The Periodical Cicada

The 1987 emergence of Brood X was especially resonant for me. I was 18, poised between childhood and adulthood, eager to try new things, but also a little afraid. The analogy between me and the cicadas is almost too obvious to merit an explanation, but I will try anyway. 1987 was a time of change for me. It was the end of one period of my life and the beginning of another. To put it bluntly, I was like a cicada, becoming someone new as part of the awkward and sometimes difficult process of growing up. As with cicadas, the first 17 years or so of your life go so slowly, so much waiting, and then, suddenly, you are an adult, and the time flies by so fast. The following story is an amalgam of several of my summer time experiences in DC in the late ’80s. The characters are amalgams of people I knew.

When I met Luke, I was a senior in high school and had just started my first job, at the local movie theatre.  I worked behind the concessions counter.  Luke was an usher.  His hair was short and blond, spiked like Sting’s from the band The Police.  He had pale-blue eyes.  He wore preppy clothes, blue or white oxford shirts, khaki shorts, loafers, but he wasn’t rich.  His single mom was a librarian, barely making ends meet.  He had three younger siblings.  I had a crush on Luke all summer but nothing happened between us.  I was far too shy to initiate anything.  Luke went to a school for the performing arts down the road from my private high school.  Before I met him, I used to notice him on the public bus that we both took to our respective schools.  

That summer, between high school and college, we became close friends.  At night, we went to secret spots near the Potomac River, the C&O Canal, and the grounds of the National Cathedral to smoke pot and hang out.  We went to jazz and bluegrass bars that didn’t check ID and to free concerts on the National Mall and at Glen Echo Park.  We saw each other almost every day.  When summer ended, I left for college.  Luke had another year of high school.  As I forged new relationships and adjusted to the life of a college student, I didn’t think about Luke much.  

Home again for the following summer, I found myself drawn back into Luke’s orbit.  One night in July, we went to Luke’s friend Elias’s apartment near the Georgetown Reservoir.  I had never met Elias, but I had heard about him from Luke.  They met when Luke was in ninth grade and Elias in tenth at the performing arts school.  They were both guitar players.  They had a wide group of friends, but there was something special between the two of them.  They were more like brothers than friends.  Elias had shaggy dark hair and penetrating, dark blue eyes.  He could have been the love child of Ringo Starr, with his thick, dark hair and musical talent, and Deanna Troi, the empath on Star Trek:  The Next Generation, with her ability to see right into your soul.  

The apartment was on the ground floor of a brick, three-story building, no air conditioning, and right on top of the boiler room.  Luke and I sat on mismatched kitchen chairs, watching Elias do a line of coke on the futon.  He offered us some, but we turned him down.  I could feel the sweat beginning to gather in my hair, at the nape of my neck, and behind my ears.  Soon, it would be dripping down my neck, causing my tee-shirt to cling to my back.  The heat was unbearable that summer, the worst I could remember.

“Do you have any weed?” Luke asked.  

“Sure, a little.  Let’s go outside to smoke.  It’s stifling in here,” Elias said.

That year, a brood of 17-year cicadas had come in late spring and stayed around well into the summer.  Thousands of them materialized, seemingly overnight, in our neighborhood of old trees.  Everywhere we walked we crushed their discarded exoskeletons.  They buzzed around us as we stood in the shadow of a huge oak tree to share Elias’s weed.  Across the street, we could see the Georgetown Reservoir and the Castle Gatehouse, a pumping station built in the 1920s by the Army Corp of Engineers to look like a castle.  We passed Luke’s green ceramic pipe around, keeping the ember burning red.  Luke took a drag and pointed to my mouth.  I leaned toward him and opened my lips.  He locked his lips on mine and exhaled the smoke into my mouth.  His lips were dry and slightly rough.  I inhaled the smoke, held it in, then exhaled.  I watched the smoke disperse into the humid night air. 

“It’s cached,” he said, “Sylvia got the last hit.”

“Do you guys want more?” Elias asked.

“Maybe later,” Luke answered for both of us.  

