8 x 8 ÷ 4
The houses were built quickly in the suburbs because it was a time when demand was great. We had moved four years earlier from a country setting and it had taken me three years to be accepted by the city kids after great adjustments on my part.By the fourth year I had learned the city ways, made friends, become involved in school activities, and was happy. Now, the 8 x 8 patios were turning my world upside down. Everything I had striven to achieve over the past four years was being snatched from me for a brick house, no trees, and an 8 foot by 8 foot cement patio.It was an ugly patio too. Men had quickly poured cement, finished it in a rough texture after which they cut a groove to divide it into four squares and finished the edge of the four squares like a city sidewalk. As it turned out the 8 x 8 patio was where I spent my afternoons every summer for the next three years.Everyday, unless it was raining, I’d go out onto the patio at noon, set up a single wide camping cot with a brilliantly colored striped foam pad. I still recall the scent of the Johnson & Johnson Baby Oil I applied all over myself and how difficult it became at times as I lay baking in the sun until 4:00 PM, but keeping the fabulous tan seemed a necessity of life at the time.A few nights ago, I was applying high priced, wonderfully scented body butter with an indoor tanning ingredient to my legs and arms when these thoughts came to mind and I remembered Trish. Well, actually it wasn’t Trish I thought of first, it was the woman in the house next to ours.Looking back now I’m guessing she was about 28 to 30 years old, shoulder length dark hair, and a figure perfect for the bikini she wore. Her routine was the same as mine. At noon she’d come out onto her 8 x 8 patio slicked down with baby oil, lye in the baking sun, and at 4:00 PM she’d call Trish.Her husband was a salesman for a large firm downtown and evidently made a hefty salary because they bought the largest home offered in the new development.They had two young children; a boy in his first years of school and the tiniest little girl; so frail, not old enough for school.The third summer of the patio routine was the year the woman learned she was going deaf from a genetic disease and it progressed so quickly she lost her hearing before she could learn sign language.Doctors tested the children and the little boy was fine, but the tiny girl had inherited the same disease and faced her mother’s fate. Amidst all of these circumstances the man decided he didn’t want to be married anymore and moved out.I don’t know what happened to the family because I was preoccupied with my own life, but looking back now she must have been devastated. I still remember how her voice changed with her loss of hearing.She’d let their German Shepherd outside and ten or fifteen minutes later her monotone voice echoed through the neighborhood as she called from the sliding door that opened onto the 8 x 8 patio…Trish!...Trish!What we remember from childhood we remember forever. Permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.- Cynthia Ozick
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