The Summer We Said Goodbye [Installment 3]

Latchkey Kids

Spending the summer working abroad may have been my idea, but the Windy Arms was all Aris’ doing. 

Her father had gone to law school with its owner, a lord or gentleman of some sort, who lived nearby in the region and arranged for us to join the small inn’s staff for the summer. I was just happy for the job and jumped at the chance to travel overseas for the first time while saving some money for my second year of college. That was a non-negotiable with my mother, and once I had her assent, I didn’t ask any more questions.

This wasn’t going to be just another one of our childhood adventures, though. We had a year of college under our belts at campuses geographically and culturally far apart. I had gone west to get as far away from the gravitational pull of my older siblings as possible. Aris was an only child who had gone east, following in her parents’ footsteps, both successful professionals. 

Aris had a plan; I had ideas. The doer and the dreamer. It’s what made us work as well as we did together.

But the impending stakes of adulthood had begun to assert themselves. Academic majors would soon need to be declared, with ramifications lasting far longer than a mere summer or two.

“Decide,” which shares the same Latin root as “homicide,” literally means “to kill off.” And that’s what it felt like I would be doing to my future, killing it off. I had my siblings to thank for it.

After some rough patches in their own lives, they had each settled down and were at various stages of marriage and having kids. There were six of them, and none seemed entirely happy about it. 

My eldest sister had scandalized the family, eloping with a truck driver she met while cocktail waitressing after dropping out of college. Her husband, my brother-in-law, had already bankrupted his trucking business twice, and my dad had to bail him out, not that we had that kind of money.

My second sister, conversely, had married her high school sweetheart. He joined his family’s successful accounting firm right out of college, and they were married with kids in no time. Picture perfect, except he was fond of the bottle and was an angry and unpredictable drunk. 

Next up was my eldest brother. He’d drawn a low draft number during Vietnam and signed up for the Marines when I was still a toddler. He survived the war but had been AWOL from the family for years. Things had taken a bad turn when my father remarried within weeks of the divorce and expected all the kids to schlep to New York for the nuptials. My mother went mental, and my brother couldn’t handle it, ceasing all contact with the rest of us.

The real casualties of my family’s demise were the next three, another brother and two sisters, grouped in a tight clique after a small gap in my parents’ procreative efforts. If the first three were of a Leave It to Beaver mindset, these three were all Kerouac, having grown up in the late 60s. They were the ones who had borne the real-time brunt of our dad’s philandering.

A warren of rooms on the top floor of our house had been their domain, which is where the attic was. I used to love making covert excursions up there whenever the coast was clear. I’d discover all kinds of treasure on forays deep into closets and crawl spaces, like the sculpture of water and colored glass I found on one such mission. I had no idea what it was for, but it was fascinating to look at, even if it did smell funny. So I swiped it. I’ll never forget the look on Miss Pelly’s face when I planted my brother’s bong squarely on her desk for “Show & Tell.” Needless to say, I was banned from the upstairs moving forward. 

In no time, though, they were all gone, off to college and out of the house, my dad included. Just like that, the chaos that had been my birthright cleared. And it was just my mom and me bumbling around in an oversized domicile that was, as she was fond of complaining, “too big to heat.”

Even at my age, I could have told you she'd never date, let alone marry again, and not just because we were Catholic. Underneath her “jilted for another woman” narrative, I think she was relieved. 

My mom was a smart woman who had graduated from high school with honors at sixteen. At a time when most women were getting married and having kids, she continued her education, earning a Bachelor’s in business and enjoying a short stint in corporate America before succumbing to the times and settling down with my father, a traveling watch and jewelry salesman.

The dissolution of her marriage had been her worst nightmare. But it had also effectively given her a new lease on life.

It seems significant, especially in retrospect, that my mom and I were now the only single people in our family.  And we quickly fell into a rhythm with rituals that were ours alone.

If there was one thing I’d been conditioned for my entire life, it was adaptability.  I’d grown accustomed to being left behind when the party moves on.  So it was no great shake to me when my mom pursued interests outside the home, part-time work, at first, and then full-time enrollment in a Master’s program.

The transformation of my family was complete. I was now a key-carrying member of the fastest-growing demographic of the 1970s, a latchkey kid. 

Aris was a latchkey kid, too.  It was all she’d ever known. 

“A real self-starter, that one,” my mom would needle me. And she was. 

Aris would tackle initiatives I didn’t have a clue about starting. She’d have a well-balanced, three-course meal perfectly timed with her parents’ arrival home at the end of a long day and frequently recruited me for afterschool runs to the local butcher or baker to pick up items for that evening’s feast — brisket or salmon filets, babkas or rugelach — all Kosher, of course. 

Aris’ parents were cultural Jews. But sometime during her primary years, Aris declared otherwise, and they started keeping Kosher and attending weekly temple. 

It was an entirely Aris way of being, like with the oboe, all or nothing. And her parents were only too happy to indulge their little prodigy.

My siblings took to calling our budding friendship “Cosmo’s cultural exchange program.” Even Aris’ mother quipped I was becoming Jewish by osmosis.

They weren’t wrong. There was something. It just didn’t have anything to do with religion. 

For me, it tracked back to that first morning of tennis camp after my dad moved out. I was in a tight spot that day. There was no guarantee I’d keep my head in the game. And it was a game. I knew because I had been witnessing my brothers and sisters play it with varying degrees of success, the beguiling Horatio Alger Myth.

Education was its linchpin, something my mother knew all too well, having grown up in a blue-collar, devoutly Catholic household during the Great Depression. It’s what made our affluent, predominantly Jewish suburb both a blessing and a curse for her: a blessing for its top-notch public schools, a curse because keeping up with the “Steins” proved frustrating if not futile.

From amiable altar boy to algebra ace, I knew what was expected and aimed to deliver — until my dad dropped out, taking the floor with him.

Cosmo from the cosmos…

Aris hadn't so much co-opted his moniker for me as usurped it, turning it from the barker’s pitch it had been to a decree so unflinching that I went from sidekick to hero in one fell swoop. 

The tent flaps parted, and the sun streamed in. Fresh eyes revealed a landscape of untamed potential.

Those eyes belonged to Aris.

---

You can find a full archive of past installments and posts here.