“Let’s find somewhere to swim,” Elias suggested.

We climbed into Luke’s car and drove down MacArthur Boulevard, toward Maryland.  That summer our constant quest was to find a place to swim.  Our neighborhood, the Palisades, is long and narrow, running along the the Potomac River.  MacArthur Boulevard is the main artery, stretching from Great Falls in Potomac to the Georgetown Reservoir in the District.  Water mains run beneath MacArthur, connecting the dam at Great Falls to the Dalecarlia Reservoir near the Maryland-D.C. line and the Georgetown Reservoir near Elias’s apartment building.  We couldn’t get near the reservoirs, protected as they were by chain link fences and barbed wire, and the river was too dangerous at night.  There were several members-only pools in the neighborhoods across the border in Montgomery County.  At night, they were easy to access.  Briefly, we stopped at my house so I could get a bathing suit and towels.  I called down to my parents, who were watching TV in the basement.

“I’m going back out, okay?  I might be late.”

Now that I was in college, home for just a few months of summer, I didn’t have a curfew.  Most nights, by the time I was heading home, the birds would be just waking up and starting to sing.  As the car sped down MacArthur, I let the air from the open window dry the sweat in my long hair, releasing it from the clip that had been holding it in a messy bun.  

We arrived at the pool, Merrimack, located in a hilly neighborhood of winding streets, big houses, and cul-de-sacs.  We left the car in a corner of the empty parking lot, beneath a big sycamore tree.  The noise of the cicadas was even louder further away from the city.  It rose and fell, occasionally stopping for a second or two, only to start up again, even louder and more strident.  We approached the pool from the side, where the chain link fence was lower.  Luke had a cassette player in one arm, which he passed over to Elias before he jumped the fence.  I threw the towels over and climbed after them, losing a shoe as I landed on the other side.  I retrieved my shoe, then went to change into my suit.  The empty locker room was creepy, the shower stalls and cubicles dark with shadows.  I hurried out of my clothes and into my bathing suit.

Luke turned on his boom box, and we jumped into the pool.   We didn’t need to be quiet.  The big, leafy trees and the hum of the cicadas would muffle the noise.  All the houses nearby were running their air conditioning full blast.  That summer, it never cooled off, even at night.  We floated for a while, listening to Pink Floyd.  We smoked more pot.  Thirsty, we pooled our coins to get Cokes out of the machine by the pool office.  We could only get two, so we shared them between the three of us.  If this were a horror story, there would be a stranger lurking in the shadows.  He would pick us off one by one.  Perhaps I would be “the girl who lived,” escaping to drive away in Luke’s car before the killer could finish the job.    

As we left the pool and started walking toward the car, I brushed my arm against Luke’s.  Last summer, I would not have dared.  Now that I had been away to college, I was bolder.  We had been hanging out almost every night that summer, but we had never hooked up.  He drove back down MacArthur, blew by my house, and pulled up in front of Elias’s apartment building.

“Good night, man,” Elias said, and pressed the rest of the weed into Luke’s palm.  “See ya, Sylvia.”  

Luke stopped the car at his house, on the way to mine.

“Do you want to come in?” he asked.

I nodded and we got out of the car.  We had to be silent as we opened the back door.  We snuck past his mom and little brothers and sisters, asleep on the couch in front of the TV, which was still on, broadcasting static.  His dog Bella snored beside them.  Luke’s room was in the basement, past the laundry room.  We lay down on his bed and began kissing.  Eventually, we fell asleep for a few minutes, maybe longer, but I soon woke, briefly disoriented.  I had to get home before my parents got up.  They would look in on me before they left for work.  I threw on my clothes and slipped out of the house.  It was still dark but the sun would be up soon.  The birds were already awake.  The cicadas had never stopped their drumming.

As the summer wound down, the cicadas became less numerous.  They had fulfilled their purpose, to mate and lay their eggs in the trees, and were beginning to die off.  Whereas before, their cast-off shells had littered the pavements, now it was their bodies, turning to mulch.   The days grew cooler, and it was time to leave and go back to college.