Every Hutterite child knows what fields day means: It is a day of cotton candy, water balloons, scraped knees, and Freezies. Growing up, my siblings and I would argue over who would go along with dad to pick up the inflatables and the giant portable tent the day before because it meant a Winnipeg trip and that meant a giant Big Gulp slushie from Seven Eleven, with every single color and flavor mashed together, because who could decide on just one? That following Saturday morning, the air was filled with anticipation as kids ran around the school ground, getting yelled at for darting in between four-wheelers and mohslite as they set up the yard of the afternoon festivities.
That one summer day is stuck in my mind forever because I was ready to wave that school year goodbye. I seemed that every day for the past two months, I was spending my recesses indoors or my 4 o clocks in detention. I was always in trouble for yelling, for fighting, for simply starting to cry. I was frustrated. Possibly because I knew exactly why my parents were getting calls every day. Earlier that spring, my family had suffered the tragedy of losing my baby sister. I was only 11. I had no way to process that grief and only knew that mom was hurting, and dad was hurting, and I didn’t want to bother them with my hurt. So I took it out at school and my friends and my teachers. I would look down at my math paper again as the entire pages of double-digit division began to swim then blur in front of my eyes, until two big splotches of water dropped onto 34 x 67, alerted the teacher to another episode. But it was easier than crying over baby sisters I only ever got to hold or moms that didn’t smile anymore.
But this year’s picnic was going to fix everything. For tiny, 11-year-old me, fields day complete with the ice-cream and cotton candy machine, a Trailor filled with coke, and tables filled with games was as close to real-life magic as I could get. It would officially mark the end of school and therefore all my problems, and usher a smile back into my family. Picnics made me happy and I just knew it would make mom happy again too. There were other magical things about the picnic too. I was growing up quickly, and at 11, with a developing body but 6 siblings, one could hardly expect mom to keep up with sewing. Living on hand-me-downs and sulking through my last few months of wearing a “mitz” I was eternally self-conscious beyond my years, aware that my too small mitz made my round face rounder, and the dresses were in no way flattering like my fellow playmates were. The magic of the picnic was an entire day in swimwear. No restrictions; just children in t-shirt and trunks. There was no mitz, no dress. Just tan skinny legs from the gaggles of children, with screeching and laughter from joy, too much sugar, and sunburn.
At 4 o clock, sharp Tiny freckled me followed by a mass of curly brown hair shot out the door ahead of our parents, towards the field ground to meet my friends at the top of the giant waterslide. This year, it was new: a huge yellow and red and blue, with bubbles and water at the bottom, slippery treacherous stairs leading up that sometimes became a domino when one of us slipped and slid down dragging the 20 kids behind us along. The top was covered with a bright yellow dome that obscured us from the sun and the blazing eyes of all our chaperones.
This picnic was different. At the top of the slide, I found my cousin with two other englishah mandleh, the sons of nearby neighbors.
“Hey, Alisia! Want to race me down?!” All four of us took off at a run, turbo-ing” down the slippery slope so fast that we shot over the inflated slides onto the soggy grass in front in a tangle of limbs, fresh bruises, and laughter. That’s just how kids work. We untangled ourselves and raced back up, where I was introduced to the two foreign boys.
“Hi, I'm Noah!”
He stuck out a hand
I didn't take it.
“Hi, I’m Alisia. How did you climb up with flipflops on?”
“I always wear flip-flops.”
The boy was rail-thin, with big front teeth, a mop of wet blond hair that stuck to his forehead and fell into his eye no matter how often he tossed it back.
I grinned and he shoved me down the slide. Thus began perhaps the happiest 6 hours of my life, where I met A boy I never saw again. Noah was two years older than me and so cool that he could even flip over the protective netting on top of the slide, landing in the pool below, winning every splash contest that day. He was the only one who listen to slip on purpose on the stairs to cause an avalanche of laughing tumbling kids. He was the only person who laughed as we compared bloody elbows afterward and made up a secret handshake as my mom cleaned up our scrapes. We cut lines together for cotton candy and he liked to point the hose at the top of slide right at me before I slid down to make me yelp. We stole more than the one allotted coke from the Trailor and snuck it into the hollow he found below the waterslide.
