The last few days, I’ve started to miss my old summer jobs — not the jobs themselves, but the mindlessness of them, the frank sweating, the clear boundaries, physically going and working with my hands and my back, my t-shirt soaked through, and then sitting and drinking tea-monade, and then going home. It’s got a lot to recommend it, my job, writing, working from home, but sometimes, sitting at my desk and sweating…it’s not a lot of sweat, it’s just a film, but it doesn’t do anything to cool me off, it just makes me sticky and stanky and uncomfortable, and I’ll knock down one deadline just to see four more I have to fight off by the weekend, and I look back at the days when it was my “job” to play tennis on the ragtag pool-club team, and my doubles partner K. Jump and I could never just roll over in straight sets, oh no, we always had to get our fight on and take it to a tiebreaker every time, the sun straight overhead, little flecks of Har-Tru kicking up and sticking to the sweat on our calves, mopping our foreheads with tennis balls because our shirttails had soaked through. But then it would end. We’d wear them down or we’d get beat, but then, we’d be done and we’d just cannonball into the pool with our whites still on, shoes and all, and then Ma or Mrs. Jump would come pick us up, and I’d go home and change and read ghost stories in the cool, dry basement until dinnertime.

Good sweat. Sweat that said I’d worked, done a job, done the whole job and could stop now.

I sweat like a pig; I accept that. If it’s in the service of something, I can live with it — running around the backcourt like a monkey because, if I get to every ball and return every shot in the alley, eventually that little lefty at the net is going to screw up, and maybe we can win. It’s when I’m just sitting on the couch under my laptop, trying to wring some funny out of TomKat, that I can’t take it.

I miss…laboring, hard but not difficult labor, a full day of cinching girths and slinging lime and picking out hooves and a full night of weightless, dreamless sleep. Hard, but easy. I’d get up at five-thirty, and the air would have a weight, cool and dewy from the night but just waiting to get heavy and soupy from the sun, no breeze, perfectly still, like the neighborhood at that hour. I’d put on my jodhpurs and my socks and a big blue t-shirt — blue to show I was a first-string counselor, big because that was the style then — and I’d put my left foot against the bedroom wall and strap my bad ankle, over the sock, bracing it with the bandage so it could only move up and down, not side to side, and then another sock over the rig, and then downstairs to grab an apple and shove my mismatched feet into a pair of busted-out Tretorns so rank my mother wouldn’t let them past the back porch, and down the street to walk the first of two dogs I had on my pet-sitting list. It was like underwater outside, heavy and silent, and I would let the Brittany tug me along while I ate my cold, sharp Granny Smith, and on the way from the Brittany’s house to the golden retriever’s house, I’d launch the core down the hill where there were no houses.

Ma would drive me to the barn. We’d have the sunroof of the wagon open and it was already starting to get thick, the air, and when I walked through the barn with my box and my boots under my arm, I’d see all the barn cats clustered around the hose in the yard. Tray and Kay went out to the side pasture to drive the horses in, Kay trailing behind, putting her hair up with sticks, and Wiocks and I fed. The sun had started to come up then and burn away the low-lying fog (“fairy breath,” Kay called it), and Wiocks and I did our feeding waltz, dodging and weaving in and out of the stalls, Wiocks on hot mash and me on hay, and by the time we did the whole line and the horses came in with tiny Tray bringing up the rear, lunge whip in one hand, Sunkist in the other, it was already hot. Only seven-thirty, the damned campers hadn’t even shown up yet, and Wiocks and I were already just drenched with hay seeds and bran in our hair all itchy, and I would say, “To dunk or not to dunk,” and Wiocks would say, “That is not even a question,” and we’d stick our whole heads in the run-off trough, and then everyone else went off to tack up for the morning counselors’ lesson, and my bad ankle and I got set up in the shade to clean bits with a toothbrush. Then the campers would come, and we’d run them (or after them) all morning, tacking, mucking, grooming, dunking the girls’ heads and then braiding their hair up off their necks crazy Pippi-stylee so tight they got headaches, and then, oh bliss: lunch. Hand out the paper sacks and water bottles, troop out to the big shade tree in the front field, lie down head-to-lap in a big circle and eat Doritos and catnap before lessons. Seemed like hard work, then.

