palm, to listen to more of her stories.
A sliding glass door opened, and a naked woman entered from the backyard. Nina introduced her as Sally. She was Summer’s mother’s sister. An aunt. Only no one called her that. They called her Sally. I remember turning away from her nakedness, a sight I did not want to acknowledge, although everyone else looked and did not say a word. In my home, the body was hidden and ignored or protected from strangers. Sally rubbed her arms and her breasts and her belly and her thighs with a large terry cloth towel and massaged lotion into her skin.
‘Sunbathing,’ Nina explained. To get the bronze Nina had. I wondered about my yellow skin, how it would deepen in the sun, and I thought about how much trouble I would be in if I ever stripped down to nothing and lay outside to burn.
Sally slipped into a bikini and joined us. Hunter grabbed a bowl with a pipe and announced it was time for a peyote feast. Sky and his girls gathered around on the carpet. Nina and Summer joined them. I stood, waiting to be invited. Nina smiled and patted the space beside her. I slipped between Nina and Summer and felt exhilarated and frightened. My chest tightened in the billows of sweet-smelling smoke. The bowl and pipe were passed around the circle after each person inhaled a few breaths. When it was my turn, the heat from the pipe stung my throat. I coughed and choked. My head spun. Nina’s face, with its gentle brown creases, grew large and floated like a giant moon in a pale sky. She shook my shoulders gently. ‘Are you all right, child? Breathe. Deeply. From the bottom of your chest. Feel your belly expand. That’s right. Slower. Steady, now. Don’t go too fast. That’s it. Do you want to try again?’
I did not know whether or not I wanted to try again. Someone was knocking on the front door. Someone was yelling my name. My mother.
Hunter answered the door. Nina joined him. Voices rose and fell. I thought about the hurt in my belly, the tightness in my chest, the swelling in my head. I did not want to go home to precision and order, responsibility and consequence, rules and regulations, silence and lack of love. I wanted to stay in the chaos of smoke and music and exotic foods and vivid stories, of nakedness and openness and acceptance and love. I wanted to sleep beside Summer with her arms around me, her naked belly pressed against my naked back, not alone with an armor of cotton around me. I wanted to listen to the strange rhythms of guitars, not to the sappy love songs or brokenhearted tunes my mother played on the radio. More than anything, I wanted the freedom of Summer’s world.
Nina drifted around the corner, looking for me. ‘Your mother is asking about you,’ she said. ‘I told her not to worry. I would walk you home.’
I stood up, dizzy and nauseated. Nina linked her arm around my waist and led me outside. I could see my parents’ house down the street with its yellow stucco and bright red trim. My family was different. I knew how others judged us-except for Summer and her family. They were different, too.
I stared at Nina’s bare feet against the pavement. She smiled and wiggled her toes. ‘I can feel the vibrations of the earth on its axis. It is the pulse of the universe.’
‘Aren’t you afraid of stepping on glass and cutting your feet?’
‘All cuts heal.’ Nina hugged me close. Her flowing gown smelted damp. ‘Nothing can be broken that can’t be fixed, you understand? We are human, strange and wonderful. We are meant to be broken. By pain. By grief. By disappointment. By each other.
But we are made whole through love and forgiveness. Remember that, and you will never be lonely.’
She stroked my hair and kissed my cheek. ‘I hope you come visit us again.’ Though I did not say it, I knew I would never again be allowed back into Summer’s home. Nina and I walked, hand in hand, down the sidewalk and across the street. Nina stopped at the front door and waited until my mother answered. No words were exchanged. My mother’s angry stare bored into me. I shuddered in my skin, already feeling her icy words in my body, her violent pleas to be obedient, to honor my father’s demands.
After I stepped inside, I bolted for my room and closed the door. My mother did not knock, but just stepped inside and said, ‘Tell me what possessed you to go over to that girl’s house when your father told you not to? I was worried sick, don’t you understand? I knocked on every neighbor’s door. No one knew where you were. I called the police. I called your father at work. I thought you had been kidnapped and raped and killed. I thought you were never coming home.’
Tears crested in my half-moon eyes. I held my breath, determined not to let them fall.
‘You know better than to sneak around behind our backs. You are grounded for a month. I’m going to have your grandfather pick you up at school and bring you home. I’m going to call from work and make sure you answer the phone. You’re a disgrace to our family and a poor example to your sisters. Just wait until your father gets home.’
My mother stormed out of the room and banged pots and pans in the kitchen as she attempted to cook dinner. My head ached.
My stomach churned. I felt so bad I wanted to die.
At dinner, no one spoke of my transgressions, though my sisters glanced at me with furtive eyes. My father was not home. He did not return from work until late at night when we were supposed to be asleep.
The following morning, my father called me into his room. ‘You embarrassed us,’ he said. ‘What will people think of us if they saw you at that slum? What type of parents will they think we are for letting you go over there?’
I did not know and I did not care, but I was told I should know, I should care. So I did.
I listened to my parents. I let my grandfather pick me up after school when everyone else rode the bus. I let my mother call me from work to see that I was home, caring for my sisters like I said I would. I let my father lecture to me about good people, honest people, trustworthy people.
A week before Christmas, Summer and her family moved as mysteriously as they had appeared. By January, another family had moved in, a more conventional one, with a mother and a father and two children, a boy and a girl, both of whom did not want to play with me or my sisters, even after my father said it was okay. ‘They go to our church, be nice to them,’ my father reasoned. But they kept to themselves as much as we did.
Only once did my father speak of Summer’s departure, and when he did, he dramatized it as if it were a made-for-TV movie. ‘They left in the middle of the night. They had something to hide and did not want to get caught. They didn’t have a moving van. Just a truck. They piled up furniture and left the place a mess. The owners had to paint and re-carpet and replace doors and the stove. They left trash everywhere. And they never paid rent. Not once.’
I missed Summer. I missed the escape into a world where time did not matter, where tasks could be forgotten, where it was just fine to be. I wanted stories like Nina’s to tell my children someday.
Years passed. I forgot about Nina and Summer-for a time. When I was nineteen, I moved 110 miles from home and lived with my boyfriend. A year later, I married. Three years later, I had a son. For five years, I did not own a TV. I listened to whatever my husband played on the stereo. I walked barefoot and naked in the house. I have stories to tell. Of my wedding reception: how the best man had broken his toe and was downing vodka to numb the pain and when the time came for his elegant speech, he wavered with his glass and said, ‘Get a life!’ We laughed. Guests and relatives cowered with shame. It is a tale I tell strangers when they want to get to know me.
I still have problems trusting others and myself. I keep secrets. I exaggerate. Sometimes I lie. When others berate me and demand perfection, I forget to open my heart and offer them forgiveness and love. Many nights, even with my family home, I feel alone.
I’m still looking for that freedom. Sometimes I see it when I grow out my hair, wear clothes that are no longer in style, disregard consequences. I see Summer in the man I married, a man who is proud of his body, relishes his talents, doesn’t weigh the opinions of others more than his own, a man who has seen my body change from a back injury, a pregnancy, an abortion, and who loves me more each day for the woman I was, the woman I am, the woman I will someday become. I hear Nina’s voice in the stories I tell: delivering an unapproved valedictory speech at my high school graduation, leaving my boyfriend to date his best friend, having sex at a construction site high above the city lights, writing love letters to a writer whose work I fell in love with long before I fell in love with him, taking my three-month-old son with me to work, nursing him during my ten-minute breaks, nourishing him with my milk, my presence, my poetry, my love.
Each day is full of discovery. I give myself permission to be whoever I am, a spirit of fire and water, a
