I recall the true last days of my childhood clearly. They began one evening with me crouched in the driveway in the glow of the evening summer sun, pressing light blue pigment into asphalt. I’d spent over half the cash I’d gotten for my birthday on a pack of real artist grade pastels and had passed the day drawing this massive humpback whale mid breach, back bent with pectoral fins stretched skyward. The driveway was the only canvas I had where I could truly experiment with size.
As I blended out the color with my fingers, I heard the rumble of an engine as my dad’s truck pulled up behind me. It continued running as I kept my eyes fixed on the ground. I pressed my pointer and middle fingers into the whale’s stomach, rubbing outward in tiny circles, watching both fingertips turn blue. Finally, the engine cut. There was a brief silence before he stepped out of the cab. He walked up behind me and stood there, watching me work from over my shoulder for a minute before clearing his throat,
“We should head inside, kid,” he said, awkwardly patting my head. “Get washed up for dinner.”
I brushed my hands together to loosen the powder and grabbed the chalk box, feet dragging as I followed my dad up the sidewalk. I remember looking back at the driveway to where the whale floated in black space. I thought about how it would rain, sooner or later, and she’d be gone.
* * *
My parents were not perfect people, but they had this supernatural ability to communicate with each other wordlessly. They seemed to be at their best when working against me. In the middle of dinner that night, I saw them glance at each other once before my mom asked me, “What do you think about getting a summer job?”
I looked at her and shrugged. I knew this wasn’t a question, but a slight nudge toward insistence. My dad jumped in then. “How about coming to work with me?”
I shrugged again. My dad was a roofer and had been since he was sixteen, working under one of his father’s buddies. He’d worked his way up to foreman before I even started second grade. I was proud to be the son of a hardworking man, but I also knew his definition of hard work had more limited parameters than my own.
I understood what my parents really wanted to say: I was fourteen—too old to spend all summer doing nothing, as they saw it. Time to join the “real world.”
Dad added, “I’ll ask Toby about you coming in on Wednesday, hm?”
“Sure,” I said, keeping my eyes on my plate but still managing to catch their smiles out of the corner of my eye.
I figured he’d already gotten permission to bring me on. My dad liked his plans to be sure things, but he also cared about his position. He was proud of his job, how revered he was by everyone, including his boss. In a way, this was him paying me the highest compliment, that he trusted me enough to bring me into his domain. I, however, wasn’t especially curious about it.
* * *
That night I stayed up sketching the head of a fin whale under my desk lamp, rounded and narrow, its mouth in a sharp downturn. This obsession had begun the week prior when—falling down yet another online rabbit hole—I’d stumbled across an article on the 52-hertz whale. In the late 1980s, scientists recorded a whale call measuring 52-hertz in the Pacific around the migration routes of blue and fin whales. Thing is, neither species has calls that measure close to that frequency, so the other whales didn’t respond, not recognizing the sound as coming from one of their own. Even scientists aren’t completely sure what species 52 is. I listened to the recording on repeat, sometimes even while falling asleep. It was an oppressive force on my mind. I just couldn’t comprehend a creature living through decades of loneliness in the largest ocean on Earth.
* * *
A few days later I met up with my best friend Matt down on the bank of the Blackburn River. We’d met in our school art club, where I first heard him read his collection of poems about his grandparents’ immigration to the States, and he became the first person to compliment my still life drawings of empty fishbowls, which I found to be very profound pieces at the time, dripping with some intangible metaphor. It was the first time I ever met someone that I sensed was truly talented, far beyond myself. I always imagined him living in a bungalow on the west coast, one of the most famous American writers of our generation. He would’ve been that great writer, in a generous world.
Matt was a year older than me and had started working at the McDonald’s downtown a month before. I sat leaning against a tree, drawing a blue whale mother and calf in my sketchbook, while he skipped rocks and talked about hating his manager, the annoying tendencies of customers, and how much money he still needed to put a down payment on a used 2004 Honda Civic he’d seen in the used car lot.
“I looked it up, and they’re one of the most reliable cars,” he said, evaluating the flatness of the rock in his hand.
I didn’t tell him that two days before, I’d stood on a roof watching my dad nail down shingles in the blistering sun, tired and angry, getting my sunburned shoulders slapped by grown men. As Matt told me about his manager’s seemingly unrelenting smoke breaks, the profile of my dad’s face—lit by the sunset through the open car window—and his proud smile flashed in my mind.
Matt plopped down next to me and peered over my shoulder at my drawing. He let out a “hmm” in approval before lying back and closing his eyes.
“God, I wish I had time for anything except working and sleeping,” Matt said, almost mumbling, as if already falling asleep.
“You will,” I said, and jokingly added, “just give it a few years.”
“Eh, maybe. But have you seen our parents?”
I paused. “My dad loves his job. Been doing it for over half his life.”
“And he’s one of the lucky ones. Us?” Matt grabbed his hat and pulled it over his eyes, “We’re destined to be disappointed.”
For the first time that afternoon I set my pencil down. I traced the underbelly of the whale calf with my thumb, biting the inside of my cheek. I noticed the contrast in how I’d shaded both whales’ eyes, the mother’s being darker and deeper set. Tired.
I took off my shirt and told Matt I was going swimming. I jumped in the river and, after getting used to the cold, decided to float on my back, not caring how far the current would take me. I closed my eyes and imagined myself dissolving away, leaving behind the beginnings of a life I never asked for, one that I couldn’t see a way out of. The world had no space for another pair of starving artists.
The warmth of the sun contrasted the water lapping around my body. I felt each finger slowly uncoil, releasing the last hopeful parts of me. As my ears dipped in and out of the water, I swore I heard a desperate cry echoing up the river and slamming through my body.
Avery Bauer is a freelance writer, avid reader and book collector. She holds a BA in English Writing from the University of Pittsburgh, where she also had her first piece published in the university literary magazine Collision. She currently lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Featured image by Steve A. Johnson on Unsplash.
