Summer Queen

The summer between fifth grade and sixth, my glasses were thick. Confidence pale, skin paperback thin, the what-ifs lay like folded corners on my forehead.

The weeks stretched humid and hollow before me. Girls were at their meanest, and boys weren’t even a thought. My father was fun you never saw coming, leaving red-random slices that sunblock forgot and a disappearing slit under my mother’s door, the light swallowed like a damp, grey towel. 

But on Saturdays, the Honda Civic shone like a silver capsule in the driveway. My mother’s brother’s Hush Puppy sole held steadfast on the gas as he and I shot downtown like confetti from a cannon, windows all the way down, my brittle lashes thrumming under July’s emerald sky.

Under the steep concrete canopy and above the squeal of streetcars, their other brother waited, the bike seat a neoprene V at his elbow as deliberations commenced straightaway.

“She hasn’t tried Indian food yet,” Uncle One offered. “There’s that great place on Wellesley?”

Uncle Two squinted into the wobbling heat, helmet straps swinging in step. “Let’s do Japanese.”

Uncle One frowned. “In that case, it would have to be Okonomi . . .” Located across the city, very far from where we just found parking.

Uncle Two conceded the point. “Next week, then. We’ll do the whole uptown.”

Years earlier, a trip through the local car wash, my eyes full of psychedelic wonder, was our ultimate adventure. Then the annual Santa Claus parade, followed by strawberry sundaes bigger than my head. Smarties clattering from my pockets as I bounced through the front door. Now, an adolescent riptide pulling ice cold at my toes, my mother’s older brothers seemed set on infusing my anaemic horizons with the paced urgency of an organ donor truck, one sunny Saturday, one storied Toronto borough at a time. 

Wandering the stacks of Book City on St. Clair, classics roused to life like smelling salts had overtaken the parchment air. August bloomed pink on my cheeks in an open-walled eatery on the Danforth, where I worked up the nerve to order the smiley fries (they were from the kids’ menu, and technically, I’d just turned twelve-and-a-half). Uncle Two glanced around, conspiracy in his voice. What are they going to do, ask you for ID?

At the iconic Café Diplomatico on College, I returned from the restroom to find they’d snagged at a patio table, the third stool empty between them, a cold Sprite and cannoli waiting (the kind with the chocolate chips mixed in). Feet paddling the air, I made that bendy straw sing—louder, I hoped, than the pooling joy behind my eyes, because it was everything I’d have picked out myself.

And they understood that, without even having to ask.

I was fourteen the day we ground to a halt in the middle of gridlock on Yonge. They’d asked what my favourite CD was, and I’d shrugged; I didn’t own any. A furrowed scrum, the revelation hanging like a hot whiff of street meat. A frantic one-eighty as they beelined me under the giant blitzing discs of Sam the Record Man. I leafed bug-eyed through the imports, mind blown to pixie dust at the existence of B-sides (proof my prized shoebox full of cassettes did not, in fact, hold every Jovi song ever recorded). Behind me, they defended albums like doctoral dissertations. 

“Classical supports healthy brain function,” Uncle One maintained. “They’ve done studies!”

Uncle Two’s hand lifted like a stop sign. “She’s fourteen. We’re getting U2.”

“U2?”

“Her first CD is going to be U2, yes. End of discussion.”

Uncle One paused, considering. “Okay, how about you get U2 and I’ll get her . . . Gypsy Kings?”

“Sure. Whatever. Meet you at the cash.”

“WAIT! Which U2?”

Uncle Two sighed. “I don’t know. Achtung Baby.”

Uncle One’s eyebrows shot up. “We can’t send her home with Achtung Baby!”

Uncle Two’s eyebrows pulled together. “It’s a masterpiece.”

“How about WAR? Much more going on lyrically . . . ”

“If she likes Achtung, we’ll take her back through the older stuff.”

“A lot of people would argue Joshua Tree is the quintessential U2. I’m just saying . . . ”

They bickered constantly. A sophisticated, affectionate banter, sarcastic and layered and native to my own tongue today. I loved every second, marvelling at their calm in checking one another’s assumptions, their brazenness in pressing each other’s every button. Not a concern among us it might go too far. That they—we—could ever not be family.

A curated collection of guests began rotating through, until it became commonplace for me to be swapping bread rolls with a forensic pathologist while mulling personality indexes with a psychiatrist. Whipping out my curly-edged jokebook for the Poet Laureate. In colourful booths across every mosaic tile of my glorious city, I practiced public speaking assignments before priests, sharpened term papers with journalists, borrowed hardcovers from the high shelves of theologians.

Even back then, I understood my self-driven uncles should have been too busy to fritter prime Saturdays indulging this precocious only. Yet the three of us taking to those summer sidewalks, chess manuals in my mini-backpack and Italian lessons on my Discman, saganaki or falafel or (eventually) biryani in my belly, always felt like the end in itself. 

I did not return to September halls with sizzling tales of sleepaway camp or photo albums encrusted with sand, though armed with plenty to say. As my textbooks grew thicker, so did the global citizenship with which I carried them. The non-judgmental stance, perpetual curiosity, the cultural humility.

The near-instant recall of U2’s entire back catalogue. 

My mother’s older brothers taught me to disagree, not just with respect but genuine appreciation for the opposing view. They showed me men were capable of sticking around, proved time and again it was not unreasonable to expect I could count on one as they maintained seamless watch over my intellectual growth, my psychological welfare, the length of my denim cut-offs. 

With two impeccable corners framing my reference, my gaze levelled, then pushed higher. These beautifully dutiful men treated me as I would later demand to be treated by men, ensuring I could discern the gentle ones among seismic jackass strobes. Sniping any rogue doubt as to which stripe I might be worthy of.

In shockingly short order, Saturday sidewalks grew littered with the sort seeking needy feed-me dolls. Beating their chests. Casting firewall nets. Crying out in the cocksure dialect that is subtly–yet unmistakeably–reserved for the girls with dad-shaped holes in their homes. 

But I couldn’t understand them.

Didn’t hear a word they said for the voice of my mother’s older brother,

who always called me Queen.

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This essay placed first in the 2022 One Book One Aurora Writing Contest, the theme of which was “Family.”