Leave Your Stepping Stones Behind

A short story that was first published in the The Women’s Times

In the dead middle of summer, in the dead middle of Massachusetts, the leaves are so green and full you could give up the stars for them. I am in back of the family car, on the way to that crooked fenced sandy finger of Cape Cod, via the Mass Pike from our home in the Berkshires. All the anonymous mill towns of the central part of the state streak by like melting emeralds – Ludlow, Belchertown, Ware – towns with names not trying to pretend they’re anything they’re not. But then who am I to judge, I am coming from Pittsfield. The signs on the highway match so completely with their surroundings that if I squint my nearsighted eyes, it’s as if the names of the towns are floating, suspended in the trees. I wonder about who made these signs: did Irish immigrants, lonely for their homeland, paint them with aching hearts on some bitter winter day only to discover come blushing spring that they had captured the soul of their native island along this faraway stretch of road? Or did an ambitious government official in Boston commission a corporation to come up with a unique shade – “Massachusetts Ivy”? I am at the age where I still think about these things.

I am 16 and mortified that I have been talked into going to the Cape with my parents. Right now, my friends are running these forests that I am watching through the window. Tonight I know they’ll drink sweating cans of beer in a dewy wooded hideaway, somewhere hard to get to for cops and hopefully bears. They will laugh around a roaring fire like a band of debaucherous fairies, gathering in the moonlight to create mischief or perchance fall in love, while I sit in a musty one floor cottage and lose a game of Scrabble by at least 100 points to my parents. In the front of the car, said Scrabble geniuses share a bag of Pistachios (complete with teeth-cracking shell removal sound affects) and laugh at a particularly geriatric episode of “Prairie Home Companion.” My father’s laugh is low and guttural, the sort of laugh that follows an inappropriate comment; my mother’s laugh is shrill and punctuated with snorts. I put on my headphones and retreat to my newly found world of Bob Dylan. With images of sad-eyed ladies and little boys lost, I let my mind wander naturally back to Jimmy.

I’ve got these memories so tight under lock and key, I must measure how often I visit them. Each time I look them over, they lose a little luster, so I take them out cautiously and examine every exquisite detail with the utmost care. I start with his scent. I can smell his soft shirts, washed with some kind of fabric softener my mother never explored. He always smells like hot, clean laundry and being next to him makes me feel fresh and new. I go on to savor the shape of his dark features, eyes like twisted dirty rope and skin like a strong cup of tea. Then I get greedy quickly go through every part – his chewed up fingernails, his scabbed and knobby knees, his taut and unfathomabley narrow stomach. I stall myself with these images before I think of when he kissed me. If I’ve waited long enough since the last memory session, at the moment his lips touch mine, my insides will tighten and drop like one large aggie marble down a jar of honey.

In the time it takes me to recreate the nuances of this well-preserved scene, my parents have launched into a fight. I take off my headphones because I don’t want their voices compromising Bob’s harmonica. The argument is concerning the angle of the passenger side mirror. To compensate for the 75% visibility created in the front seat by my father’s overhanging Kayak on the roof and the 25% visibility created by my mother’s bike strapped on the back, my father has decided he needs the use of the passenger side mirror, one he prides himself on not needing. My father instructs my mother, in increments of centimeters, as to the optimal placement of the mirror. “I am turning it effing UP!” my mother yells. “We’ve got a ways to go UP,” my father says. “Alright, keep going…” he sighs in frustration “KEEP going – NO! STOP! Ok, WAY too far up now.” I imagine myself kicking them simultaneously in the backs of their heads.

