On the “Early Bird Show” the weatherman says we’ve had thirty-two days with temperatures over a hundred degrees. “Miz Burgess, out in Pilot Point phoned in yesterday. She saw 114 on her thermometer, ‘round about two-thirty. And Butch Hoagland called in just after lunch Tuesday to report 103 in the shade out at the fairgrounds. We have a forecast high of 101 for today. Same for tomorrow and, sorry folks, no rain in sight.” I am nine. My brother is six. This is Texas in July in the early 1950s. We are not allowed to talk when the weatherman is telling us this stuff.
Outside, the reddish, heavy clay earth is cracked and fissured, like a badly done mosaic. The unwatered grass beside the driveway is scorched yellow-brown and crunches when we step on it. Only the red ants seem to carry on normally as they scurry to build their nests deep under ground.
For nine cents admission, we can spend the afternoon at the air-conditioned Campus Theater. A Holloway Bar, caramel on a wooden stick, costs a nickel there. My teeth sink into to the sweet goo until I can’t open my mouth and I just have to watch the movie and wait until the candy melts. I have seen “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” three times.
My mother hums a lot these days, a tuneless sort of hum. She talks about going back to Canada to visit. She tells us stories about growing up far north of Toronto, about swimming in clear, pine-ringed lakes, and ice skating for miles on the frozen river that ran through town. I have never seen my mother cry, but I have heard her humming.
By late afternoon we are all waiting for the blazing day to end. The sun sinks abruptly in the Southwest, gathering momentum as it approaches the flat horizon and dropping out of sight so suddenly I expect to see a crimson splash as it dives into the western sky. After dark we go outside. Lawn sprinklers are turned on now, making soft whirring sounds as they spin. Little kids run around in the flying spray, wearing nothing but their underwear. I have to put on my bathing suit if I want to cool off. I am too old now and my mother wouldn’t want anyone to say I wasn’t being brought up to be a lady.
June bugs fly onto the patio, under the yellow floodlight. They bump into the lightbulb, singe their wings, and fall to the ground, buzzing, and scolding, until they recover and take off again.
Sometimes the four of us all pile into the two-tone brown DeSoto and head for the Watermelon Pavilion down on Route 24. “Men in the front and ladies in the back,” my brother calls out. He always says that. The screen door slams behind us as we climb in. We never lock our doors.
No one goes to the Watermelon Pavilion until after dark. It sits on a corner lot where they sell Christmas trees in December under the same fat-bulbed Crayola color lights that hang over the picnic tables in the summer. At the back of this set-up stretches a line of huge white enamel coolers holding the watermelons. Dry ice smoke rises up eerily from somewhere deep inside the coolers. Margaret King lives three houses down from us. She says if you touch dry ice, you will burn your fingers right off. In front of the coolers are several long tables where the watermelon butchers work. They toss the melons around like so many green party balloons, using sharp cleavers to whack them open and expose the delicious glistening pink insides.
We sit down, each of us with a huge triangle of melon, and bite the sweetest pink point off the top. It is so cold, colder I think than Jell-O, or Fudgesicles or even long ago snow in Toronto. I chew each bite ever so slowly and the tiny, sugary, crunchy, pink bubbles pop, one by one, in my mouth.
One of the butchers leaves his post and comes out to the picnic tables with a red rubber water hose. “Ya’ll stand up. I’m comin’ through.” We get up and he hoses all the accumulation of syrupy, sticky juice off the tables. We sit back down. The seats are wet, but nobody cares.
Back home, Daddy raises the door in the hall ceiling and turns on the attic fan. It shudders to life and swirls its hot breath through the house. I would like to dream about icicles.
