My Fifteenth Summer
A story of sexual gratification mixed with sparkling, twinkling ennui
It was during my fifteenth summer that I turned fifteen for the first time.
She was much older, but that did not seem to matter to us.
Barney Ühlüûrch was fifteen too, but I didn’t know him and we would never meet. Yet I envied him those little squiggles over all his U’s. She told me she didn’t know him either, but I once found some briefs in her bedroom monogrammed B Ü. She denied everything, and tried to convince me that the Ü was just a smiley face.
Fifteen. And hot. I can remember that it was so hot that year you could fry eggs on the sidewalk. A pedestrian couldn’t go three feet downtown without stepping on a fried egg. The yokes and whites dripped off boot-heals like warm tofu, but with more cholesterol. Short order cooks filled block after block with Sunny-Sides and Over-Easies. Nearly every street corner held pile after pile of soufflés. Omelets lay like fields of wheat, stretching to the horizon. Street-sweeping machines stalled to a halt, their mechanisms clogged with bacon and sausage grizzle that had been lifted from the fat-smeared gutters. Technicians were flowed in from neighboring towns to strip clean the greased gears of the machinery.
Slices of toast lay wrinkled up against the sides of buildings; jelly-smeared postal boxes stood like soldiers awaiting their orders.
And we were hot, she and I. She was still beautiful and I remained fifteen.
&&&
She was an older woman, so much more mature than I—and the most beautiful creature I had ever laid eyes on. And I was so young.
Only fifteen.
She said to me, “Five years ago, you were only ten years old, and I was forty. I was four times older than you. Now you’re fifteen and I’m forty-five, just three times older. In fifteen years, you’ll be thirty and I’ll be sixty, just twice as old. You’re bound to catch up with me pretty soon.”
I told her that I felt like I was standing in the middle of an Abbot and Costello routine.
“You are,” she said. Then she added, “And I am standing there with you.” Then she added as an extra bonus, “Perhaps, we all are.” And she nodded her head with what we both felt was an air of wisdom and sagacity. As she often did back then. Many, many times, she did that. Nod, nod, nod, all the time. It was only later that I realized those so-called nods of wisdom were in reality twitches of early-onset Parkinson. But not that early. She was so much older than me. I was only fifteen, and I hoped she didn’t have anything catching.
I did not know back then that she would be the one to stand forever in my memory—the protean turning point of my life, the casting mold for my own persona, the stewardess on my fog-bound flight to maturity. I knew none of these things.
We had sex only three times that summer. And never at the same time.
She told me that she found all sexual liaisons to be draining, demeaning, and dry. I tried to convince her that it still beat Pickle Ball.
I would enjoy undressing her with my eyes, except when my eyebrows got caught in her zipper and she started to walk away
At fifteen, the only things I noticed about her were her incredible beauty and the fact that she stood before me crying. A stranger to me really, crying to no one, with her tears falling like rain drops.
So many tears, so many rain drops.
&&&
Each of my senses was swamped by her beauty that fifteenth summer, as I luxuriated in the sight of her muscles, the feel of her soft skin, the smell of her perfume, the taste of her key lime pie. Only my sense of hearing was immune to her charms, because I had somehow gotten both my ears stuffed with beans that summer, causing a season of blocked inner-ear cavities and near total deafness.
In the fall, my mother used a pair of needle-nosed pliers with yellow plastic handles to remove each of the beans. As she struggled with those beans, my Mom told me, “At least you didn’t get a baseball card caught up your nose,” while giving my brother a dirty look.
“It was only a Bob Cerv,” my brother offered in his defense. “I had doubles anyway.”
Bob Cerv was a reserve outfielder for the Yankees that summer, and he hadn’t been having a very good season, so my brother had folder his baseball card in half once, then again, and again, until the thickness of it nearly equaled its length and its width, like a child’s block, and then he had stuffed the card up his nose.
Our mother had used those same pliers to remove the Bob Cerv. During both extractions, she attempted to put our minds at ease by reminding us of tragedies much worse than these.
