Casualties Stories by Joyce Becker Lee

Author:Joyce Becker Lee
Format: epub

THE DIFFERENCE

I once read that the human brain gets a new wrinkle for everything we learn. After that, when reading or in school, I'd occasionally try to feel my brain twisting as it filled with knowledge, to feel the subtle crinkling that was certainly going on inside my skull. Growing seemed much the same; after hearing some aunt gush about "what a big boy Sanford is getting to be," I'd strain to feel myself grow, lying still in bed to better discern the stretching of bone and tissue. Of course, as with the brain wrinkles, I never actually felt a change, and I turned fourteen believing that growing, like learning, wasn't anything physical that could be described. I learned differently soon enough.

That summer of 1963 began the same as every one before it: as soon as school ended, Dad, Mom, my little sister, Nettie, and I packed up the station wagon and headed for our cottage at Putnam Lake, which was located about mid-way between Chicago and Milwaukee, where we lived. There were a lot of lakes in that area, most of them loud with the roar of speedboats and the shouts of transients polluting the beaches. Putnam Lake was different in that it had no public easements—families owned the entire shoreline with cottages coexisting with year-round homeowners, all of us scorning the "vacationers" with their loud music and even louder clothing. We were, after all, above them, for we were permanent (albeit on a part-time basis).

Mothers and children were ensconced at the lake while fathers spent hot weekdays in the city, doing whatever work they did to provide the summers of country coolness. There they sweltered in a semi-bachelor existence until Fridays when they joined the line of cars snaking out of the city toward their waiting families.

Meanwhile, the women visited the village beauty shops to create a vision worth traveling to see. The children were scrubbed and dressed up in their casual best and instructed to stay clean while waiting for the exhausted warriors returning from the battlefields astride eight-cylinder steeds. The weekend air was filled with the sweet, pungent smell of barbecue smoke and the deep, alien sound of male laughter.

The rest of the weekend would be spent in a frenzy of such catch-up activities as swimming, horseshoes, and softball. At night we'd fish, pick out constellations, or tell jokes, savoring the closeness that comes with knowing that the end is near, wanting to stretch those warm moments forever. Sunday evenings, our fathers, sunburnt and spent with non-stop "relaxation," returned to the cities to eerily silent homes and skies bright with the artificial glow that washes out the stars.

For those of us left behind, the week maintained a casual open-endedness: housework was reduced to that dictated by basic sanitation; meals were catch-as-you-can; we lived in bathing suits and shorts, with shoes an unnecessary encumbrance,

For those three months of every year, we had an extended family comprised of our summer friends: people I had grown up with, but only during the summer months.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.