Tendresse
Posted 05-07-2013 at 10:46 AM by Urban Sasquatch
Once upon a time during my childhood there was a day.
It was a day which was curious and beautiful. I don't know why the things which happened that day did, but the memory lives with me and influences in some small way the manner in which I view the world.
It was a hot summer's day back in the 70's, the kind of day when it's impossible to get children to don shoes no matter how they may complain at the concrete and asphalt burning their feet. The collective child-gangs of our trashy little apartment complex ran and played and made small war upon one another anytime intruders from the next complex over dared cross unspoken boundaries, all carried out amidst the endless drone of summer insects and the distant off-key chimes of ice cream trucks.
Each quadrant within the complex looked precisely like any other, yet to a child's discerning eye was unfamiliar and hostile territory which contained loose rocks and fast-flying clods of hard-baked dirt, gravel paths and cement sidewalks precisely like our own yet somehow alien to us. I recall the sense of daring at riding our bikes around and around our own quadrant until we’d built up the courage to pass between the buildings on the far side and circle the enclosed lamp post in the next quadrant before speeding back to "home base" and security, unscathed and lauded within our own minds as warriors triumphant, daring what others did not. It was practically a rite of warrior passage, this rapid trek, meaningless yet unquestionably important.
The paths and sidewalks were filled with unfamiliar footprints trod by mothers we did not know as they chatted and talked past waggling cigarettes which stuck to their lips, the acrid smells of ashy cancer smoked down to the filter, stale beer and housecoats which may or may not have ever seen the inside of a washing machine. Fat plastic tubes held in place by bright pink spikes adorned the heads of these Matrons of the Unwanted in our brick equivalent to the trailer park, turning their garish attempts at style into a mockery which would later delight tourists and denizens alike in Picadilly Circus a third of a world away; but in the here and now we kids biked past these women, daring to look from the corners of our eyes, always ready to dodge an insult or a flying hand from a complete stranger if in our faux bravery we edged too close.
That was every day.
This story is about THE day.
I was eight years old and being "babysat" by the woman two doors down from us -- I recall her name being Shirley or some such name seldom heard anymore. I'll call her Shirley; it's a good name for the time.
Shirley had two daughters, Debbie who was my own age, and a younger girl whose name I never actually knew, but who was just enough past that chronological boundary designating her as "too little" to play with us, leaving her crying and squalling around the periphery of our self-proclaimed maturity in frustration and anger and repeated cries of "I'm gonna tell on you" as we haughtily ostracized her. It wasn't meant as cruelty; rather, it was the pecking order, the way of things. Our elder siblings did this to us and we resented them mightily for it, yet we were unable to draw the parallel when we did the same to our younger sibs.
On the day in question all we kids were excited because it had been declared we were not only going to a swimming pool (back in the days when public pools were widespread) but to a special pool called Wave-Tek, a new facility where a machine produced waves allegedly capable of pushing a surfboard! Instantly our childish minds were awash with visions from Hawaii Five-O and tubes towering dangerously over our heads. We couldn’t help but picture the danger and excitement as this swimming pool slowly inflated itself in our adventure-febrile minds to the grandeur and scope of the most tropical of islands. Those who had been there before egged it on, driving us into a fury of anticipation.
Supplies were gathered: Garish towels and coconut-scented oils in their dark brown plastic, sunburn ointments in the medical-looking blue and white bottles... Sandwiches were made and set to grow disgustingly warm in folding plastic bags while thermoses (thermosi?) were filled with lip-staining concoctions half fruit punch, half Kool-Aid. After a great deal of screaming and running in and out of the apartment we were at last ready to go.
The trip over was the usual hubbub of who wanted windows up, who wanted windows down and best of all, people in the front allowed to have windows down while we children crowded in the back – myself and Debbie, along with all the necessities which failed to fit in the trunk – were NOT allowed to put windows down. Long-heeded parental lore was apparently rife with instances of children sticking arms out the window only to have them brutally torn away by passing vehicles. Maybe it's just me thinking that was a load... or maybe back then people really did drive perfectly square cars that came within millimeters of one another.
When at last we arrived, the lines were long and the place was crowded; but eventually we made our way in to water, glorious water! It looked just like every other concrete-and-chipped-paint public pool in the world, but who cared? This was summer and the smell of adult armpits and coconut lotions and gleaming skin! The atmosphere was rife with too-expensive soft drinks and vendor foods with scents which drove us mad with aching desire but for which we could only pine hopelessly, knowing that warm bologna and mustard awaited us.
After that we children were left on our own and gleefully went away to drown as those responsible for our care and well-being lathered themselves with oils until they looked like seals and then lay back, eyes shaded, to reap every ray of ultra-violet the sun would generously bequeath in the pursuit of health, fashion and all things attractive (such as skin the colour and texture of a vanilla bean).
