Nashville, Tennessee: heat shimmered upwards from the pebbly driveway at my grandparents’ house. It practically hissed alongside the sound of insects’ wings. Heat had a visual; this is what I learned, a shininess.
We were kids. A little hot weather didn’t stop us from racing past the patio furniture through the scratchy browned grass toward the trampoline in my grandparents’ backyard, where we’d jump and bounce unconcerned about the blazing canvas against our feet and the thickness around us, as if to defy the slow rise of that shining hot air that was a summer day in the south. We wanted the thrill of the jump, and we braved hot cars to get to cold swimming pools, Vandyland and its old-fashioned counter and its thick milkshakes and as many relatives as degrees on a thermometer, almost.
**
Take home lesson: heat is palpable and what’s that palpable seeps into your tissues and can rise up on other it’s-so-hot days as memory so strong you cannot shake it. Like the air that entraps, memory sweats out and clings to your skin.
Or at least it does to mine.
So, while my present-day life is a New England house in a valley that each summer takes at least a few days to hold heat like steaming soup in its bowl shape, I seem to be travelling through time via heat wave.
I went to Nashville.
I went to Philadelphia, where the pool grew tepid by August and the soft serve ice cream cones began to drip between the time fingers wrapped themselves around the blond wafer cones and we reached the car, damp towels outspread across the backseat.
As I walk through the heat—it sinks hard into me and pushes against my body and I push back—on my way to pick up my daughter at her preschool midday, I recall rush hour traffic in Center City Philadelphia, bumper-to-bumper past Chestnut Street, the tiny white Datsun B210, no air conditioning so the windows open and the exhaust streaming in. I played the radio loud in order to try and distract myself from the stink and crazy heat and honking horns. I heard one song at the Whole Foods, where it was cool from that summer last week (Down in the street… Electric Avenue…and then we’ll take you higher…down in the street…). I’ll never know more than the tune and fractured phrases from the actual lyrics. End of the day, all that heat, all those women’s stories poured into me in the cool abortion clinic.
I sweat and I sweat as I drove and later in the park as I ran along the dirt path ribbon beside the darker watery stream so low because it was summer and everything drained away, save for the osmosis of all that humidity pressing down upon the steamy city. I did not sweat out their stories, the young teens, black girls with long legs and Catholic girls with spray thick in their hair and as much church-and-family guilt stiff in their young hearts. I did not sweat out secrets: affairs and whoops and already arms full with a baby just starting to crawl. I did not sweat out the teenage moms’ stories, either. I worked at the Booth Maternity Center out on City Line Avenue that summer, three days a week. That drive was less bumper-to-bumper traffic and more intermittent breeze and then slow, slow traffic-driven heat, the car practically waddling along the road. I had my sweater on the passenger seat. I taught childbirth education and sat in on appointments with the midwives. While at nineteen, a baby was far from my peers’ daily lives, in pockets of my hometown by fifteen or sixteen or younger everyone had babies. These same young women came to the abortion clinic, the pregnancy before or after the first pregnancy at Booth. The midwives wished sometimes that pregnancy and childbirth itself were harder for these adolescent women, whose bodies ballooned at the belly and often seemed to drop out babies like so many watermelon seeds after a picnic. They’d say childbirth wasn’t enough of a deterrent. We missed one that summer altogether; she gave birth in the toilet. The ambulance arrived. The medics cut the cord.
I went to Brooklyn, where my college boyfriend lived. He was a bike messenger that summer, his bag slung across his shoulder, his wiry body and jumpy nerves attuned to all that traffic, delighted by it, even. One weekend, we walked through blazing heat and as much humidity, from Brooklyn over the bridge to the Upper East Side. We stopped for seltzer water and juice and a smoothie and a movie and Indian food. All day, we walked—I think I showed him the building where my grandparents lived (they were at their weekend place)—and talked and drank and sweated. We did not use the bathroom until we reached the restaurant that evening, even after imbibing fluid steadily all day long. That night, our bodies tangled, as if parched, as if we were immune to heat. We were immune to heat.
**
Looking back, I marvel at wanting to touch anyone in the heat, how even so many years later, the summer of my second child’s infancy, there were moments when our bodies, melded together as mama and breastfeeding babe must be, seemed so very overwhelming. I can’t imagine now desiring that combination of heat and touch.
Looking back too on that summer of so many pregnancies going so many which ways, I flash back to myself again, early fall, in the shower unable to dislodge the diaphragm, calling for the boyfriend to help me, and knowing at that very moment how it would go.
I took the pregnancy test before my period should have arrived. It seemed like cruel fate at the time. That year was about as low as I’ve been in my entire life, a kind of emotional unraveling that marked a passage from childhood to adulthood, a passage that wasn’t easy (childhood wasn’t easy, and I think the adult understands this more as the years progress). I don’t think it was cruel fate now, or terrible or anything; I think some things just are and this year was one of them, a necessary passage. That abortion, so clearly right, wasn’t always easy for me as it fell into the path of what was an arduous journey—growing up—but I can see that time now: the boxy little college room, the smell of apples in the air and grapes’ perfume on cool morning runs after all that heat, the taste of carob almonds from the school’s co-op and feel the smooth pages of books I had to read and the thin lines of my razor sharp felt pens scrawled across pages making cryptic, sad poetry. I can appreciate it with some sadness and more tenderness and even more compassion for the bittersweet nature of our lives, the way that sometimes what is hard just is and is until it can become something else.
