Summerlings Read online

Next to the Andersens were the Wormy Chappaquas, so-called because they’d given me worms, or at least Dimma decided they had, possibly because their skin was a dark gray. They were new to Connors Lane from a place called Chappaqua, which we decided must be an Indian reservation, maybe explaining their skin color. We didn’t play with the three girls because they were girls, and too young, but we were intrigued with what they referred to as the Mess: a tiny car with all kinds of strange gadgets. It had only three wheels and opened from the front. My grandfather said it was made from the nose gear of a German Messerschmitt warplane, and, “Who in hell would want to drive around in a piece of crap like that? How many people were killed by that thing?” We would have loved to drive it around, and I guess I got the worms from them the one time we went over there and tried to bully the girls into letting us play Sputnik in it. Brickie said we’d be traitors if we played in it, and Mr. Friedmann told Max he agreed. It’s possible they were kidding, but we took it to heart.

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  At the corner of Connors and Brookville was the Pond Lady, whose yard, tangled with vines, featured a brown pond that obsessed us, although, like Miss Braddock’s yard, the pond was off-limits to us. Of course, this hadn’t stopped us from twice sneaking in to meddle with the pond creatures, most notably an albino frog we named Peachy because of his pale, rosy body, which we could see through. His insides looked like M&M’s. We’d gotten caught last time by Josephine, the Pond Lady’s helper, who yelled at us but never told on us, maybe because she and Estelle were friends. The Pond Lady lived in an iron lung that we were keen to get a gander at—I’d described it to Max and Ivan as similar to a personal-size submarine or a coffin, based on a terrifying movie my dad took me to see—The Monolith Monsters—in which a lady was in an iron lung because of some radioactive meteorites. Brickie said the Pond Lady wrote spy books that were “grossly inaccurate,” but because she was British, Dimma approved of her—the piece in the Whitman’s Sampler filled with Nut Honey Caramel, as opposed to the weirder Liquid Pineapples.

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  Beatriz’s family, the Montebiancos, lived on the corner opposite the Pond Lady. Senhor Montebianco was some kind of cultural attaché at the Brazilian embassy and worked with museums and galleries around Washington. He was extremely handsome, and I got the same wiggly feeling seeing him as I did watching Clipper on Sky King, or Mary Martin and Cyril Ritchard in Peter Pan—I loved their tights. Senhor Montebianco wore slim, beautiful suits, and smiled warmly with big white teeth like piano keys. Sometimes he smelled faintly of something like my grandmother’s Shalimar, but how could that be? We played with Beatriz, “an unbridled tomboy,” according to Dimma, who liked her in spite of this because she had nice manners that might rub off on me. She was Max’s age, and smart, funny, and tough. Beatriz didn’t go to school with us, but to Visitation, a Catholic girls’ school down in Georgetown. She had to wear a navy-blue uniform and her shiny black hair in long pigtails, so Max sometimes called her “Little White Dove,” from “Running Bear,” a popular song we boys liked. The Montebiancos were very religious. Brickie didn’t seem suspicious of them, although I’d heard him say to Dimma, “At least they’re not more goddamn Reds,” to which Dimma had replied, “That’s enough, John. Little pitchers.” Every morning, when we began our trek to Rosemary School, a good mile away, the Senhor, Beatriz, and her older brother went off in their Mercury Montclair, the Senhor and Beatriz waving enthusiastically and calling, “Oi! Tchau! See you later!”

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  The Shreves lived in a small, newish house next to the Montebiancos and across the lane from the Chappaquas. They were from Louisiana—Shreveport, they liked to point out—and they might as well have been from another country, too. We had more trouble understanding Mrs. Shreve than we did our foreign neighbors. We didn’t have a lot in common with the Shreve boys, Beau and Davis Lee, called D.L., and, although we sometimes played together, we were intimidated by them. They went to Bullis Prep and were mainly interested in baseball—playing it, as well as following the Senators and the team from where their dad had gone to college, a place the boys referred to as “Ella Shoe.” The Shreve boys believed that the Montebiancos had probably been Nazis because a lot of them hid in South America after the war. Beatriz’s older sister, Zariya, had blond hair, a thalidomide arm, which I’m sorry to say we referred to as a “flipper,” though not around Zariya or Beatriz, and was retarded, which Beau and D.L. thought proved their theory. I don’t think anyone else believed this; Brickie said it was “ridiculous and mean-spirited.” Beau and D.L. scorned our preoccupation with collecting butterflies—“Queers collect butterflies,” we were told. Their parents were nice, though. Mr. Shreve had gotten a big job at the FBI because he’d helped to send Earl Long to the nuthouse. He seemed dumb sometimes, and I had a notion that Brickie thought so, too, because he made fun of things like Mr. Shreve always wearing a walkie-talkie device on his belt.