We laughed and played; we fought and screamed. More than once I recall as Debbie and I came to juvenile fisticuffs and ragged cries of I hate you! After that we would go our separate ways, drifting aimlessly for a while before returning to one another rather than remain lonely among a crowd of strangers. This was the pattern which had always been, and everything was normal until a particular moment...
As we were drying off and preparing to leave, something unspoken and inexplicable passed between Debbie and myself, a kind of electricity that came from nowhere. It wasn't sexual. We weren't looking one another up and down with new eyes from which innocence waned and vanished; rather, there was a magnetic need for nearness so powerful that we fell silent amidst all the chatter and bustle surrounding us. It was that moment known to those older than we, later in life as eyes briefly lock before flickering back and forth between the windows to the soul and lips ripe with sensual promise, beckoning like sirens – and yet that tingle was stretched out into a strange sense of forever for us children as we looked back and forth at one another in a shared confusion. All we could feel was the universe opening to us and the question: What is this that’s happening?
The car was packed full and we were stowed once more in the back along with towels, baskets and myriad flotsam and jetsam. Only this time rather than fighting and arguing, we sat side by side, quiet – never really doing more than glancing at one another's eyes only to look away instantly, not ashamed but feeling, rather, a kind of shock, a recognition of a thing, something of which we were previously unaware.
All the way home we sat with our forearms and knees touching, a powerful feeling of warmth emanating from the minor skin-on-skin contact. Occasionally one of us would reach over with the other hand and touch, touch so gently it might have been nothing more than a thought. During the very few instances in which we managed to hold our gaze we each saw our own wide-eyed, wondrous and very sweetly puzzled expression looking back, reflected in the face of the other.
Once we returned to the apartment, somewhere just past noon, as everyone else scattered to their activity of choice Debbie and I felt a crazy, pounding need for privacy and seclusion, a sensation of being actually driven although neither of us knew by what. The younger girl insisted on chasing after us and in an effort to both appease her and get her to go away we concocted a game of house in which we were the parents and she was the child. We heartlessly proceeded to send her on countless errands to "the store" for enough imaginary supplies to feed ten imaginary doomsday families, sending her and sending her until she gave up and went away to watch television –
...and with our peace restored we turned toward one another and began to kiss. It was not the pinch-lipped or puckered kissing of children; we actually kissed with longing and intent as though the spirits of two ancient lovers had been granted time on this earth and had found refuge within us. Our eyes met and our lips parted and souls long separated sought communion and rapture.
It was not pornographic. There was no nudity, no games of doctor, not even the slightest hint of any such thing; but there was a crazy, powerful feeling between us, a void, an aching need never before felt and we tried to fill that void with kisses, with the most tender gazes into one another's eyes; we tried to bridge that imagined expanse with gentle caresses of shoulders and arms, caresses so slow as to almost be studious, and then our lips would find one another again, foreheads touching, eyes drifting open then closed and cheeks brushing as we breathed and flowed and ebbed and drifted on a tide which swept us along. Our cheeks touched. Our mouths shared breath and we gently moved and each gently clung to the other, sometimes smiling before the great power of what moved in us and through us would once more draw eyes closed with another sensational wave of electricity and bliss…
And then with one last kiss it was gone.
I remember the sense of confusion as both our expressions yielded to complete and utter dismay, looking at one another with the most distinct sense of questioning: What are we doing here?!?
We rose from the bed where we'd lain, rose from the pit in the blankets where so much unspoken intimacy had passed between us in the feathery touches of fingers and skin and heart and soul, and we stepped back from one another, absolutely everything simply... it was simply vanished as if it had never been. We each knew we'd experienced something and while there was a lingering sense of preciousness nothing else remained, neither passion nor urge nor even sense of something new. It was like waking from a dream, where one feels the most powerful sense of a different reality, only to have one's heart broken as this reality overtakes the other, swallows it and gradually erases it.
Looking back with elder eyes on the innocence and beauty of that day I'm thankful we were not interrupted by adults, that we were able to have that experience. It would be impossible to explain to someone the rapture and non-sexuality of our brief... love, would it be? I don't know, for there are so many definitions and interpretations of the word; but yes, love of a sort, however fleeting. I'm glad we had that time.
We played that day and all days after, fighting as we always had, polluting the air with our insults and endlessly hurtling epithets at one another. There was never for a second any return to that day emotionally, any toggle switch of heart-madness to be thrown. It was never even brought up again, not once by either of us. That day came and went and I was still a child; but that's okay, for although many years have passed and I've both loved and lost numerous times, there are times when I cannot deny that in many ways I'm still a child, as wide-eyed and wonder-seeking as ever.
