Fireflies

After she finished radiation, after her scar healed and a halo of curly, gold fuzz appeared on her head, my mother upgraded her fake breast. The previous one had been a little pad she slipped inside her bra, but the new one was better, “A foam rubber cutlet,” she called it. For a week I had caught her prodding it with her fingertips at odd moments, a puzzled look on her face. Then, Saturday morning as I was getting ready to leave for work, she asked me to touch it, check it out. “Come here, Charlie,” she said, planting herself in the middle of the kitchen doorway, her feet wide apart, blocking my escape.

I chewed on a slice of toast and stared at the maps she had pasted on the walls. Florida covered a two foot long strip above the stove. “To keep it hot,” she said. Alaska hung next to the refrigerator, and Ohio, with a circle around Unity, was behind the dog’s bowl, so, according to Mom, Casper could find his way home if he ever got lost. She had trimmed the maps carefully so that each one was the shape of the state and all other information, the list of counties and cities along with any pictures of state birds, flags, or flowers, was discarded. I studied Wyoming, which had been neatly placed on the wall above the kitchen table. Devil’s Tower, Spotted Horse, Buffalo. Each morning for the past month, a new state had appeared, the route of a family vacation highlighted in the bright fluorescent green, blue, or red my father had used when he planned the trip.

“Here,” she repeated. She unbuttoned the top three buttons of her blouse and exposed the upper fringe of her bra. “Go ahead.”

I touched Powder River Pass with the tip of my finger and followed the blue line while my mother stood in the door and waited. My father, mother, and I had camped at Ten Sleep Creek the previous summer, and I was prepared to distract her with a question about when exactly the hailstorm had hit or what my father had yelled when the black bear walked into the picnic grounds. I was seventeen, six-foot-four and weighed a hundred and eighty-five pounds. I could throw a discus over one hundred and sixty-three feet and dunk a basketball two-handed behind my head, but I had not once poked, touched, rubbed, held, or caressed a breast, real or otherwise.

“Really,” she said, “it won’t hurt. No need to be shy. It’s not me.”

I leaned closer to the map. Nothing there mentioned that some of the oldest rocks on Earth can be found in the Bighorn Mountains or that my father had thrown several dozen in the back of the pickup. Had he been alive—he died in front of his first period geography class while drawing the outline of Ohio on the board, (“It looks like a heart,” he said before falling to the floor)—my mother’s request would have gone to him. And had my mother been dating—she wasn’t—the job of checking out the breast might have gone to the boyfriend, although I didn’t like the idea of any man checking out my mother’s breast, fake or not.

“Here,” she persisted, poking it herself with a red fingernail. “See?”

A purple scar, still puckered and angry, ran up out of the bra toward her left shoulder. The part of her chest surrounding the wound was slightly concave. I glanced at the clock and then the door. “Maybe later,” I said.

I worked in the park as a groundskeeper and spent most of my days riding the mower around the ball fields, the picnic grounds, and the basketball courts, far from the chatter and questions of those going to and from the pool. I was one of “Weaver’s Crew,” a group of high school students who shared a history of loss and misfortune. My father had died in January, just two months after my mother found the lump in her breast. Greg’s sister had been killed in a car accident three years earlier on the back road to Negley when a tool truck took a curve too fast and flipped into the oncoming lane. Kyle’s brother was missing in Vietnam. The O’Hara twins, Coreen and Lyndsay, both lifeguards, came from a family of eleven. Their mother had been admitted to Youngstown’s North Side Hospital for something the girls called “the blues.” Mr. Weaver, the park supervisor, hired us because of our “special circumstances,” and in return he got loyal workers and a sympathetic community that passed every park tax levy put on the ballot.

This was the summer of ‘69, the summer Charles Manson murdered Sharon Tate and six others; Senator Kennedy drove off a bridge, killing Mary Jo Kopechkne; Hurricane Camille, the strongest hurricane of the century, slammed into Mississippi; and the Vietcong launched a massive offensive on South Vietnam. The world was falling apart. Even before the next tragedy struck, we could feel its presence hanging in the air as heavy as the mosquito spray that lingered from the fogger’s loop around the park the previous night. I worked alone and seldom talked with the others, but when we did talk it wasn’t about the news. Instead, we talked about our jobs; the temperature of the water in the pool, the mower deck’s tendency to fall off, or the three dollars in change Coreen found at the bottom of the pool.