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  Beside the Shreves, across the street from us lived my very best friend, Ivan Goncharoff. The Goncharoffs’ sprawling stucco bungalow—shrimp-colored—looked like something from the British Raj. It was pretty much the center of our universe because there was not a lot of supervision over there, and the enormous wraparound porch was a great place to play and skate on rainy days. But mainly we liked to hang out there because of Elena, Ivan’s gorgeous, fascinating aunt, whom we boys worshipped. We thought of her as the Goddess of Connors Lane. And we weren’t the only ones. We loved her because she was lovely, with long auburn hair, and she never appeared without eyeshadow and lipstick, just like a movie star, but also because she was lively and kind and always took an interest in the things we did. The Goncharoffs seemed fairly well-off, and Elena often took Max, Ivan, Beatriz, and me to movies at the Hiser, to get ice cream at Gifford’s, or on outings to Glen Echo amusement park, where she would ride on the hair-raising white roller coaster with us, not the pink one that chickens like Ivan and I preferred. Of course we loved her! Josef—Ivan called his father by his first name, and we were allowed to, too—had been ambassador to Mexico but was now “between assignments,” according to Ivan, who thought it was because his father had a heart condition. Brickie put it another way: He’d been “recalled” by President Eisenhower for “some unpleasantness.” Josef and Elena, brother and sister, had come to America from the Ukraine when they were young, to get away from Stalin, but even so, the Soviet connection didn’t endear Josef to my grandparents. Or at least that’s what I thought, although their misgivings might have been about Elena, about whom I’d overheard Brickie say, “consorts with unsavory refugees.” Because of all that, Brickie and Dimma didn’t like us hanging around the Goncharoffs’, but they liked us hanging around our house even less. They approved of Ivan, though, because he was sweet, quiet, and studious—and I think they may have felt sorry for him. Josef and Elena didn’t get along at all; they had loud, disturbing arguments. Ivan didn’t get along with his father, either—he never wanted me and Max to come over if Josef was home. Luckily, he was not around much and was often away for a week or two. Ivan’s mother had taught Spanish at B-CC, the local high school, but she’d died after having Ivan’s younger brother and sister, twins, and that was when Josef had brought Elena to Washington—to help take care of Ivan and the toddlers. The household was pretty much run by Maria, the housekeeper, who’d come with the family from Mexico and lived in the Goncharoffs’ attic. Maria was the enforcer but mainly was busy with Katya and Alexander, who ran naked most of the time, going jungle-potty, causing Dimma to declare that “too European” for her and the neighborhood. Which didn’t make any sense, considering all the Europeans who lived on the street, but it was just another thing that was said that I didn’t understand. Ivan rarely talked about his mother, although I knew he missed her. It was part of the strong bond that existed between us, missing our mothers, and surely a
part of why we clung to Elena like little limpets.

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  Last, next to the Goncharoffs, were the Allgoods. They were old, and we largely ignored them, but they had a high school–aged daughter, Dawn, who was blond and almost pretty, but mean and not a good babysitter. She was viciously jealous of Elena. Dawn occasionally babysat if my grandparents were desperate enough, and she took great pleasure in beating me and Ivan at Chinese checkers. Max said his sister said Dawn was a “b-i-t-c-h,” and we were inclined to agree.