So simple. Things needed doing, and we did them; when nothing needed doing, we lay down. We were working, a line of kids in the haymow and me at the top with the big baling hooks on my wrists, sweat pouring off us in sheets; or we were sitting perfectly still, doing perfectly nothing. We were pulling jumps apart and keel-hauling the pieces out behind Indiana’s paddock, or we were motionless in the hammock. We were riding, we were untangling ropes, we were going down a line of faces and forearms with a giant bottle of Coppertone, we were patching scraped elbows, cutting bales, packing hooves with thrush treatment, splinting stepped-on toes, explaining what a martingale does, oiling saddles, watering the ring…or we weren’t doing anything. There came a moment every day, standing in the sun, black hard hat, black boots, tight poly jodhpurs, my right leg aching because it had to do three quarters of the work when I walked, when I’d be leaning on a shovel and watching the kids mucking out a stall and they’d be messing it up, and I’d say, “All right, look, you’re going to watch me do it but pay attention this time — Casey, go get me a Coke,” and I’d give her fifty cents out of the budge in my right boot and just muck the stall out myself (I’d have had to do it again anyway), heaving out the wet hay and poops and sawdust, lime, more sawdust, stir it around, back and forth with the wheelbarrow and the water bucket, I could do it in my sleep to this day, and by the end, I’d be soaked, sweat running off the tip of my nose and down my back, my big blue shirt sticking to me, and Casey — who spoke aloud only to the horses, and to them only very quietly; with us she communicated only in gestures and varying angles of eyebrow — would take the shovel and cock her head at me, and I’d say “give it” and she’d hand over the Coke and I’d shotgun it in four seconds, and then I’d go over to the run-off trough, peel my shirt off, dunk it, and put it back on, and Casey would sidle up next to me, and I’d wring out the tail onto her head and she’d shiver.

There’s something about that feeling, the feeling that you’re a furnace, that you’re melting, that your body is going to cave in and puddle and boil, that to stop it you would have to take off not just your clothes but everything between your bones and the air…and then an ice-cold Coca-Cola and a gi-GAN-tic belch and a freezing, dripping shirt that smelled faintly of iron and moss…it’s like waking up from a bad dream, or finding something you thought you’d lost, “I live here,” “keys thank God,” sweet uncomplicated relief. The last stop on the pool-testing route was the best half-hour there was, the sun heading for the trees, starting to weaken, and I’d trundle into the pool area with my test kit and my clipboard and a pen stuck through my ponytail, and Smitty’s behind me carrying the sample cooler and whistling, and then the whistling veers off and is joined by splashing and I see that he’s cutting through the kiddie pool with his shoes on and everything, but it’s the last stop so why the hell not. Smitty and I really like going out together, but the problem is we only get sent out together on the shore route, the shittiest route on the list, a string of nasty greenish motel pools that always fail chlorine and we’d have to drive two hours just to get to the first one, and by this time it’s close to five, we’re getting stuck in Parkway traffic going back for sure, so we do a little splashing around, I run the test and Smitty writes it up, the Beachfront fails chlorine again, ho hum, and then we go back to the car and put everything away, it’s hot on the blacktop and we both smell like bleach and armpit, and we look at each other. “Roy fucking Rogers.” “Right fucking now.” And we inch along the Parkway, eating fries and smoking with the AC turned up to Yukon, just sitting and talking, maps put away, pens put away, the fact that we have to get up at crap o’clock tomorrow and do it again put away. Just relaxed, cooling off, looking forward to a shower and some TV. Just done.

I miss that binary — sweating and not, working and not. It doesn’t go that way anymore; I don’t have a pool to jump in, workdays don’t just end, sweating just happens for no apparent reason. I miss no in-between.

July 18, 2005

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