A small childhood memory

One summer when I was eight, my family drove to a town in Pennsylvania near the New York border. We were invited by the parents of friends of mine, a girl, K., just turned nine, and her seven year old brother M. The center of the town was a large lake, a mile across. You could walk all the way around it, and there was a general store that sold day old Philadelphia Inquirers, candy, soda, and party snaps – those bits of gunpowder wrapped in airmail paper kids throw at the ground to frighten animals or protest their enemies. You were allowed to take boats without engines out on the lake, or swim. There were houses around the lake, set back a decent distance, that never changed hands. They stayed in families. There were houses farther out that were fungable, but they were bundled in little blocks of eight or twelve, and surrounded by woods.

The lake house we stayed in as guests was hot and creaky. Everything was old. The house itself dated to the Centennial, the fans that sort of cooled us were 50s models with cast-iron bases, the freezer part of the refrigerator was so unbalanced and cold that it turned water to ice in half an hour. The Ellery Queen Digests in the downstairs bathroom were from 1978 and it was 1987. One of the stories was about a police captain who realizes he’s eating the leg of lamb his murder suspect used to kill her husband. “You thought you could get away with it, but I read,” he said, arresting her, which I thought was very funny at the time. The meat turned to ashes in his mouth.

My ‘vacation allowance’ was seventy-five cents a day, which was enough for a can of Sunkist at the store every day and a pack of baseball cards every other. I’d go there with K. and M. They’d buy candy I didn’t really like – the segmented Sky Bar, Candy Buttons. (“I like eating the paper on the back,” M. explained.) I realize now, checking the web, that the store must have had a deal with a Necco distributor.

We stayed two weeks, which felt like forever. I fell in love with K., silently, and took to writing notes to myself about it on oversized index cards which I cut down and hid among the rubber-banded stack of my new woodgrain-styled baseball cards.

And that’s how the trouble started: the written word as an emotional outlet, the instinctual move toward secrecy, girls, having to leave paradise. When we left we left with hand-filled glass bottles of spring water and rainbow trout on ice in our trunk. We stopped at a Howard Johnson’s on the way back. “That was a good trip,” my dad said. I ate my grilled cheese with one hand and tightened my grip on the pack of baseball cards in the other.