  So there was our Whitman’s Sampler, and it was not without its problems. Even though World War II had been over for more than a decade, there was still a collective war hangover among the people on Connors Lane, maybe because so many of our neighbors had been affected by it in one way or another. Some had run away from Europe, some had fought, like Mr. Shreve, who had lost a leg—and Mr. Allgood’s brother had died at Utah Beach. Brickie had been in the army, too, though not in combat—he had specialized in linguistics and spent time in England and Latin America. There must have been a point in the early fifties, around the time we boys were born, when everyone was relieved that the war was over and optimistic about peace. But things had ratcheted up again with the Soviet Union humiliating us in the space race, having spy rings that cracked the Manhattan Project, and now they had the Bomb. Khrushchev had already vowed, “We will bury you!” and, earlier that summer, visiting Moscow, Nixon had angrily poked him in the chest. In retaliation, Khrushchev had said he was going to do everything he could to help defeat Nixon in the 1960 election, which infuriated Brickie: “The very goddamn idea of those bastards interfering in our elections!” And, of course, right after Christmas, there’d been the Cuban revolution, Castro bringing Communism within ninety miles of the U.S. There was a lot of fear in America. Everyone believed that there was a very good chance that the world would soon blow up. At school we practiced three scary civil-defense drills for different attack scenarios, but even we boys knew that Washington would be the first place annihilated, and nobody would survive. So the Cold War caused our neighbors to be nervous and suspicious of one another. Who you were, where you had been, and what you had done during World War II set boundaries, and for Ivan and Max and me, this meant things often got in the way of our having fun. On those broiling August days when we could hear Kees and Piet splashing and yelling happily in their pool, we wanted badly to be invited to swim again and for Max to be included. We wanted to get in the Wormy Chappaquas’ Messerschmitt without feeling like traitors. We wanted to be able to hang around with Elena as much as she’d let us, even if she did consort with unsavory refugees. And, though it had nothing to do with the war, we wanted to get a look at the Pond Lady’s iron lung. We wanted what we wanted first, but we also simply wanted everybody to get along. Why couldn’t our neighborhood be more like Beaver Cleaver’s, where people were nice to each other?

  We hoped to fix things. Taking our cue from the Marshall Plan, which we vaguely knew from our Weekly Readers was a plan to help reunite Europe, we came up with our Beaver Plan. Of course, we had no idea of how we’d accomplish neighborhood reunification, but if we could enlist the help of our goddess, we knew we’d find a way. And it was a good excuse to spend more time with her.

  2

  Ivan and I started our summer mornings as if we had a job we had to do, and we would report to Max’s front porch and wait quietly for Max to get up. This particular morning, we’d intended to discuss the Beaver Plan, but Ivan and I had woken to find all the yards up and down the lane festooned with clouds of spiderwebs. Hedges were frosted with them, and in the trees overhanging the lane, the webs looked like strings of crystal beads lit with dewdrops that sparkled spectacularly in the early sun, connecting all the yards, as if the neighborhood were one big carnival. Ivan and I were beside ourselves, hollering like maniacs under Max’s window until he busted out of his house in nothing but his underpants.

  “Can you believe this?” I shouted at him.

  “Man, oh man!” he yelled. “How did this happen?”

  Some webs stretched horizontally between trees that were a good thirty feet apart, and some soared way above our heads, like the gossamer riggings of a ghost ship.

  “How do they do that?” Ivan said.

  I was clutching the front of my shorts, an unfortunate habit when I was extremely excited. Ivan was spinning around, taking it all in. “There are thousands of them! Maybe millions!”

  “Do you see any actual spiders?” Max called. “Let’s catch them!” He raced over to the privet hedges in front of the porch. “Here’s one! A big one with yellow stripes! His web has a sort of zipper thing right down the middle! Here’s another one!”

  Mrs. Friedmann stepped out from behind the screen door in her robe. “Vaht’s all the commotion?” she demanded. “It’s only seven o’clock!”

  “Mutter, spiders are everywhere!” Max shouted. “Look down the street!”

  “Oy gevalt!” she exclaimed, shaking her head with a hand to her mouth. “Your fahzer is not going to like zis. Max, come inside and put some clothes on!”

  “Rats!” He ran back inside.

  Ivan and I continued around the yard, examining the wild profusion of spiders easily within our grasp. Like tiny nets of diamonds, the webs even covered the scrubby lawn.

