Seventh Heaven Read Free Page A

children kept it to themselves. They never told their parents or whispered to each other. Sometimes the monsters reappeared on paper in school, drawn with crayons and colored pencils; they had purple hair and large yellow eyes, and you could tell they didn’t believe in good nights or sleeping tight.
    In some of the houses on Hemlock Street, good girls slept with their fingers crossed. They believed it was wrong for boys to want to touch their breasts, and luckily for them they never dreamed. They never thought about how babies were made; they wouldn’t even tell their best friends if they did. And yet on summer evenings they felt weak in the knees. They sat in the bleachers at the high school and watched the boys play baseball; they chewed Juicy Fruit gum and combed their hair, and suddenly they felt as if they were made of glass, as if they were on the edge of something they knew in their hearts was bad.
    And when the sky grew darker, the late blue dusk of summer, boys of sixteen and seventeen stumbled along the bases in the approaching dark. Boys who had never had a thought in their heads found themselves feeling defeated. They thought about their fathers, how they set out the trash cans on the curb, how they could always be found at the kitchen table on Saturday nights, their checkbooks in front of them, stacking up the bills. Water, electricity, mortgage. They had no idea why thinking about their fathers should make them stumble, why suddenly they couldn’t stop wondering what a girl’s mouth was like, what her fingers would feel like against their skin, how pale a girl’s eyelids might seem when she closed her eyes.
    These boys’ fathers had once felt what their sons felt now, that terrible freedom of a summer night. But lately odd things pleased them; they found themselves grinning when they paid the bills, they found themselves thinking, This is mine, and they didn’t mind so much being home on a Saturday night. They had poker games to think about and promotions at work, they had candy-colored cars with long fins in their driveways. So why was it that they were so moved when they saw their oldest sons button their white shirts and comb their hair back with water? Why did the youngest of their sons, the fearless ones who climbed to the top of the monkey bars and begged to stay up past their bedtimes, make their throats grow tight with longing?
    On August nights these men’s wives no longer looked at themselves as they tissued the cold cream off their faces. Many of them still could not believe they had children; put into a twilight sleep, then handed a baby they hardly recognized as their own, they were suddenly much older than they ever thought they’d be. Just before winter each year they took down the red boots from the top shelf of the hall closet. Just before spring they carried up light jackets and Easter coats from the basement, shook out the mothballs, and hung the coats on lines in their backyards. They had recipes for coconut cake; they had chicken soup with rice for the littlest children, home with sore throats; they had orders in for new dinette sets with laminated tabletops that looked like real wood yet were easily sponged off after a meal.
    But this year the women saw that the fireflies had returned. They saw a flash of light at their windows just as they were about to get into bed. The green light formed a net of stars within the grid of silver fences along the backyards. When the women went into their bathrooms they could hear their children’s even, sleepy breathing through the thin plaster walls. They sneaked cigarettes while sitting on the rims of the tubs, which they had scrubbed with Bon Ami earlier that day. Then they faced the mirror and took the bobby pins out of their hair and combed out their pincurls, but by the time they went back to their bedrooms their husbands were already asleep, and the fireflies were hidden between the blades of grass on their