What
Fits
by SuniD
The
concert in Memorial Park was regenerating, something I hadn’t done
in years. The lethargic adults hoarded blanket space. While the
children who outnumbered them played chase on grass trails, which
emerged spontaneously between groups of grown-ups.
The
music was popular in my childhood. Stuff dad used to blast in the
Volkswagen bug while we spun snow cookies. I took my nine-year-old
son down front to fully experience the atmosphere of the thing. I
remembered singing and dancing the same “Locomotion” with my
mother and brother at about the same age. Though I doubt my brother
would admit knowing the words today.
Fireworks
filled the air with electricity before groupies could even think of
clearing the stage gear. Children sat wide-eyed, tangled in free glow
strings, thanks to our sponsors. We were absorbing the explosive
display, burning it into our retinas and memories, when two ghosts
from my junior high days tapped me on the back.
Last
time I saw Jimbo, he was falling backward into an original Adam’s
Family pinball machine at the Skate-A-Long. The head, like all
sensitive spots, bleeds a lot. Jim got six stitches in his head from
my playful push, but I moved out of town before making amends. We had
only known each other about a year, but something about small town
bonding sticks.
I
barely pushed him, but he was on roller skates. Inline skates were
still a big deal in the early nineties, so you couldn’t rent them.
The current generation, my son included, can’t visualize the wheels
forming a square. In a world where skates braked in the front, Jim
fell backward. I don’t even remember what smart-assed remark
provoked me.
The
adult version of Jim shrugged and said, “Shit happens when you’re
skating.” Now there’s barely a scar to remember me by.
The
other apparition was Sugar, a younger girl I might have teased too
much. In fact, that nickname came from something I said on a bus ride
after school. Whatever it was, the name stuck. She was a grade below me, so I lectured her about
wasting cigarettes by not inhaling once. We both ran with outcasts:
skaters, criminals, thugs. Picking on people was akin to making friends.
I had
known her about the same length of time as Jim, but never in
conjunction with one another. I guess they hooked up a couple years
ago. Now they oozed happy couple, one graduating, and the other
entering grad school. I still have a year to go before I get my
four-year degree. Amazing how those obvious age gaps between seventh
and eighth graders disintegrate in the late twenties.
My
son was heading to a sleepover, so I invited myself to the
after-party at Jim’s neighbors. We hot-footed it from the park,
herded into pedestrian clusters for the sake of traffic control. I
followed, never sure which way to go, until we saw the line of cars
leading to the shindig. They could have hired a valet.
The
host charged drinkers five bucks, calling it a benefit for a resident
cancer victim who wasn’t even present. We mixed our own drinks and
walked next door. The naïve patrons were high school seniors and
college freshmen. After awhile, they forgot we hadn’t paid. The
booze was in the garage and I started that way at one point, but I
faltered at the image of children coupling through the window. The
scene was a pack of bipeds, training for future sport-bar breeding
pools. Guys held themselves upright by throwing their burly arms over
the flimsy shoulders of the two nearest girls. The girls in turn
giggled and blushed, watching the set of lips closest to theirs,
staking out the moment. I don’t remember ever being that
obvious. Never. Ever.
Sugar
and I passed our party time by grabbing ankles under the garage door
and running away. She acted too fast on the second round and I was
inadvertently trampled. One minute I was crouched, groping for the
unsuspecting ligament, when Sugar landed her target, popped up and
sped away, knocking me and my screwdriver off balance. My fall was
short lived and my recovery graceful because I bounced away with her.
Fleeing in a vodka fog, I felt the life force trickle down my shin.
The skinned knee brought back memories of every two-wheel wipe-out I
lived through at age nine.
We
ditched the midtown garage party shortly after an impromptu limbo
contest. Sugar drove us out to her snazzy pad in West O, on about a
hundred-and-fiftieth and bum fuck. The pool was technically closed,
but the night was hot and we felt a little frisky after spooking the
brood at the kegger, drawing and spilling first blood and all.
In
Sugar’s bathroom, wrestling with the strings of a borrowed
swimsuit, I experienced another series of flashbacks. There was every
sixth grade slumber party I wasn’t invited to, and my own twelfth
birthday. My dad must have thought I needed exercise videos because
he bought a whole set focusing on abs, buns, and cardio. I ended up
making use of those tapes after my son was born, but at the time, it
was a devastating left hook to my adolescent mind’s eye. He had me
open them in front of my closest friends, right before taking us to
the water slides at Peony Park. What used to be Nebraska’s largest
amusement park on more than 35 acres has been relocated and
privatized. I remembered the lime green two-piece I wore that day in
‘93, glanced at the tiny candy cane triangles topping the pile of
rejects on Sugar’s bathroom floor, and realized my twenty-eighth
birthday was two weeks away.
After
fastening a sort of bow, I twisted and turned with my reflection,
checking for bulges. I jumped up and down a few times, tucked my
breasts back into the two vertical strips of fabric that constituted
a top, and tightened the strings again.
The
guest bathroom had an intense lighting design. The large round bulbs
left a row of purple spots in my eyes. The figure in the mirror
should have been familiar but those two strips ran from tummy to top,
covered the maternity war wounds, and squished the baby bottles back
into shape. I was skinnier than I remembered and made a note to eat
again once my miniature midlife crisis was through.
Being
summer, my son stayed at his dad’s or with friends most of the
time. Without my boy, my moral compass malfunctions. I forget how to
be good to myself. He’d been gone about a month, only visiting on
weekends, and I had lost at least two pounds every week since. As a
result, the leg and hip holes of Sugar’s swimsuit hit me in just
the rights spots.
The
pattern distracted the gaze from other subtle flaws. It looked as
though someone used a fat black sharpie to draw a coloring book
outline on white spandex. Someone else came along with yellow and hot
pink and deliberately colored outside the lines. In the back, there
was only the butt cover and those heroic strings.
When
I left the sanctity of the bathroom time capsule, Sugar handed me an
oversized blue t-shirt for the walk to the water. I wasted no time
choosing sleek brown Sketchers over fat white high-tops for scaling
the fence.
Opening
the door onto the outside world felt like bursting into the night. We
moved like bandits, stirring the wind in the wake of our train. It
was late enough that we kept all eyes peeled for early birds taking
their morning coffee on the terrace. We tiptoed and took long
strides. Making our way through the thick quiet, we weaved in and out
of six story complexes with wrought iron balconies. From the ground,
they looked like fungus steps on tree trunks. I wondered if we were
more insignificant than inconspicuous.
Of
all the places I was never supposed to swim -- spillways, private
ponds, gigantic puddles that formed in ditches during rainy season --
this one was asking for it most. I smelled the chlorine waft down the
hill before spotting the six foot pin stripes that kept me from it.
Ha! I could kick higher than that. Jim and Sugar held back a minute,
maybe to formulate a plan. But I ran straight toward the revealing
electric light where a trash can was propped against the inside; up
and over, slick as butter.
Once
inside, I took cover in the shadows, shed the t-shirt, kicked off the
shoes, and slid into the simmering water. The chemicals stung my
knee; I had completely forgotten the tender wound. I briefly wished
it would scar, imagined picking the scab to ensure the mark, to
remember how brave I had been once. Both feelings passed quickly.
I’m
a Cancer, so I was swept up in my element. I swam to one end of the
pool and back, did handstands, back flips, and that trick where I
swim with no arm movements. The dark glass eyes of the buildings
stayed shut, slumbering, and I settled into a back float. For a
moment, the moon seemed to race east, but it was the sky below it
blowing west. I wondered if smoke from the fireworks had wafted this
way, mingling with the clouds, like smoldering coals in the hot bright
sky.
