JULY 4TH, 1983, BRANFORD, CONNECTICUT
That summer I rented a house in Branford, a shoreline village outside New Haven. The house, an old foursquare with a big screened-in porch, was built above a pebble beach overlooking a very calm Long Island Sound. Long Island itself was in the distance, a thickening of the pencil-line horizon off to the south. I read, in a hammock strung up on the porch, all of Patrick O'Brian's books set on sailing ships during the Napoleonic Wars, which always mention the hammocks strung up between the beams of the lower decks of the frigates, the men-of-war, the ships-of-the-lines. I would look up from the book to see the Sound off in the distance — through the screen, the branches of trees, and over the roofs — suddenly filled with sails of all types reaching across the cove and then turning and tacking back down east. Speedboats darted across the wakes, the only wave in the water, going up on step and slapping back down to make a sound that would reach me many seconds after it happened. When I wasn't reading, I walked through the neighborhoods, the houses mostly year-round places whose inhabitants lived all the time at the beach so that the novelty of the ocean had worn off. They vacationed elsewhere. On the cross-country drive to get there, I went through Amish settlements in Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and stopped once in one of the stores and bought a big, black, broad-brimmed flat straw hat I wore as I walked through Branford and down to the beach with my folding chair and flag-striped towel to watch the boats wheel, the fang-shaped sails stirring in the smooth water with the bright sunlight amplifying what little chop there was, a sprinkle of sparkle. I rolled up my long pants to the knees and waded out into the shallow water. The breeze that pushed the boats blew further out. The shade from my hat cast a black shadow like a hole into which I could step, fall completely through. I had driven out to Branford in a '67 Dodge Dart I inherited from an aunt. The temperature gauge had never worked until it did one night, instantly jumping from C to H as I drove through fields in Iowa, fireflies sparking off the corn all around me. The radiator blew, blowing fluid through the hood onto the windshield. Ever after, mechanics, who loved working on the ancient engine, the old slant-six, clucked when they saw the blood-red that rust had painted the engine and its compartment. From Branford, I drove the Dart into New Haven, stood in line for a seat in one of the pizza places there, something the guidebooks said I should do. By the end of the summer, I ended up liking Sally's more than Pepe's, not so much for the pizza as for the many pictures of Sinatra on the wall there. I waited by myself in the lines outside and often sat with strangers inside, taking up the odd seat, and only mentioned I was spending the summer in Branford if anyone asked. I read about old sea battles and walked to the beach and through the town and then back up to try to write something myself — a story or a poem — as I rocked slowly back and forth in the hammock on the porch. Or, as a change of pace, I hiked up the road toward the interstate, to the Trolley Museum and rode an old street car — the PCC salvaged from Philadelphia, the bright red open-sided convertible car from Brooklyn, or the drab trolley from the St. Charles line in New Orleans with the destination placard scrolled to Desire. The cars trundled through the salt marshes and scrub forest, sparks spilling from the overhead wire on the turns. At Short Beach, where the track ended, the motorman got out to lower the trailing trolley and then forked up the leading trolley to contact the wire. He got back inside, flipped the backs of the seats over rattan benches to face the front, and powered up the car to go back in the other direction. I turned the lights out in the house the night of the Fourth. The neighborhood around me was dark, the houses emptied out. The local families going into New Haven to celebrate, a vacation from the permanent vacation the village seemed to live. There was no moon but plenty of stars drifting south and west. Far away on the north shore of Long Island the fireworks there began, launched to bloom silently just above a seam in the dark. The explosions were so small that I couldn't tell the patterns or be sure of the color, only the intensity of light. The porch screen blurred the little smudges further, framed them in the pricked openings of the wire mesh. It is all perspective, the miniature bombardment that breathed out and then smeared, falling back into the sea. Up and down the length of the island, the static scatter of sparks, as if they were signaling each other, a couple dozen patches flaring up, tendrils of one or two high altitude rockets arching back over the lit-up pulse of smoke. Fleck of rust. Burning mold. A random pantomime that seemed to communicate, in some subdued but desperate code, that something urgent was happening somewhere else.
JULY 4TH, 20—, FORT WAYNE, INDIANA
That summer I went back home to sell my parents' house, living there, sleeping in my old room, getting the place ready to put on the market. I had to cull through everything, decide what I would put in the garage sale, what I would give away, what I would cart off to the dump. My father collected souvenir golf balls he kept in pressed-paper egg crates. Each ball was printed with a different stencil or decal commemorating some event, a company or tournament logo, sports team mascot, fortune cookie saying, motivational motto. My mother framed pictures using the same frames over and over, stripping out the picture and mat, replacing it with a new mat and photo, then storing the old one behind the new one sealed up inside the brown paper backing. Opening up the paper backing of a picture was like opening a Christmas present, with the gift being the layers and layers of past pictures, of annual Christmas photos, say, July Fourth picnics in the backyard, stashed there. The Christmas shots were department store studio pictures of the three of us and then just the two of them through the years. The wallet-sized copies had been sent out in the Christmas cards. I read science fiction at night, books about the future after a day of grubbing through the past. I read brittle paperbacks, foxing pocketbook editions I read first when I lived there — Dick and Clarke and Asimov and Bradbury's Martian Chronicles—on the same couch I had read them years before. I worked on curb appeal, cutting the lawn in a checkerboard pattern like my father had. I shaped the hedges, cleaned the gutters, painted the shutters, changed the seasonal wind sock from Easter's green and purple to the striped and starred bunting of Memorial Day that would do for the Fourth of July. The backyard butted up against the boundary of an office park with its cluster of brick and glass box buildings sloping away gently down the contour of a hill to a pond where a gaggle of Canada geese milled. In the parking lot of the nearest building, an endoscopy office, my parents used to watch the fireworks fired from the top deck of the parking garage on the college campus on the other side of the bypass. It was easy to drag some chairs and a cooler to a spot there and watch the lot fill up with pickup trucks and vans of families arriving to hold vigils of the night coming on, the sun falling toward the campus. In the dusk, legal bottle rockets lifted off of truck beds. Firecrackers sputtered on the ground next to the gathering vehicles as they crept along looking for a parking spot. Cherry bombs spooked the geese that spat. In the black windows of the next building over, I could see the glinting rows of computers, their screen savers, I imagined, flickering and rolling. A contract company of the post office that remotely examined badly addressed mail and routed it remotely to where it was supposed to go. The screen savers saving the screen, the flashes there reflected in the glass of the windows as if each window pictured its own tiny fireworks display. I thought about the workers who would be back soon enough at those consoles after the holiday, scanning the lost and diverted mail scrolling on the screens, attempting to read the blots and smudges splattered on the envelopes, the fractals and fragments of the stuttering hands of correspondents from somewhere. They would try to put a spine in some smear, make fragments mean something once again, the parts more than the whole or at least something whole enough to mean. Like that “i“ there in that cloud of inky sky. I imagine the dark dot dotting that “i“ as a concentrated black hole, an absence collapsing into the zenith of a rocket's launch, exploding over the straight streak of its exhaust. For that instant, a lit mass of a million billion pieces flaring then nothing. More than nothing. And nothing more.