I was probably 7 when mom bought the trampoline for me. Did I ask for it? I don't remember. Sometimes mom and granny decided to do these generous things for me even though we didn't have the money to spare. My reactions to their gifts weren't performances, but I enjoyed the reception anyway because their pleased faces made me feel loved.
The year must have been 2000. Yeah, must have been. My cousin, Little Ray, one of 6 William Raphaels, 3 dead, 3 living, all Ray, Big Ray, just Ray and Little Ray, except for the youngest who goes by Will, assembled it for me. I remember him standing in the garage, talking to me in the stuffy heat. We hadn't spoken much before that nor have we since. Some people only want to spend time with you when you're a kid.
I think he had just graduated high school. He had a shaved head and a tan. He was handsome. Ray and his sister, Amber, were better looking than me. I was aware of this as a child—they were the beautiful cousins. The football player and homecoming queen at Stars Mill High.
I was telling Little Ray how much I loved school. He said it wouldn't last. That was partially true. I wanted out by middle school because of teachers who dragged me down the hall for skirts with hems that aligned with my fingertips or the shyness that made me feel encased in an inhuman shell or maybe it was that school never felt like education. But I never stopped loving learning, except when I was afraid that I wasn't smart enough to comprehend what I was tasked to do, but that's another story.
I'll tell you now there's many little tales constituting this one story. No story is solitary, unlayered. Tell me one that is. That’s not a challenge. I’d like to hear it, read it, learn from it.
My trampoline helped me make friends. I met Lizzy on Christmas day 2000. We'd both received Razr scooters for Christmas. Hers was accented red. Mine was purple. We were both friends with Cindy, who lived two doors down from me. I was friends with Cindy before Lizzy. For a while, a short time, there was the three of us girls hanging out on my trampoline.
When the weather turned hot enough to feel like a punishment to be made to choose between outside and the cool but lonely inside, we put my Crazy Daisy sprinkler beneath the trampoline—the little jerking flower was surrounded by tall grass because our yard was always the wildest in the neighborhood. This was because my single mom was often away on trips as a flight attendant, and mostly, because a cousin borrowed the riding lawn mower and gave it back broken. Since then, 24 years later, she uses a push mower.
Us girls liked to turn the sprinkler on and bounce, even though the water barely got through the dark mesh. There was enough water to leave imprints of our butts when we did “butt busters”—jumping and stretching our legs midair so we’d land flat on the backs of our legs and as the name suggests, our butts.
Lizzy said my imprint was the Indian Ocean, hers was the Atlantic, and Cindy's was the Pacific. This was the era when hip bones poking out like accessories from our low-rise jeans was what we aimed for, so I knew Lizzy was being mean. I didn't say a thing, though. Soon, it was just me and Lizzy.
Kids like to find places outside of home to call their own. We had a tiny playhouse in our neighbor Miss Lydia's backyard, but I was afraid of her and the spiders hanging out in the corners of the wooden structure that was made for kids younger and shorter than us. So, we spent a lot of time on the trampoline and made it our space, though it wasn’t as lawless as we would’ve liked because it was in my backyard, in the domain of parents.
Alone, I'd bring a blanket and book and spread out on the sun-absorbing surface.
Together, we'd surround ourselves with Seventeen magazines, fluffy diaries, and snacks. Dreaming of becoming someone else had started, but we were still kids when we began treating the trampoline as another room.
We'd invite other neighborhood kids to the trampoline, but the friendships never lasted long.
There was Chris, a tall, blonde kid who helped us swindle the neighborhood. Lizzy and Chris were older than me, so they decided to use me for sympathy. Using a toy pot, they'd push me in front of them when adults answered our knocks at their doors and say that they were raising money for my Girl Scouts uniform because my single mother couldn't afford it. She would have been furious and humiliated had she found out. Maybe she will now. A few women frowned, gave us a couple dollars, and with their pity voices, wished me well. The man across the street from my house slammed the door in our faces. He also did that when I was raising money for Jump Rope for Heart. I was glad when he moved away when I was in my early 20s. Chris ended up taking most of the money we’d raised. I bet he’s a businessman now.