That Saturday morning I was pruning the maples that lined the tennis courts, just watching the limbs fall then moving on to the next. All morning little kids screamed and splashed in the wading pool while their mothers retrieved bright-colored plastic toys from the water. Young girls and boys threw insults and taunts back and forth, and every few minutes another car dropped off a load of kids. Limbs and branches piled up and as the sun began to burn my shoulders, I considered my mother’s request. I’d driven her to Salem for chemo and radiation. I’d read the pamphlets in the waiting room describing various treatments and what could be expected after surgery. I’d seen clumps of her hair in the bathtub drain and listened to Mr. Ames, the high school counselor, whisper about the stages of grief while I sat in a hardback chair in his office and watched a wren flutter against the window. But nowhere had I heard or seen anything on the dos and don’ts of touching a mother’s fake breast. I understood the possibility that she needed reassurance and that in some small way she might want me to take my father’s place. I was no closer to figuring any of it out when around noon Coreen climbed down from her chair, and a tall blonde girl I’d never seen before climbed up. She crossed and uncrossed her long, tan legs, blew her whistle at a pale, fat boy hanging on the ropes. I trimmed more trees, took my lunch alone in the shade, and continued to watch. Once, she glanced over in my direction and I started to wave but before I could lift my arm she looked away.

My best friend, Nick, was gone that summer, working on an uncle’s hog farm in Iowa, and I had no girlfriend. I spent my evenings shooting baskets at the hoop that hung from our garage or helping my mother paste another map on the kitchen walls. Sometimes, I’d rock on the front porch swing and listen to the trucks out on Route 14 or the music coming out of Miller’s house two doors up.

By a quarter ‘til four, I’d finished with the trees. The new girl was still there, so I waited until it was almost time for the hourly ten-minutebreak, then walked over to the fence.

The air was heavy with the smell of chlorine, sun lotion, and damp towels. Otis Redding’s “Sittin on the Dock of the Bay” played on the loudspeakers that hung from the corners of the restrooms. The new lifeguard glanced in my direction and I waved. She squinted, waved back. After everyone climbed out of the pool, she stepped down from her chair, dipped each foot in the water and walked over to the fence, leaving long, dark, wet footprints on the pale green paint. She swung the whistle in large circles with the practiced motion of a young girl turning a jump rope, but I guessed that she was my age, maybe a year older. Her black suit was faded and too small, the one, I suspect, she had worn the previous summer. A white strip of sunscreen ran the length of her nose. I wondered who she was and what misfortune her family had had, but I didn’t ask.

I hooked my fingers through the chain link fence and leaned forward as if I was trying to pull it down. “Hey,” I said, sawdust falling off my arms and out of my hair.

She smiled. “Why aren’t you swimming?”

I shrugged. “I trim trees and mow.”

She studied the oaks and maples that surrounded the pool, looking for cut limbs, frowning from the sun or maybe the thought of the damage I might be doing to nature.

Her name was Jennifer Morgan and her family had moved into a farmhouse on the back road to Waterford. They came to Ohio to be closer to her grandparents, but she missed her friends back in Minnesota and said she hoped to go back to visit them at the end of summer. As we talked, she repeatedly pulled on the straps of her suit, lifting one side, then the other, and I pretended not to notice her breasts moving and swelling under the shifting pressure. I looked up at the clouds and over at the pile of limbs next to the tennis court. I looked down at her feet and at the kids lining up at the edge of the pool, but then she’d tug again on the straps and the strip of pale skin pushing over the top of her suit would catch my eye.

In addition to sharing a love of track and basketball, we both liked to fish. She said walleye were the best; I said bass. Before Jennifer headed back to her chair, I asked if I could pick her up after work, take her out for a milkshake, and she said yes.

