Every Third Thought (6 page)

“Another grim season,” her husband granted, although he could still hear his father declaring (probably over Chesapeake crabcakes, coleslaw, and iced tea, another favorite Newett family menu) that it sure put the country’s economy back on its feet, their domestic one included, despite wartime shortages and rationing: his insurance business up; people eager to buy new cars—or better used ones, as war production raised
farm and factory incomes but curtailed production of nonessential goods.

“
Seasons
,” Mandy echoed. We happened likewise to be enjoying crabcakes, made however with blue-crab meat imported from who knew where, the local crabbing season having ended in the fall; and instead of iced tea we sipped jug Chablis and mineral water. “You seem to be hooked on that particular motif lately.”

Netted by
, he guessed he’d say, rather than
hooked on
, the accompanying victuals being crustaceans rather than fish. But, “I reckon I am: hooked in spades, to mix another metaphor.” Because the more he mused it—which is what he mainly did with his mornings through that January and February and into March, while Senator John McCain won the Republican presidential primaries, and Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama battled each other for the Democratic nomination, and things dragged bloodily on in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the stock market went down and up and down, but the price of food and fuel went up up up—the more it appeared to him that those ascending levels of the South Neck fire-watchtower, with their “incremental perspective” of the surrounding scene, could be said to correspond not only to the successive years of his and Ned Prosper’s then-so-young lives, but also to the successive stages, or extended “seasons,” of Narrator’s much longer Story Thus Far. The first of which (“Platform Number One!”) might be thought of as the Depression-era “Winter” of their Bridgetown childhood. Ages zero through thirteen, say: birth
to adolescence. Or better, kindergarten through “junior high,” as middle school was called back then: the period of “Gee” Newett’s developing buddyhood with (the late) “Nedward” Prosper, whose never-published (because never finished)
magnum opus
this “seasons” thing ought properly to have been and might somehow yet manage to become, if Ned’s old and still aging pal can bring it off.

The late . . .
We’ll get to that.

“So you’re hooked. Netted. Hung up. Whatever,” said Poet/Professor/Helpmeet Amanda Todd. “So haul in your catch, even if it’s yourself. As your friend’s parents said back in 1936 and Pete Seeger sang in the 1950s,
To everything there is a season
, right? Me, I’ve got Shakespeare’s sonnets to teach tomorrow morning and their author to learn from tonight, so if it’s okay by you we’ll do the dishes now and I’ll join you later.”

We did that, as is our custom: cleaned up together what we’d together prepared and enjoyed, then withdrew to separate rooms, not this time for our usual postprandial hour or so of undistracted leisure reading, but Wife instead to work in Her makeshift home-office workspace, and Hubby—most unusual for him at this hour—to do likewise in His: to make a few reminder-notes, at least, of some further Kids-in-Bridgetown recollections triggered by his “vision” of that long-ago fire-tower climb. E.g.:

—
Their high-spirited street and sidewalk games
: “Gee,” “Nedward,” Ruthie, and a couple of Ruth’s girl friends, maybe.
Hopscotch
, played with oyster shells tossed onto the chalked
diagram.
Jump rope
: the girls only, as he recollects, but he and Ned sometimes spun the longer rope for them, duly calling “I see Christmas!” if occasion warranted.
Kick the Can
: rules forgotten, but not the satisfaction of being first to reach the empty quart-sized food tin standing inverted in mid-Water Street (the low-traffic side road on which both families lived, just off busier Bridge Street) and send it clanking down the macadam, sometimes under a parked car. Backyard
Hide-and-Seek
—or Hide and
Go
Seek, as they customarily called it, perhaps preferring the rhythm of that extra syllable; or Hide and
No
Seek, as they’d call it when whoever was “It” decided as a prank to go sit on the front-porch steps and wait with amusement for the hiders to realize that they weren’t being sought—with one of the neighborhood’s great maples (all now dead and gone, like the original residents of its two-storey clapboard houses) designated as Home.

