Absolute Beginners

In the summers, my grandparents would hook the trailer up to the tan Suburban and pile their three oldest grandkids into the back seat for a week or two at the camp grounds attached to the Army complex at Solomon's. Or that's what I remember it being, it might not have been Army at all. There was the best playground ever there, and a rollerskating rink, and a swimming pool and I don't know what else. I think there was even a place to go fishing. We'd help with the chores around the campsite, and wash dishes, fish for supper, bask in the sun. Nights, my cousin Mike would sleep on a cot in the aisle and Mel and I would share the pullout, where dinner table became bed. The grandfolks slept in back in the full size bed. We'd have to tiptoe by them to go to the toilet at night. When all the lights were off, we'd whisper a bit, and they'd always tell us, "You kids hush up there, now." But we could hear them whispering and laughing, the transistor radio slung low to some country station. I don't ever remember being too hot on those hot summer nights. It was all just so perfect, even without air conditioning and television.

One summer, of course towards the end of our stay, I saw this boy in the rollerskating rink. Black hair in one of those bowl cuts so popular at the end of the 70's, only somehow, it looked good on him, with his hair so straight and long and thick. He was just a boy, but he smelled good, clean like lemons and spring and the odor of good earth between your fingers. I have this awful habit of falling in love at first sight, and had it even then, some inner compass for beauty, grace, the curve of a limb bent in full skate flight, a wild grin on a hairpin turn, the way his fingers brushed the wall as he went flying by. We were bird-spirits, flightwinged and hearts beating fast, and I thought he was the most wonderful thing I had ever seen.

What can I say of pre-teen courtship? The fascination is there, oh yes, but no earthly knowledge of why or what it's for. He just was, perfectly and wholly was... was himself, was a sympathetic vibration in my own heart's path, was this wild, pure creature unbeaten by media and hype. He wore black Keds with the laces draggled and frayed. I was in heaven every time he sped past me on his skates, whiplash incarnate. He must have bumped into me, or me into him. I remember some machinations, using my cousin Mike as a go-between, thinking at least like could speak to like, those with the correct plumbing could speak each other's languages... ascertain whether this midnight haired boy might enter into our little familial tribe, might take an interest in gawky, gangly me, with parts too big and parts too small, glasses and straight geeky hair and already trying on a sort of studied irreverence for size. He accepted my emissary's invitation to skate with us; then came that awkward dance of what do we do now? When  you don't know what it means to go anywhere but 'go steady', how far can you actually go? And me already defiant and refusing to 'go steady' with anyone, having absorbed so well my mother's logic against it... "what does it mean, what point does it serve?" even at such an age--I must have been no more than 11 at the time--I knew that 'going steady' edged dangerously towards the white spaces on the map, where monsters and the edge of the world abide. It was not for me, this vague attitude of possession, of belonging. So we did what we could, which was skate, and swim, and play in that fantastic park. Skating allowed some degree of physical touch that never stepped into the fringes of risque behavior. We chased each other with all the joy of young bodies charging full speed, in love with the chase and the sheer, bone-creaking speed of the thing, blurring around the track on eight wheels, laughing and calling in unnamed words for all the gods to hear and obey: young and alive and tasting for the first time what it might mean to be something other than the caged things that our age and experience defined us to be. At night I burned to whisper his name against my lips, I thought of him and dreamed of what might happen, were the skating rink to be deserted, should the chase suddenly end with someone caught... what would happen? At eleven, I dreamed of kisses, and holding hands, and perhaps being precious to someone else.

The night before we were to leave, my grandparents let us skate late at the rink, and allowed Jay to escort me back to the trailer. It was one of those utterly perfect nights. Unspeakably perfect, the air etching memory deep into the skin, a body memory of a light breeze, of a black sky of piled up clouds that hinted of rain, putting a drop of urgency into our last moments together, fitting Nature into our natures, a spare leaf skittering along the moon-flitted path. Our feet grew heavy, our hands grew magnets and pulled together. I knew the path by heart, knew that last possible moment before the bend that would bring us out of wonderland and back into the boring everyday sight of campers and belly-scratchers by their fires, and I desperately did not want those eyes to see this magic unfolding on the path. Our lips touched. so lightly as to steal a breath without each other's knowing, and there were no words, there was nothing else to do... I ran back to the trailer, ran faster than skates even could carry me, his address folded tight into the change pocket of my jeans, hoping against hope that we might write letters to each other until the next summer, when we could recapture it all again... and knowing, secretly and with a dark chocolate sort of bitter, delicious taste in my heart that such a thing would never happen.

But nearly thirty years later, I have not forgotten his name, or the scent of him.

His name was Jay Knight, and it wasn't until the last day, our last day together ever, that I realized he was probably some mix of something Asian and  something like me.