Member-only story
The Summer of Skylab
Being 13 and scared
It was a hot night in the middle of a hot summer and I could not sleep. I lay on the couch at the Betty Street house, on top of my sleeping bag because I couldn’t bear to put my body inside it, listening to the sounds of the night: crickets, the occasional car out on the street, my dad’s snores from the bedroom.
I liked going to Betty Street because it was kind of like a time-out from a time-out. Summers already meant no school, and going to live with Dad and Stepmom out in the country, with their, shall we say, looser relationship to rules and structure and routines. (Mom, by contrast, LOVED routine.)
Betty Street was even more removed from any rules, any order. Betty Street was a weird little rental house in town that Dad shared with his business partner and another old friend, while they were building what would be the town’s first health club — this was 1979, and health clubs were the hot new thing.
Betty Street had a TV with subscriptions to the fancy channels like HBO, stacks of adult magazines lying around, and a table-hockey game always set up and ready to play. There were cookies in the cupboards and ice cream in the freezer: a full-on bachelor-pad atmosphere. Everyone hung out there and nobody really lived there.
