The summers of my childhood were sweltering. The air was thick and sat heavy on my chest. Everything was always damp from the humidity or just plain sticky. It was inescapable.
This rarely bothered me during the day when games and playmates could keep my mind off how uncomfortable I felt. My mother would twist her hair at the nape, secure it with one barrette, and walk around with a wet washcloth around her neck. She would sigh, appearing more tired than usual. If I aggravated her, which was much easier to do in the summer, she’d simply say, “Michelle, it’s hot.” That was my cue to leave her alone.
Without the distractions of the day, I could not shake off how truly miserable I was at night. The second-floor bedroom I shared with my brother was small. If I had to guess, I’d say it was an eight foot by eight foot square. Jim’s bed was a youth size, smaller than your average twin. My bed was a glorified wooden box atop which sat the same crib mattress that I used as a baby and Jim used before that. I couldn’t be sure, but I would guess we weren’t the first babies to sleep on that mattress either. Jim and I each had a small night stand, which wasn’t so much a nightstand as a set of drawers made of cardboard. Mom bought them at Woolworth’s or the five-and-dime, or maybe McCrory’s. We had one small dresser for our clothing. Nothing else could fit.
There was one window in the room where Mom placed a box fan facing out. She placed a similar one in the hall window. She said it pulled the hot air creating circulation to cool the house down. I’m sure this idea makes sense from a scientific standpoint, but as a child whose body was threatening to melt, I just thought she was crazy. When we would go to bed, Mom would say, “Just don’t move and it will feel cooler,” this another logical piece of advice that I thought was pure crap. No matter what, we were roasting in there. There was no breeze and every night felt about a thousand hours long.
One day, an air conditioner appeared. It was just the one, and I had no idea where it came from. Our new-to-us air conditioner wasn’t powerful and no doubt this is why it was cast off by the original owner. But it was better than nothing, and so it was installed in our dining room window. So incapable was this AC of cooling the entire first floor, small as it may have been, that Mom thumb-tacked bed sheets over the doorways to thwart the drift and dissipation of the cooler air. That night, and many otherwise unbearable nights to follow, Jim and I brought our sleeping bags down to the dining room and slept under the table, as this was the only clear spot large enough to accommodate us. The table became a makeshift fort and sleeping beneath it was just another shared story of our youth.
We only had that air conditioner for one summer. It limped along nobly until it finally just gave up.
Jim and I haven’t shared a conversation in years, much less a space as close as that under a dining room table. Since that time, the bridges between us have burned hotter than a New Jersey summer night, the embers smoldering on longer than a hand me down air conditioner ever could.