Playground Rules

I knew the Ten Commandments and The Golden Rule before I could spell my name. I knew the twenty-third psalm. Not just memorized, but absorbed---like extra ribs in my chest. I was reminded of them whenever I saw others committing forbidden acts. I recalled friends who sneaked into the coatroom at school to pop their outlawed bubble gum, and the filling station man who always told my Aunt Teddie she needed a quart of oil when she didn't. She would just smile and say, "Thanks, I'm about to get it changed anyway." I figured her answer was sort of like turning the other cheek.

I think I did just fine with those Eternal Rules, honoring them to the fullest as the years went by. Yes, all was close to textbook until that one day at Spider Lake. Spider Lake was my getaway. It was so different from the fast pace of Chicago, and it restored me with its calmness. It was like a secret elixir with its muddy shorelines and caramel-green colored waters. The fern glades were so open and inviting, like alleys into a happy realm I had long since lost. There were mushrooms everywhere, bright-colored and poisonous. I bathed in the coolness of its waters, tasted its purity. It was the rekindling of my sleeping little spirit.

This day, my uncle Duncan drove me to the lake and left me with a dollar seventy-five to buy ice cream and a soda. I found my way down to the pier that led to the dock. It was a hot and humid August day, and my thoughts drifted back to the advent of another school year, less than a month away. I was reminded that summer was fleeting, like sleep being interrupted by shards of daylight through the blinds.

I sat there with my root beer and plain vanilla ice cream, mesmerized by the things around me. The river swept by, curling itself around the pine knees then dancing away with its trail of leaves and algae. At my foot, I noticed a cord tied to a post on the dock. I pulled at it, and felt something heavy on the end. My curiosity got the best of me, so I hoisted it up. It was a net, and it contained a six-pack of beer. Had someone left it there to cool beneath the dock? Was it a gift from some devil who tempted teenage girls with the stains of adulthood?

Playground rules came to mind. Finders keepers! Oh, and no one was there---no one to see, no one to tell. I stared at the cool dripping cans with a strange lust. Surely this cannot be me, slipping into the woods with my prohibited fruit. I found a resting-place in the forest, away from prying eyes. The sumac leaves obscured me from anyone approaching the dock, and there were no sounds except the distant staccato of a woodpecker and the drone of the cicadas.

As I sat beneath a towering spruce, I cracked open the first can and drank deep. The bittersweet taste of my father’s beer. It tasted illicit and sharp, but I swallowed hard and took big gulps till my head began to spin.

I drank four cans before being dashed away on a magical carpet ride. My body was vacated as I rose aloft. I could see everything below, as if perched among the tallest trees. My view was spectacular. Below me were my old schoolteachers and my principal. They convened a class without me, but all my papers were in order. The principal spoke to the assembly of beaming faces. I relished the moment he named me "Class Most Creative." A peculiar young girl with a precocious talent for sketching and poetry, and I wanted recognition for my hard work.

Then, in a flash, all these things vanished, like a vacant stage after the second bow. I felt something at my side. It was my Uncle Dunc, nudging me with his boot. I remember thinking his face wouldn't hold still. He had two of everything.

The ride home went swiftly. There was no conversation. Lights in houses flashed by like a midnight train. Abruptly, I recognized the cottage front porch, with its painted wooden floor and the glider nestled in its grapevine canopy. Dunc lifted me inside the house and lay me down on the sofa; my awareness still swooning above me like smoke from the chimney. My grandmother came to my side. She stood towering above me, her face obscured in the dim light. She seemed at least twelve feet tall.

No bathtub could contain the amount of shame that I bathed in that night. My grandmother made it worse. There was no lecture, no scolding. There was only the look of hurt on her face. What had happened to my commitment to those Eternal Rules? There I had been, drinking forbidden elixir, and worse, stealing from some thirsty fisherman who returned to find but an empty net. He would have harsh words to say, and no one there to hear.

Despite my misgivings the night before, there indeed was a dawn the next day. The sun was unusually bright as I sat at the breakfast table with blueberry pancakes and fresh honeydew. The scolding I dreaded never came. My grandmother rushed about in her usual way before Sunday services, and my Uncle Duncan arrived on time to drive us to the chapel.

That morning, my place on the hard oak pew was unusually comforting. I suppose it was because I had survived a double-sin. But something else was different now; I was listening, and I was hearing. When the pastor made his invitation, something seemed to lift me out of my seat. I found myself at the front of the church but my feet never touched the floor.