My mother’s youngest sister never married, but lives with her partner and their two spoiled cats. The rest married and divorced, two remarried a few times. Again and again they embarked on new lives in new states, but eventually, they always came back to each other. As a child, to see them together was to witness a witchy power which made me reverent. They were louder, more confident, and funnier when they were together, as if each of them was amplified.
One of the summers before my first period, when I was twelve or thirteen, my mom and her sisters gathered at my aunt’s house in Indiana. They drank wine coolers and made margarita slushies in the blender. As the sun set, they climbed into my aunt’s above ground pool which looked to me like a big bathtub. When the moon rose in the sky and the stars appeared, they took off their swimsuits and flung them over the side of the pool. I don’t know whose idea this was, but they all followed suit.
The crickets cooed in the tall grass. My mom told me that I could join them in the pool. I was hesitant, but as the night darkened, I slipped off my suit and waded into the water with them. It was as if we were all babies getting washed in the same tub, and we were all grown, and we were all branches on the same tree.
I don’t have the same constellation of freckles which spans their faces, shoulders, and arms, but a small smattering appear on my face like a magic trick each summer, a few dots on one cheek climbing the bridge of my nose onto the other cheek and sprawling there, like my friends did the night we lounged on a freshly bought rug to uncurl the corners of the fabric and share talk of past loves. When I was a child, my mother told me that my freckles were fairy kisses. In the pool with my mother and her sisters, I wondered how many fairies must’ve kissed us, and how many times? My mother and my aunts laughed and laughed, silly, and happy, and in love, and it seemed the night would carry on this way forever, until my aunt’s husband came home, and security lights flooded the yard. He yelled. He shamed us, and threw our bathing suits back into the pool.
Sometimes, when I think back on this night, I imagine my uncle never comes home. Instead, we stay in the pool until we are pruney and our cheeks are sore from raucous laughter. I am twelve or thirteen, in my gangly shape shifting body, or I am older with my stretch marks and rounded out edges, and I am a daughter among sisters, all of us wearing my grandmother’s features like hand-me-downs and floating in the reflection of a warm summer night.
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Brooke White is a Michigander with a penchant for long conversations. Her work has appeared in Midwestern Gothic, Entropy, Iron Horse Literary Review, March Xness, and Lunch Ticket, among others. She received her M.F.A. from the University of Minnesota. She’s at work on a book about desire, transformations, and fairy tales.