In that sunbaked underside. We both sat giggling and panting, sopping wet without crossed knees touching as we passed the coke back and forth. I remember we talked about some book and some movies. Kids’ stuff. The sound of the inflatable’s generator muted the screams and games happening around and above us, as we, two kids, sat sharing a coke, without a difference or care in the world. He passed me the coke. I told him I had a huge family, except that my baby sister died before she was born, and it was still sad to think about and how my mom still didn’t smile, and how that made me sad every time I got frustrated in school. Noah told me he had a brother and sister, and a mom and dad who didn’t talk much except when they fought, and sometimes when dad wasn’t home, mom would tell him to watch his siblings then dress up pretty and someone would pick her up, but he didn’t know what that meant and so he didn’t want to tell his dad. He told me about his dad’s pizza shop, which I knew well since out parents knew each other, and how his dad said he would take it over one dad, but he really wanted to be a race car driver instead. I told Noah working in a pizza shop that made pizza that good was so awesome and that I knew his dad because he always brought me and my siblings toys and treats when he came to visit, and that Noah was lucky to have a dad like him.
Noah sat quietly looking straight ahead, but he did smile a bit.
In my mind, I still see his expression. It was suddenly distant, confused, almost empty. As though what I had said was foreign or somehow did not understand. In the strange, muted, damp air under the slide, we sat in the sweltering heat, listening to the muffled yells and screams above us on the slide, sharing a coke, and thinking about our families. I imagine that the day wore on, that the sun kept blazing and we kept tearing the place apart, but as these childhood memories go, I somehow cannot recall the rest of the day. I remember a footrace, a soccer game, and Noah throwing up because he ate too much cotton candy, and me laughing at him for it.
But what I do know is this particular picnic was magical. I was able to tell someone about my school and about my mom, and about how I believed the picnic would fix everything. And he in turn had told me about the yelling she heard from downstairs while he was supposed to be asleep. About the cars and other men coming to his house. And how he felt confused and alone. Two children. Bright-eyed and skinny-legged. Crooked tooth grins and freckled faces, connected for a day in the same laminal moment. For a day, I wasn’t Hutterite, and he wasn’t Noah. We were just kids, who didn’t yet understand what we were living through. Only that we both had families and friends, we both liked to read, and we both wore green trunks and brown t-shirts, so we basically matched. Noah and I were the same children. The same thousand children around the world. We were friends, thoroughly and indescribably for a very short time. If someone were to ask me what it is to be human, it is this description of a boy and a girl, who did not understand the other’s life, not culture, not even all the same words. But they still understood the other exactly in who they were for that day.
Both as one moved and flowed from one conversation, cotton candy, and dream, to the next.
Last year, I was driving in town with my dad, when he suggested we pick up a pizza at his friend’s place. I pulled into a small store, and my dad went in. It was a blazing hot day in June and I had the a.c. cranked up. I absent-mindedly watched the workers inside, when my dad came back.
See that kid in there?
Yeah?
That’s his kid. Last week, his kid didn’t show up for work. He was supposed to come in and cover for his dad but no one could find him.
Why?
His mom filed for divorce yeah? Well, his dad told the kids why: because his mom was sleeping around and didn’t want his debt from the pizza shop coming along with her when she left. All three kids as coping in different ways I suppose, but for him? Well, he found relief in meth, heroin, and painkillers. Drinking through the night, his father has to keep an eye on him to make sure he does try to kill himself again. Takes vehicles and drives them into oncoming traffic. It's pretty sad, but what can you do?”
My father talked and talked, as though about a stranger. Which, when I thought about it, he was.
Noah.
I hadn’t heard that name in years. Noah never came with his dad again after the picnic, and I never gave him a second thought. Until now. My fingers on the steering wheel turned white as I stared straight ahead. Noah would be almost 22 by now. Through the storefront, I saw his long blond hair that he tossed out of his eyes, and the trunks and flipflops he still wore, even as he worked around hot ovens and food regulations. And I noticed new things too: long sleeves that rode up occasionally as he worked the phones. The trunks didn’t entirely hide the bruises and patches on his thighs. Dark circles under his eyes seemed to hood his entire face.
He must have felt my stare, because the boy- now man looked up, confused, and raised an eyebrow, before returning to his call. Part of me wanted to go inside and reintroduce myself. “Hey, it's Noah, right? remember me? I’m Alisia, we hung out for like a day years ago at that colony picnic?”
But there’s no way he recognized me. If we ever met in the street, I would make a wide circle around him -this strange man with wild hair and wilder eyes. And he around me: The women with a black shawl and long dark dresses that dusted the floor. And we would see each other, but nothing more. Me because we were all grown up. And because they weren't the same boy and girl from under the slide. What would our conversation look like now? What if adults talked as children did?
Guiltless flippant innocence of traumas and daydreams.
Dad: “good to go, girl?”
Me: “yep. Did you grab me a coke?”
Dad: “yesir.”
Me: “Awesome, thanks.”
Dad: “Lets go home.”
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