Oh my goodness, it is so very hot. In two weeks, our weather has gone from rainy 40 degrees to 97 degrees and air that is so humid you need a snorkel to walk to your car. And to compound this, the Monte is in the shop and I must drive Esteban’s truck, which has no air conditioning, no CD player and a complete lack of style and class. Oh, I take that back. It has class… the kind of class that blasts Ted Fucking Nugent at stupefying levels and keeps Steven Segall in gold plated numchucks.
What is more, Esteban has been carting around a bed full of grass clippings for about a week. I’m not certain why. It’s fermented and smells like silage. Maybe he wants to make his own moonshine or something. Thus, I constantly have an urge to hoard up big mouthfuls of snot and spit them out the window at teenage girls, while laughing at Jeff Foxworthy comedy tapes.
Thus, my weekend has been comprised of hiding within the sanctity of our air conditioned haven or lounging in Ward & June’s lovely backyard oasis, where I am waited upon hand and foot by my lovely smiling mother-in-law, who might secretly believe that all of this pampering will relax my uterus into accepting her son’s reluctant issue. Or something. Gah. Regardless, it’s rather amazing how I can be convinced to spend 4 hours outside when lounging in the pool whereas I am hardpressed to even drive to the store in the truck with all the windows rolled down. It’s all relative, I suppose. Perhaps if I had a lovely foofoo drink while driving the truck, that would make all the difference. Of course, that would also be a tad illegal.
This weekend, Esteban and I went to a graduation party for our friends Lori and Don as well as a surprise 30th Birthday party for my friend Cheri. It was a crazy party. My lungs really aren’t up to par yet, so I baled early. Apparently, I missed quite a cake fight, involving two large sheet cakes and a lesser cake which looked like a hamburger. Kim V apparently was covered with lard frosting. Gah. I think I would have hurled. I did, however, witness No Pseudonym Scott bare his down-covered ass to a video camera. I’m awaiting a screen cap of that. I’m debating whether or not I should post it. I mean, I’m certain it was a fine hinder, but I still have this dark spot over my right eye, as though I had improperly looked at an eclipse. I think No Pseudonym Scott might be renamed Scotty Boom Boom after that little incident. Maybe we could have a “Name The Scott” contest. As always, suggestions are welcome in the comments section.
I have, for the first time in possibly my adult life, tan lines. Actual swimsuit tan lines. I was very responsible and kept slathering on the waterproof sunscreen, but some rather tenacious UV rays must have persevered to taint my rosepetal-like skin. What is more, my blonde streaks are considerably more blonde than they were before, mostly because my natural hair color is lightening as well.
I looked in the mirror this morning and was puzzled by the face looking back. It was golden and touched by sun, with freckles. God. I had forgotten that I had freckles. They are so very faint that one never really notices them. And then I realized that I looked exactly like my Aunt Sharon.
My father’s sister, Sharon, lived with my mom and Mo and I during my ninth summer. It was a strange arrangement for her, I suppose, living with your brother’s ex-wife and the daughter he had ignored for most of her life, but it was one of more fun summers of my childhood. She moved in with us in late June, brought her yellow Malibu packed with a few paltry belongings saved from a failed living arrangement with a boyfriend. It was 1981. Hair was big, Le Chic was freaking out, and it was all about the Urban Cowboy look. Sharon had big multi-toned hair, treated to an inch of frizzing from Sun-In and an industrial size can of Aqua Net. She wore black tube tops over her rather ample chest, tight black jeans and three or four inch heels and spent between 10 and Noon (when Days of Our Lives came on) sweating on a shiny mat in the backyard, the straps of her bikini lying obscenely to either sides of the blanket.
That summer, we were free. My mother must have made some kind of agreement with Sharon, exchanging free room and board for indentured babysitting of Mo and myself. She always has attracted strays of one kind or another. That summer, Sharon dragged us to beach parties and various park blow outs in her Malibu, with a cassette deck. It was the hottest summer I remember as a child and you could leave layers of skin on the black vinyl seats. They inexplicably had metal embellishments too, capable of branding the GM symbol backwards into the backs of your thighs. I seem to remember a blister from one less cautious entry while wearing a swimming suit, a little blister at the top of my leg, where the elastic my underwear rubbed.
When the car had been closed up tight, a thick cloud of vomit odor would waft up from the back, as my Aunt Kim, whom I’d never met, had apparently puked her sixteen-year-old guts out in the pit behind the passenger seat earlier that spring. Thus, we spent the summer trying to not let our feet touch the floor in the backseat. Do you have any idea how hard it is to enter and exit a two-door coupe without touching the floor? It’s like being born but without the aid of forceps.
Hot metal and vomit odor aside, it was as close to freedom as a ten-year-old can get. Sharon, despite her sage 19 years, was very much a giggly teenager looking for partners in crime, a position I was very willing to accept. Together, we caught crayfish in the creek and brought them home to create a makeshift pond in Mo’s swimming pool, went swimming in filled rock quarries, where icy fingers of drowned teenage corpses lingered only inches away from our wiggling toes, and spent months of evenings driving around listening to her Eagles and America tapes.
It was a grand summer, but like all summers, had to come to an end. She decided that she really belonged in Arizona, with my paternal grandmother and her little sister Kim, she of backseat stomach disgorgement. I suppose the fact that she had no discernible income probably also came into play. A few weeks before the school year began, her mother wired her $200 to fly back to Arizona and then she was gone.
I haven’t seen Sharon since, actually. I’ve talked to her on the phone but despite the fact that she is now back in Wisconsin and lives only 40 minutes from me (near Appleton, where I often go) I haven’t dropped down to see her. I have as limited contact with my paternal relatives as I can and truthfully, I can only imagine that I would be disappointed. When I was ten, her tube tops and roach clip stuck in her hair seemed very dangerous and cosmopolitan. But now… I think it wouldn’t be the same. Even still, when I look into the mirror and see those genetic commonalities that we share, it makes me a little nostalgic.
Not so nostalgic I’m going to wear a tube top or anything. Sheesh.