For instance, Queenie, our silver-dollar sized pet turtle, had choked to death on a clump of wet (fish) food. There were no food processors back then—which could have prevented the clumping, and there was no Heimlich maneuver—which could have neutralized it. And the trusty needle-nosed pliers with the plastic yellow grips were just too big and clumsy for successful reptilian tracheal extraction.
“These pliers are too big,” my mother said to me.
“What you say?” I said. “I can’t hear anything.”
“I said these pliers are too big, for Christ sake. What, you got beans in your ears?”
&&&
That older woman, that love of my life, as far as I know, had never used a pair of needle-nosed pliers on me or on anyone else. But she may have, once or twice, before our lives had joined, before I turned fifteen. As far as I knew, she remained plier-less, mostly a stranger to me, crying to no one, with her tears falling like rain drops.
&&&
Boy, she was stillstanding in front of me crying.
So many tears. So much rain.
Pedestrians ran for the cover of balconied store-fronts and canopies. “If it’s not the fried eggs, it’s the rain-tears,” they would complain good-naturedly, as the teary water washed into the storm drains like melted butter.
Our local television weathermen predicted more precipitation, more eggs, and with a grin he would take the good natured ribbing from the guy at the news desk. “Hey, I just predict the weather, I don’t cause it,” the weatherman would chuckle and repeat, many times per week.
He insisted that he wasn’t just a weatherman, but a college trained meaty urologist. He didn’t look that meaty to me, with those flimsy arms and turkey neck. Plus, he couldn’t come up with a remedy for the blisters on my scrotum, even when I wrote in. What kind of urologist is that?
She swore to me she had nothing to do with my blisters.
I also wrote the weatherman asking if a fifteen-year-old boy should be dating an older woman, but all he seemed to care about was the tears falling like rain.
The farmers of the Great Midwest remembered the parched earth and fried eggs of just a few days ago, and their faces relaxed, and they thanked God. It would be all right now.
In Idaho, a dam let loose and destroyed a trailer park. Displaced residents squatted blank-faced on the banks of the newly-formed river and fished for dinner and household utensils. One lucky man found a pair of pliers. They weren’t needle-nose, but that didn’t matter to him; he had no children with beans in their ears or baseball cards up their nose.
Back in town, my woman’s tears mixed with the dirt on the sidewalk and flowed brown and thick toward the gutter, taking with it the tired eggs, now turned thin and watery. Egg prices jumped geometrically as hard-pressed locals turned to alternatives. Middle-aged men with high lipid levels stooped to the sidewalk to retrieve products with names like “Egg-So-Fine” and “Not-Egg-Zactly.”
A visiting housewife who could not swim was almost saved by lifeguards, then had her lungs pumped out. The autopsy uncovered mucus and albumin.
&&&
She and I were to encounter each other many years later in Barcelona and Madrid. She was in Spain. I’m not talking about me and the woman with albumin in her lungs, I meant me and that older woman from my fifteenth summer.
She walked by me across that sunny Valencia sidewalk, asking strangers in English what city she was in. I was studying the ukulele at the time and failed to look up. If I had, I would have seen a decrepit but still beautiful woman. Except for around her eyes and face. And body. And hips. Her ass was nothing to write home about either.
She ordered a double Saviourgin, but the carwash said they were all out, so she had her undercarriage super-waxed instead.
We sat together at the café and thought back to that summer we had shared so many years before. I had been just fifteen. She asked me if I still had my paper route. When I told her no, she suggested we go around and try making collections anyway.
She told me she had a daughter, and I asked how old.
“She’s fifteen.”
“Fifteen, really? Wow, that’s really, really interesting. Do you think I could…?
“Keep it in your pants, Humbert.”
She asked me if I still had my ennui, but she spelled it N-U-E. I told her N-O. Well, maybe just a little. Actually, my ennui is still quite debilitating, but I didn’t care.
&&&
That is just about everything I remember from my fifteenth summer.
&&&
Oh, and there was something about English muffins, I remember. What was that?
And one time my ankles got so cold I had to put on wool socks.
And I had a dream that the Mona Lisa mooned me, but my therapist said it didn’t mean nothing.
“That’s a double negative, Doctor, does that mean is really doesmean something?”
“What?”
&&&
But that’s about all I remember of that summer. I really mean it this time, that’s it.
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