When I got home from work, my mother was standing in the kitchen next to Montana, a bright red scarf tied around her head, the tip of her finger tracing a blue line while she sipped a glass of iced tea. Although still very thin, she had gained weight and lost the dark circles beneath her eyes. She looked pretty in ways she hadn’t for a long time. “Your dad and I were in Missoula,” she said. “In a nature store that sold posters and photographs of grizzly bears. That was their thing, grizzly bears. They had clay models of them and life-sized casts of their paws. There was even a stuffed bear in the corner, maybe seven-feet-tall, with big yellow teeth and sharp claws. Your dad was staring at it when this huge black dog came up behind him and licked his hand. He yelled and almost jumped over the counter. He thought it was a bear.” She tapped the map with her fingertip and chuckled. “You should know these things.” Her hand went to her breast.

“I have a date,” I said.

She looked down at the front of her blouse. “They come in every size you could possibly want.”

“Your new one looks good,” I said. “You’d never know.”

She shook her head. “Boobs.”

I looked at Montana. “I could stay home.”

She ran the palm of her hand over the map. “Who?”

“A lifeguard, a new girl. Jennifer Morgan. I won’t be late.”

She looked at her watch. “You don’t want to see them land on the moon?”

“Maybe at Jennifer’s,” I said.

“Jenn—i—fer,” my mother said, drawing out each syllable. “The new family?”

I nodded.

She frowned, started to say something and stopped.

“I can be home early,” I said.

She glanced at the map, then back at me. “No, no. We’ve talked about this.” She dropped her arms straight to her sides. “I look like a wooden matchstick, don’t I?”

I studied her. White slacks, white blouse, pale skin, the red scarf on her head. “Like you could burst into flames any minute,” I said.

Having breast cancer and my dad dying in front of twenty-five seventh graders would have gotten my mother the sympathy vote from everyone in town, but she wouldn’t have any of it. “No pity party here,” she said. Shortly after I was hired at the park, she called Mr. Weaver and told him I could accept only if he promised to work me hard. She was tough on herself, too, and made jokes about paying half price for her next breast exam, and once, when she grew dissatisfied with the fake breast, threw it out, saying, “Wait until you see my new knocker.” When anyone asked her what had killed my father, she’d say he fell over and died and that the doctor said it happens, people sometimes just fall over and die. “I don’t want to go into it,” she explained. “Some people see dying as a weakness, a character defect.”

But not many people called or stopped by to ask about my mother. People were afraid of the words cancer and breast.

Before I left for Jennifer’s, my mother called me back into the kitchen and pointed at the map of New Hampshire next to the door. “This is where we picked apples,” she said, pointing at a little dot. “Cortland, the best.”

I stared at the green line my father had traced through Franconia Notch, Mount Washington, and Lincoln. There was a photograph on the living room bookcase of the two of them backpacking in the White Mountains. He had been her eleventh grade geography teacher, and in the picture she’s eighteen, just weeks out of high school. Her brown hair hangs halfway down her back. His arm is in the air, about to wrap around her shoulder, his worn, brown backpack at his feet. He’d balanced the camera on a nearby rock and raced back to embrace her, but he was a fraction of a second too slow and the camera had caught his arm in midair.

“Oh, the places we went,” she said.

Had I not been going out, I would have pointed at the map of Colorado and asked if she remembered camping on the side of Mount Wilson, just below Telluride. She would have described how my father had backpacked a pizza four miles to our campsite, would have asked if I remembered feeding the yellow bellied marmots the burnt crust.

She was looking forward to watching the astronauts walk on the moon later that evening and it didn’t seem right that she should be alone. I hesitated at the door.

“I’ll be fine,” she said.

A brown dust cloud billowed behind the truck as I drove down the dirt road to Jennifer’s. Small stones flew up through the hole in the floorboard and road maps my mother had not yet found flapped beneath the seat. Each time I hit a rut or bounced on the washboard, the billionyear- old Wyoming rocks bounced and banged in the truck bed. The rocks were rough and gray, nothing special to look at, but my father had liked the idea that they were among the oldest rocks on Earth, and he had wanted to make a border around the flower garden in our backyard with them.

Jennifer had said she lived by my basketball coach, so when I saw the old farmhouse across from his, I figured that was her place. The front porch sloped like the deck of a sinking ship and the yard was wild with bushes and shrubs that hadn’t been trimmed in years. I turned into the drive and killed the ignition. The engine coughed, then died as I ran up the front steps, rang the doorbell and waited. In a far room of the house a woman sang, “Somebody loves you, peek over here….” She had a good voice and I waited until she paused before ringing again. A few seconds later a barefoot woman wearing a necklace of bright-colored beads opened the door.

