When Lilacs Bloomed

The following is the opening of a work-in-progress, a coming of age novel about a young girl growing up in the 1950s and 60s.

It’s August 16, Meg’s birthday, and I’m up at daybreak, as I always am on this day. I take my coffee to the porch and watch the dawn creeping over the mountains, dappling the trees with light and licking up the night. The lilacs planted along the porch emit a sweet fragrance, and the memory of Meg’s laughter trills faraway like the tinkling of distant chimes. I sent her a card, as always, but this year it was returned with “address unknown” stamped on the envelope. She’d never responded anyway, never acknowledged that she’d even received the cards. I haven’t seen or heard from her since that long ago summer.

I walk to the edge of the porch and bury my face in the lilacs resting on the rail. When I think of that summer now, what I remember first is this same heady, pungent bouquet drifting from the lilac blossoms on that overgrown bush in Meg’s backyard. It was there we huddled—Gail, Meg, and me—in a shaded cavern formed by the pendulant branches. It was there, out of the summer sun but mostly out of sight of Meg’s mother’s suspicious, probing eyes, that we plotted and planned, inventing a scheme to free Meg from her mother’s possessive grasp and give her a way to join us in our summer adventures.

It was a scheme we would call on again and again that summer, whenever Meg needed an excuse to get out of the house, and it succeeded beyond all our expectations. We laughed and larked our way through June and July, but always kept our sights on August, when Gail’s family and mine planned to spend a week at the Grand Lake Resort cabins. Our anticipation was even greater than usual because this year, since our scheme was succeeding so well, we knew Meg would be able to tag along.

We were thirteen that summer—three gangly girls hoping to giggle away the surprising and unfamiliar awareness of our looks and teenage bodies with an endearing dopiness and a comical goofiness. Caught on the edge of girlish pranks and womanly concerns, we spent hours in front of the mirror styling hair-dos on each other that we copied from magazine pictures of our favorite stars.

We used my father’s stash of short golf pencils to practice holding cigarettes in a seductive way, blowing imaginary smoke rings into the air, pretending that an adoring male companion gazed with passion at our puckered lips as we shot come-hither looks through half-lidded eyes in his direction. We lathered our legs and shaved them, caressing their smooth, silky texture while trying to ignore that the procedures involved with turning ourselves into teenage temptresses could be annoying and tiresome.

Finally, overwhelmed by the irksome demands that beauty and grace required, we’d revert to the tomboys we had spent the last few hours trying to vanquish, scramble out the back door to our bikes and ride whooping down the alley looking for an adventure.

We met each morning in the alley behind Mrs. Gundy’s house where the piquant perfume of the sweet peas bulging over her backyard fence mixed with the rancid vapors of pet feces and rotting vegetables crammed into trashcans beside her garage. A graveled lane, just one car-width wide, overgrown with weeds and lined by an odd assortment of wire, wood, and wrought iron fences, the alley’s eclectic, hodge-podge nature fired our imaginations. On its dusty field, overlaid with the scent of grass cuttings and wet leaves, we had grown up fighting bloody battles behind trashcan barricades, scaling the peaks of garage roofs to plant flags or screech a Tarzan cry, and slaying monsters concealed in the fiery caves of bulky, concrete incinerators that belched a lingering smoky stench even on non-burn days.

School had been out just a week and, as we made our way down the alley, we were discussing what to wear to the “Welcome Summer” dance for teenagers at the Community Center on Friday night. Gail was munching on a piece of jelly toast and a dab of jelly nestled at the corner of her mouth. Gail was always munching on something. My grandmother, Momey, called her “pleasantly plump.” She was describing the purple skirt and lavender top she was going to wear, when Meg interrupted her.

“I can’t go,” Meg said. “My mother won’t let me. She says I’m too young to go to dances with boys and I’ll get a reputation.”

“A reputation for what?” I asked. “Mooning over Sonny Denault or Mike Lewis. Or talking with a parent chaperone when no one asks you to dance so you can pretend that you are having such a fascinating conversation that you couldn’t possibly tear yourself away from it, even if Sonny or Mike asked you to dance, because you’d much rather talk to Mrs. DeBrock about the new aquarium Debbie received for her birthday.

“You can joke about it if you want, but it’s not funny to me,” complained Meg. “Since my dad died, my mom is getting worse than she was before. She doesn’t want me to leave the house, doesn’t even want me to hang around with you guys. It’s like she doesn’t trust me. I don’t do anything bad. I just want to be with my friends, but she thinks I’m up to no good every time I want to leave the house.”

“But what about your brother, Billy?” I asked. “He’s two years younger than you and she doesn’t make him stay home all the time. Why can he go out and you can’t?”

“Well, Billy’s a boy and…” Meg paused a minute, then shrugged her shoulders. “Oh, you know, my mom says boys are independent and can take care of themselves. But, she says, girls have to be careful, particularly when they become teenagers. They can’t just run around loose with all sorts of people. She says girls are susceptible. People will talk about them.”

This was news to me—Anne-Charlotte Knight, better known as Charlie, for short. I had had a lot of mother warnings in my life—always put on clean underwear in the morning, don’t lean your elbows on the table, don’t pick your teeth or your nose, don’t use someone else’s comb—but I had never been warned that people might talk about me for hanging around with my friends.

“I don’t get it either,” said Gail. “Like what are girls susceptible to? My grandpa says he is susceptible to constipation. That’s why he eats dried prunes on his cereal, so he can poop. I don’t know what the prunes have to do with it, except they look like little dried turds, so maybe he eats them and then his body goes ‘Turd Alert Overload, Turd Alert Overload’ and his brain flashes a green light “Go” signal so he can poop.”

Meg and I laughed so hard. Gail can be so funny. She can imitate all sorts of voices and crazy sounds. As we walked down the alley, she kept repeating in a high, shrill squawk, “Turd Alert Overload, Turd Alert Overload.”

“I can ask my mom to call your mom,” I offered to Meg, when we quit laughing, “and talk to her about it so she knows that it’s okay.”

“No!” Meg shook her head. “That will just make it worse. She’ll get mad because I told someone. She doesn’t like us to talk about her or our family to other people. Maybe I can convince her. I’ll try again tonight.”

“Well, we’ll have to think of something to convince your mom to let you have some freedom,” I said. “You can’t miss all the fun this summer.”

And we did, later that afternoon, we did think of something. How were we to know then the disastrous results that would occur when our clever scheme finally unraveled with tragic results.

Copyright Susan Matthewson 2009