Dirty Summer by Jennifer Maloney

She comes every June to set us free. Zooms into our neat little neighborhood, somehow boiling a cloud of dust from Grandma’s swept asphalt, brakes squealing like a stunt driver. Grandma’s jaw works but she forces the corners of her mouth up, tries to smile a welcome. The car fishtails in, parks crooked as a middle finger. A brown foot, naked, toenails the color of a freshly skinned knee, heels open the driver’s door and a cardboard cup in a long-fingered hand appears. Immediately upends. A brown waterfall of liquid and half-melted ice splatters the driveway, and as it rivers down to the street I hear it: that wonderful voice. Yuck, flat, Aunt Glory announces, and summer begins.

Her voice! Her voice is summer: LonG Island laid-back. The crackle of Coca-Cola in a rock glass tilting gently south accompanies it like music. Leaned back in a webbed lawn chair, long, freckled arms drag a cigarette dangerously close to the brown brush-cut of Grandma’s lawn, threaten to set it alight, one bare foot swinging lazy as a loose shutter in an ocean breeze. She says Why worry? I nevah do, and you know that’s the absolute truth. After so many buttoned-up months, it’s time to loosen our collars. After so much clean, it’s time to get dirty again.

She decides to drive us to the beach, her natural habitat. She invites Grandma, who shakes her head, looking at her with that squeezed look she gets around the eyes when Aunt Glory blows in, like she’s trying to read something without her glasses. Suit yaself, shrugs Aunt Glory, opening the door to the big backseat and bowing to us like she’s the head waiter at a fancy restaurant.

We yell and pile into the car, toting a beach bag full of bath towels and dry clothes and a Styrofoam cooler stuffed with tuna fish sandwiches and cans of Orange Crush that Grandma packed. Next to Aunt Glory’s hip, her purse overflows with a bottle of tanning oil, a hairbrush, and at least three open packs of cigarettes. Grandma leans in the front window as Aunt Glory starts the car, pins her with a serious look. You be careful, she says, jerking her head towards us, and even though I can’t see it I know Aunt Glory is rolling her eyes as she lights her first Salem of the trip. Mom, she mutters around it, exasperated, stop worrying! and we reverse down the driveway, lurching hard into drive at the bottom, the three of us in the backseat sliding around on the white leather like pinballs, knocking into each other, gasping and laughing and hollering out the open windows, on our way. Aunt Glory rummages around in her purse and I hear the crack and hiss of a can opening. She raises it to her lips. I look back at Grandma standing at the top of the driveway, arms folded, watching us leave, and a cigarette is hanging from her lips, too, so out of place I almost gasp. It stutters up and down like it’s trembling, and my stomach grabs the way it does when I try to tell her a lie, and none of it makes sense so I forget it.

What’s the good station? Aunt Glory yells over the rush of wind. BBF, BBF! We holler back, and almost immediately the Beach Boys spill out of the radio’s speakers, flood the car, pour out its windows. Susie and Nance and I start singing Wouldn’t it be Nice at the top of our lungs and the back of Aunt Glory’s blonde head bobs along in time. Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older? Then we wouldn’t have to wait so long…

We scatter the gulls from the beach parking lot as we roar in. Doors bang open, slam shut, my sisters run toward the sand. Aunt Glory totters along behind us, purse and beach bag slung over shoulders, struggling with the cooler, a lot heavier since she opened the trunk and stuck something else in it. I head back to take it from her, and she hesitates briefly, then ruffles my hair. Yer tha best, honey, she tells me in her summer voice, full of sunshine and smoke, already a little blurred at the edges and starting to fade…

…but maybe that’s just my untrustworthy memory. I can’t remember my sisters’ voices except in dreams, singing about wishing they didn’t have to wait so long to be older, not knowing they wouldn’t have to wait any longer at all, so why should I remember Aunt Glory’s so perfectly? Why do I know the exact moment she got dirty again, after all those months of being clean?

Jennifer Maloney

Image: Pixabay.com. Beach sand with sunglasses and sunscreen