right here by the entrance, was the stone archway and the stone porch. Stones that looked too big to be called stones—more like boulders—yet someone had once, a long time ago, placed them here and built this hotel around it. Under the massive stone arch, a damp coolness welcomed the carriages whose delicate spoked wheels rolled to a stop.

  In those days guests would have ridden all day, first on the train from the city into town and then up the bumpy roads right to this very spot. They would be dusty and tired. Or just excited and jumpy, anxious to stretch their legs.

  “Julia, c’mon.” Eliza called to me. She was already up on the porch. Technically, we really weren’t supposed to be in the hotel itself, we weren’t paying guests, so the quicker and smoother we slipped inside the better. I knew this. So why did I feel like I wanted to turn around and look back at those two boys? They were just stepping down, so I figured they waited until everyone else had gotten off and, even then, they were proceeding very slowly. The blond one pushed the darker-haired boy as he got to the last step, just enough to make him stumble. They were brothers for sure, I thought. I hurried to catch up with Eliza, through the wide glass doors.

  It was cool inside, dark and cool, thick with the smell of old wood and old wool. I could see hundreds of old-fashioned shoes walking over this very carpet, over thousands of days and millions of hours. But right now the hall was nearly empty. There was a couple standing at the registration desk checking in. The man, in a blue jacket, was talking to someone behind the counter and the woman, who was wearing all black—cropped pants and a tight tank top—was standing, with her feet straddling her luggage as if someone might just run by and grab it. They must be from New York City.

  Our own footsteps thumped past and echoed down the hall. We were headed to the gift shop.

  “Girls, girls. Where’s the fire? What’s the rush?” It was Pam, the ice-cream lady. Pam worked in the gift shop. She sat all day on her stool and rang up the people who were buying postcards and rock candy on a stick. Or Mohawk sweatshirts or stuffed animals that said I MOHAWK. Or a magnifying glass or a boxed set of little rocks. But we called her the ice-cream lady because she gave us free ice cream.

  There was a big freezer that slid open on top and inside were boxes and boxes of different kinds of ice cream. Fudgsicles, which aren’t really ice cream. Drumsticks. Push-Up Pops, not ice cream either. Ice-cream sandwiches. Chipwiches. Klondike Bars. Good Humor Chocolate Eclairs. And then there were lots of those stupid-baby ice creams in the shape of some cartoon character that got real messy and dripped red
and purple all over your arm before you could ever get to the bubble-gum nose.

  “Hi, Pam,” I said without looking up. My eyes just fell over all the objects in the gift shop. It was impossible not to look. There was just so much of everything. Pens and stationery. Stuffed animals. Cups and saucers. Aprons. Jewelry. Soaps, lots of pretty soaps. In here, it smelled like flowers and lemons and cinnamon.

  “Julia, you’re here for the whole summer this year, aren’t you?”

  “She is,” Eliza answered. “Her mom is still in Iraq and her dad is working. So she is staying with us all summer.”

  I knew what was going to follow.

  “Iraq, my goodness,” Pam said. “You must be so proud.”

  I wasn’t proud. I wasn’t proud at all. I mean I was. I was proud. I was proud that my mom was in the army, that she was fighting for our country. That she was so brave. And had given up so much to help other people, to protect our country. But no one really understood. They thought they did. Proud sounds like a happy thing and I wasn’t happy that my mother was in Iraq.

  But I was proud, too, so I said so.

  “Yeah, I guess.” And I must have looked like I was about to cry because I felt Eliza put her arm around me. Her shirt was still damp from the rain. She smelled like a body that had been sleeping, and a body that got wet, and that ran and that played. It was familiar and I was glad she was with me.

  “I’m sorry,” Eliza said. I knew she meant she was sorry for bringing it up, and sorry that it made me feel sad, but she was also sorry for me.

  She was sorry my mom was so far away. Sorry there was a war and some people didn’t come back, or they came back without their leg, or their hand, or their eyes. Or their memories. There was this lady, Mrs. Jaffe, who came to our school once a month just to meet with kids who had a mom or a dad on active duty, but me and Peter Vos were the only two kids in the whole school. Even though it felt good to talk to someone who knew what I was going through, I just wanted to get back to my class.

  Eliza was the only one who really seemed to understand. She was sorry just for me and to tell the truth having someone feel sorry for me wasn’t so bad.

  “I’m okay,” I said. I didn’t want to feel the stinging behind my eyes.

  “How about a little ice cream,” Pam broke in. “On me.” Which was funny since it was always “on her” but we had all agreed some time ago, without ever saying so, to act like it was the first time. The only time.

  Until next time.

  Eliza picked the Snoopy on a stick with the black collar and bubble-gum nose. And I did too.

  five

  Eliza and I ate our ice creams on the porch. The rockers were for the old people and paying customers, so we sat on the porch steps overlooking the lake. When the lake was still, and the sun was shining, like it was now, the water was a mirror and the whole hotel hung upside down in the perfect glass for all time.

  “Whatcha want to do?” Eliza asked me.

  “Nothing. How about you?”

  “Nothing, either.”

  So that’s what we did.

  For the longest while we just sat there, our ice creams finished and only invisible but sticky remnants on our fingers and chins. Guests and staff walked by, up and down the stone steps, and all around us. The staff all wore green polo shirts with the neatly stitched Mohawk Mountain Lodge insignia on the left and a rectangular name tag pinned on the right.

  Everybody else was guests, except for me and Eliza.

  And Mrs. Smith.

