It was the Friday of the Fourth of July weekend, and I was on a train to Manhattan and couldn’t stop sneezing. There was an elderly man next to me reading, he was there when I got on the train. As is so often the case with Amtrak, it was a sold-out train, and it took me wandering to the second-to-last car to find an unoccupied seat.
He was very elegant with white hair and khakis, reading an Eric Ambler novel.
***
I used to spend a lot of time in a suburb named Ambler. And when I snuck peeks at the man and the novel, it reminded me of the amazing Mexican restaurant there. I would go with my friend, Shawn. Shawn was so beloved by the staff that one time we went there on the later side, and I apologized to the staff for ordering so close to quitting time. The man behind the counter said “for him? We’ll stay open.” We sat at one of the glossy tables and I had the best carne asada burrito. It tasted like San Diego. It tasted like home, and being a teenager, and eating at Santana’s with my best friends. For that moment in the darkening restaurant under the pink sky of a suburb outside of Philadelphia, space and time closed in on itself. I was both an unburdened teenager in San Diego and an adrift 29-year-old adult who just lost her apartment after another lay off. But I was eating a carne asada burrito with a best friend. Shawn and I ordered tres leches cake to share and while we ate, the guy from behind the counter dropped the television remote off at the table just in case Shawn wanted to change the channel.
It’s a good memory.
***
I’ve never read Eric Ambler, who writes spy novels, but I have always wanted to be a spy.
I will never be a spy. As much as I strive to be unassuming, I am constantly conspicuous. It is not that I walk into a room with the grace of a cool breeze and command attention, nor am I a bright swallow charming in my bounciness creating a draw. It’s that I’m clumsy. If there is a table, it will not be saved from my knees. No sidewalk un-tripped. No train seat was avoided by the crash of my silly body. No surface not stumbled upon.
And I have allergies.
A sniffle for all seasons. Pollen. Heavy rain giving way to humid days. Dander. Plants. Sun. Stars. And the moon at night. All of it makes me sneeze. I have oak rings under my eyes, which I found out is likely attributed to allergies. My nose is always running. My eyes are the coat of a fox, ringed and bleeding into the whites with the constant rubbing. Two fists in a circle distressing the eyelids in the motion of a fussy baby.
***
This train trip was no different. I had a sneezing fit within the first fifteen minutes of the ride. The man turned his green and white-check shirted back to me. Who could blame him? He was a well-composed and iron-pressed person traveling. He was seated next to a woman with messy hair in a pilgrim-like dress, except cut way too short, and ADIDAS flip flops. And she won’t stop sneezing.
During the second round of sneezing, I got more embarrassed. When I became too self-conscious of the rapidity and achoo sound, I tried to swallow the sneezes. That weird, muffled body quake of holding in a sneeze. Just so I didn’t make myself too loud. Too seen. That never works, right? By the time we passed Trenton with the shouts of late passengers rushing up to catch the train before it left, I decided not to hold in the sneezes anymore as it was prolonging the whole fit.
So, I sat with my running nose and thought too much about the history of embarrassment.
***
I don’t know if the man was judging the sneezes and sniffles. I was projecting my own insecurities onto him, which is, of course, unfair and self-obsessed. The truth is, most people aren’t thinking of us as much as we believe they are. It is the painful pull between not wanting to make a show of oneself, opening yourself to judgment or humiliation, and the reality that you are likely not on anyone’s mind but your own.
***
I wasn’t always embarrassed about my allergies. I accepted them as a part of myself, like my freckles and hazel eyes. A body’s spontaneous response to protect itself from assumed threats. I have allergies, just like I have reddish-brown hair. Just like I have a scar where a cancerous mole used to be. It’s a part of my makeup.
***
I learned to be embarrassed about sneezing during one of the happier summers of my childhood. I was a preteen on Long Island, the summer before my family moved to California. The sweltering steam of a summer that lasted forever, feet forever bare and burned by the asphalt in the community pool parking lot. The taste of plums swimming in melted ice from white and red coolers on the beach. Getting sand stuck in your teeth that had clung to white bread sandwiches. The sound of the Yankees game on transistor radios. The way the seat of the swings at Hemlock Park got too hot and burned the back of your thighs. The summers you daydream of as an adult sitting in the grey bubble of an office building, everything fabric, even the cubicle walls.
