The Summer Before Boys

by Nora Raleigh Baskin

  I listen to my dad telling Aunt Louisa that my mom is due to come home any day now. Or rather, any day now we will be getting word of her exact arrival date. I wonder if grown-ups really think you can’t hear them when they lower their voices.

  He is talking about what’s going on in the war.

  The trees are rushing past my window, too fast.

  He’s talking about what he heard on the news this morning. I can make out every other word or so.

  The shrubs. Hills of grass. Even the pavement is eaten up under the car in a matter of seconds.

  In Vietnam eight military women died, not from the flu or in a plane crash, but were killed. Like all the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of men in war before them. A lot of people were against the war in Vietnam. There were demonstrations all over the country. People who were against the war put bumper stickers on their cars showing how they felt.

  MAKE LOVE NOT WAR.

  And then other people put stickers on their cars that said, AMERICA: LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT.

  Vietnam is called the Unpopular War, which has got to be the strangest expression ever. Can there really be such a thing as a popular war?

  Eliza is in the gift shop. She is sitting on Pam’s stool behind the counter. I can see her through the glass window in the hall but she can’t see me. Or at least not unless she looks up. She seems to be counting something. I can see Pam helping a customer pick out a postcard from the rack.

  “I can tell you one thing.” I feel Mrs. Smith behind me, before I can register her voice. She even puts her hand on my shoulder. “There will be plenty of boys, Julia. Plenty of boys.” And she heads off down the hall before I can figure out what she means by that.

  “Julia!”

  Then Eliza is standing in the hall next to me. We don’t even say a word. We don’t wait another minute. We just wrap our arms around each other.

  “Eliza, I am so sorry,” I say. “You are my best friend. I missed you so much.”

  “I’m sorry too, Julia.”

  All of a sudden I am flooded with all the things I want to tell her.

  About school, my teachers. I want to ask her about Tamara and Sophie.

  Hey, since when are you friends with Tamara and Sophie?

  I have to tell her about my mother coming home.

  I’m scared my mother will come home like Peter’s dad.

  About the party my dad and I are planning to have.

  I’m afraid I’ve changed so much my mother won’t recognize me.

  How can we have a party for my mom’s homecoming without Eliza? We can’t—and now we don’t have to.

  “You girls look like you could use an ice cream,” Pam is saying. I see she is waving at us from inside the gift shop.

  I reach inside the freezer and take out an ice-cream sandwich. I take out two and I hand one to Eliza.

  “Thanks,” she says.

  “This one’s on me.” Pam smiles.

  forty-one

  My mother will come home from Iraq. It will be a Tuesday afternoon. We are driving out to the airfield in New Jersey to meet her plane. On the way we bought balloons and flowers.

  My heart was beating so hard.

  My heart will be beating so hard.

  My heart is beating so hard.

  Eliza comes with us. We both sit in the back and my dad complains he feels like a limo driver. But he smiles the whole way like he can hardly contain himself. After the e-mail a week ago, we got the actual phone call just two days ago with the schedule for arrival, the time and the place. My whole language arts and social studies class made cards that I had in my backpack, even though my dad tells me we should wait until she settles in to show her.

  Ms. Jaffe had a special meeting with just me and we talked about all my fears. For some reason, knowing Eliza was waiting for me outside the door, I just let everything out. I talked and talked and talked.

  “It’s normal to feel that way,” Ms. Jaffe explained. “A lot has happened in the past year. You’ve changed a lot and grown. And there will be some time for adjustment.”

  We had graduated to the guidance counselor’s office so there were not alphabet posters for me to stare at. I was sitting in a big leather chair.

  “Above all else,” Ms. Jaffe said, “keep talking. Don’t censor yourself or beat yourself up. If you feel like crying, cry. “

  Her permission made me feel better.

  There are hundreds, or what feels like hundreds, of people at the landing strip. Mothers with babies in their arms and kids with signs. WELCOME HOME. WE MISS YOU. BEST MOTHER IN THE WORLD. BEST FATHER. NEW DADDY. PROUD TO BE AMERICAN.

  Like walking, living bumper stickers. The love is nearly visible. The excitement is contagious.

  “I should have made a sign,” I say to Eliza.

