Summer Stories 2025: ‘Practice Fruit’
1999: Tracy’s parents were never home when we got off the bus. From 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. we had free reign of the house and gorged ourselves on those Safeway treasures her Dad had bought. Ruffles Sour Cream and Cheddar chips, Kraft Mac n’ Cheese, a loaf of white bread, Jif Creamy Peanut Butter, liters of soda – one orange, one dark amber. The only item without a logo on the counter was Tracy’s mom’s famous raspberry jam. We ate then like September snowmen melted out of our training bras and Calvin Klein jeans. Traded our school day attire for sweats and braless freedom. For real life education we watched Maury Povich and “One Tree Hill” drunk on our power over the television remote. After work Tracy’s mom would drive home and pick up after us. I don’t think either of us ever considered her mom came from work only to come home and work some more. Collecting our stories about the injustice of teachers, our crushes and the latest girl drama she’d reach blindly for the pantry staples, cans of veggies and boxes of starch. “What do you girls want for dinner?” she’d ask. It was simple because Tracy always wanted what I wanted, mashed potatoes and ground beef, brown gravy and pea salad.
2000: After school and on weekend-long sleepovers, we started to practice kissing. Our heads moved side to side like windshield wipers and synchronized swimmers. A total of eight counts to the left and then to the right. Eyes closed, mostly. Confession: I liked to open my eyes. The tiny half-moon slits let me see them up close. Up-close girl eyelashes. Up-close girl skin. Up-close girl smells; cherry Chapstick and Herbal Essence. Our hands made a barrier between our mouths, something to cover up our over the top face mashing. Sometimes we’d sit in the hot tub for hours rehearsing these charades of intimacy; Kissing! Kissing a boy! Kissing a boy like this! It was the sort of fun that made my heartbeat in the whole of my body.
2001: The back of our heads palmed like babies with new necks. Support the head! We were practicing being hot and being girls so that we could be “hot girls” for the boys we imagined would know what to do with us once we arrived. Eventually, we lost our hands and just used our mouths for practice. We lip locked and kept our raspberry coated tongues behind the gates of our dentin desire. Until, one day, I broke our code, a syrup scolding from her.
“Jen! Keep your tongue in!” We always took turns on who was supposed to be playing the boy that time. Took our cheddar Ruffle hands and rifled through each other’s hair. Our glistening girl hands, searching for some mature sexual representation.
“I think,” Tracy said, “you have to dig your nails into my head a bit more.”
“Like this?” I pressed my thumbs into her peach round head the same way you look for ripe fruit at the store almost, accidentally. I still bore the stubs of childhood, still biting my nails, climbing trees and pulling myself up onto the countertops just to reach the cups. I was one grade below Tracy but it felt more like five. I hadn’t mastered the art of femininity and how to carry myself across the room like a wisp instead of a log.
“No, not like that! Here, let me be the girl.” We both had wavy long hair. Her pink painted nails comb through my matted mess and make a bird’s nest. She digs in at first with the tip of her nails. It makes my skin sprout tiny bumps. Then she adds pressure and drags down the back of my neck making bread dough gestures with my skull. I open my eyes just a little to calculate. My adolescent analysis is that this is how you turn people ON. I am now on. “Ohhhh,” I say, “like that!” Tracy tells me its easy for her because she just copied Dylan from the show. A predictable turn on, as seen on television.
2002: We started kissing boys exclusively. We let them kiss our necks and our skin, too. Four seasons passed in our agricultural town, measured. Summer cherries and apple blossoms meant breasts would be blossoming too. Most of my friends had grown grapefruits and ta-tas. The boys seemed to both laugh at and like the girls with melons. There were grapefruit and athletic looking apple sizes, too. Still, I bore the stubs of childhood. “Mosquito bites,” they said. “Nothing two Band-Aids couldn’t hold.” Though we outgrew practice kissing and certain clothing some things stayed the same. Tracy’s house was still our spot. It’s where most of our friends came to feel a part of a family. Where we all came to get fed and sometimes money for the movies.