***
My jaw ached with the ever-present motion of chewing entire packs of Bubble Yum Cotton Candy bubble gum. I had strong opinions about what bubble gum brand was the superior: Bubblicious vs Bubble Yum, and while I preferred the former’s name, I loved the latter’s mohawk-haired duck mascot, with his spiked collar and piercing. My hair was streaked from the sun, and freckles stood out like constellations; even now, the smell of pink zinc is so strong in my memory, I can feel the coating on my nose to keep it from peeling. I read Sweet Valley High and Fear Street books by the dozen. WWF and Marvel comics ruled my whole life. And while I know that there were difficulties during the humid days of that summer, I can only remember the ease. The memories are a protective shield my brain has developed to create a space in which to escape during hard times. The pruned fingers from swimming for too long. Dialing 800-numbers with friends at the payphones to laugh at messages, or, more frequently to call collect to the house with the rushed message following, “say your name,” of, “hi, it’s Janie, please pick me up at the library. Bye!”
During the summer I turned twelve, I had a crush on a boy with green-brown eyes and hair the same brownish-red as mine. Nose full of freckles. He was funny, sarcastic, rebellious, and original. He was always at the principal’s office. Those who agitated against strict Catholic school education were always the people I liked the best. His brother was my best friend’s boyfriend, so we were always in proximity. I scribbled his name in my lock-and-key diary with loopy hearts all around it. I had no chill.
***
Even now, I am not used to attracting the attention of the people I like. Awkward and fumbling, I vibrate anxious energy. And as a deeply self-conscious preteen, the fretfulness was magnified by a thousand. Everything I liked was dorky but my grades were terrible so I couldn’t even be part of the overachieving academic nerds. I longed to be like my hero, Jessica Wakefield from Sweet Valley High. But I wasn’t even her drippy twin, Elizabeth. I was Elizabeth’s loser best friend…Enid.
My crush was both popular and cool, and even at a young age was remarkably self-assured. So, when he told a friend, who told a different friend, who then told ME, while she and I were burning to the color of cherries in the grassy knoll section of the public pool, that he like-liked me, I couldn’t be sure if maybe it wasn’t a joke at my expense. I was the butt of a lot of jokes. But I was also an optimistic little kid, and believed in the impossible: that my crush might actually like me back. I buckled up purple rollerblades (it was the 90s and these were considered cool) and zoomed back home to write in the lock-and-key diary every excited emotion that a preteen could have.
***
During the 90s, comic books had subscription order forms within the crumbly pulpy paper of the comic. I always wanted to clip along the dotted line and place an order. Even though I made frequent trips to the comic book store, as well bike trips to the Hallmark store several blocks next to the pizza place where I would buy rainbow Italian ices, the thought of comics showing up at my doorstep and getting actual mail was thrilling. We are far removed from those days, and with the ever-shrinking world allowing us to get all worldly goods delivered to our stoop within a day, the excitement of a package showing up is somewhat diminished. But I cannot emphasize enough how thrilling the idea of a pack of comics arriving was. My parents never entertained my wish and annoying begging. Until that summer. We snipped the order form, I put down my preferences, and we sent that sucker into the world.
The day the mail-away comics arrived was the same day that my crush called the house and asked me to watch the fireworks at the waterfront with him, his brother, and my best friend. The comic haul was unbelievable. I got an entire stack of Cable and X-Force comics (I was obsessed with Domino) and each one was a banger. While stretched out across the bed lost in the world of Marvel’s marvels, the humidity turned my hair into a cloud with only the slow loping circle of the fan to provide any relief, my dad shouted up the stairs that there was a call for me. Thinking it was one of my friends calling to meet up at the park, I said hey but the voice on the other line was my crush; my stomach dropped. The spiral motion of anxiety buzzing through every part, tingling in my fingertips, I almost dropped the phone. I listened to his raspy voice give the details for pick up, my brain embedded in a puff of cotton candy. Replacing the phone in its cradle, I jittered with nerves and excitement, paced around my room, and then returned to the comics to pass the time.
