Lukewarm Summer by Olivia Treynor

LUKEWARM SUMMER

OLIVIA TREYNOR

YOU GOT COLD in the water. It was a lukewarm summer, with the humidity cranked down low and the sweet laugh of Idaho cicadas humming through the air. We were seventeen and felt about that age, everything feeling in between. We stood in the water, pushing oxygen in and out of our bodies and waiting for the sun to set on top of us. The sky was simmering with something. All that deep blue and warm pink. We had been dating for eight months, though it was hard to tell because we never really counted. I thought it’d be nice if I took you to my family lake house before I left for school. You agreed that it sounded like a good idea, and, to our surprise, our parents did, too. So we drove up to the panhandle of Idaho and on the way our car got totaled and my grandparents had to pick us up and when we got to our room there was a dead rat in the bed so we slept outside in sleeping bags and woke up the next day at noon and decided to go swimming. That was just the way things went. Idaho is always the same in late August: it is hot during dinner and thunder rain lightning when you’re ready for dessert. We were waiting for something to happen in that lake, noticing how it shifted, the water holding some distinctly pacificnorthwestern volatility. The thermometer on our dock measured only three inches under the surface and tricked us into thinking the water was warm. It was a heirloom and borderline-obsolete device, only accounting for the layer that is sunbaked and forgetting about all that seaweed and cold beneath the surface. The strata of temperature underneath us. I liked the hot air on my skin and the cool lapping all that warmth off, the both sensations at once. It reminded me of something, like the gnawing stomach sinking I get even when I’m crying out of joy. Hot, cold, hot, cold. I didn’t know why you were shivering. I kept asking you to dip your head under the water. You’ll get warmer once you do, I told you. I must have promised that a thousand times. You didn’t listen. Instead you stood there, arms embracing your body, goosebumps prickling when you brushed up against me.

Bats strung through the air like anachronisms, the threat of October held in their haunted silhouettes. Their clicks made me think of a sound I had memorized from a childhood home I used to live in, a noise I always thought sounded somewhere between a wind chime and a whistle. That house was tucked in between long, blonde hills. Deer often stood in the backyard and ate my step-mom’s prized thumb-sized tomatoes. My dad would run outside and yell when he saw a coyote passing through. I was terrified of the dark and slept with the covers pulled way high above my head. And then there was that noise, occasional but consistent, always definite. It was an owl’s hoot, I learned later, through a flat explanation from someone who did not find it endearing that I had never connected the onomatopoeia to the real deal. I almost liked the mystery of not knowing an owl’s hoot was an owl’s hoot, that it held something different because I so isolated the sound from its origin. When something is lonely and unnamed like that, when it is anonymous and so tied to something else, you let it become that other thing. A Russian doll emptied of her twins and made into a cocoon. A calling card, a signal, a secret I shared as the sole witness. Something greater than an owl’s hoot. Something too big to name entirely.

As a child, my step-mother would always buy me the same hand sanitizer, a plastic spray bottle with the label torn off. She would take my small and unworn palms, spritz spritz and then work the strange liquid into my skin until it disappeared. I would smell my hands afterwards, fascinated by its mysterious scent, sometimes even spraying it into the air like perfume to anoint my childhood bedroom. It had some kind of smell like a back porch, like sitting in the dirt under a farmer’s market, like pushing through wet warm moss into clear air. The smell was thyme, a discovery I made in the vegetable section of a grocery store. The sterile obviousness of the herb made my stomach feel sour, stupid for finding out such a persuasive, nostalgic experience could be bottled in a syllable.