  “Girls. The stairs?” Mrs. Smith didn’t have to use very many words. She was tiny, but packed into a compact body that commanded attention and fear. She was probably old, too, but it was hard to tell. Her hair was cut short and tight, and was jet-black, but then again so was my grandmother’s. You didn’t want to stare at Mrs. Smith’s face long enough to really figure it out.

  She was a Smith, of course, of the Smith Family who had built this hotel two hundred years ago. Anything and everything having to do with the Mohawk Mountain Lodge went through her first, and last. I suppose we were clogging up the stairs. When Mrs. Smith shook her head, we just took off.

  “Wanna go on one of the trails?” Eliza asked me. We slowed from our run and were walking that way anyway, heading in the direction of the hiking trails and the walking paths, leaving the hotel, the stairs, and Pam the ice cream lady farther behind us.

  “Sure.”

  We liked to take the tended walking path, the tiny road cut into the woods, scattered carefully with the tiny, sharp pieces of shale from the quarry below. It twisted in and out, but always up and up until you reached the very top. Even the old ladies and men could manage the walking paths, slowly, but they walked along and made their way to the tower where you could look out onto four states. I don’t know which ones but they say it’s four.

  But real hikers, even professional mountain climbers, came into town and up to Mohawk to hike the real trails, The Falls, The Lemon Squeeze, The Cat Walk, and Death Valley.

  “It’s so hot again,” I said.

  “Yeah, but imagine if we had to wear those long dresses like in the olden days.”

  “And petticoats,” I added, keeping my eyes ahead and focused down. “And wool stockings, even in the summer.” Somehow this made my world more bearable.

  The path grew narrower then wider and then narrower again. In very steep sections, there were railroad ties holding the shale in place and creating steps for a giant. And every so often the path jutted gently toward lakeside and presented the walker with a wooden gazebo to stop and rest.

  Eliza and I rested in every single one.

  “Nothing is different in the world,” Eliza said. She hung her arms over the twisted branch of tree that served as the railing.

  I thought to myself, No, everything is different.

  Our country was at war. It was far away from here, and most people never even thought about it, but it never rested. And every day, soldiers and doctors and military police and cooks and engineers came home different from when they left. Mrs. Jaffe who came to my school tried to get me and Peter to talk about it but neither one of us wanted to.

  “My dad’s a hero,” Peter said. “He’s really brave and there’s nothing I want to talk about.”

  “He certainly is, Peter. No one is ever going to say differently. I just thought you might want to talk a little bit about how you feel these days, alone in the house with your mom and sister. It must be hard sometimes.”

  Peter shot the lady a look—but it didn’t seem to stop her. It was like she was expecting that.

  “You don’t live on a military base. Neither of you.” Mrs. Jaffe looked at me. “You don’t have the support system. Most of these kids don’t even know there’s a war going on.”

  I was relieved when the bell rang. And so was Peter. He wiped his eyes and darted out the door.

  Nothing is different in the world, Eliza had said.

  But even though Eliza was wrong and Mrs. Jaffe was right, I let Eliza’s white and faded jean shorts turn to muslin. I watched her messy, long hair collect under a make-believe wide-brimmed hat. If we had a parasol, I saw that, too. If I could feel the laced-up knickers under my dress, then maybe nothing in the world would be different.

  “Father says exercise is good for the mind,” Eliza said, “and body. Healthful living.”

  “A wise man, indeed,” I said, because in the old days people said things like that, like “indeed.” We stepped out of the gazebo and continued upward. The sun was now well above the trees, clinging to one spot, it felt, burning right above our heads.

  “Mother will reprimand us if our dresses are so dirty,” Eliza said.

  I looked down at the eyelet hem of my white skirt, splattered with damp mud and specks of shale, my flat ballet slippers nearly filthy.

  “Oh, who cares?” I shouted. “We are free!”

  “We are free. No tutoring for a month. No sewing lessons all summer. No dance lessons. We can swim today if w
e want.”

  “Or take out a rowboat.”

  “Or sneak into the kitchen.”

  We were nearly at the top, the highest point of all Mohawk Mountain, where you could see those four states. The very top, where the stone watchtower reached straight up into the sky, where you could climb the winding stairs, and then walk out on the stone terrace, lean your body out into the world and fly.

  That summer before boys, I knew I could fly if I had to. I knew my legs would work, my arms would move, my chest would fill with air. My skin could bear the bites of a million mosquitoes, splinters, and sunburns. My body never let me down.

  “Julia, there’s something I have to tell you. I’ve wanted to tell you.”

  We were out of breath from taking the stairs two at a time.

  “Mother says it’s time for me to devote myself to my studies and housework.” Eliza placed her hands on the cold stone wall, but didn’t stretch any farther. “She’s says it’s time for me to become a young lady.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked. A million real and make-believe thoughts jumped into my head. It was impossible to tell them apart. No more games? No more hikes? No more running outside in our nightclothes and holding fireflies in our cupped hands?

  “I think she wants me to start entertaining suitors.” Eliza hung her head.

  “No,” I said in disbelief.

  “It isn’t up to me, Julia. You know that. If you had a mother it would be the same for you. We are nearly thirteen years old. You are free. I am not.”

  “Then we shall make a pact,” I said. I pulled Eliza away from the wall. I took her two hands in mine and brought them to my chest. “We will be friends forever. Never will any boy come between us. You will turn down every suitor until your mother and father give up.”

  “Oh, Julia—do you think that could work? Do you?”

  I loved the smile I saw come back into her eyes.

  “It has to,” I said.

  “Then it will.”