Deondre stuck around for longer. I was nearing the end of elementary school when he moved into the white house at the end of the cul-de-sac. A girl named Ella had lived there before. She took one of my headset walkie-talkies during one of the few times we hung out. Lizzy and I asked her mother for it back, but she told us Ella didn’t have it. We found a toy in their yard—a baseball, maybe. Lizzy said we should bury it by the mailbox, so we did. I never had much will around her. My mom said she was a bad influence, but maybe she helped me be as bad as I wanted to be while pretending to be sweet and good, telling her, “Oh no, that's a mean thing to do," and believing myself until right this moment.
I remember the day Deondre did backflips off the metal edge of my trampoline. I watched the first flip with a twisted gut. My grandma came outside for the next flip and said he was going to give her a heart attack. He did another one to show her he knew what he was doing and landed on his feet, as he had each time.
What happened to Deondre? Last time I saw him I was 15. He was standing by his car with some of the popular girls in my grade.
What happened to everyone? Even the ones I’m still friends with on Facebook and so, know who they married and divorced, how many kids they have, what they do to get by.
It wasn't the end of childhood, but there is a summer night that stands out in my mind as innocence still felt and vividly remembered. It didn't get dark until around 9, so my mom was still working on the yard. She was throwing sticks into the woods, and I wasn't helping. I was jumping on the trampoline with Lizzy. Bats flew overhead, chaotically circling. The insects of the woods roared. Medium blue faded to navy, and we couldn't believe that we were still outside. "It's 10pm!" we said, jumping in victory. It was night, and we were still playing rather than in our rooms, watching Nick at Nite.
When we tried to sneak out later that summer, meeting beneath the streetlight at the edge of Lizzy’s sloping yard, I'd barely stepped on the grass when I heard my granny yell, "Megan Gale!" I don't feel free in the dark anymore unless I'm in the car, but I love walking through neighborhoods at night, just me and the fox in the street. Once or twice, there has been a man I didn’t know walking behind me, still there when I made random turns. My shadow and I have always walked together. I think it’s what keeps me safe and yet, craving danger.
As Lizzy and I entered middle school, we used the trampoline for laying out more than we did for jumping. We'd bake on the polypropylene and wish our parents would let us both come inside together in the air conditioning rather than splitting us up in our respective homes. It was okay, though. We wanted tans. We spent the next four summers reddening and walking around the neighborhood over and over because we didn't have much to do other than scheming for ways to go to the gas station for snacks and planning identities for 6th grade and 8th grade.
Each year we'd solidify an image of a girl, maybe blonde, so Limited Too, then all Hollister and Abercrombie. We never were as stylish as we'd hoped, never so put-together pretty. We remained ourselves, which never felt quite right, and maybe it was because we never thought to also dream of wants that began within us.
When I began taking ballet seriously, which you must do as a kid if you want to be a professional dancer, even though most kids never get that far, including me, I didn't have as much time to jump. When I did, we'd sit around in the glaring day, pushing the trampoline beneath the leaves of honeysuckled trees that have since been chopped down.
Lizzy would watch the boys next door because she had a crush on both brothers, and I'd let her teach me about a world that seemed so much more grown up. Two years and the home life she had forced her into a maturity I hope she still isn't paying for today.
But I wouldn't know because I stopped talking to her five years ago. I was urged to cut contact with her by several friends and family members through the years, but still, I wonder about the culture of cutting off and think, did I need to? Did I need to for good? I discovered after my grandma's death that petty arguments and estrangement can last forever.
I was 14 when I got my first real boyfriend, not some little brother of one of Lizzy’s boyfriends, who she would tell me to walk in front of when they dropped her off in their trucks. Aaron was a dancer, too. He was 16 when he asked me to be his girlfriend. A few months later he was 17 and I was still 14. We shouldn't have been allowed to date and spend so much time alone together, but we did, and we became family in a way. He also came from a tumultuous home, so he lived with our dance teacher and called my granny, granny.