The recycled Safeway air, the coldness of the vegetable section and the loudness of those supermarket fluorescents. And then the source of all that mystery and comfort tucked in with every other anonymous plant that is thin and green. I liked it better when it was something else. At thirteen I enlisted a friend to tattoo a sprig of thyme on my left rib cage, our crude tattoo gun of needle and Indian ink practiced first on orange rinds and second on my skin. It was summer and she was my best friend, and so it felt intuitive that then was the exact moment something should be scarred into my skin forever. I chose thyme because it reminded me of being small and having my hand held, of that scent I could never remember the source of. Halfway through the permanent experiment I texted my parents to ask if it was okay. I was the type of child who asked questions like, Am I allowed to break the rules?, probably out of the stubborn inheritance children of divorce receive, which is the nagging sensation of being bad. When they said it was not okay, I immediately halted the low-fi procedure. To this day I bear a line with one round appendage under my left breast. It is a sprig of thyme, I explain to people I show. Or it was supposed to be. It happened a long time ago. I only show it as a novelty, a party trick, an icebreaker. The intimacy of its location makes it private enough that I have to make a joke to qualify showing it. As an apology for the crudeness of it, the humiliation of forgetting a smell enough to put it next to my heart. Eighth grade makes you sentimental like that. Now the sprig of thyme is something else, no longer an earnest homage to a childhood mystery but an awkward testimonial to a period of time when I wanted badly to put my childhood in the past tense.

My grandfather has always had an affinity for stars. He is a doctor first, a cardiologist if you’re asking, but he is also a photographer and a philanthropist and other things too that I

would recount with child-like pride if only I could remember them. He has a belly the way most men do and wears funny ties and often forgets to check his insulin after eating three bowls of ice cream for the fun of scaring my grandmother. He is a lot of things. But I think of his star-gazing tendencies first. There is something special about when you are little and a grown-up is looking towards the sky. The perspective of being small and then seeing everyone taller than you feel small, too. I went to Catholic school for a long time and now I think of everything in theological terms, making my staunchly atheist grandfather into a Moses or a David, looking up to be a medium for some kind of greater message being transmuted. Decoding stars like they are binary, zeros and ones blinking in the sky at him.

I wasn’t sure what things he was unlocking when he woke up at three in the morning to watch meteorite showers, or to point out Jupiter, shiny and stable, in between all that blackness. But I always asked to sit on his shoulders. So I could be close, too. I wanted to look up. I wanted to see that certain mysterious something high above.

* My grandmother is an artist and the gatekeeper for the cabin. She’s been coming here since she was a girl, faithfully returning every summer to paint the lake in watercolors. She was six feet tall when she was young but has shrunk considerably since. Now her spine snakes down her back in an ‘s’ curve which makes it hard to walk or stand for long. She tells me that an artist’s work in never done, and that is why she must come back so much, repaint the same scene over and over. My dad says my grandmother has too many things and is painfully unorganized. Not a hoarder, but hoarder-adjacent. He bought her and my grandfather a big house in Massachusetts so, he hoped, the moving process might make her organize everything. But instead she filled up the new basement with paintings, and objects she might want to paint, and objects that inspire her to paint.

There was a leak in the basement and it flooded while we were at the lake. I swam outside while my grandmother, with faulty rural-Idaho cell reception, talked over the phone to the plumber in Boston about what to do with all that water contaminating all those objects.

* I know it is mythologically American of my family to live in one place and have a summer home somewhere else, somewhere we would never really want to live. A place like Coolin, Idaho. The cabin was built in the 1930s by my great-great grandfather, when there were no roads and he had to take a boat or a seaplane to get there. Every summer my family would trek to the lake, flying into Spokane from Pasadena or Boston, depending on the generation, and take a rental car out the twoand-a-half hours until the paved road turned into gravel (that’s when they knew they were close) and then they would drive a little bit longer and take a hairpin turn across a road that is mostly for logging trucks and they would tuck the rental car into the bosom of the shoreline and drive just a little longer and a little slower as the road disintegrated into raw dirt and then they would park and wheelbarrow their belongings in for the summer, and pull back the curtains to let in some light. Do you hear the mythology unspooling? Are you reading this in my grandmother’s voice, papery and high, recounting the famed paternal figure but without all those ‘greats’ attached? That cabin has been a family heirloom for as many generations as my hand has fingers. It feels a little like that: like bones, like flesh, too.