***
By twelve, a lot of my peers had started to explore personal expression through whatever the cool clothes of the moment were. The baffling preppiness of every popular kid at my school was stuffy and beige, Abercrombie everything. My parents, again, were not in the habit of indulging my khaki desires to fit in among the sea of neutral palettes. Individuality was not a concern of mine, nor most preteens, and I ached to be seen as normal and stylish. But my lack of interest in spending babysitting money on anything other than candy and comics resulted in an unremarkable wardrobe. When I was taken clothes shopping, I never knew what to get to help fit in. I would often default to favorite hand-me-downs or babyish clothes from years earlier whenever I went to hang out. And while I enjoyed reading the new issues of YM at the library, I had no interest in investing the energy of “getting ready.”
***
When my crush’s parents came to pick me up, my hair was a frizzy triangle, and I wore old black jean shorts with penny loafers. I felt nervous, and uncomfortable, and had a hard time processing the difference between excitement and dread. During the car ride, I twisted in the mini van’s seat to speak directly to my best friend, a pretty girl with big blue eyes and stick straight black hair. I spoke too loudly and tried too hard to be funny. This must be a universal memory among socially anxious and awkward people, the moment in preteen/teen-dom trying to both be visible and invisible; the overly loud delivery of jokes that won’t land to impress the person you are pretending to ignore.
This day from twenty-six years ago, has mostly been lost to time. The location was a waterfront with slicked-down, cool, grass patches before a rocky beachfront, but it was not the ocean. Where we went was likely somewhere near the Long Island Sound or a Bay. His parents left us to our own devices, and we wandered around a fair with food vendors and the racing bodies of kids and adults flying kites. The four of us ambled about before we climbed on top of picnic tables and acted like we were much older and cooler than we were.
By the time it got dark, our group split into two. My best friend with her boyfriend, and my crush and me. The darkness swallowed us up as we sat on a curb that separated the grass section from the parking section. Both of us looked out to where the ink of the tides lapped against the shore, the upstairs and downstairs of the atmosphere was one void. In a brilliant burst, the red flower of the first of the fireworks appeared. It illuminated the dark water below and shimmered vermillion in the gentle waves. And it was in that shining moment when my crush turned and kissed me on the cheek. He like-liked me. I like-liked him. And maybe being a preteen wasn’t so hard. And I shouldn’t be so nervous. And it was not unthinkable that people would like me despite my weirdness.
And right after his lips left my cheek, leaving a slightly damp imprint in its wake, was when I sneezed super loudly.
***
Up until that moment, my list of things I was insecure about was the unfurling-of-a-Roman-scroll-to-the-floor levels of long. But it had never included my allergies. Sneezing was beyond any control and not anything I could keep from happening. It is what it is. Nor was sneezing really that gross since it came with a built-in sanitization method of covering one’s mouth.
***
But there we sat in silence as the boom of fireworks blossomed overhead, both of us not knowing how to broach the continued quietness. He was embarrassed because I said nothing in response to the kiss. I was embarrassed because a sneeze was the answer to the kiss’s gesture. Not the eight million things I had imagined and rehearsed, not a Jessica Wakefield toss of my hair before kissing him on his cheek in return.
The world was bright with the extending and disappearing shapes above, the distorted glass water below. I was mortified but happy, a repeated complicated feeling felt all throughout my teen years.
***
The silence between us persisted but I slipped my sweaty little hand into his; we watched the dancing fire unfold.
***
It was the summer again, and the train was almost to Manhattan. I took two Benadryl, which made me dreamy. When I got to the city, I transferred to the Long Island Railroad, and a second leg of the trip took me through the echoed halls of childhood. The bassinet motion of the double-decker rocked like gentle waves past places that shaped me. And after grousing at the lack of sidewalks, I arrived at my parents’ house, a short walk from the train station. They had returned to Long Island years ago.
When I greeted my parents, they gave me lots of hugs, and after we went to eat linguine with clam sauce at a restaurant with red-checked tablecloths.
The Island was a home that was also not quite a home. After eating, I asked my dad to drive us past Bayville, where there are arcades, ice cream shops, and firework displays during the Fourth of July weekend.
We drove through the village with the Long Island Sound making its music in the background. Fireworks lit up the skies above us, and I remembered with humor and forgiveness the summers of my childhood.
And with the memories like whispers from ghosts in my ears, I was embarrassed but happy.
You life is not so great 