The Summer the Mayers Moved Away

I remember thinking it was the end of an era the summer the Mayers moved away.  Although it’s a cliche, I felt pretty grown-up having such a thought at age eight.  In spite of the fact (or perhaps because) my siblings and I considered them the absolute weirdest kids in the neighborhood, their absence was felt.  There were three kids in my family and three in theirs, and I suppose that symmetry led to a natural competitiveness and probably a mutual comfort in the fact that war between our families would always be a fair fight.  While Elizabeth and I were only a year apart and enjoyed spending hours together playing Barbies and dress up and pretending we were going on dates with various movie stars and heroes (Christopher Reeves, Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, Smokey and the Bandit-era Burt Reynolds), there were still the moments when I’d catch her chewing her Kool-Aid or eating her fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt without stirring it, or the time when, at age 4 or 5 she walked into our backyard stark naked to retrieve her Big Wheel that made me shake my head and think, “Man, this kid is weird.” 

The oldest of the Mayer Three, Jimmy, was a year younger than my sister Kelly.  They shared an animosity that usually sparked from nothing and occasionally resulted in Kelly kicking his ass in front of half of the neighborhood.  Mrs. Mayer didn’t have the sense to feel embarrassed for the poor boy and let it pass,  instead she would rush down the hill through the yards to our back patio in a furious state to defend him.  Since both of our parents worked during the day, we knew a visit from Mrs. Mayer could be easily covered up, so we listened quietly tucking away the best moments of her outrage to giggle over later as we lolled on the couches in the gameroom watching Movies of the Week or summer reruns of Happy Days.  The sad thing about Kelly and Jimmy’s enmity is that it probably began as a crush on Jimmy’s part, but Kelly was not the type to react to having her pigtails pulled with a stomp of the foot or a roll of the eyes.  She’d just sock the kid.    

Kip was the middle child of the Mayer clan and, sort of like our very own Peter Brady, was the cute one who provided comparatively little fodder to us in the midst of his siblings’ laughable peccadilloes and pointed instigations.  He was usually the emissary sent from their party when peace talks became necessary.   Although my older brother Sean was the brightest of just about anyone in the neighborhood (adults included) and was slow to anger, our side would usually just draw straws at treaty time.  After all, why let the Mayers get off easy?

The families would find almost any excuse to go to the mattresses, waging battle whenever boredom struck.  Altercations usually included cap gun and garden hose fights, notes passed around the street outlining all the ways in which the offenders were weirdos, and photos of Elizabeth plunged into cups of water to be placed in our deep freeze.  (I still have no explanation for this behavior although I suspect it was partly voodoo and partly inspired by some torture doled out by Lex Luther in one of the Superman movies.)     

Our only-child neighbor Danny whose yard was the mid-point between ours and the Mayers was a one-man front, so he learned to retain a position of neutrality (after a few failed campaigns as a double-agent.)  We accepted this eventual disassociation from the combat, as his back patio became its own little Seoul where we’d pop in for some R-n-R when the constant stress of war got to be too much.  (You must understand that we got most of our wartime references from M*A*S*H at this point in our lives). 

As I said, that summer that the Mayers moved to Ohio, I was around eight-years-old, which would have made Danny nine and technically, no longer an only child.  However, his three-year-old brother Ben was too little to even qualify as a grunt during times of warfare. With the Mayers gone, Danny and I found ourselves more or less alone in the neighborhood.  My older brother and sister were now in junior high, and were less interested in spending their days with grade school kids.  Sean was usually busy in his room with his friends playing video games on his Commodore 64 and writing three line programs that would cause their names to repeat infinitely across his TV screen-cum-monitor.  Kelly was usually twirling her baton, watching soap operas, or hanging out down the street at her friend Maureen’s house practicing applying mascara. 

