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It was summer in the Deep South and impossibly hot.  We sat around, cooled by a window unit air conditioner, and doing nothing but watching TV.  We’d been living in France for the last three years and had had no television there, so we had a lot of catching up to do.  We were soon to enter the wonderful world of “Maverick” and re-join “Gunsmoke” where we had left off.  We had no friends, no hobbies, no chores, and our mother apparently didn’t seem to think there was anything unnatural about doing nothing.  She was our partner in crime.   I think she must have been lost too.  Or in limbo.  Maybe she was glad to be back in the hot, wet, heat characteristic of her Panamanian origins, and knew that the only way to survive was to sit around doing as much nothing as possible. 

We lived in a furnished, rented house that summer, until, a few months later, when we found and moved at the end of the summer to an unfurnished, rented house up the street.   The first house was in the periphery of a new subdivision and butted up to property that was still wild.  The owners of the house rented it out when the mother and daughters went to a Jewish summer camp for the summer.  The father and his teenage son stayed on.  The family had built an apartment, attached to the house but with its own separate entrance, and no direct entry into the house, for their grandfather to live in.  Unfortunately, this grandfather, from New York like my own Jewish grandparents, refused to occupy this cute but tiny apartment that his son had built especially for him.  Understandably, he decided he’d rather be in hell than in Alabama.  So, while the mother and daughters went away at camp, the father and son occupied the apartment and rented out the main house. 

The boy, Richard, about 15 years old, told us in his funny southern accent, stories of the snakes that frequented the back yard, describing the encounters in exciting detail.   My sister and I assumed he was fabricating these events, or at least greatly exaggerating, until the night my father encountered a Copperhead, a poisonous variety of snake, in the back yard and hacked it to death with a shovel.    (What was he–my father, not the snake–doing in the back yard anyway?  Why didn’t he just let it–the snake–alone?  Let it scamper–no, slither off.  What did he, a city boy from New York, know about snakes, let alone killing snakes?).  I was scared to death after that to go in the yard. 

But I was already scared to death.  This place was strange.   I had lived in the south before, in Texas, hot but dry, with water shortages, and watering restrictions, in a house that sat on a tiny lot and neighbors you could hear arguing, crammed in on all sides.   But this was the Deep South!   Mildew, new to me, a by-product of extreme humidity, inundated anything that sat out for more than an hour.  It feasted and reproduced on papers stored unwisely in the shed, coating everything a velvety gray-green, like the thick fuzz you get on your tongue when your stomach’s upset.    It permeated the fabric ceiling of our car; it gummed up the steering wheel. There wasn’t much you could do about it.  And another calamitous byproduct of the humidity: for the first time in my life, my hair frizzed out, became huge, like a damp, brown, cotton ball, a challenge I continue to face each time I venture south of the Mason Dixon line. 

The nights were black and noisy with crickets and frogs, and steamy.   It seemed like the setting in movies where you knew something was going to happen, the camera keeps focusing on the edge of the lawn where it meets brush and woods beyond, and whatever it was that was going to happen was imminent; then suddenly all the jungle noises stopped and you knew this meant the Mau Mau or zombies would now be coming, staggering out of the brush.  The bedroom my parents put me in was at the beginning of the hall, so, I reasoned—reasoned?—a killer coming in would get to my bedroom first, and I would be his first victim.  Perhaps after he had gotten the killing out of his system, he wouldn’t even bother going on down the hall to the other bedrooms.  Maybe he’d had enough.  The rest of them, those that were spared by my unwilling death, would finally notice me missing in the morning, but not until Jeopardy! came on and I didn’t show up to watch.   The worst of it was that each night my parents turned on a loud and largely ineffectual attic fan that sounded like a helicopter landing on the roof and kept it running all night.  It barely stirred around the hot wet air and did nothing to diffuse the gagging smell of the paper mills.  I tried to stay alert but because of the fan, I had no chance of hearing the killer coming, nor did my parents stand a chance of hearing my screams.  I begged my mother to turn off the fan, but nothing doing.  No lights either–no such things as nightlights or the bathroom light left on with the door a crack open.  Not in our household.  Nothing but deep, deep, dark, so deep my eyes never got used to it and start to make things out.  My sister and I had always shared a bedroom before that, and she protected me to one degree or another depending on her inclination, would sometimes hold my hand, and sometimes not, but now I had my own room in which to lie awake, waiting for the killers or the snakes or both.