  “We just have to shout louder than anyone,” she answers.

  The plane is huge as it taxies closer and closer. I can hardly breathe. But maybe that’s because I squeezed into last year’s jeans and T-shirt. I wanted to wear something familiar. Something my mother would recognize.

  When the plane wheels finally stop moving and the loud sound of the engine is cut, the door begins to open. The metal stairs are pushed into place. Suddenly the roar is deafening and I realize it is all the families. There is crying and shouting and even screaming. There is a baby wailing from having been woken up. I don’t even know I am crying until my throat starts to hurt and I taste mucus on my lips.

  Because I see her right away. She stands a minute at the top of the stairs like she is scared too. Like she is wondering if we will know who she is. Maybe for a split second she wonders if we are really here.

  She is a little thinner than I remember, but she’ll like that. Her face is tan. Her camouflage hat is in her hand. I watch as she pulls her hair out of her ponytail and gives her head a little shake.

  “Mommy!” And my voice carries above the music of the families. She jerks her head toward us and the huge smile that spreads across her face tells me everything.

  My mother is home safe.

  forty-two

  It’s not over completely. There are still moments when the magic is working. And there are moments when it doesn’t, no matter how hard I want it to. And there are still moments when I get really mad for no reason, and I don’t know why.

  But today, Eliza and I are making paper dolls of Lester and Lynette so no matter what happens, we won’t forget who they were. Like sometimes, I feel like I am forgetting who I used to be. I sure don’t know who I am going to be. It’s like being stuck in the Lemon Squeeze. It doesn’t feel real good.

  My mom is making us a snack before she has to leave for work. She got a new job at a pediatrician’s office in town, but she makes sure to be home when I get back from school. The only thing I’ve noticed is that she gets up in the middle of the night sometimes. I hear her in the kitchen or when she turns on the television. Or once I saw her just sitting in the dark.

  The quiet, she told me. She forgot the quiet.

  “Lester doesn’t look like that,” Eliza tells me, inspecting my handiwork.

  “How do you know what Lester looks like?”

  Eliza smiles. “I know exactly what Lester looks like, don’t you?”

  We are sitting on my bedroom floor. I’ve always liked coloring. My mom drew the outline of the figures and we are filling them in with colored pencil. It’s kind of babyish but it’s relaxing.

  “This is what he looks like,” I say, but I don’t really know anymore. Lester and Lynette feel like people I knew a long time ago. I remember them, but I can’t really conjure up their faces. My Lester has brown hair and brown eyes. He looks kind of like Peter if I think about it, and I mention this to Eliza.

  “You are boy crazy,” she tells me. “I saw you talking to him in the hallway today.”

  “Who?”

  “You know who,” Eliza says. She is coloring in Lynette’s long dress with the entirely wrong color.

  “I don’t l
ike like Peter,” I say, but she’s right, sometimes I can’t think of anything else but boys. Eliza and I made a new vow, a pact, in real life, and I am sticking to it. I could have as many boyfriends as I liked as long as I always remember who my best friend is.

  I can do that.

  “Well, I hope you’ll be able to spell his name right, at least,” Eliza says. Then she immediately throws her hand over her mouth.

  “Okay, what are you talking about?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on, tell me, Liza. You have to tell me now.”

  She is peeking out from her hand. Her eyes wide. “You won’t get mad at me? You can’t remember?”

  “Swear I won’t get mad.” But of course, I can’t really say that for sure. I can only remember that Eliza is my best friend and I need my best friend. Boys will come and go, just like Mrs. Smith said.

  “Tell me already!”

  “Well—” Eliza clearly doesn’t want me to know something. She did something she shouldn’t have and she’s worried I’m going get upset. I know her so well. I want to put my arms around her and tell her there’s nothing she could have done that would make me not like her anymore.

  Love her.

  So I do. And she tells me.

  “I read your diary,” she says. “The one you hid in the cabinet under the sink in the bathroom back at my house. The one where you wrote Michael’s name over and over.”

  I am less upset than I’d thought I’d be. “So?” I say. “And?”

  “You spelled his name wrong. Every time. Over and over. It’s Michael, M-I-C-H-A-E-L. Not E-A.” And then she waits.

