who's that standing over there by the record machine
looking like a model on the cover of a magazine?

apparently (according to martha, later) she inquired about me on saturday night, which must have been very shortly after i made my first appearance at basin harbor, arriving late for dinner in my light striped jacket (dubbed 'mafia'). maybe she noticed my dancing (that's how i get all the girls, pretty much.)

coincidentally or not, we spoke for the first time the next afternoon (it wasn't clear who initiated the exchange - she said "hello," but i paused first): she was getting off her bike, and i thought that she was wearing a blackalicious t-shirt. no, it said "the blackouts," which sounded vaguely familiar, but i couldn't place it. they're from rochester, she said, which explained that. so am i. she's from croton-on-hudson. we exchanged names. ("r names," rachel comments.)

"i heard you talked to rachel," said martha, was i guess the next thing. (insignificant, right? i noticed that she was at the cookout that night, and even, briefly, at the red mill before the dancing started, but i don't think we made eye contact.) yes, that was before this:

at lunch the following day, a waitress came up to our table to announce: "the lady in red would like to buy you a soda." man, that was classic. of course, in the family reunion context, such things can't but provoke ribbing and curiousity - while peter talked about past experiences with drinks ordered across the room, josh and carla conducted a recon mission to scope out the post-obscured lady in question (her friend catches them out, dryly: "nice walk-by.")

on the return kayak, i toodled by the trampoline (the lady in red was now the lady in strappy olive-green two-piece) to thank her for the ginger ale. carla daniela and i jumped in and swam out to bounce ("the water tramp is good times," "the townies slashed it a few weeks ago") and chat (after they left she started clutching for conversational straws, painfully - "what breakfast cereal would you be?") at dinner, she popped up between ordering and appetizers to ask me to dance, brazen and irrepressible. that was the happiest moment - managing a half-decent jitterbug, and finding things to talk about other than cereal (skavoovie, philly, basin harbor.)

apart from unprompted intelligence reports from martha ("she's about my age" "she broke up with her boyfriend two weeks ago"), all i mostly had to go on was appearances. so: she really was/is adorable, and not just in a demeaning way. okay, i'm not going to describe what she looks like. young. from conversation (she'll be a senior in high school, her birthday was four days ago, she's a BHC regular, having spent eleven summers there since her first at age six) i establish that she's seventeen. and other things (after eleven years, of course, besides seemingly knowing every kid in the place, she's friends with the staff, including sarah, the curly blond daughter of the owners and waitress who brought my soda - knowing which makes the lunchroom scene all the more comical.)

i thought about how the age seventeen is idealized in all of those songs - well she was just seventeen, if you know what i mean, "what a nice way to turn seventeen," and of course the classic (the line that follows my opening couplet above): she's too cute to be a minute over seventeen. (those songs were written, of course, by boys around my age.) i thought about the brilliant earnest wholesomeness of it all - waning august and the full-mooned nights, i miss the innocence i've known and what could be more classic-american-summer than a frivolous fling.

there was a hypnotist show that night (which she told me about, but i didn't see her there) - if this were a movie, rachel would somehow arrange to have me hypnotised into love with her. wouldn't that be perfect. (but to make it really work, the hypnosis would eventually have to somehow lose its effect so that we could see a genuine love underlying it.) feel like writing a teensploitation screenplay?

needless to say, all of this unexpected attention was terrifically flattering, not to mention brave and impressive (to the point of second-guessing it.) but come now. all her pluck and determination (and appeal) couldn't stanch the factors working against her, chief among them the family reunion setting, my limited time, and inevitably age divide.

that's a really big difference, high-school-senior to college-junior. not to say that it's unthinkable, because i don't believe age need necessarily be an important factor if experience and personality and circumstance make up for it. ("are you going to make out with her anyway, just for fun?" speed-said impish josh, smirking self-satisfiedly - carla cut him off before i could respond) but rachel, as it turned out, really was too young for me. it did not feel right, and that's that.

worse, her milieu was the frenzied-yet-mundane world of childhood summer, the club-sponsored activities, bikes and bonfires, peopled with kids and staffers whose roles she bridged, whom she could introduce me to more of in a minute than i could even begin to distinguish. she invited me to a party (a send-off for cornell-bound sarah) and i realized it was really impossible.

she disappeared for about 24 hours after we danced, and our last interactions just grew more awkward: i apologized for not going to the party (charades and late-night pounce in cocktail room), martha for some reason invited her to go tubing with us (but we weren't in the boat for the same shift), she biked over to say goodbye. and i saw again more while waiting to depart (she fends off oak and bean - "not a dog person - i rock the cats"), and perhaps against better judgment gave her my e-mail (my typical inability to say no.) i half expected to find a message from her when i arrived last night. no, but true to form, there's one in my inbox now.

so. i'll either have to think about this more or not. right now i'm going to attend to another rachel, in the form of an ornately-papered shoe-size-box that was in the post yesterday, with a completely unnecessary return address in astoria. as if i couldn't recognize the aesthetic sense responsible for those patches of color, texture, and map. and it smells like her as well, unmistakably.

cheer up
honey i hope you can
i think there is something wrong with you