Summer 75 Fertility

Summer Seventy-Five

Are you decent?

I’m always decent. Please rephrase the question. 

Nightstand lamp lit the satiny leopard fabric drawn between eye clasps; elbows squared; fingers led by muscle memory negotiated contact with grace. Tussles with eye clasps may have been settled with pullover spandex, but no such providence this late July midnight pregnant with promise. 

That’s all I can remember. I said something like, “Bless my heart.” 

Securing the door, erstwhile etiquette marched me down the staircase to a neutral corner where I could restore my promise to her dignity. 

Decency, dignity, whatever it was that we promised to with countervailing physics plotting the indecent laced only with love, love we spread like peanut butter as need arose on the toast of the town, the town an amalgam of subdivisions intermeshed by borough and township boundaries. 

No further memory until later that summer on the August waterspout shimmying toward matriculation; Asti Spumante under a bag of ice in the cooler on the backseat. 

She lay out the blanket and let her sandals at one corner, then she sat on the blanket hugging her denim-skirt knees unsheathing bare calves, sublime ankles, and ruby toenails; she swayed over propping up on one arm, her Oxford sleeve turned up to elbow, one classic button miss. 

The heavy-wired cork foil balled-up and discharged on the blanket. Our plastic cups stood pushed into the sand, freeing a hand by shifting weight to the other elbow.

Her smile held promise to the deserving, and I kept watch for semblance as the conversation turned corners in playful directions. I can’t remember a single word, but there was the timbre of her contralto, lyrics always another verse more, another kiss more. Her hair slate-chestnut in the gloaming, same barrette with gym-suit powder blues, took flight on a gust of wind of its own volition; then the off-campus campus dormitory shared with a roommate who may or may not be home later; aroused blood pressure confused with emotional rush. What kind of motives will get us by, within the registry of motives, that won’t add up to sin?

The sea-salt air sealed invincibility to every choice gamboled along this path chosen for generations, so well-worn, we expect to play out like a movie. When the movie doesn’t play because something interferes with the film spooling, we see the scar of celluloid against a sun backdrop. We splice the cauterized ends to resemble a flinch or hiccup as the story unfolds. 

You can waste a lot of time patrolling through the murky valley of doubt, escape is inevitable once the river mouth meets open waters pooled with faith and forgiveness. In the meantime, having sheltered and nourished your character in hiding, you shoot from the depths as a geyser of beer and Southern Comfort. We hope the episodes resemble life to the best of our ability to mimic and to blend with our surroundings. Escape to the sandy edge where the way forward follows footholds taken and taken again with the benefit of hindsight. It’s a good place to take new steps too on the well-worn path, up against it, with everything to prove, commissioned to arrive beyond a stone’s throw from mediocrity. 

Making no such investment, I brooded over the family car returned by an hour just short of scandal. Grabbed anything leaving a trace from the desk chair or coat-tree or bed covers once I was gone and no longer of the agenda. 

There was a second summer that framed the bicentennial; possibly a reprise of the Asti Spumante beach run, or a night trek from Levittown via River Road to Lambertville and the Swan Hotel sing-along piano bar, but no concrete memory distinct from unconfirmed versions of Black Russians ordered for accelerated effect, off my radar. 

Fertility

“Really?”

“Pretty sure. I think I’d know.”

Last month’s salvo strafed her fertile crescent with horning precision bent on reception, but always a crapshoot which fallopian hatches the golden egg. One way enforced granularly. Seems like you never lose the perspective, when it comes to winning them.

“Now or never, huh?”

“Tick tock, tick tock.”

“Don’t see how I can refuse. Twins in play?”

“Please, it’s pruning-up as you dawdle.”

“Maybe we should try a downstream trajectory.”

“Want me on my head?”

“No mine?”

“Plumbing doesn’t run that way. You can kiss KY goodbye…”

“Have you been feathering the nest?”

“Cracked opened a chardonnay.”

“You’re sure you felt that pinch this time?”

“Left hip. Cross my heart.”

“I wonder, if we propped you up on your left side, and I sneak up like a bugger on my knees, we will minimize the swimming distance, although, you’d probably want the strongest swimmer to pin the corsage, or anoint the crown, you know, bestow my seed upon your most fertile pistils, and I don’t mean six-guns, wouldn’t you?”

“Maybe I could just roll over. Let Mother Nature take charge. It’s like miles for them, it can take days.”

“Microscopic salmon on a uterine quest, not unitarian. Is that why Japanese go to Alaska?  To conceive where salmon spawn?”

“I think it’s the Northern Lights. Aurora Borealis. Supposed to boost fertility. Come on, time to crank it up.”

“Creak, crrreeeeak. I bet the salmon go for the Aurora Borealis too. Who knew, all this time?”

“It’s a Japanese thing, like sushi.”

“Are there Japanese salmon?  Where do they spawn?”

“They hide in the luggage of Japanese tourists.  Well?”

“I find that hard to believe.  Speaking of titanium, Ready Freddy!”

“Let’s see what he’s packing this time, big time.”

“I want nothing more than to get something straight between us, and I mean that on the level, unless you know some secret stacking rituals.”

“You used to say I was stacked.”

“And so you were, especially while nursing. Not a day goes by I don’t relish the memory of your mammaries.”

“How do you want me?”

“Let me count the ways, and how! Ask any man and abracadabra a hot flash turns to nightmare; he can only pantomime a neanderthal playing charades.”

“Wouldn’t his ‘bonus’ appendage, sort of, give it away?”

“You think he controls that thing? It’s a rouge agent. Anyway, no more than any other species former or erstwhile evolved.”

“Your supposition holds up like a Yugo.”

“I go, Yugo, we all go to California. I just made that up.”

“Better copywrite it, tout-suite.”

“Are we on video surveillance? I would have worn a cummerbund.”

“Can’t keep anything just between us.”

“Like I was saying.”

Critical urgency, whoa’ she was so right, almost eerie how she knew. Bingo! Counting backwards the math is fuzzy -- birth, gestation, conception, a Hebrew translation, right to left, like telling a story from the denouement. Then there was Uncle Hymie, hanging out, catching story ideas from a most devoted fan like some singular focus-group coughing up raw data, we’ll never know how much it helped the script. Then he didn’t need help anymore, or rarely, by conference call, gushing with appreciation, leaving the impression he and you, not I, were old friends. 

The subject raised in confidence testing the boundary, the conversations nagged on something, the timing, discarded possibilities come into light.