Jennifer  

Excavations

Her name wakes me in the middle of the night.

I am forty-six and a year into menopause. Sweat-drenched, and writhing, I fling the covers away. Hell flashes, I call them. They burn me down, from the inside out. Fevers bring delirium – and dreams. Hell flashes bring delirium – your life.

Excavating memories.

The direst, the hardest to face.

Names.

It is 3am. Clammy, cold, teeth chattering, after the fire. Draw the covers close again.

In the ashes –

In the ashes, you find

Jennifer

I am six.

My family has fled the Iowa blizzards that trap us in our double wide trailer, stuck at the end of a long dirt lane the snowplows ignore. It is the off season in Florida, and campgrounds are cheap. Dad has the heart of an adventurer and the bank account of a self-employed carpet cleaner with outsized dreams. He has saved scrupulously all year so instead of being locked in snow, we can camp in the cradle of old growth live Oaks, prettily shawled in Spanish moss.

Juniper Springs. Even the name is a fairy tale. A jewel in the Ocala National Forest, revered for its treasure of trees, cypress swamp, and the turquoise luxury of its spring, where park-goers can swim and snorkel, while nearby, the romantic waterwheel attached to the log and stone millhouse churns and froths.

            But for me, the playground is what matters most.

The swings are belt swings. Although designed for swinging fast and high, belt swings have drawbacks. They squeeze your butt and cramp your thighs.

            Therefore, it is not the swinging that lures me, it is the pit of dirt and sand beneath, carved out through the years by children’s feet. I deposit my fleet of toy dump trucks, and soon, I’m in the flow, intently loading, carrying, and depositing dirt. The same ritual I enact at home, on my own, for hours, in our pothole ridden dirt lane. In Iowa, we live near a quarry. This has sparked my dump truck obsession.

But in Juniper Springs, my dump trucks carry sparkling sand, interspersed with gleaming, broken up shells, even crab claws, and oh, it is exotic, exhilarating – rich.

“Can I play?” 

            Her voice breaks my trance. I look up.

Her long hair is molasses with sunlight twined through.

            She sets one bare foot atop another, waiting. 

            Her feet are dirty. And her toenails are tiny pink seashells.

            “What’s your name?” I ask.

            This means, we are friends. 

            She squats, plucks up a yellow dump truck. “Jennifer.”

A deep growl arises from her guts as she pushes the truck across the sand.

Jennifer and I are together, as though, we always have been.

            Grandma

I am ten.

Grandma is my sixty-years-older BFF.

            Mondays are Grocery Day.

On Grocery Day, I stroll with Grandma, up and down the mall, as she pushes the shopping cart she plucked from Walgreens, leaning on it, her innovation on the walker she can’t afford. Down the glossy-tiled aisles of Petersen’s we go, shopping cart rolling, serenaded by the pianist in a tux, the yellow canary in an illustrious white bird cage, more like a mansion. Grandma’s blonde ponytail swings like a teenager’s. We stop to caress the fabric of blouses she can’t buy. She cracks jokes that border on dirty. We tee-hee-hee. My arm hooked through hers, I hug Grandma to me, again and again.

             Later, back home, we help Grandma haul her water bottles and bags from Hy-Vee up the front porch steps, flanked by the beloved concrete pelicans she collects on our trips to Florida. Across the street, a barge thrums down the Mississippi River. And a yellow sports car slides up, parks.  We freeze as the door swings open and Aunt Judy, on her way home from John Deere, climbs out, waves with her car keys. Aunt Judy and Grandma are perpetually and bitterly embattled. Aunt Judy and my mother rarely speak. Yet, that afternoon, whatever is egregious about her is forgotten, or at least endured, in part because she possesses a life-of-the-party wit that cracks mom up. 

            And it happens –

while mom is snorting, pounding the table, and Aunt Judy is cackling her signature chain smoker’s laugh –

Grandma glances back and forth between them, sharp.

Clunks down her coffee cup, hard.

            The laughter dies. 

            Grandma crumples her napkin, shoves her chair out, and stands.

Turns her back.

            Storms away. 

            Stomp! Stomp! Stomp!

            Slam!

            Aunt Judy sighs. My mother groans.

            I sit, encased in shock.

            My BFF refuses to speak, the rest of the night.

            building

Crouched beneath the belt swings, day after day, our hair pulled back.

Jennifer’s long, dark ponytail snakes down past her waist. Mine is a wild poof of blonde, sticking up straight. 

It is a quality we share, that unites us. Our work, a rapture, transcendent, the two of us, ignoring the hikers with backpacks and binoculars, the swimmers wrapped up in towels toting inner tubes, the bicyclists whooshing by. They are here for recreation. We are here to work. Jennifer and I, heads bent together, immersed in, devoted to our architecture. 

Jennifer’s parents are camped in a tent site, across from the park.

Her parents keep an eye on us as we strategically load and push our dump trucks, leaving wheel tracks deep in the shell laced sand, there for all time I believe, like Jennifer and I, psychically linked in profound concentration and camaraderie, constructing, creating.

Our castle.

Mother

I am two.

My mother is eating a violet.

She’s dressed me in a bonnet and lacy pink dress, black patent leather Mary Janes, from Birley’s, her favorite secondhand clothing store, where you can find name brands, so gently used no one would ever know. We sit on the ground beside her flower garden, ringed by glittering pyrite clusters and showy conch shells with sunset bellies she’s collected, brought back from Florida. Her jewels, she calls these decadent shells and stones.

