George Bilgere

The toddlers in their tadpole bodies, with their squirt guns and snorkels, their beautiful mommies and inflatable whales, are still too young to understand that this is as good as it gets. Soon they must leave the wading pool and stand all day at the concession stand with their hormones and snow cones, their soul patches and tribal tattoos, pretending not to notice how beautiful they are, until they simply can’t stand it and before you know it they’re lined up on lawn chairs, dozing in the noonday sun with their stretch marks and beer bellies, their Wall Street Journals and SPF 50.

I am doing laps at night, alone In the indoor pool. Outside It is snowing, but I am warm And weightless, suspended and out Of time like a fly in amber. She is thousands of miles From here, and miles above me, Ghosting the stratosphere, Heading from New York to London. Though it is late, even At that height, I know her light Is on, her window a square Of gold as she reads mysteries Above the Atlantic. I watch The line of black tile on the pool’s Floor, leading me down the lane. If she looks down by moonlight, Under a clear sky, she will see Black water. She will see me Swimming distantly, moving far From shore, suspended with her In flight through the wide gulf As we swim toward land together.

I remember watching my father stop halfway up the driveway because my tricycle was blocking the way to the garage, and how he solved the problem by picking up the tricycle by the handlebars and smashing it through the windshield of our brand new family station wagon, his face red with scotch, his black tie and jacket flapping with effort, the tricycle making its way a little farther with each blow into the roomy interior of the latest model as the safety glass relented, the tricycle and the windshield both praiseworthy in their toughness, the struggle between them somehow making perfect sense in midday on our quiet suburban street, the windshield the anvil, the trike the hammer, the marriage the forge, and failure glowing in the heat, beaten and tempered, slowly taking shape.

I can see her in the kitchen, Cooking up, for the hundredth time, A little something from her Limited Midwestern repertoire. Cigarette going in the ashtray, The red wine pulsing in its glass, A warning light meaning Everything was simmering Just below the steel lid Of her smile, as she boiled The beef into submission, Chopped her way Through the vegetable kingdom With the broken-handled knife I use tonight, feeling her Anger rising from the dark Chambers of the head Of cabbage I slice through, Missing her, wanting To chew things over With my mother again.

When I came to my mother’s house the day after she had died it was already a museum of her unfinished gestures. The mysteries from the public library, due in two weeks. The half-eaten square of lasagna in the fridge. The half-burned wreckage of her last cigarette, and one red swallow of wine in a lipsticked glass beside her chair. Finally, a blue Bic on a couple of downs and acrosses left blank in the Sunday crossword, which actually had the audacity to look a little smug at having, for once, won.

The sun is still burning in my skin even though it set half-an-hour ago, and Cindy and Bob and Bev and John are pulling on their sweatshirts and gathering around the fire pit. John hands me a cold one and now Bev comes into my arms and I can feel the sun’s heat, and taste the Pacific on her cheek. I am not in Vietnam, nor is John or Bob, because our deferments came through, and we get to remain boys for at least another summer like this one in Santa Cruz, surfing the afternoons in a sweet blue dream I’m remembering now, as the nurse puts my cheek to sleep, and the doctor begins to burn those summers away.

The last time I saw Paul Castle it was printed in gold on the wall above the showers in the boys’ locker room, next to the school record for the mile. I don’t recall his time, but the year was 1968 and I can look across the infield of memory to see him on the track, legs flashing, body bending slightly beyond the pack of runners at his back. He couldn’t spare a word for me, two years younger, junior varsity, and hardly worth the waste of breath. He owned the hallways, a cool blonde at his side, and aimed his interests further down the line than we could guess. Now, reading the name again, I see us standing in the showers, naked kids beneath his larger, comprehensive force—the ones who trail obscurely, in the wake of the swift, like my shadow on this gleaming wall.