“Yes?” she asked.

“I’m Charlie,” I said.

She tipped her head and smiled.

I tucked my hands under my arms, then shoved them in my jean pockets. I felt awkward. Jennifer’s mother—I assumed she was Jennifer’s mother—was younger than I had expected, and it was my first date in close to a year. I stepped into her living room where a fan, rotating on the floor, shot a blast of warm air my way every few seconds. A pink sweater was draped across the banister. “Nice evening,” I said.

The fan turned and her blouse fluttered as if a bird trapped inside was trying to get out. “A little warm,” she said, looking at me as if I might be selling something, which, I suppose, I was. She had curly, red hair and a white eyebrow that gave her a skeptical, flirting look. My father might have said she was dressed like a hippie. I didn’t think so although she was barefoot and had that comfortable with her body look many hippies had. I couldn’t see any resemblance between Jennifer and her mother but then I wasn’t good at spotting that sort of thing. I liked the white eyebrow.

I agreed it was warm and said one of the advantages of working at the park was being allowed to swim after the pool closed. I asked if she swam and she said yes, but she burned easily. She pointed at her red hair.

“My mother’s hair is coming in curly,” I said, thinking that this woman, although new to town, might know my mother. But she gave me a blank look and I scrambled to explain. “The radiation. It all fell out.”

She ran her fingers through her hair and grinned. “The red is mine, the curls are not.”

The bare feet, the beads and that white eyebrow were throwing me off. I stepped back, crossed my arms against my chest. I suspected she was sizing me up, wondering what sort of guy was going out with her daughter. I told her about my job at the park and how during my lunch break I would shoot hoops at the basketball court or sit in the shade and watch a family of black squirrels chase each other up and down the trunks of the trees. We talked about the astronauts who were then just hours away from walking on the moon. She listened intently, nodding, cocking her eyebrow, biting her lip, and opening her eyes wide.

We stood there for another minute discussing the weather (hot and dry) and what a terrible summer it was for the Cleveland Indians (last place) while I wondered what Jennifer was doing. I glanced at the sweater draped over the banister. “Jennifer?” I asked.

“Jennifer?” The woman repeated.

I felt as if I’d been dropped on another planet. “Jennifer Morgan?”

She shook her head.

I went out onto the front porch and looked up and down the road. I half expected to see Jennifer waving from a distant drive, but she was nowhere in sight. The woman stood behind the screen door and watched.

“The new family?” I asked.

She smiled, leaned out and pointed at a gray house a hundred yards up the road.

This time, I left the engine running while I hurried to the front door and knocked. A skinny, black cat, sunning on the porch, arched its back and tiptoed away. I knocked again and pressed my nose to the screen. A television flickered. A folded wheelchair and a green oxygen tank stood near the end of a sofa. I was debating whether or not I should call out and ask if anyone was home when Jennifer danced down the steps. As she opened the front door she turned and called out, “Be back later,” but no one answered.

“I went to the wrong house,” I said. A car flew by, sending up a cloud of dust that drifted toward us.

Jennifer coughed, waved her hand, choked and turned away from the road. “I’m starved,” she said. She’d changed into black shorts and a black tank top, and when she slid into the truck, a black bra strap slipped off her shoulder.

On the way to town, she played with the radio knob, tried to find a station. “Bob Dylan is from Minnesota.” She paused to gauge my reaction. “Zimmerman is his real name. We’re distantly related.”

“I like his songs,” I said, although I couldn’t always understand the lyrics.

Jennifer seemed pleased, but she found only static and a baseball game. She shrugged, leaned back, and smiled. “Ohio,” she said, staring out the window at a woods where my father and I had once gone mushroom hunting. Her hair blew in her face and she pulled long fine strands from her mouth. When we stopped at the crossing on Blair Road for a slow moving train, she offered me a stick of Blackjack gum, then held her hand under my nose. “I smell like chlorine,” she said. Her bare knee rocked back and forth, coming dangerously close to the gear shift and my hand.

