S^{ummer Discoveries
by Stanley B. Trice}

The night that school let out in early June 1983, eleven year old Jeremy stayed awake in his bedroom listening to AIDS updates on the radio news. This kept him from mourning the lack of friends he never really found in grade school the past year. He made one vow to see the movie Return of the Jedi, hoping this pilgrimage would end the growing AIDS scare and he would never have to worry later in life. He hoped nothing else came along to keep him from having friends. But, then he remembered he had three sisters to mess with his head.

With school out every Thursday morning, his sisters and Mother went to town for the weekly sale specials. They clumped together like wet clay. Jeremy guessed it was important for them to maintain a social network, but not so important for men. The first Thursday they were gone, Jeremy stayed with Papa who made a nest of tools in the garage tinkering on the rototiller. The cars had become too computerized and he took them to a garage. He could manage the simple tiller machine with the two cycle engine.

As Papa made adjustments, Jeremy handed him greasy tools like screw drivers and pliers. This made Jeremy's palms and fingers greasy. Finally, he decided to avoid more fatherly direction and figure out what tool Papa would need next.

"Papa, what tool do you need now?" Jeremy asked. Papa didn't answer. Jeremy guessed it would have broken Papa's concentration loosening a rusted nut.

"Adjustable wrench," he said. Jeremy thought Papa sounded like a doctor doing open heart surgery.

Jeremy gave him the wrench with one hand and a small hammer with the other thinking a few whacks on the nut would help. Papa ignored the offered hammer. Jeremy put it back. "Hammer," Papa said.

Jeremy gave him the hammer and picked up the pliers from the floor. Immediately, Papa reached down for the pliers that weren't there.

"Stupid. Why did you put the pliers back? Hand them here."

Jeremy handed him the pliers and waited for further instructions. All he got were grunts from his Papa struggling with the nut. Jeremy circled his father to see what tool he would be expecting when they suddenly bumped legs. Unexpectedly, Jeremy fell backward throwing his greasy hands behind him to keep his pants off the dirty concrete floor. The grease on his hands took hold like grease would do on concrete floors, and Jeremy slid backward fast while kicking out with his legs for balance. He hit Papa's ass, who in turn lost his balance and tipped the rototiller over in his effort not to. The exposed tines looked like a laughing skeleton.

To break the silence of Papa sitting in his toolbox, Jeremy suggested they buy a new tiller. Papa spit out some distorted words, which Jeremy never remembered, and he backed out making sure he didn't slip on the greasy concrete floor. At least Jeremy kept his pants from getting dirty. He looked back once to watch Papa climb out of the toolbox with grease smeared in splotches on his pants.

Jeremy took this opportunity to sneak into his sister's bedroom. Men never stayed together, anyway. At least that's what he learned every Thursday in the summer. Besides, Jeremy figured it was time to learn something about these other people he shared a house with. Maybe I'm supposed to be with them instead of Papa, he thought. I could have this all wrong, this male-female relationship, he thought.

All three sisters shared one room, much larger than his, but of course to hold three growing women it had too many clothes and looked smaller. That was his first impression as Jeremy pushed open the bedroom door with his heart thumping as if he was running a marathon. When the floor creaked, Jeremy jumped. It was not because he was scared. He was just being cautious.

He flipped on their overhead light to better see the scattering of clothes and size of the room. Wendy the youngest had clothes piled on the floor next to her bed. Glenda, too. The oldest Audrey had the messiest part with clothes and shoes even on her made up bed. Maybe his sisters had more clothes because they were shaped different from him, Jeremy thought. He did not understand the blouses with buttons on the wrong side and skirts that wrapped around their thighs making it hard to run fast or climb things.

They had a big room that looked even bigger with the lights on. It looked bigger than the dining room and kitchen put together. You could make three rooms out of theirs and each one would probably be bigger than mine, he thought. They even had their own bathroom. Jeremy was not going in there. He did not want to accidentally find female products that they used in places Jeremy had not figured out yet.

Jeremy almost forgot why he entered his sisters' bedroom. He still did not know why, but he figured their bureau would be a good start. He felt pretty good about things as he pulled open the top drawer.

Jeremy could not figure out who owned the lacy underwear. He did not know why he touched the lacy things. The fingers on his left hand just ended up tangled in the elastic. It was a trap. He shook his hand trying not to mangle the rest of the folded slippery pieces of material meant to cover leaky holes and support bags of flesh. He did not want to think about that since they were his sisters,family. The slippery material was not squares and he would never be able to figure out how to fold them back like squares again. They were so fragile they moved on their own into contorted shapes that did not look like a neatly folded pattern. Why did they have a messy room and a tidy bureau drawer?

He had to get away. Jeremy could see his whole arm being dragged inside the long drawer. Finally, Jeremy shook his hand free leaving a clump of twisted, slippery material looking like a dead body. I didn't do anything wrong. "Just curious", Jeremy told the room. Shaky voice he almost did not recognize.

He figured he had been their too long already. He thought about what it would look like getting caught holding his sister's under things. He suddenly remembered that some of the under clothes touched body parts he did not understand. He did not want to catch anything. They talked about cooties when they talked about boys. Jeremy did not know what cooties were, but they sounded like something girls gave to boys who touched girl things.