It was a day which was curious and beautiful. I don't know why the things which happened that day did, but the memory lives with me and influences in some small way the manner in which I view the world.
It was a hot summer's day back in the 70's, the kind of day when it's impossible to get children to don shoes no matter how they may complain at the concrete and asphalt burning their feet. The collective child-gangs of our trashy little apartment complex ran and played and made small war upon one another anytime intruders from the next complex over dared cross unspoken boundaries, all carried out amidst the endless drone of summer insects and the distant off-key chimes of ice cream trucks.
Each quadrant within the complex looked precisely like any other, yet to a child's discerning eye was unfamiliar and hostile territory which contained loose rocks and fast-flying clods of hard-baked dirt, gravel paths and cement sidewalks precisely like our own yet somehow alien to us. I recall the sense of daring at riding our bikes around and around our own quadrant until we’d built up the courage to pass between the buildings on the far side and circle the enclosed lamp post in the next quadrant before speeding back to "home base" and security, unscathed and lauded within our own minds as warriors triumphant, daring what others did not. It was practically a rite of warrior passage, this rapid trek, meaningless yet unquestionably important.
The paths and sidewalks were filled with unfamiliar footprints trod by mothers we did not know as they chatted and talked past waggling cigarettes which stuck to their lips, the acrid smells of ashy cancer smoked down to the filter, stale beer and housecoats which may or may not have ever seen the inside of a washing machine. Fat plastic tubes held in place by bright pink spikes adorned the heads of these Matrons of the Unwanted in our brick equivalent to the trailer park, turning their garish attempts at style into a mockery which would later delight tourists and denizens alike in Picadilly Circus a third of a world away; but in the here and now we kids biked past these women, daring to look from the corners of our eyes, always ready to dodge an insult or a flying hand from a complete stranger if in our faux bravery we edged too close.
That was every day.
This story is about THE day.
I was eight years old and being "babysat" by the woman two doors down from us -- I recall her name being Shirley or some such name seldom heard anymore. I'll call her Shirley; it's a good name for the time.
Shirley had two daughters, Debbie who was my own age, and a younger girl whose name I never actually knew, but who was just enough past that chronological boundary designating her as "too little" to play with us, leaving her crying and squalling around the periphery of our self-proclaimed maturity in frustration and anger and repeated cries of "I'm gonna tell on you" as we haughtily ostracized her. It wasn't meant as cruelty; rather, it was the pecking order, the way of things. Our elder siblings did this to us and we resented them mightily for it, yet we were unable to draw the parallel when we did the same to our younger sibs.
On the day in question all we kids were excited because it had been declared we were not only going to a swimming pool (back in the days when public pools were widespread) but to a special pool called Wave-Tek, a new facility where a machine produced waves allegedly capable of pushing a surfboard! Instantly our childish minds were awash with visions from Hawaii Five-O and tubes towering dangerously over our heads. We couldn’t help but picture the danger and excitement as this swimming pool slowly inflated itself in our adventure-febrile minds to the grandeur and scope of the most tropical of islands. Those who had been there before egged it on, driving us into a fury of anticipation.
Supplies were gathered: Garish towels and coconut-scented oils in their dark brown plastic, sunburn ointments in the medical-looking blue and white bottles... Sandwiches were made and set to grow disgustingly warm in folding plastic bags while thermoses (thermosi?) were filled with lip-staining concoctions half fruit punch, half Kool-Aid. After a great deal of screaming and running in and out of the apartment we were at last ready to go.
The trip over was the usual hubbub of who wanted windows up, who wanted windows down and best of all, people in the front allowed to have windows down while we children crowded in the back – myself and Debbie, along with all the necessities which failed to fit in the trunk – were NOT allowed to put windows down. Long-heeded parental lore was apparently rife with instances of children sticking arms out the window only to have them brutally torn away by passing vehicles. Maybe it's just me thinking that was a load... or maybe back then people really did drive perfectly square cars that came within millimeters of one another.
When at last we arrived, the lines were long and the place was crowded; but eventually we made our way in to water, glorious water! It looked just like every other concrete-and-chipped-paint public pool in the world, but who cared? This was summer and the smell of adult armpits and coconut lotions and gleaming skin! The atmosphere was rife with too-expensive soft drinks and vendor foods with scents which drove us mad with aching desire but for which we could only pine hopelessly, knowing that warm bologna and mustard awaited us.
After that we children were left on our own and gleefully went away to drown as those responsible for our care and well-being lathered themselves with oils until they looked like seals and then lay back, eyes shaded, to reap every ray of ultra-violet the sun would generously bequeath in the pursuit of health, fashion and all things attractive (such as skin the colour and texture of a vanilla bean).