“That’s okay,” I said. The train passed and we waved at the two men standing on the back of the caboose. As I drove across the tracks she ran her hand over the seat and glanced through the rear window at the rocks rattling around in the rusted bed. “Nice truck.”

I looked to make sure she wasn’t joking. The upholstery was cracked and peeling off the seats, there was a hole in the floorboard next to the clutch, and the dome light dangled from a single black wire like a giant spider about to drop between us.

“Thanks,” I said, “it was my father’s.”

She stuck out her lower lip and nodded as if she approved.

“He died this past winter.”

“Sorry,” she said, running her fingers through her hair, untangling knots.

I waited for her to ask how he died but she didn’t. “He was forty-four and other than the headaches had never been sick,” I said. “My mom was recovering from surgery and when the teachers in her building heard, they thought there had been a mistake. They thought she was the one who had died.” Still, Jennifer didn’t ask any questions. Maybe she wasn’t worried about dying herself; maybe she was and didn’t want details on how easily it could happen. Or maybe how didn’t matter.

“I’m starving,” she said again. She twisted a cheap ring with a yellow stone on her finger. I felt sorry for her but I wasn’t sure why.

We were the only ones in the Fiesta Drive-in parking lot, everyone else probably home watching the lunar landing. We sipped our shakes and listened to the sizzle and snap of the blue electric bug zapper that hung above a picture of a giant chocolate cone outside Jennifer’s window. She said she knew all the words to Dylan’s songs and that in Minnesota he was bigger than the Beatles. Her black bra strap slipped farther down her arm. It looked smooth and silky and I wondered if that was one of the things my mother missed. Perhaps white bras with pockets for a fake breast didn’t feel the same. Jennifer joked about a boy at the pool who had lost his suit when he dove off the board and had cried so hard she was afraid he was going to drown. I started to tell her about my dad and I swimming in a mountain stream, but I stopped, realizing it had nothing to do with a boy losing his pants.

Jennifer said that the men in her hometown went ice fishing every winter and three of her friends camped out one night when it was thirty below. “That’s what it’s like there,” she said. She fiddled with the radio knob. “What’s a buckeye?” she asked, but before I could explain she looked at her watch. “If we hurry we could watch them walk on the moon.”

“Sure,” I said, backing out of the drive-in, then adding, “It’s a kind of nut.” I was racing down the back road to Waterford, listening to the billion-year-old rocks bounce in the back, when I got the idea of showing one to Jennifer when we got to her house. I’d tell her about Ten Sleep Creek and how my father and I had collected those rocks during a hailstorm, but, before I could start my story, there was a loud thump. The entire windshield bounced. Jennifer shrieked. Blood and feathers splattered everywhere.

I hit the brakes and the body of a large bird slid off the hood.

Jennifer stared at the windshield. Her face was white and her mouth hung open. I wasn’t sure if she was breathing. “Jennifer?” I said.

She didn’t move.

“Jennifer?”

She buried her face in her hands and moaned. “You should have swerved,” she said over and over. “You should have been watching.”

I got out of the truck and walked back to where the bird lay beside the road. The large round eyes were open and one wing was stretched out as if trying to fly, but it didn’t move. I nudged it with the toe of my shoe, then rolled it into the ditch. When I got back in the truck, Jennifer was sobbing. “An owl,” I said.

She choked and I thought she was going to be sick. I turned on the wipers, but they only smeared the blood. Jennifer groaned again. “Sorry,” I said. I rolled down the side window and leaned out in order to navigate down the road. I didn’t know what else to say. It had come out of nowhere.

She wiped her eyes and stared down at her feet so she wouldn’t see the blood or feathers. “Didn’t you see it?” she asked. Then she was quiet until we turned into her drive, and I asked if there was a hose I could use to clean the windshield.

She pointed to the side of the house. “There.” She opened the front door and went inside.

I found the hose in the weeds but the nozzle didn’t work and I couldn’t get much pressure. Feathers slid across the hood and caught under the wipers, splatters of blood clung to the side mirror, and I got almost as wet as the truck. But eventually, the windshield was clean enough for me to drive home. After I rewound the hose, I went to the front steps, and Jennifer appeared on the other side of the screen door.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Me too,” I answered. Then she closed the door.