  “Here’s one with a huge butt!”

  “There’s a big moth stuck in this web and he’s wrapped like a mummy! He’s still moving!”

  Max emerged with shorts on, carrying some jars. “C’mon! We can have an instant collection before anybody else!”

  “Boys! Zhey might be poison! Do not bring zhem into zhe house!” Mrs. Friedmann shuddered and went back inside.

  “Look at this one, you guys!” Max cried. “He looks just like a tiny crab!” He fiddled with a jar, trapping it.

  Just then, Beatriz came squealing up the lane, waving her arms. “Boys, boys! What is this? Look what happened to me!” She was alarmed but laughing, her head and shoulders veiled with webs.

  But just as we all began twirling into the nearest webs, laughing and winding ourselves like spools of thread in the gluey, silken lines, Beatriz screamed, “Help! A spider went down my blouse!” She danced around frantically until something big and black fell out of her shirt, and the spider ran to a hole in the ground and disappeared. “Ick! The webs are fun, but I don’t want any spiders on my personal body.”

  Max, still twirling, guffawed and said, “I guess that spider was a sex maniac and wanted to see your bosoms!” He was always saying stuff like that to Beatriz, to either get her attention or annoy her, I wasn’t sure.

  Beatriz said back, “I don’t have any bosoms, Max, so shut up and stop talking about bosoms all the time.” Max just laughed.

  Ivan had fallen to his knees to examine the hole. “Wow—do some spiders live in the ground?”

  Mr. Friedmann shouted from inside the house, “Don’t go near zhe garden today, kids. I’m going to put poison on zhe wegetables to kill zhe spiders.”

  “Not even a spider would want to eat his flabby eggplants,” Max said. Mr. Friedmann had so many eggplants in his garden that the family ate them every night, to Max’s disgust. “Yech. They taste like fried flip-flops.”

  Ivan, abandoning the spider hole and wiping his hands on his shorts, said, “These webs are too itchy. Let’s wash off in the hose.” Ivan was often itchy. Max pulled a hose around from the side of the house, squirted himself, and Ivan and I stripped off our sticky, sweaty T-shirts and he hosed off the two of us.

  Beatriz, still on the sidewalk, watched. “What about you, Beatriz?” Max said, grinning; his little wet nipples pinched up from the cold water.

  She said, “As if! See you guys later.” She flounced off home. If one can flounce in polka-dot short-shorts.

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  —

  We were in hog heaven. We lik
ed spiders but didn’t know a lot about them, though, of course, we’d all read Charlotte’s Web and loved it. But Max and Ivan and I were rabid collectors, and this spider plague opened up new collecting opportunities. Past summers it had been rocks, fossils, and shark teeth from the Chesapeake Bay, and then snakes, although we gave that up because snakes presented too many problems: Ivan the Tenderhearted cried about the little pink-and-white mice we had to feed them, so he started to liberate his mice in the house, which hadn’t gone over well with Maria, and one of my garter snakes had gotten out and just about given Estelle a heart attack—the only time she’d ever threatened to quit. And there was an unsettling event at the Friedmanns’ involving Max’s sister and his queen snake.

  Most recently we’d gotten into butterflies. Max and I had our favorites—buckeyes, red admirals, various swallowtails, and question marks—along with some obligatory blues, painted ladies, and sulphurs pinned to boards in our rooms, and a few colorful, spiky caterpillars. Ivan didn’t have many because they were so beautiful he couldn’t bear to kill them, and he was more interested in studying their behavior anyway.

  He was an excellent observer, and, following his lead, we made it our business to find out everything there was to know about whatever we collected—or at least everything there was to be found in our little pocket Golden Guides, or, the ultimate authority, Brickie’s Encyclopaedia Britannica. We also ransacked the rickety green bookmobile that parked every Thursday in front of Doc’s pharmacy on Brookville Road, but they didn’t have much. Sometimes we nagged Elena until she took us to the National Museum, its monumental presence on the Mall a holy shrine to us boys, stuffed with sacred relics in the form of dinosaurs, gems, fossils, insects, and butterflies that we could worship, and covet, up close. So we already knew some things about insects, making the shift from butterflies to spiders a natural progression.