With a sudden shortage of friends, Danny and I began including Ben in our plans more often until pretty soon he was a regular presence, trooping out the side door with Danny every morning as I circled their driveway on my electric blue three-speed.  Ben had a Big Wheel, so he could ride with us and he was capable as anyone of building space stations with Legos and racing Matchbox cars.  Plus, he delighted in doing all of the menial tasks that Danny and I could cook up for him (cleaning the lightning bug jars, organizing the rocks on the driveway by size and shape) so, for the most part, he was okay by us.  The role at which he really excelled though was “membership” in countless short-lived, purposeless clubs that required just enough planning to entertain us through a long summer afternoon when it was too hot to ride bikes and we were too lazy to run through the sprinkler or forbidden to play on the recently Chemlawned grass. 

We were fortunate that nature had provided us with the perfect clubhouse.  In the corner of Danny’s backyard was a stand of three or four aged pine trees, a natural barrier dividing the kids’ makeshift playground/baseball field/bike rally on one side from the elderly neighbors’ lemonade-sipping, newspaper-reading haven on the other.  Perhaps it was from years of kids playing within the trees or perhaps it was that the trees’ growth was prohibited by their close proximity to one another, but for whatever reason the lower five feet or so of each pine had outer branches but, no branches beneath this cover so that when you pushed aside those outer boughs and ventured in, you found yourself in a clearing that stretched about ten or twelve feet along the ground.  The outer branches acted as exterior walls giving us all of the privacy we needed to make us feel like we had our own little piece of the world just yards away from our parents’ watchful eyes. 

We called our stand of pine trees “The Fort” and although it was in Danny’s yard, we all felt a strong sense of ownership in it.  From 1978-1983 it was headquarters to clubs covering interests as wide-ranging as catching and racing toads, devising arguments to effectively convince at least one of the sets of parents to build a pool (preferably inground), and planning nature hikes through the friendly neighboring backyards while devising ways to elude the scornful old souls who didn’t want us on their grass.  Typically, though, the purpose for starting a club was fundraising.  (Isn’t that always the way?)  Whenever one of us was short on cash, we’d convince the others that it was time to start a club that, like any self-respecting organization, would require dues.  Then the president would eloquently persuade the assembly that dues should be used for the common good: perhaps to fund that week’s trips to the candy store or new wiffle balls or action figures that would of course be jointly owned by all members.  All of our clubs began with big plans to meet every day, the logic being that if we had to pay dues at every meeting money would magically appear that would allow us to do that.

Whoever decided to start the club got to be its President, and that person usually doled out a couple of other executive positions at his or her discretion.  In the grand tradition of vice presidents, that job was meaningless and usually was filled by whomever the president thought would be good at helping him or her boss the rest of us around.  Requirements for secretary were minimal and the position usually fell to whomever wanted to run home and grab a pen and paper, while treasurer would only be bestowed upon someone trustworthy enough to safeguard the coins we all dug out of our pockets at the start of the meeting.  Everyone else was essentially powerless, but like any good constituents we made sure to bitch a lot and remind our governing body that as the club was a democracy they were beholden to us and our wants.

The summer the Mayers moved away, Danny and I found ourselves starting lots of clubs.  Increasingly lonely with this new dearth of playmates, starting clubs was our attempt to feel part of something bigger, the hope being that the whole would be greater than the sum of its parts, I suppose.  In reality, it just served to highlight our smaller numbers, as meetings that had once averaged five or six kids, were now attended by only two.  While the founder still took the honor of president, secretary and treasurer became a joint position as there was only one member left.  VP became necessarily obsolete in the face of a shortage of qualified candidates with the caveat that, should the President be unable to perform required duties, the Secretary-Treasurer would step in (and, let’s face it, usurp all the power while the president was in bed with chicken pox or on vacation in Ocean City with their parents or whatever it was that was so pressing it had dragged them from their responsibilities.) 

Once Ben became our constant playmate, he began to lobby for an invitation into the clubs.  As we couldn’t deny that recruitment possibilities were grim, we agreed to let him join but drew the line at giving him any real responsibility.  However, we dressed up his purpose in the club by telling him he was fulfilling the ever-important position of “membership”.  As we reasoned, a club cannot exist without membership and since Danny and I were officers, it was Ben’s duty to keep the club alive by giving us someone to govern.  After all, now that Danny and I had all the power in The Fort, we’d be damned if we didn’t have someone to boss around.

To be continued …