(photo & inspiration from Andrea)
We shaved our legs that Summer, remember? Both of us crammed in the stall together in the shower of the (the what, the changing room, is that what it’s called?) at the line of dunes between the house and the shore, fighting over the Lady Bic plucked from your cousin’s suitcase, arguing about how far up we were supposed to go, and with the hair, or against it? I lost my balance and toppled us both, earning each of us a bruise that would draw your father’s unwelcome scrutiny to our newly-smooth thighs— (please oh please don’t look any closer)!
We were still children, though, that Summer. Remember? We would ride our bikes in, spend hours at the stationery store carefully selecting Lisa Frank stickers for our albums (yours— pristine, the work of a strict collector; mine— incomplete, pages torn out, stickers actually stuck on it and on each other, rather than preserved on their original backing sheets), play with kaleidoscopes and push our hands into bins of cool polished stones in that hippie store, try to perform balance-beam routines on the raised wood borders of the landscaping that unified the shops.
We were bad, though, or ready to be, aching for crimes we couldn’t name. Raised without religion, how did we manage to know we wanted to sin? The boys that worked at the stable, tan and freckle-shouldered, with backs and arms and chests that suddenly seemed like of course they ought to be touched? They gave me the first hello (because that was the birthright of the fair-haired-girl in a town like that), but they quickly realized that I was the pretender to the place, and it was your family who belonged. In English tack, you were transformed, Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet, perhaps a glimpse of Grace Kelly. The boys we’d watched in secret as they worked, they offered their cupped hands for your riding boot, but you could mount easily by the stirrup, unassisted, and did so without a thought. Did you even know this only heightened your appeal?
Your brother wasn’t there the whole time that Summer, right? Just a week? I don’t think I ever told you that I fucked him a few years later. You were slipping away from me, you had already changed schools, you were better at drinking and smoking than me…I was an embarrassment, and a jinx. I fucked him when all I wanted was to be beside you on the bench seat of the station wagon, laughing and unashamed in the Summer sun.
Remember?
I LOVE this!