—
Fishing
(apropos of his and Mandy’s recent talk of his “being hooked” and “hauling in the catch”) in Avon Creek with Ned and Dad Prosper, off the concrete seawall at the foot of the Bridgetown-to-Stratford drawbridge, a few blocks from their houses. No rods and reels for the youngsters, but long bamboo poles rigged by Mr. P. with hooks, lines, bobbers, and sinkers, and baited with bits of peeler-crab meant to snag, with luck, perch and “hardheads” barely large enough to be Keepers, but sometimes eels (a slimy nuisance to untangle and unhook) or inedible, bait-wasting toadfish, which one simply whacked to death on the seawall-top and tossed back. Although the Keepers generally yielded no more than a few forkfuls each,
Mrs. Prosper and even Ma Newett, when not in one of her down spells, would obligingly scale, clean, pan-fry, and serve them up for dinner, typically with cornbread, mashed potatoes, lima beans, and her highest compliment: “Right nice.”

—Summertime swimming
, not in narrow and workboat-busy Avon Creek, but in the wider, relatively cleaner Matahannock River, off a stretch of public sand-mud-andmarshgrass “beach” above the point where creek joins river, just downstream from the larger bridge connecting Stratford proper to the neighboring county. More bathing and aquatic horseplay than actual swimming, supervised in their early grade-school years by Mrs. Prosper or a mother of one of Ruthie’s friends, later by Ruth herself, more or less, in her Big Sister capacity, and on the boys’ own from about age ten, by when the neighborhood deemed its kids capable of trekking unsupervised to and from the rivershore as they did to Bridgetown Elementary, and disporting themselves harmlessly through a sultry tidewater afternoon.
No diving from the bridge
: a posted prohibition routinely ignored by the older boys.
Don’t swim out farther than you can swim back
: a rather self-enforcing rule; and
Stay out of the main channel
: a more negotiable one, since work- and pleasure-boat traffic was lighter on that upstream stretch of river than on Avon Creek and the lower Matahannock, with its numerous other creeks, boatyards, and crab-and-oyster-processing establishments. For these particular pre-teens, however, crawlstroking out to the river’s channel would have bent, and perhaps even broken, the preceding rule.
Watch out for skates and sea
nettles
: the former (a.k.a. sting rays) fortunately not numerous, and generally avoidable if one remembered to shuffle one’s feet when walking on the firm mud/sand bottom (all but invisible in more than knee-deep water), but most unpleasant to be “stung” by—as witness Captain John Smith’s near-fatal encounter with one off consequently-named Sting Ray Point on the lower Chesapeake during his first exploration of the Bay in 1608. The latter the less formidable though distinctly unpleasant medusa jellyfish
Chrysaora quinquecirrha
, so abundant in dry summers especially (when the brackish water becomes saltier) as to be all but unavoidable except by staying ashore.

Which, when the nettles were plentiful, the girls inclined to do, especially as they approached adolescence: a cooling dip now and then in the shallows just offshore, where they could more likely avoid being stung; then back to the more-or-less-sandy “beach” to play in its “sand” (not to be compared to the fine Atlantic beaches several hours distant, which the Prospers visited maybe twice per summer with “Gee” sometimes in tow), or merely stretch out on a towel like the older girls, gossip, leaf through magazines, and acquire a tan (more often a red, since only those older girls sometimes applied sun lotions, and SPF numbers weren’t invented yet). Fair-skinned boys simply blistered, peeled, and got the bill some decades later in the form of actinic keratoses, basal-cell epitheliomas, sometimes even dangerous melanomas. Kids from Stratford/Bridgetown’s Negro ward were luckier, Mrs. Prosper once observed, with respect to sunburn if little else. But one didn’t know any of them personally;
they had their own small schoolhouse on the far side of town, and their own swimming-place somewhere down near the mouth of Avon Creek. To Ned and Gee and the other boys, the nettles were normally no more than a minor nuisance: In the water as much as the girls were out of it, the fellows romped and splashed one another, played Tag and Submarine, dived off the concrete bridge-piers and, as they got older, illicitly off the bridge itself—even
swam
a bit in the course of their horseplay, instructed by one another or the occasional parent. Their inevitable, more or less severe jellyfish stings (picric acid burns, actually, Mr. Prosper explained) they accepted like the skinned knees and scraped elbows from other sorts of play, and treated with various folk remedies: rubbing the inflammation with sand, which hurt so much worse that ceasing to do it helped a lot; pissing on it, if the girls weren’t around and if the stream—preferably one’s own rather than one’s buddy’s—could be aimed on target. To add one’s uric acid to the medusa’s picric, they would understand later, might be rationalized as fighting fire with fire; in any case, the fire always won. And now that we have their little weenies out . . .

