Into the Night

How did the boys coax me into their little prank? It was easy. I was the only girl not invited to Louise Alpern's sleepover. On that summer evening with the fragrance of lilacs in the air, my task was to knock on the door, get Louise to open up for me, and then step aside.  They'd do the rest - bombard the girls with water balloons. My little ping in the grand symphony was to simply knock on the door and step aside.

Later, Louise's mother would be livid, as the water had stained her carpeting, and Louise would demand to know how I dared do such a thing.

Water balloons were a huge part of our lives that summer. In assembly line fashion, we filled them, knotted them, and lobbed them at each other or at innocent passers by.  Late afternoons, we'd take pleasure in climbing up on a cement embankment and releasing our plump balloons down onto grocery shoppers rolling their carts out to the parking lot.

That evening after the boys had finished water ballooning Louise's hallway, they decided to go on a bike ride and asked me to come along.  I wasn't a tomboy, but I wasn't a sissy girl either - I'd spent time with my dad when he delivered his orders to the Mom and Pops. I'd seen him hoisting 100 pound sacks of rock salt up onto his shoulder and lifting fifty pound sacks of Jack Frost sugar without  a wince.  He'd give me something light to carry in from the truck. In imitation, I'd hoist it up on my shoulder and carry it across the entry.

I had inherited a super fine bike from my Uncle which had been lodged in my grandparent's basement for twenty years. I'd found it covered in dust and cobwebs, but I'd oiled it and polished it back to health. It had a wide open handle bar. It was made of heavier metal than modern bikes, but it was a racer.

So I took off with the boys, all five of them. I'd never ridden beyond the neighborhood. The sky was the shiny black of olives coated in oil, its darkness  interrupted only by a crescent moon. We rode past the grassy curves of Scheneley Park and up the hill to the Panther Hollow Bridge, guarded by the statues of two stone panthers. I was pumping hard, but not really sweating. A light wind blew against my cheeks.  We passed Phipps Conservatory and rode on into Oakland. At last, we headed back through the parks towards home. All the while, I kept pace with the boys.

There was one boy in the pack, a lanky Irish kid with freckles. He and his twin brother had been adopted by a Jewish woman whose husband had died.  When he was relaxing, he rode without holding onto the handle bar; for him it was like treading water. I tried imitating him, taking one hand off the bar, and then for a fleeting second, taking both hands off. He rode along side me for a while and we talked.  Then he'd go back to riding up ahead. My heart was open, and that evening I fell in love.

When I got back home, it was about 9:30. The little kids were still up as it was summer.  My mother scolded me for coming home late.  I'd told her that I was going on a bike ride, but hadn't given details.  It was my job to bathe the four little kids.  I remember hauling them into the tub, dreamily running the washcloth over them, and finally wrapping them in a towel one by one.

I had a pink diary with a little lock.  Later that night, I listed all the boys who had been on the bike ride and I wrote a few sentences about the lanky Irish kid.