My mother has plucked a violet, and she eats it while looking in my eyes. She smiles a slow, crooked smile of delight, of mischief. It is a spell. An enchantment.

And I wake up.

My consciousness whooshes in, lighting up my brain, my spinal cord, my nervous system. An embodied Lite Brite, in the shape of a flower.

My mother plucks another violet, and this time, offers it to me. I am alive now. I am awake to my life, laughing with my mother, the garden goddess, aglow in the sunshine, everything sparkling, the pyrite, the shells, the grass, each petal, her platinum hair. I, too, eat the violet. Mother and daughter, a holy communion.

Fifteen years later –

At the dinner table my mother stares, fixed, glassy-eyed, over my head.

Dead to her. I am dead to her. Not even a wisp of a ghost.

I went on my first date, without asking her first.

The pain I’ve inflicted is profound, so she’s left.

“She’s too attached,” Grandma says. “Can’t accept you growing up.”

Is that it? Is that why? This wretched, baffling punishment. Her face hardening, eyes leaving.

She makes her eyes leave first.

Makes you stand there and watch the leaving in her eyes.

So that before the door ever slams in your face –

Violets!

you are desperate, driven to your knees. 

destruction

in Juniper Springs, side by side –

building together, bare feet beneath the belt swings.

Our castle. Blooming. Becoming. Bigger and more.

Other kids, arriving to play, keep a wide berth, circling on tiptoe, gazing with Sistine Chapel hushed awe reverence at the sacred, here, finding its way to Earth.

One day, I look up and –

Oh, we are happy. We are content! 

Jennifer. She is packing sand into the bed of the dump truck, her tiny hands, her lovely pink nails, yet how fierce, how determined her squat, wisps of molasses hair glued to her face by sweat. It is not the castle we are building. It is us. We are the masterpiece.

I don’t remember angry words.

Only standing up –

and storming away. Stomping hard, in my plastic flip-flops.

Jennifer following behind, words, and whimpers, then –

High-pitched cries. Stop! Please!

I refuse to turn.

No, she will not get from me,

not even one glance over my shoulder.

Sister

I am fourteen.

My sister is older, and yet it’s twins! wherever we go.

It drives her mad, and lifts me to heaven – sublime.

Redeemed.

I am desperate to look like her.

She is – I’ve heard her pronounced – a classic beauty.

I am ugly, the kids at school enlighten me. The educate me daily about my looks. They read and annotate my hair – frizzy – eyebrows – caterpillar – nose – witchy.

My sister stares at me, squinting and scrutinizing. “I don’t get it. We look nothing alike! Your nose dips like two dancers on a dance floor.”

Delighted by her simile, my sister throws her head back, laughs. 

We love watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers films. Top Hat and The Gay Divorcee. We pop popcorn, and share the couch, my feet in her lap. She is saying that my nose is like Fred and Ginger. A compliment!

My sister wants to be my best friend.

But she does not want to look like me.

Then I meet Jessie.

Jessie is tall and gangly, with braces. I am short and frizzy, with braces.

Jessie’s nose is bumpy as turbulence while mine dips – Fred and Ginger style.

We recognize each other.

At the mall one day, I take a breath, buy a broken heart necklace.

One part engraved with best – the other with friend.

My sister asks what’s in the bag from Claire’s. She is the one who usually buys jewelry, though that day, we are wearing our matching watches we bought together from the outlet in Sunrise, Florida, the same little pink flamingo second hand ticking round the beach, the sky, the palms.

My sister sees the necklace, and erupts. “She’s your best friend? I thought I was!”

I scramble, not knowing how to excuse or defend this necklace, a testament.

My clumsy groping for words, shutters her face.

At the mall, my sister and I like to giggle and gossip our way down the corridors, weaving through the stores. But that day – my sister lifts her chin and strides away, ahead of me.

No matter how fast I walk, she walks faster. Nearly runs.

At last, I give up. I fall behind. I trail her through the mall, in and out stores,

and thirty years later, that view of her, from behind, is vivid.

My sister in her black denim jumper, the black stripes on her turtleneck

becoming bars

choked by the silence

the crinkle of my little Claire’s bag, loud

My sister’s hair, flowing to the middle of her back, the ends curling,

like vine tendrils.

.

Half of a heart, is jagged.

why

Behind me, Jennifer’s cries become peals, words a sobbing blur.

My campsite is there, just ahead. So I walk harder, faster. I run –

up the steps, into the camper.

Slam the door. Twist the lock. Hand shaking.

My mother is trying to drink her coffee in peace.

And outside is Jennifer, rattling the locked door, shaking it, screaming. 

“What on earth is going on?”

I cross my arms, try to carve my face from stone.

“I don’t like her anymore.”

A wail rises.

            I give in, and look –

Jennifer in her bare feet, had followed me all the way, blind, down hot Florida asphalt. She is now looking up at me, here, behind the window. Her face bright red, garish with sun, and anguish. Saliva dripping in long strings. Suspenders hanging down, off her shoulders.

In the campsite across from the park, Jennifer’s parents are already beginning to uproot the tents. The next morning, heart afraid, bleeding remorse, I will go, only to find her campsite barren, emptied. I don’t know this now. In this moment I only know, and am satisfied by –

Jennifer’s two palms, pressed together.

She is begging.

Begging.

Mom looks back and forth between us.

And pained, she says –

“But why?” 

Phyllis Green

Summer Hammond grew up in rural east Iowa and the campgrounds of Florida. She earned her MFA from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Texas Review, Sonora Review, Coachella Review, and StoryQuarterly. Her fiction was named a 2022 finalist for the Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize.