When I was thirteen, fourteen, and even fifteen -- but particularly fourteen -- summer afternoons were a desert. Too young for a real job and lacking the ambition for, say, candy-striping, I started the blank summer with bravado, picturing day after delicious day spent up to my eyebrows in a book. Even my beloved books couldn't lick one of those tireless summers, though. To begin with, I planned my reading badly and chose randomly, wandering in a daze around the public library; inevitably, I'd glut on weightless mystery or romance novels and ruin my appetite. Secondly, but all-importantly, there was the heat, the quiet, deadly heat. It was Long Island heat, occasionally gray and always sticky, with no shore anywhere in sight. I was defenseless.

Mornings weren't so bad. They could mostly be slept through, then occupied by a late breakfast and meticulous ablutions. A book thrown down in disgust the previous day might regain a momentary charm in the relative cool of 11 a.m. Eventually, my mother, who worked at home, would stop for lunch, and I'd eat again with her: tuna sandwiches on white toast with chopped iceberg lettuce and tinily diced dill pickle. We'd set up trays in front of one of “our” shows: “The Young and the Restless” or “As the World Turns.” Done, Mom would go back to her sunny porch with its whirring fans and real work; I'd clean up and confront the problem of the afternoon.

I could easily have lost myself in the daily round of soap operas, but I sensed vaguely, from the way they made me feel (rather sticky and unsatisfied) at day's end, that they were bad for me in such large doses. There were few other ready-made diversions. The arrival of the mail was an event, though its contents were relentlessly unexciting, and never-of course-meant for me. I'd grab the newspaper as soon as it was delivered, and quickly drain all possible adolescent joy from it: advice columns, movie reviews, and horoscopes. Incurably self-absorbed, I was no newshound.

More rewarding was picking blackberries in our yard and in the vacant lot down the street. I liked to do this late in the afternoon, with the air a degree or two cooler and the shade trees doing their thing. Here was a challenge for body and mind, the only one I knew: combing the bushes for berries that had ripened to a perfect dark sheen; deciding whether to take those few that weren't quite ready, or gambling that the birds wouldn't get them before tomorrow; devising ways to reach that gorgeous purple clump just past my fingertips. Our own bushes were an ordinary backyard tangle, in which our German Shepherd, helping me, got stuck about every three minutes; even with his help, it was a simple matter to survey the crop and make the rounds. The lot down the street held all the mystery of the venture. Kid-created bike paths wound through miniature canyons, over almost-hills, into near-dales and brambly hollows. It was easy to lose oneself, impossible to get lost. Sick to death of lying around all day, I put my whole heart and all four scratched limbs into blackberrying. Every few days, when I'd collected enough berries in small Tupperware bowls, Mom made a cobbler, or served them fresh with cream. I would've picked berries full-time if there had been enough bushes.

My friends seemed far away, unreachable, off on family vacations or variously busy with their own lives; my good friend Nancy worked long hours as a day camp counselor, tanning a rich walnut and earning a criminally low salary. I was left to my own devices. Unfailingly, when these devices gave out, Laurel would call.

Laurel was a girl with whom I never had a conversation. Both quiet types, we could be stirred by the frenzy of the school cafeteria to occasional animation or even cleverness. Together alone, we were a disaster. I knew this, and Laurel surely did too, but what could be done? She'd call; on my calendar was day after barren day, punctuated by berrying and bringing in the mail. We'd set a date -- say, Thursday -- that seemed sufficiently distant to both of us. That settled, we'd hang up without further comment or chat. I was invited to Laurel's.

I dreaded it. I resented the harvest I'd lose to birds and insects that day. Still, it was a reason to dress painstakingly, as for an occasion, to construct my image with enormous care. Thursday after lunch, paint on my face and lead in my belly, I'd walk the sweaty mile and a half to Laurel's. The world watched me: I was fourteen, I was on display, I tried to hold my shoulders back and live up to all the fuss I was creating on those quiet streets and deserted sidewalks.

Laurel greeted me at the door, wearing yellow, as I was wearing pink, or vice versa: the colors that looked worst with our “trouble-prone” skin. She wore a bright yellow feather-and-bead ornament clipped to her hair -- the kind of clip, I discovered later, that was used to smoke marijuana, but we had no idea of that then. The ornament dripped down the side of her head and clacked against her glasses: fancy plumage, calculated to attract. Actually, the only attention we might have attracted was a heated debate over which of us was the homelier. We were waiting --desperately, painfully -- to outgrow our ugly stage. We showed no signs of ever doing so. We both wore glasses; Laurel's magnified her eyes to enormous glassy blue marbles, while my eyes were shrunk to watermelon pits. Our hair-hers red, mine brown-hung lank past our shoulders. Our complexions were truly beyond comment. We were gangly and knobby and always about to knock over some expensive ashtray.

She offered me iced tea (I hated iced tea). I accepted. With a stifled sigh, we settled on the scratchy gold sofa, rattled our ice, muttered things like “not much” and “nothing.” Silence. By default, we turned to the soap opera shouting across the room -- not one of “mine.” With force and violence, I hated all soap operas that weren't “mine.” Like hard-boiled eggs, they seemed to exist for the singular purpose of tormenting me. We sat there, our ice melting into our detestable tea. I sweated all over, except for the hand that froze and stuck to the glass.

Sometimes, in a herculean feat of ingenuity, one of us would suggest playing cards, but we didn't know any good games. We'd play Crazy Eights, a jaw-grinding, mind-numbing game if there ever was one. Once we started, we played for hours; we couldn't stop because there was nothing else to do. We accepted it: we were doomed to one another's company because, although it wasn't better than being alone, it should have been. We were young, we were restless, but no possibilities for living occurred to us. Instead, we sat around. Somehow we knew this was adolescence and not madness.

Laurel seemed even worse off than I was; she had an air of desperation that I lacked. Of course: there was no one here to eat tuna sandwiches with, and not a blackberry bush in sight -- nor a book, for that matter. She had a couple of years to go before she discovered sex as a pastime. (I had quite a bit longer.) Meanwhile, she was lost. What did she do when I wasn't there? I could picture her sitting there on the gold sofa, face blank, every long morning and afternoon of the summer.

The awkwardness between us didn't mellow; it grew with each hour and with each encounter. It shrieked in our ears, excruciatingly: the high whine of distress and boredom that must be ignored at all costs. When I was all but deafened, usually by around 4:30, I'd mumble that I had to get home. She'd agree. We shuffled our good-byes, and I fled.

So late in the day, and exhausted from strain, I didn't cause such a commotion passing through town. The sun had lost some of its sizzle; the pavements were gray, not blazing white. I was out, stretching my skinny legs and dangling my skinny arms, moving around in my skin at last. I would soon get a little, a very little bit prettier. Soon some doors would crack open in my mind, just an inch, and I'd recognize their light. I was lucky, lucky, and I'd survived another afternoon at Laurel's.

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Laura Cherry is a poet and technical writer, and this year's winner of the Providence Athenaeum's Philbrick Award for Poetry for her chapbook, What We Planted. Laura received her MFA from Warren Wilson College. She lives in the Boston area with her partner, Ted German, and their daughter, Lila.

copyright © 2002 Laura Cherry. All rights reserved.

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