He left quickly not forgetting to shut the bedroom door. Later, while pretending to read in his room, Jeremy heard the threesome and Mother come home. With a spill of chattering and a chaos of noise, he suddenly remembered that he had left the bureau drawer wide open. A panicked feeling came right into his throat. He felt like an idiot and a fool. He had just read about these words in a book he never read again.

He heard them pile into their bedroom still chattering away like a flock of crows cawing at each other for attention. With the glass cup shoved so close to his ear that it hurt, Jeremy heard someone shove the bureau drawer closed without breaking stride in their chatter. He swallowed that hardness in his throat and vowed not to go snooping again.

The next Thursday, Jeremy made it back into his sisters' bedroom after they and Mother left for town. Jeremy had first approached Papa in the garage, but his father's look told him to get lost. In his sisters' room, Jeremy stayed away from the sinister bureau drawer with the dark, unspeakable secrets that had it out for him. Instead, he stood near the beds smelling sweet perfume and surveying Audrey's vanity at a distance.

One thing Jeremy learned by looking over Audrey's vanity was that she used makeup first. He studied the tubes, canisters, and brushes without really seeing them. Somehow, this world of his sisters contained fragments of a society he did not fully understand. They had connection with each other and it revolved around the makeup and pieces of clothing they used to create an attraction on themselves. Jeremy wondered what it would feel like to fix his body so that people noticed and liked him. But, then, people would notice me and see something I didn't want to show them, he thought.

Jeremy walked out of the room slowly and steadily knowing that he wouldn't be found out. There was no one to see him come or go from this adjoining room to his. He had wanted to find something that the girls had of his to prove they had been in his room and been as curious. But, there was no evidence that they had any interest in who he was. Until the next month.

In July 1983, Glenda hit sixteen like a locomotive smashes into a car stuck on the tracks.

Jeremy saw more of her skin than ever before. On the night of her birthday party, the house filled with giggling and gaggling girl chatter.

"You're a boy. You think boys will be attracted to this body and love me?"

Glenda had pounded on his door with her foot and Jeremy wondered why she did not feel pain. They stood facing each other on the threshold of the door. Jeremy only hoped one day to be taller than she.

"What about your party?" Jeremy could hear people singing `Happy Birthday' in the dining room.

"They don't need me. They know the words. Are boys going to love me?"

Predictions like this had no meaning to him at his less than mature age. "Yeah, of course boys will like you. Why wouldn't they? You didn't get a tattoo, did you?"

"No, stupid. How would I get a tattoo? Why, will boys like me with one?"

Jeremy did not like this situation. Glenda sought his brotherly advice on a topic he still did not understand himself. "You're a girl. You're not fat. Your face isn't scarred. You got hips and breasts, so you got all the right equipment. And, your skin is hairless and smooth and fleshy."

"I know what I want. It's to get laid before I get out of high school. If I can't do that on my own, I expect you to help me when you get older."

She spun around and left as the singing died down. Jeremy shut his bedroom door trying not to picture Glenda having sex with someone he knew.

That evening, Jeremy saw her reading Christine by Stephen King. Jeremy imagined the evil car driven by a maniac Glenda running him down over and over because he could not provide her a suitable suitor.

To avoid Glenda's presence for the next few days, Jeremy stayed outside pushing the vibrating rototiller between plant rows. A hot humid sun pushed sweat from his face in a spiral and bounced off the hard clay. Through the salty haze, he scrutinized tomato vines slipping through wire mesh and green leaves that dangled pea pods from narrow stems. He puzzled at the onion sprouts and cabbage balls. He did not understand how living things could creep up from such an inhospitable clay soil. He admired his Papa's talent to mother plants into living things. He did not understand how he could live in an old farmhouse filled with the edgy spirits of unkind womanhood who were not out here witnessing life's growth.

Papa had planted with enough space for Mr. Rototiller to breeze through. Jeremy just had to keep the machine from running away and taking him with it. He hit as many rocks as he could so that fixing a jammed rototiller engine would make Papa happy. Sometimes Mr. Rototiller hit the rock Jeremy meant for it to hit, spun in a non-straight direction, and took out one of those precious plants. Maybe his duty out here on the hard clay tundra of Papa's farmland included hope that life would spring up despite loss. Or, maybe Jeremy wanted the tines to need sharpening so Papa would be happy with something to do.

If Mother took the sisters in tow as they grew up, Papa did not take his son. Papa had the clay soiled farm to hunt for spots to grow eatable plants and sustain their lives. He had no son to help him because only Papa could do it right. It was a question of communication. Jeremy did not think his parents and sisters understood. Jeremy thought that Mr. Rototiller clipped down those plants on purpose to bring about communication that didn't happen.

At the end of July, Papa divided the girls' bedroom into three. This required a major renovation to one side of the house that ended with a reduction to Jeremy's room. Another question as to why being the son was so good. Jeremy felt his brain vibrating in his skull as he pushed Mr. Rototiller outside, while inside the house his world got smaller.

In the heat of summer, Jeremy felt the ground beat back. He watched the clumps of clay get smaller with each churn of the tines; he imagined the same thing happening to him and his bedroom where he found his only solitude outside under the hot sun. Maybe Papa did not realize this. Jeremy pretended he did not, anyway.