2003: Behind closed doors we spoke of what we heard it tasted like and if we should swallow it? Can you get pregnant from that? “Wait, didn’t your cousin’s friend Abbie get pregnant like that?!”
“Well she was! But then she went to Planned Parenthood and got the Plan B pill, so now she can go to Costa Rica with Mrs. Richard’s Spanish class.”
On summer nights, in Tracy’s sprawling yard we fed the trampoline gods our girl bodies, left body mist perfume at the altar, prayed to the saint of don’t-get-caught. Under the tall pines we snuck out and played games where we dared each other to do wild things. Girls being girls together, for them. For them we ran through the yard topless. For them we’d kiss real hard and rub our bodies together while someone timed us. For them, we’d practice knowing what our power felt like.
2006: Tracy was long gone by then. A year in nursing school. Our worlds, parted by her education and my Smirnoff habit. After graduation there was nowhere to go to feel a part of anything anymore. Ate ramen from the cup on my lunch breaks at the mall. Time slothed on under fluorescent lighting and Macy’s minimum wage. Still, I knew the raspberries in Tracy’s mom’s garden would be ripe soon.
2011: My first child was a sobering surprise. Motherhood had found me when I wasn’t looking. Facebook said that Tracy and I had matching babies now. At first, we reacquainted through private messages. Eventually, she called and said the distance was unintentional. “I miss you!’’ she said. Wondered if I would like to visit them in Spokane? “Bring the family! We can get coffee and walk around Riverfront Park.” Our outing that day was a distant translation of our foreign tongue. We spoke of nap schedules and Le Leche League. Tracy read up on the cry-it-out method. “It tells you when to feed them and when to leave them,” she was excited, “You should read it too!” I smiled and nodded while contemplating how the bright skin we knew for pleasure was now hued for-purpose-only. And why on earth did I need to purchase another muslin cloth to hide my breastfeeding child? Who was it that I invariably seduced with my bottle breasts and infant? For them, we’ll cover up.
2015: A yearly rendezvous; we’d watch our caloric intake and ask for oat milk in our lattes. We still laugh too loud in public and eat chips, these ones without palm oil. Have traded all our Pepsi and Red Vines straws for tips on how-to-get-your-body-back and making homemade yogurt. I recommended Tracy start using whey protein instead of pea protein. She recommended cloth to disposable diapers. More babies and braving the reality of bringing people into a world neither of us knows how to fix. Our lives are made up entirely of replacements.
2023: “Our kids are driving us around!” We text each other “proof of life pics.” Still, I feel I’m one grade below her still, waiting for her to tell me what to do. Palm my now single-mother life like overripe produce at the grocery store, careful not to bruise what I can’t afford.
I buy off-brand crackers and bagged salad. Groceries purchased with a state-funded card because I cannot afford to feed my children on my own. Mostly, I try not to act embarrassed that nothing worked out the way it was supposed to. Enter my four-digit pin, some digital dignity intact.
2024: “Am I really supposed to use 7 cups of sugar?!”
Tracy’s mom’s raspberry recipe comes up often enough in conversation that this question never seems off-handed. Frequently we go over the running list of ingredients because of course its not written down. And seems to change in quantities year to year. I promise to make it one day. “… with my own raspberries!” “Yah, right!” Tracy scoffs. We send links to order expensive supplements and skin care. Would fill my online cart only to abandon it after the dopamine faded. One afternoon I told her, “I think I’m still a little gay.”
2025: At almost 40 I have nothing left to prove. I’m back to eating Oreos, a sleeve at a time, and Cool Ranch Doritos if the mood strikes. I’m watching kids on screens grow up and be better than all the rumors I had heard. Now, I have kissed a woman for real. It was like watching a firework show go off in May. Or having ice cream before dinner.
She answered,
Yes, you are.