We wake early on these humid August mornings, our sweaty arms and legs embraced by damp sheets, a hot yellow sun already intruding through the slats in the closed blinds. Our mothers have to convince us to eat the breakfasts they’ve made for us, a cup of coffee that is more milk than coffee, some buttered toast, a banana. We wash our faces and get dressed, shorts, t-shirts, and battered Keds our summer uniform. We don’t tell our mothers where we’re going this day, nor do they ask. They assume that we’ll be home when we get tired enough at the earliest or by dinner time at the latest and in spite of the fact that we wear no wristwatches, we will be home on time. We carry no wallets, no identification, no water bottles, no snacks. The only warnings our parents ever give us involve not talking to strangers, and we mostly, but not always, follow this instruction. We carry no house keys with us because we know that whenever we decide to go back home, our mothers will be there, waiting but not waiting. Their lives do not revolve around our comings and goings. The door will always be open.
We eat hurriedly and then rush off, running our bikes down asphalt driveways already hot to the touch at this early hour, and as the bikes pick up speed, we fling our legs over the seats and rush off down the hill out of our neighborhood, past our friends’ fathers leaving for work, past their mothers hanging out the day’s first load of laundry. Our fathers make adequate livings working on factory floors or in the trades, and our mothers keep house. Summers stretch out before us, hot and lazy and pointless. There are no summer camps, no enrichment programs to distract us from our idleness. Our homes are not air-conditioned, so on a hot day like this one it’s better to be outdoors, where at least the breeze is cooling, and the shade of a tree is a comfort. Our fathers like to call this “Nature’s air conditioner” and then laugh, and we don’t get the joke, but we know that it feels good to be under a tree on a hot August day.
Down the hill we coast, the wind blowing our hair back from our bare heads, and then up a short hill on the other side, the sweat starting now as we pedal, sweat pouring down our foreheads, down our backs, between the buds on our chests that have not quite turned to breasts, down into the waistbands of our shorts. We turn left at the top of the hill and pedal hard out of town, across the bridge that spans the small river that runs between our town and the next one over, and on into farmland, where we stop finally to look at some cows in the farmer’s field. We are fascinated because farm life is so close and yet so different from how we live. The smell here is pungent and because we are young, we make jokes but secretly we are thrilled by it too, enthralled by the damp animal smells and the sight of their smooth brown hides and their liquid eyes. They chew incessantly as they gaze over the fence at us, tails swatting away the persistent flies and eventually we tire of watching them and move on.
We ride into another suburban neighborhood not unlike our own, but we don’t know any of the kids here. Like ours, their neighborhood is made of houses all alike on neat, postage-stamp lots, the houses mostly differentiated by how well or poorly the owners have landscaped. The kids here go to a different school in a different town, and yet their lives are very much like our own. Here, too, mothers are hanging laundry on clotheslines and shaking mops out the back door and waiting but not waiting for their children to return home.
A car pulls up alongside us and we glance at the driver. He’s not as old as our fathers, but older than our big brothers and we eye him warily, at once cautious and also interested. He slows the car to keep pace with our leisurely pedaling and smiles at us. The smile is friendly and also sharklike, disquieting, and we want to talk to him and also we want him to go away. He tries to talk to us, and we remember our mothers’ warnings, but he is handsome and we are wary but we are also interested.
“Hey,” he says, slowing the car a bit more and leaning out the window. “Where you goin’?”
“Home,” we say, not wanting to look at him while turning our heads to look at him.
“You wanna ride? I could put the bikes in the back.” We glance sideways at each other but not at him and we are suddenly fearful, like feral cats drawn by the promise of a meal but wary of being trapped.
“No!” we yell, and we pedal faster, and then fast enough to make our hearts race. We are picking up speed. Behind us he laughs to himself, and we’re relieved when he turns onto a side street. We slow our pedaling a little to give our hearts a chance to beat less loudly. We are afraid to look behind us, but we look sideways at each other, eyes wide.
We ride through this neighborhood and then the next, each one different and yet also the same, and then we turn eastward again and come down on the other side of the hill toward home. In the process of completing our great circle, we ride past yards edged with honeysuckle and forsythia, we pass the occasional sweet scent of a rose bush, we listen to the crickets and the bees and the cicadas making their summer noises as we ride past, coasting now, the houses and faces looking familiar again, looking like home.
It is well past lunch time when we finally reach our street, but we know there will be a snack for us when we get home. Our mothers are there when we fling open the back door. Things feel the same, and they also feel different.
“Did you have a good day?” they ask, without looking up from the laundry they are folding on the kitchen table. We pour a cold glass of milk from the refrigerator and reach for a couple of the freshly baked cookies cooling on the counter. We consider the question while we chew a cookie and brush the crumbs from our lips.
“Yes,” we answer. “We did.”
Lisa McKay earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Southern Connecticut State University. She and her husband live in coastal Connecticut with one indoor cat and a yard full of bunny rabbits.