As is often the case with my feelings towards my parents, the anger soon subsides, or rather, reaches a fiery death, but then the ashes well up together and swoop over me like a Phoenix of guilt. It is this gentle washing over of recalcitrant compassion that causes me to accompany them into depths where no teenager would dare tread. It’s my only child status and their aged parent status that make me statistically more likely to spend time with them. My mother is 58 and my father is 62; I was more an afterthought to their marriage than a product of it, so you’d think they’d let me have more of a life of my own. But they beg me with the persistence of a stray puppy to come with them to poetry readings, political rallies, whitewater rafting, cross country skiing, blueberry picking, nature hiking, documentary watching, and even once (albeit, through a misunderstanding of the title “Jude’s Jewels”) – erotic film watching. And I always go. I even go when there is a party Jimmy will be at. I go and I make them laugh – at the bad poetry or the giant blueberry and we were even able to laugh at Jude’s jewels, in all their glory.

Right now, in the backseat I share with my mother’s rug hooking and my father’s books on Polymer Viscoelasticity (beach reading), no stretch of fine Cape Cod sand is going to compare to the tiny stretch of Jimmy’s lower back. As the positioning of the mirror outburst transitions into a lively discussion of gas prices, I put my headphones back on and close my eyes, hoping I can absorb some of my waking dream into my sleeping one.

As I drift off, it’s not at all Jimmy I see. I’m looking out the window again but the green has become blue. I might be traveling underwater. Out the window, rushes of deep navy are jetting through soft clouds of light blue pockets. This blue world, it’s wonderful and it is somehow answering all the questions that were wandering wordlessly in my mind. And my body feels all electric and light as air. I think of swimming and the blues turn into gentle currents. I think of flying and the blues turn into ribbons of sky. I suddenly remember my parents in the front seat. I can’t wait to tell them, to show them all of this, to tell them I understand so much now, that I know what it means to be Tangled Up in Blue. I turn from the blue symphony and reach my hands between the two front seats and stick my head between them – but they are gone. The seats are empty; the car is driving itself. The wheel slightly aligns itself with the rhythm of the road, in time with the steady murmur of the wheels on the highway. The wind outside is wailing mechanically, like the rise and fall of some part in a giant clock. I look out at the world flying in front of me, the road coming at me all at once and I go to scream. Just as I realize I can’t take a breath, I gasp awake with a gulp of air.

I sit up and see my parents in the front seat. They are holding hands across the gearshift and Nina Simone is crackling on the radio from some off shore station. We are driving along the highway next to the ocean in Hyannisport and the sun is dropping in the sky, drizzling light all along the horizon. Dusk has filled the car and the wind is moving gently through the trees like a mother’s hand through her child’s hair. The sky has gone a dark blue but, thank God, it’s not like any blues from my dream. It is a stationary hue, for now, deep and solid in the sky where it will stay until it is swallowed by the black of night. There is a streak of pink gliding in the blue with edges that bleed a blush over the light side of the sky. I think the sun has not set this time, it really has disintegrated into the sky. My hands are sweaty and as I look down at them they seem to disappear because of the fading light of the fast approaching night. The night, and the music, they are conspiring to make my heart bust; it feels like it’s full of tears. Suddenly Jimmy and all the parties in the woods under that bright teenage moon mean nothing. There is only this night, with its gloom sinking twilight over this tiny strip of land jutting out into the ocean and these people in the front seat who watch the road ahead. My father’s profile is caught in a passing headlight and he is stroking his beard. I hear my mother singing along with the radio and her voice is like a meadowlark. I want to tell them to stop the car, because I suddenly feel that if we pull off Rt. 28 we will not journey any further through time. The pain in my heart is piercing now and it’s as if the marble has been shot up like a pinball and exploded into a thousand glass shards in my chest.

My mother turns around and takes my hand. “Great sunset, eh sweetie?” I grab her whole arm to my chest and cry with sobs that break against me like the ocean on the shore.

As the moon appears ever so faintly on the horizon, lovingly gazing over Nantucket Sound, I can’t stop crying. I see an image of myself on every pier we pass, trying to skip stones on the waves of the sea. I know when the stars come out they will laugh at me, thinking I could abandon them for this or any other summer.