—
Playing a different sort of “I See Christmas”
with Sister Ruth, not at the rivershore but up in the Prospers’ attic at 213 Water Street, across and two down from the Newetts’ 210. “Here we go,” Narrator already imagines his mate sighing, to whom this tidbit will not be news: “
You show me yours, I’ll show you mine
, et cet. What else isn’t new? And who cares?” She and Sammy, she’ll remind him [her two-year-older brother, killed in a Vietnamese helicopter crash back in the high 1960s]
played Doctor a few times before they sprouted pubic hair, but does she write poems about it?

Why not, love? A Petrarchan sonnet, say, its Octave describing in memorable tropes the bold lad’s “Jimmy” (or whatever you-all called it; that’s what Gee’s mom called
his
timid tool, when she needed to name it) and the sort-of-scared but notuninterested lass’s “Susie” (ditto, changes changed, and those blue-crab nicknames stuck); its Sestet the delicate—one hopes it was delicate!—hands-on inspection of each’s by the other? In the case in hand, so to speak, all quite innocent, actually, as one hopes it was with the young Todd sibs: first the three D’s (a Dare, a Display, a bit of Demonstration), then the four or five T’s (Touch, Tweak, Titillating Tickle or Two). No harm done, and a thing or two learned, by Gee anyhow, up in that wintry attic among rolled-up summer rugs and stacked cartons in some appropriately literal Christmas season, 1939 or thereabouts: he and Neddy in maybe fourth grade, Ruthie in seventh, the three of them parentally dispatched to find a certain box of colored light-strings with which the Prospers (unlike the Newetts) traditionally decorated their screened front porch and entrance doorway. “Long as I can remember,” saucy Ruth surprised them by announcing, “you guys’ve been saying
I see Christmas
, right? Well, take a good look, and then it’s
my
turn.” To the boys’ considerable dismay then, she yanked down and stepped out of her step-ins (robin’s-egg blue, as Narrator recalls, though he may be supplying their color from other, later initiatory experiences), hiked up her skirt, and thrust virtually into their faces
the first female pudendum ever seen by George Irving Newett, almost though not quite too embarrassed to look. But “Look!” the bold girl demanded, and look they did: not merely at its ever-so-interesting frontal aspect (which didn’t after all seem
totally
unfamiliar; Gee guessed he’d maybe seen photographs of nude female statues, but he didn’t recall their having had that fascinating little crease up the middle), but at the betweenand-under part as well, which she insisted they squat down and inspect close up—no poking, though, or she’d kill them both! They duly did, Gee at her orders not only
looking
at the curious pink puckers between her thighs, but (she gripping his wrist to guide and if necessary restrain him) lightly Touching, Tweaking, and Tickling them, as her brother was not allowed to do.

“Okay, now tit for tat: Let’s see what
you
’ve got to offer.” Her own undies snugly back in place, she knelt before them on the dusty boards, hands on her hips, and became the Inspector instead of the Inspected. The boys, having more than once ministered to their sea-nettle stings as aforenoted and enjoyed backyard pissing contests when no one was about, were not unfamiliar with the sight of each other’s male equipment. To display it under present circumstances was a quite different matter, but they gamely did: unbuttoned the flies of their corduroy knickers and (avoiding each other’s eye, but not a glance at each other’s business) fished out their limp, pink-and-cream-colored little—

“
Penises
,” Ruth Ellen Prosper declared, looking from one to the other with an expression of mild disgust. “
Pricks
.
Dicks
.
Cocks
. Now skin ’em back.”

Do
what
? Ned Prosper evidently understood what his sister meant, and boldly obliged. Can it have been that George Newett at age nine remained unaware of the operation (never mind the names) of foreskin, prepuce, glans penis? Unlikely; but on a similarly wintry day nearly seven decades later, what he remembers is his having been too mortified to do more than stand there, pinching his penis between right-hand thumb and forefinger practically in Ruthie’s face and wiping his suddenly sniffly nose with his left (on which—distinctly!—he caught the scent of
her
private parts from when their roles had been reversed) until, “If you’re so set on seeing it,” Brother challenged Sister, “peel him back yourself.” Which to G. I. Newett’s fascinated appall she daintily did: exposed for her close-up scrutiny what a dozen years later the then college-age pals, laughing and shaking their heads at the recollection over mugs of frat-house beer, would call “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”
²
and then dismissing it with a finger-flick and a brisk, “Okay, you pass.”