Once I got addicted to daytime Jeopardy with Alec Fleming, I got up earlier as it was on at 10:00 a.m.  Mama served me breakfast and then, because she thought I was too thin, tried to force the equivalent of two or three other breakfasts on me (cereal and eggs and toast and fruit with wheat germ on top of everything, just to deaden the taste).  Next, I positioned myself in front of the TV for the day.  Mama and I had side by side armchairs directly opposite the box and Carol, my sister, settled in too, stretching out on the couch that ran along the side wall, and pretty soon Richard, the owner’s son in the grandfather apartment, came up and found a chair and settled in to watch with us.  I thought he was pretty cute.  He was a year older than me, and a year younger than Carol, and he was clearly more interested in her.  She casually told me he’d tried to kiss her, and she had just laughed and pushed him aside.  I was shocked and insulted.  What about me?  So my hopes were dashed, but at least I had the benefit of him hanging around, even if was just for Carol, or for the TV or for some (barely) human company.      

Richard didn’t have much to do in the way of chores either.  He had to make lunch for himself though Mama didn’t mind his hanging around, but she had no intention cooking for one more lazy adolescent.  One afternoon he took us down to the apartment to show us how a can of tomato soup had exploded on the ceiling of the grandfather’s apartment.  The directions said to heat contents of the can in a saucepan, so he put the can unopened in the saucepan and proceeded to heat it up.  I think he wanted us to help him clean up the mess, but he didn’t realize he was dealing with the two laziest girls on earth, or at least in the Deep South.  One day Richard came up and boiled his father’s socks in a huge pot on the stove.  I think the grandfather apartment’s stove was too little–just large enough for soup heating up.  He said his father had athletes’ foot and his socks had to be boiled before they were washed.  We were intrigued by this process, but mostly because we’d never done any laundry in our lives, and thought it odd that Richard had to, and to such extremes of involvement.

On Sunday we packed up to go to the beach.  Though I was almost a teenager, I didn’t yet realize fully how uncool my parents were and not so embarrassed about them that I would refuse to go to the beach with them and miss out on one of and possibly the best thing one could do in this life.  There was no other way to get there as it was about a 40-minute drive to Dauphin Island, and no one drove except Papa, so I hung around watching them load up the car with enough paraphernalia to keep us dry, sun burned and well fed for a week although we were just going for the day.  Of course we had to go to mass first, so it was after noon when we headed out.  About 10 minutes into our journey all hell broke loose.  A huge thunderstorm came up, so we turned around and went home, our windshield wipers slashing like mad and completely useless.  In about 10 minutes the storm, typical of an afternoon thunderstorm in the Deep South, vanished and the sun was blinding with an inconsequential cloud or two in the beautiful blue sky.  But we were home and unpacked by then.  So much for our first foray to the beach.

But we did finally make it to the beach, soon, and fairly often.  I never turned down an offer to go to the beach.  (As I got older, I would invite a friend with whom to set up our little outpost camp away from the water cooler, beach chairs, loud, mismatched-clothed, older people, who had ridiculous arguments about where was the best spot in which to settle and which angle the chairs should face. My friend and I were so cool (or desperate to be cool) that we were free of equipment, the thing that defined those middle-aged, no-longer-svelte, comic people.  Stuff, that is.  My girlfriend and I just brought a towel and threw it down on the beach just wherever it landed and snickered and rolled eyes at the hopelessly square and embarrassing parents.  If I had no friend accompanying me, no one to laugh with or snicker with, I glowered and read a book or daydreamed.  But that came much later.

When we went to the beach those first few summers in Mobile, the good far outweighed the bad.  First, I’d been to many beaches in my short gypsy life, but I’d never seen anything like this.  Sand dunes!  I mean huge sand dunes.  We had to climb over them to get to the wonderful, isolated beaches away from the public beach with the snack bar and parking lot and smelly bathrooms.  Climbing them was no mean feat.  But once you were settled and finally had enough of the water for the moment, you returned and slid down them, rolling over and over, fast down the hot sand, until sand was in your every crevice.

We outgrew our interest in the sand dunes quickly. They became just a nuisance to climb.  But I never outgrew my love of the ocean, the rhythm, the smell, the gentle breeze, the incredibly blue and beautiful sky and clouds, the benevolent and punitive sun, the taste of your skin after a day at the beach, and the each-one-is-unique exhilarating waves.  Strangely, this beach love of mine managed to co-exist with my terror at the thought of sharks, jellyfish, crabs, undercurrents, Tsunami-like waves smacking me, stinging me, grabbing me and forcefully tumbling my body over and under, with no control, hoping for it to pass. What an analogy of life—exhilarating and terrifying!

In September I would enter my first year of high school at a Catholic all-girls high school, where I would stand with the other girls to say morning prayers in my dowdy uniform, sing “Alabama” at assemblies, and make friends with girls who tried to teach me to “talk right.” I would come to love shrimp, azaleas, Southern accents, and Mardi Gras parades.

Some of my fears I finally recognized as foolish, while new one cropped up.  But a dose of maturity and the excitement of new adventures dampened my anxiety.  I lived in Mobile for nine years before leaving home and family for other new worlds, never forgetting that summer that introduced me to the South and a path to growing up.