April 18, 2017

Pennsylvania Summers

          When I was 10 I'd lift an arm protector from my grandmother's ancient furniture and marvel at the bold rectangle concealed beneath. Brick-red and ivory and Hunter green—the stitched bouquets freshly picked, tight as Braille.
          The many summers had bleached everything, leveled the surface, and it was difficult to find secrets—but not impossible—when I was 10.
          Conversations overheard from another room were franker, had a different tone, but never do I remember anything said about my father—or my mother.
          The calf skin of his Oxfords was brittle, and the shoulders of his sports coats sagged on their hangers, but my grandmother's eyes moistened when I appeared, downstairs, in the stuff.
          The present and past had a collegial relationship in the large old house, telling different versions of the same stories but never sitting down to the table togetherat lunchtime, when bees gorged on fallen plums at the end of the yard and bluebirds rocked the wooden houses hung on the clothesline posts.
          It was hard to get my grandmother to talk about the past as she folded maraschino cherries into angel food batter or rubbed knuckles of delicates together in Borax in the bathroom sink.
          But I sat on the lid of the hamper and watched—when I was 10.
          When storms came through we all gathered in her bedroom—so habitually that I wondered if they were visible anyplace else. Cathedral tall, the single window in the room faced north, its sheers turning to neon in the darkness as we counted the seconds between the lightning and the thunder.
          Butter, milk, eggs, and bread—the crust breaking away from the loaf in golden sheets—came to the house, but no chums or old girlfriends of my father ever did, and his fable was never interrupted by evidence, or the bawdy corroboration of a war buddy—even though I was only 10.
          My grandmother still drove out to pick string beans or raspberries, angling the huge old Buick precariously on the side of the dirt road, and we pulled up to orchard stands for peaches, the engine never entirely cooling down in the July afternoon.
          The hub caps, like chrome chef's bowls, came off as she drove, and I'd have to run back to get them. The steering wheel was large as a yacht's, with a stentorian, musical horn. The smell of the interior—of old car—if you have not known it can be compared to nothing else. 
          It persisted in the airless darkness of the garage—when I was 10.