If there had been no owl, if I could have told Jennifer about the mountain pass and the oldest rocks on earth, how my father and I had picked them up despite the hailstones stinging our arms and backs, things might have worked out differently. Jennifer would have invited me inside, and we would have sat close to each other on her couch. She would have told me more about Minnesota and Bob Dylan. I might have mentioned my mother pasting the maps to the wall and how difficult it was for her to raise her arm. Jennifer would have rested her head on my shoulder, and we would have leaned into each other while we watched the astronauts walk on the moon.

That is, I think, the way things sometimes get started.

As it was, I climbed into the truck, put it into reverse and backed slowly out of Jennifer’s drive. Drops of water ran down the windshield and rolled across the hood. The porch light went out. I waved in case anyone was watching, then headed down the road. As I passed the old farmhouse, the woman with the white eyebrow was sitting on the porch steps. She waved with a flutter of her fingers, and I realized she had probably known all along that I was at the wrong house. I stopped, backed up, then pulled forward until I was off the road. I didn’t know whether or not to turn off the engine and lights, but she scooted over and patted the steps, so I did.

“You knew I was at the wrong house, didn’t you?” I said as I walked up the weed-lined path.

She grinned. “I suspected.”

“And you didn’t say anything.”

She shook her head.

“You let me walk right in.” I stood next to the steps and leaned against the railing.

She glanced at my jeans. The white eyebrow went up.

“I hit an owl,” I said. And then I explained that I’d had to wash off the truck so I could see out the windshield. “I got wet, too.”

She nodded as if it all made perfect sense. “It was probably diving for a mouse.”

I stood there thinking I should get home but not really wanting to go. “Why aren’t you watching the landing?”

She pointed at the field next to Coach Swinderman’s house. “Have a seat and enjoy the show.”

Across the road, fireflies, more fireflies than I’d ever seen, hovered over the field, above the fresh cut hay and at the edge of the woods.

Soft yellow lights drifted in every direction, blinking in a secret language only fireflies understood. I sat on the step, the air smelling of powder and shampoo.

She smiled. “Want a Coke?”

It was after ten. My mother was home alone, perhaps trying to paste a new map to the cupboards.

“Ice cold.”

And what next if I said no? Watching the fireflies across the road and sitting next to a woman I did not know, I thought the whole world seemed delicately balanced, and at the right time, a small shove might get it spinning in the right direction.

“Sure,” I said.

She pushed herself up, one hand braced against my shoulder, and went inside. I stared at the quarter moon hanging above the trees at the edge of the field and thought of the tiny space capsule nearly two hundred thousand miles away. Then the screen door creaked, and she was sitting beside me again.

“You waiting for someone?” I asked as she handed me the bottle.

A car went down the road, and we both watched until the red taillights disappeared in the distance. “Not tonight,” she said. Then, “Charlie?”

“Yes?” I answered, surprised that she remembered my name.

She stuck out her hand, “I’m Charlene. I’m a Charlie, too.”

And sometimes, this is how things get started: A teenage boy and a white eyebrowed woman with the same name, a cold Coke, and a night full of fireflies. She reached out and caught one, but when she opened her fingers it refused to fly away. It blinked on and off in her hand, its pale yellow light illuminating the lines that ran across her palm like tiny highways.

“Want to hear an old rock story?” I asked.

She tossed the lightning bug into the air. “You bet.”

“From Wyoming,” I said. “Three billion years old.”

She nodded, then pulled her knees up and wrapped her hands around her ankles.

I went to the truck and carried one up to the steps for her to see. “Gneiss,” I said, handing her the dark, rough rock. She turned it over and pressed it against her cheek. I sat down beside her, sipped my Coke and took a deep breath. And then I told her how my father and I had jumped into Ten Sleep Creek and the water was so cold we could barely move. She said she had once gone swimming beneath a mountain waterfall and had nearly frozen, her skin going numb until it felt like plastic. We traded stories back and forth, our voices growing softer as we watched the moon sink behind the trees, her shoulder pressed against mine. Frogs croaked in a nearby pond and an owl, perhaps looking for its mate, hooted from a distant tree.

Roger Hart