* I was raised there the way that children are raised mostly in the summer. July is the year breaking open, cracking in half like a great pomegranate to dirty my knees and tie knots in the hair I refused to brush. I’ve always thought of childhood as the three-hour stretch in between school and dinner time, that growing-up occurs when there are no adults around to remind you what happens when you do get older. I was a loud kid, not

quite bratty but adjacent to it, the kind of kid that wears teachers into the ground. I tried lots of hobbies like dancing and singing and guitar playing and pottery but nothing really stuck. I had a terrible momentum that made it hard for me to pause. My refuge, what feels like my only, was swimming. I spent lots of time in water. I used to take long baths every night my parents would let me and I would ask my mom or step-mom to wash my hair for me so I could close my eyes and feel baptized. Water has always had this quality for me. I think it was something about turning off, about gravity getting quieter and the feeling of my body escaping out from under me. It was peaceful, not saying anything, though I didn’t quite think of it like that. I’d spent a lot of my adolescence thinking that silence was the same noise as failure. Maybe swimming was practice for me, my own kind of growing up. As children, a favorite activity for me and my brother was wading into a river two cabins down from ours to see how long we could stand the cold. The river was named Hunt Creek, a zigzagged thin line on a map, a squiggle that looks more like a vein than any sort of body of water. Hunt Creek drains down from a nearby mountain, made up of snow runoff and other freezing things. It had a strangely steep incline: the bank was all big rocks and soft sand under, nothing really to grip onto or let you only walk in halfway. Just cold water flooding in from something high above, water so cold it makes it hard to breathe. We made it a game to see who could last in the impossible cold. We’d force cousins or visiting friends to play with us, finding it thrilling to subject ourselves and everyone around us to play our waiting game. There was something about the terrible tolerance that made it intriguing us, asking our bodies to wait and wait and wait, because patience was always a punchline to us and never a virtue. The trick, my brother and I decided, was just to jump into the water. No testing to feel the temperature. Just to dip our whole bodies into its freezing cold and then run away towards the lukewarm water of the lake, deceiving our skin into thinking the rest of the lake was hot. Stunning our nerves into a

frenzied dance of hot, cold, hot, cold. It was a game we taught ourselves, a game every child somehow independently teaches themselves, because everything about childhood rhymes, doesn’t it? Everything I thought I was alone in was really just an inevitable rite of passage.

* At night we would retreat back into the cabin. My grandfather would be on his computer, loudly recounting his favorite lines from the Shouts & Murmurs section of the New Yorker to no one; my grandmother sitting in the kitchen and telling my father stories he had heard a thousand times. How in the afternoon she and her sister would be sent to the kid’s cabin, an old houseboat that was rolled onto land in the forties, and the two of them were always given a single Hershey’s chocolate bar to share. Their game was to try to go the longest time possible in between every bite, to draw the sweetness out for as much time as they could stand. My brother and I would seat ourselves at the table and ignore all the noise around us and ask will dinner be ready soon and can we please eat outside? And the food would always take longer than we expected because the stove is as old as the house and old things always take longer, it felt like, and so we’d prop our legs up on the table and count our mosquito bites and scabs until one of the adults floating around the cabin noticed our grossness and asked if we could please not do that the dinner table. And then we would sit and try not to squirm too much and wait.

When we stood in the lake long enough, your teeth began to chatter and I asked if you wanted to get out. You said no but wouldn’t tell me why, and I watched you swear you were fine while your skin crawled up and your jaw stuttered against itself. We stood in the water a little bit longer, the bats dipping and bending through the thin air and your teeth crack crack crack like a heartbeat flutter.

It was sad, though we didn’t know it quite yet. I was leaving for college the next week and there was something melancholy mixed in with all the beauty, something about the sky canted, something about the moment too cold for you. I had to be the one to suggest we get out. I didn’t want to, at least, I didn’t really. I wanted to stay a long time. I wanted to drink in the stillness of mountain water and the swiftness of those chirping bats and the way your jaw betrayed your insisting that you were fine and listen, listen for the sound of an owl cutting through the air and wait and wait and wait until it all came back to me, the cast of my childhood, my grandfather staring upwards and the hot, cold tricking my small body. Instead we got up and dried off and you promised maybe later, when it was warmer, we could go swimming again. But it had already been cannibalized by the sourness of it all, the sweetness of its savory. The way a moment always ends too soon. The way that thyme doesn’t smell like much but will drive you crazy when you forget its name.