In Spring

Temple Roberts, the Baptist preacher’s daughter who knew more of sense and sin than I ever would, was my nearest neighbor for longer than I can remember. Until the eighth grade when Temple’s parents sent her up north to boarding school. Her white clapboard house sat on a hill overlooking the cleanest part of Nelson River with daisies growing in the front yard and white Christmas lights that hung tastefully from the edges of the roof year round.

After my father died the Roberts invited us into their home for Sunday turkey and mashed potatoes every week for almost a year. Mrs. Roberts always wore an apron over her dress with matching shoes, as if at any given moment she’d just stepped out of the kitchen. She had different patterns every week, yellow lace with daffodils, blue satin polka dots, even orange pumpkins with carved smiles for Halloween. I wouldn’t know until years later – when my mother decided in a fit of rage to turn all my memories of childhood into ugliness – that their maid Conchita, a pretty girl from Honduras, was responsible for any culinary efforts in the Roberts’ kitchen and, my mother implied scornfully, efforts in other parts of the house as well.

I would follow Temple up to her room after each dinner. That bedroom, done in light gauze and pale pastels, would always elicit in me a twinge of envy. Jealousy was part of it but even more the realization that I wouldn’t know what to do with her riches if I ever were to possess them. Stuffed animals overflowed from the window seat, a tall bookshelf towered over one corner stuffed with board games and porcelain figurines. A giant pink teddy bear stood sentry next to the canopied bed, its belly stitched with Temple’s full name and date of birth.

We played house with a chrome kitchen set and Temple was always father. She told me, imperious like a bull, that I couldn’t possibly know how to be a daddy when I no longer had one. Her long body scrunched into an outgrown tea table, waiting for me to serve her an imaginary plate of bacon and eggs that I made by banging tiny metal pots together and imitating the ch-ch-ch sound of a gas stove lighting.

My favorite toy was the Barbie styling head. It was nothing more than the decapitated head of a Barbie doll, enlarged to full-size and mounted on a piece of flat pink plastic so that Barbie was always sitting straight and tall like a macabre symbol of synthetic vanity. The doll’s eyes stared pleasantly ahead, no matter how many times I accidentally on purpose burned her ears with the plastic curling iron. I would run the blonde hair between my fingers, blonde because Temple would only allow her mother to buy white dolls, and hold the life-size head close to my face so the cool plastic of Barbie’s cheek pressed against mine. When I closed my eyes I could pretend that the silky waves tickling my ear were my own.

The last dinner we ever had must have been in late March or April because I remember the trees as green and full but a chill wind blew through the open bedroom window. Temple was an imposing twelve years of age to my meager ten. When she pulled a play doctor’s bag made of fake leather from the toy chest and told me to take off my sweater and pants because it was time for an examination, I never said yes but I don’t remember saying no.

Here is where memory dissolves into fragments of sensation, tantalizing half-images that dance behind closed eyelids and make a mockery of story-telling. The smell of baking biscuits floating up from the kitchen or was it the plate of fresh cookies Mrs. Roberts made for my mother to take home. A bitter knife of wind cut the night and I remember the top of Temple’s head, thick and shiny from oil and a liberally applied horse bristle brush.

That was how Temple’s mother found us minutes later. Me, naked save for brown dress socks and pair of brand new penny loafers a size too big and Temple on her hands and knees, a toy stethoscope in her ears, feeling for a pulse in a place I never knew a heart could beat.

My mother and I were never again invited to dinner.

It was early in the spring and the air carried with it the odor of rotten wood and dead flowers and underneath the decay, the sweet pulse of new life.