  I think about this for a minute. Michael. All the dreams I’ve made up come back to me, all the nights I spent fantasizing about ways I might run into him up at the hotel one day, and then like a movie-reel projector, the whole thing comes grinding to a halt. I can even hear the background music slowing down and getting all distorted.

  “I did?”

  She nods.

  “I spelled his name wrong?”

  She nods again.

  “I spelled his name wrong, like, a hundred and fifty times?” A huge laugh is breaking out inside my stomach.

  “Yeah, like, a hundred and sixty times. In pink magic marker!”

  We are both squealing. There’re lots of different kinds of magic.

  winter 2005

  “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

  —Albert Einstein

  forty-three

  There is still a war going on. It’s on the news every day. Eight hundred and forty-one United States military have died in Iraq—this year alone.

  And my mother is not one of them.

  But hardly a day goes by I don’t think, She could have been. Or that somebody else’s mother or father is. It took me a long time after my mom got back, to not wake up in the middle of the night and worry if she was home or not. I can’t even admit how many nights I crawled into my parents’ bed.

  “Peter’s dad is going back,” I say to my mom. “He wants to go back.”

  We are baking in the kitchen, like it’s the most ordinary thing in the world, but it isn’t. Not for me. My mom is here.

  “I heard that too,” my mom says.

  “But why would he do that?”

  We are making cupcakes for my class because tomorrow is my birthday. I’m going to be thirteen. My mother puts down the bowl and wipes her floury hands on her pants, just like she tells me not to do but these days she probably wouldn’t say anything. Little things like that don’t bother her anymore. If there has been any change, my mother is calmer since she’s come home.

  “I don’t know, sweetie, and I imagine it’s hard for Peter and his mother, but we should all be grateful there are soldiers like that.”

  “I am.”

  I am pulling apart the little paper liners and placing them one by one into the baking pan while my mom is stirring, a blue one, a red one, a yellow one. “Mom?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Mom?”

  This time she just waits for me to talk. “Do you think it’s silly that Eliza and I still play make-believe?”

  “No, not at all,” my mom says. “Sometimes when I was sitting for hours, waiting for incoming wounded, I thought I was going to go crazy, just waiting. Feeling scared—not knowing what was going to happen. Or what I was going to see.”

  “You were scared?”

  “Sure, sometimes. So I would just play a game in my head, like pretending I was somewhere else. Doing something else.”

  We are ready to pour the batter into the little paper cups. “Hold the pan still,” my mom tells me and she lifts the big bowl.

  “Like what?” I ask.

  “Well, I used to imagine I was at a dance, like a high school dance, with Daddy like when we were young. I used to think about what shoes I would be wearing, what color my dress was. What my hair looked like—you know.”

  “Did it help?”

  “Definitely, I know it did.” My mom fills each cupcake cup to the top and then puts down the bowl.

  “Mom?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can I ask you another question?”

  “Surely.” My mom opens the oven, slides the two cupcake pans inside, and shuts it with her foot.

  “When you were my age, were you boy crazy?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” she answered. “I was a bit slow in that department. I think I was still only interested in my Cabbage Patch dolls in seventh grade.”

  “Your what?”

  She is smiling. “Wanna see them?”

  “Really?”

  “Sure, in the attic. C’mon.”

  So while my cupcakes are baking, we climb up the pull-down stairs and my mother shows me her Cabbage Patch doll collection, all their clothes, little boots, thermal blankets, hair clips—because, boy, do these dolls have hair—pink pacifiers, even make-believe diapers. My mom could remember not only the name each doll came with, but also the name she chose when she sent back the “adoption papers.”

  This afternoon, my last afternoon as a twelve-year-old, my mom and I sit cross-legged on the attic floor and we play. We are making up stories for what each doll has been doing all these many, many years, as my mother says. One of them, Gillian, just got married to her college sweetheart. Don is now a retired fireman who likes to take his boat out fishing. The one with the purple boots is a Vegas showgirl named Allison who just signed a modeling contract with Wilhelmina. The one with the dark hair is Tyler. He is a sports announcer now.

  And nobody is happier today than I am, sitting up here with Mom, except maybe Gillian, and Don, and Allison, and Tyler.