The trampoline transformed again when he and I lay together in the dark on it, so close to the woods, I imagined deer and squirrels staring at us. It was autumn by then. We lay in each other's arms, kissing and cloaked by the wonder of such feeling. When he began to finger me, it felt more like making love than so much sex that would happen in the following years, well into adulthood. It felt like he wanted to know me, to please me.
I'm grateful for him being the bulk of my firsts. Of course, he was ready for more than I was. He'd already experienced more than I had, drugs and sex, which I asked him about with wide eyes beneath the floodlight in my mom's driveway, granny occasionally peeking out at us from behind one lifted blind in her upstairs bedroom.
I yelled at him the first time he went down on me. But I did that because I felt like a bad girl. I liked it. Loved it. Was obsessed with it. Aaron was the reason I advocated to also finish with the sexual partners that came after him. Still, I've never been so vocal about my sexual wants as I was then. Maybe never so sexual.
I can see the good and the probably wrong all tangled now. It's funny how childhood is ever-transforming.
I didn't talk to him for a decade, but about a month ago, I was moved to check on him. He told me he'd been reading the notebook my granny gave him when he was a teenager. I burst out in tears. I didn’t know she’d given him a notebook. I'd found a notebook of hers the day after her death. In the front cover, she'd written "Give this to Megan after I die." I wonder if Aaron and I are the only people in the world who know this granny who was revealed to be not just Christian but perhaps unknowingly new age in the pages of her wire notebooks.
The trampoline went missing by the end of high school. I was enraged when I saw the empty backyard. Mom told me that she'd given it to Lizzy's mother. It now belonged to her three little brothers. It was in Lizzy's backyard, but even to her, it was never the same. Yes, we'd grown up too fast, but we still wanted a say when girlhood ended.
I don't know what happened to the trampoline after it disappeared from across the street, but I miss it. I'd lay on it now if I could and slip into the continuity with that Megan I cannot trace.
Granny's gone. Lizzy's family moved away, though her grandpa still lives next door. My house, which I now refer to as my mom's house, has changed because mom could afford to replace the holes left by rotted wood, though it's decaying again because she hired people who said they’d work with what she could afford. She got what she paid for. This happened again and again but never again.
She chose dark gray for the house. Everyone told her it wouldn't work. But it looks great. The same everyone says so. It makes me proud in a way that feels parental, a feeling I experience more often with each year passing. It must be the same house, with the Magnolia tree planted by my dad for me when I turned 1, towering now. I sit beneath it for hours whenever I can. But there is no trampoline.
I'm afraid of the sun these days, so I probably wouldn't sit on it during summer afternoons. If I did, I'd be thick with sunscreen, long sleeves, and a big hat. I'd wake early because I like to do that now. I'd watch the sky brighten as I lie on my back. Late at night, I'd smoke a joint because my mom doesn't care about weed anymore, even tells me to smoke it when my anxiety is concerning her. I'd watch the stars like I used to from the driveway, though I think there are less in Newnan now. I'd feel nervous to be so close to the woods because I'm not part of that grass, those trees, that land anymore.
I'd find the thread through my life if the trampoline was still in the backyard. Because for some reason, the house isn't enough. I'm not sure all that happened, my childhood, my relationships with people I love even more now because it is conscious and tinged with loss. My mind is no longer torturous, but it is laced with fiction, which to me is truer. I’m more of a kid these days than I ever was. No, I'm vital now, which we associate with youth, but it’s just the fundamental state of sentience.
I'd bounce unselfconsciously if that trampoline materialized, wanting and willing to jump with others more than I was capable of back then, but the others aren't here. I had to say goodbye for all sorts of reasons and none of them make sense to me, other than the sharp-edged facts I acknowledge—life keeps going and growing until it doesn’t. I know there has to be a past, but must it belong to another life?
This is great. There is nothing more universal and more particular than childhood, memories and imagination.