The summer I was fifteen my father moved out, my breasts grew in, and my mother told me to call her Eve.
We were sitting in Mrs. Peter’s Restaurant in Hot Springs, Arkansas, when Mother leaned across the table and said, “Miranda, this summer it looks like it’s going to be just you and me. We might as well be friends. Right?”
I shrugged. My older brother Al was in North Carolina pretending to be a camp counselor. My younger sister Louanne, Lulu in those days, was with Dad. I too would have spent the summer with Dad. But I wasn’t invited.
“Someone has to stay with your mother,” Dad had mumbled. Everyone knew Lulu was his favorite.
“So,” my mother continued, taking a drink of her margarita, “I want you to call me Eve. It will help us get to know one another. As people.”
Privately I thought my mother was going crazy. I had seen evidence of it earlier in the month. I would come home from my job at the market, and Mom would be sitting in the back yard wearing a sundress and reading a romance.
“Hi Mom, what’s for dinner?” I’d say, and Mom — Mrs. Well-Balanced-Meal herself — would answer without even looking up, “Whatever you want, cottage cheese, ice cream. I really don’t care.”
I guess one child was not enough to keep her anchored to real life. One child meant she could read the evening away and eat Rocky Road with chocolate sauce for supper.
I took the last bite of my salad and said,“OK, Eve.”
I cast about for something special my mother could call me to solidify our new relationship, but I couldn’t think of anything. She already called me Miranda, Randy, Mira, Honey Buns, and whatever else she fancied.
When our chicken arrived, Eve and I each ate a wing with our fingers. Eve looked like she was having fun eating chicken. Eve looked like she was playing a big game. I tried to play right along with her.
Eve and I were on a getaway weekend, because Eve could no longer stand a house that smelled of Dad’s aftershave, Lulu’s grape bubble gum, and Al’s old newspapers. All those smells made Eve sad. All those smells made Eve sit outside until mosquitoes danced all over her. When Eve finally came in she went straight to her room, shut the door, and yelled, “Good night, Mirandy.”
Sometimes I’d see her in the morning before she went off to be an emergency room nurse, sometimes not. I’d pack a cheese sandwich, and walk the mile and a half to the market, where I practiced being the world’s greatest cashier. I spent the long, hot hours hoping Jonathan, the boy I loved, would come in for some plums, peaches, or nectarines. But so far it had been a fruitless summer: I had not seen him once.
Eve had expected me to be excited about driving to Hot Springs with her. I wanted to stay home. Eve begged me to come with her. Eve ordered me to come with her.
“We’ll have fun,” she said. Eve and I had managed to live together six whole weeks without having an iota of anything resembling fun.
After dinner, I suggested a movie.
“I don’t like being out alone at night,” Eve said, unwrapping a chocolate mint.
“You wouldn’t exactly be alone, Mom.”
“You know what I mean.”
I knew only too well I was no substitute for either Dad or Al.
We were staying in a family resort, complete with swimming pool, lake, miniature golf course, and game room. Everything. The floors were sweaty. I slept in a bed that folded out of a wall. The mattress was too thin. The sheets were gray. I was glad we were here for the weekend only. I wondered if two women qualified as a family. I think Eve wondered, too.
We walked by the pool on our way back to the room. Some men with bellies in the moonlight were drinking beer. Boys in Hawaiian trunks jumped off the diving board. Under the floodlight, a card game was going on.
“Want to go for a swim?” I asked.
Eve gave a delicate shudder. “I think I’ll go to bed and read.”
The room was so hot I couldn’t breathe. The television was a black-and-white. Eve put on a nightgown and I paced the living room. The damp linoleum felt like the backs of dead fish.
“I’m going to the pool,” I said. If I were home, my friend Clea and I would be spending the night together, walking round and round our block, feet flat on the hot pavement, wishing for things. We’d play gin until we got sick of it, and eat frozen lemon cream pie. I felt lonely without Clea. I put on my bathing suit, and sat down on Eve’s bed. She looked up from her book.
“Wear your shoes to the pool,” she said as if she had just come in from a dream and found herself in a family resort. I gave her the look that remark deserved, and she went back to her book. “Lock the door,” she called.
“All right, Eve,” I said in a sarcastic voice, to remind her of our game. The game she had already forgotten.
I took a towel and the room key and walked barefoot to the pool. In the dark it sounded like a lot of people having loads and loads of fun. But when I got closer it was only two pimply boys doing cannonballs. The adults sat around tables, murmuring over cards, as if they were in a living room.
I got in the shallow part of the pool, shivering at the water as it lapped at my stomach. This was my first summer with breasts, and I hadn’t even had a chance to use them yet. Instead of hanging out at the pool, I was working all day, and baby-sitting most nights. Which was probably all right, because Jonathan was not the sort to loll around poolsides.
I tiptoed to the rope, took a breath, and dove under. My hair streamed behind me, and I pretended I was a mermaid. A beautiful mermaid. I burst out of the water and almost into one of the boys. He whistled. I could tell right away he was one of those redneck Southern boys I tried to stay away from.
“Hey,” he said. In the dark I couldn’t really see his face, but I was sure it was ruined by pimples. “Can you dive?”
“Sure,” I said, in a modulated voice.
“Show me a swan dive.”
I looked around the pool. The other boy had gone. We were alone in the eight-foot, treading water beneath the board.
“All right,” I said. I swam to the ladder, not thinking of anything, just letting the water take away my mind. I tugged down the bottom of my bathing suit. The diving board felt like sandpaper. I bounced on the end a little, just for show. Then I paced, and did a medium version of a swan dive. I swam as far as I could beyond the rope, into the shallow.
If my brother Al had been there, he would have laughed to see the intellectual Miranda showing off for a preteen punk. Al and I believed we were beyond real people. It was our bond, our link, the thing that had kept us alive during the last eight years of our parents’ marriage: we were superior.
“Pretty good,” the kid said. “Watch me.”
Someone at one of the tables was smoking, and the glow of the cigarette seemed important in the darkness. A link to land. The kid sailed off the board in a perfect dive. I felt stupid, tricked. I could have done better, but I didn’t even try.
“That was great,” I said.
“I’ve been practicing.” The kid pushed his hair from his forehead. “My name’s Pete. What’s yours?”
“Miranda.” I went underwater and came up backwards, letting my hair stream behind me.
“Want to try a jackknife?” Pete said.
“OK.”
Clea would have a fit when I told her I spent hours trying to dive as well as Pete. As if it mattered. He was just some dumb hillbilly kid I would probably never see again. We followed each other off that crummy board at least fifty times, saying things like, “Pretty good. Nice try.” Sports talk, team stuff. Stuff like Al and I could have done, but he wouldn’t. Stuff a girl is supposed to do with her father. Stuff Lulu was getting to do with Daddy.
The card players were all gone, the flood light was off by the time Pete and I were worn out.
“See you tomorrow night?” Pete said.
“Maybe.” I wrapped the towel around my waist. I was so tired, I could barely make it down the hill and up the stairs to the room.
Quietly I unlocked the door. “It’s me,” I said. The bedroom light was on.
“Mom?” I called. She was asleep, a romance novel across her chest, one arm flung across the other pillow, as if it knew someone was supposed to be there for her.
I put the book on the bedside table, and straightened the covers.
“Good night, Eve,” I said, as I turned off my mother’s light.
“Summer” originally appeared in the Kansas City Star magazine and is reprinted with permission.
— Ed.
