The orange crushed faux velveteen halter top bathing suit exposed my long skinny middle. I wore cut-offs and spent the whole summer upside down.
The front of my house had two windows that my dad “decorated” with long shutters that went all the way to the ground. Even though the windows stopped four feet from the ground, the shutters did not. He cut out a panel of wood in a “creative” shape and affixed it under the windows and between the long shutters. The method of attachment: beer and cussing.
It was in between these two works of art that I would do my handstands. My feet would rest against the brick, my orange halter losing the battle with gravity.
I was bored. It was summer and my family never did camp or craft class. Before I discovered boys and beer, before the forts in the woods and the trouble that came with them, I would hang out upside down in my front yard and watch and wait for something to happen.
My sister was a tomboy – off on her bike vandalizing new house construction sites, throwing dirt clods and getting tetanus. That was not my thing. I’d rather let the blood rush to my head until I got delirious, then lie in the grass staring at the clouds and do it again.
That was the summer the whole block got divorced. I saw it all – husbands and wives creeping around, driving drunk and smashing cars, on purpose. Disco was the rage and they all put on their white pants and hit the discotheque to do coke and get divorced.
I made a mental note to my pre-teen self: disco kills.
The only thing more embarrassing and awkward than being an adolescent who is learning about boys and dating is watching your parents date. It was a parade of desperate losers, trying to appear so cool and confident in front of the kids. Mom’s suitors had the bad polyester shirts, the bad facial hair and bad breath but they usually had cool cars and good pot.
Friday night was chicken pot pie night because mom could throw that thirty-nine cent frozen brick in the oven and get ready to go out. First the hair; hot rollers, endless backcombing, the Aquanet – followed by a frightening eyelash curling session, black mascara and an obscene amount of blue eye shadow. Finally, the pantsuit. Perfume mixed with cigarettes and pink lipstick. No wonder the butcher at the Vescio’s Grocery Store (known as “The Meat Man” in our house) had a crush on her. She was a babe.
She was bored too, looking for something to get excited about. Drinking and fighting and pushing each other around got stale and now they were living apart and getting divorced. This was a chance for something new and exciting to happen; to take a lover that wasn’t her first and only, to ride in a corvette, to be desired and forget about her kids and responsibilities for just one fucking minute.
Phone rings. It’s Saturday morning. I wake up and run in her room to answer it. I crawl over her brown fake bear fur bedspread to get to the phone.
She’s not there.
“Hi honey, it’s time to get up for work.”
“Mom, where are you?”
“Toronto.”
“Toronto? Wait, isn’t that, like, another country?’
“Yes.”
“What are you doing in Toronto?”
“Having breakfast.”
“OK, mom, I guess I’ll see you later, then.”
I hung up the phone.
“Dammit!” I said to myself in a dramatic whine. “That should be me riding around in fast cars with boys I hardly know. This is all wrong. She’s gone and ruined everything because someone around here needs to act like a responsible adult! I’m going to have to keep my eye on her now because she’s obviously a morally corrupt reckless harlot, hell bent on destroying her reputation. She’s a school teacher for crying out loud. She could get fired for going to Toronto!”
This is normal, right? 
Kari – your picture is SO vivid…I am transported right back to Saginaw and gymnastics in Weiss school gym and my teachers smoking dope and my parents divorcing and dating and trying to figure out when the hell I was ever going to get pretty like my bee-hive-topped mother. Love, love the story! Thanks for putting it up here
Thank you!
it’s written so breezily… really fluid and skips along so smoothly, like a flat stone on a glass water surface…raymond carver would love this, i just know it.
Oh the good old days! Love it!