We laughed and played; we fought and screamed. More than once I recall as Debbie and I came to juvenile fisticuffs and ragged cries of I hate you! After that we would go our separate ways, drifting aimlessly for a while before returning to one another rather than remain lonely among a crowd of strangers. This was the pattern which had always been, and everything was normal until a particular moment...
As we were drying off and preparing to leave, something unspoken and inexplicable passed between Debbie and myself, a kind of electricity that came from nowhere. It wasn't sexual. We weren't looking one another up and down with new eyes from which innocence waned and vanished; rather, there was a magnetic need for nearness so powerful that we fell silent amidst all the chatter and bustle surrounding us. It was that moment known to those older than we, later in life as eyes briefly lock before flickering back and forth between the windows to the soul and lips ripe with sensual promise, beckoning like sirens – and yet that tingle was stretched out into a strange sense of forever for us children as we looked back and forth at one another in a shared confusion. All we could feel was the universe opening to us and the question: What is this that’s happening?
The car was packed full and we were stowed once more in the back along with towels, baskets and myriad flotsam and jetsam. Only this time rather than fighting and arguing, we sat side by side, quiet – never really doing more than glancing at one another's eyes only to look away instantly, not ashamed but feeling, rather, a kind of shock, a recognition of a thing, something of which we were previously unaware.
All the way home we sat with our forearms and knees touching, a powerful feeling of warmth emanating from the minor skin-on-skin contact. Occasionally one of us would reach over with the other hand and touch, touch so gently it might have been nothing more than a thought. During the very few instances in which we managed to hold our gaze we each saw our own wide-eyed, wondrous and very sweetly puzzled expression looking back, reflected in the face of the other.
Once we returned to the apartment, somewhere just past noon, as everyone else scattered to their activity of choice Debbie and I felt a crazy, pounding need for privacy and seclusion, a sensation of being actually driven although neither of us knew by what. The younger girl insisted on chasing after us and in an effort to both appease her and get her to go away we concocted a game of house in which we were the parents and she was the child. We heartlessly proceeded to send her on countless errands to "the store" for enough imaginary supplies to feed ten imaginary doomsday families, sending her and sending her until she gave up and went away to watch television –
...and with our peace restored we turned toward one another and began to kiss. It was not the pinch-lipped or puckered kissing of children; we actually kissed with longing and intent as though the spirits of two ancient lovers had been granted time on this earth and had found refuge within us. Our eyes met and our lips parted and souls long separated sought communion and rapture.
It was not pornographic. There was no nudity, no games of doctor, not even the slightest hint of any such thing; but there was a crazy, powerful feeling between us, a void, an aching need never before felt and we tried to fill that void with kisses, with the most tender gazes into one another's eyes; we tried to bridge that imagined expanse with gentle caresses of shoulders and arms, caresses so slow as to almost be studious, and then our lips would find one another again, foreheads touching, eyes drifting open then closed and cheeks brushing as we breathed and flowed and ebbed and drifted on a tide which swept us along. Our cheeks touched. Our mouths shared breath and we gently moved and each gently clung to the other, sometimes smiling before the great power of what moved in us and through us would once more draw eyes closed with another sensational wave of electricity and bliss…
And then with one last kiss it was gone.
I remember the sense of confusion as both our expressions yielded to complete and utter dismay, looking at one another with the most distinct sense of questioning: What are we doing here?!?
We rose from the bed where we'd lain, rose from the pit in the blankets where so much unspoken intimacy had passed between us in the feathery touches of fingers and skin and heart and soul, and we stepped back from one another, absolutely everything simply... it was simply vanished as if it had never been. We each knew we'd experienced something and while there was a lingering sense of preciousness nothing else remained, neither passion nor urge nor even sense of something new. It was like waking from a dream, where one feels the most powerful sense of a different reality, only to have one's heart broken as this reality overtakes the other, swallows it and gradually erases it.
Looking back with elder eyes on the innocence and beauty of that day I'm thankful we were not interrupted by adults, that we were able to have that experience. It would be impossible to explain to someone the rapture and non-sexuality of our brief... love, would it be? I don't know, for there are so many definitions and interpretations of the word; but yes, love of a sort, however fleeting. I'm glad we had that time.
We played that day and all days after, fighting as we always had, polluting the air with our insults and endlessly hurtling epithets at one another. There was never for a second any return to that day emotionally, any toggle switch of heart-madness to be thrown. It was never even brought up again, not once by either of us. That day came and went and I was still a child; but that's okay, for although many years have passed and I've both loved and lost numerous times, there are times when I cannot deny that in many ways I'm still a child, as wide-eyed and wonder-seeking as ever.
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