The Summer of 77 by Emily Rich

               Simon CC



​The Summer of 77


Do you think Dorothy Hamill ever feels pain? 

How could she? She’s America’s sweetheart. Look at her smiling out from the covers of Time and Seventeen, flipping her bobbed hair for Clairol’s Short and Sassy shampoo, a product created just for her. Watch clips of her on TV as she turns in her gold medal performance in Innsbruck, gliding effortlessly over the ice, weightless and yet perfect in her red flounced skate dress. She doesn’t seem of this world; as if she exists on a plane far far removed from the lame existence of the rest of us.

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“You look like a walking skeleton!” my older sister, Audrey, laughed the day I came downstairs in shorts a new halter-top. “You shouldn’t even try to wear a shirt like that.” 

Halter tops were for girls like Audrey all curvy hips and breasts. A 14-year old bombshell. Hair curled back like Farah Fawcett, full lips coated with clear, shiny gloss. Next to her, I might as well have been made out of pipe cleaners.

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“One of my colleagues said he saw me walking with a beautiful woman the other day,” Dad said one night at the dinner table. He gazed at Audrey, his favorite. “I said, ‘Oh no, that was my daughter…but she is quite a piece!”

Audrey blushed and laughed quietly and looked down at her food. What else could she do? I mean, we were all afraid of Dad.

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“I think this is going to be your year to get a boyfriend!” Maureen exclaimed. Maureen was my best friend, wildly more adventurous and outgoing than me. I played the role of admiring sidekick.

We were walking barefoot along the grassy medians of Denver’s 7th Avenue Parkway, with grand brick houses standing aloof and decorous on either side, like fortress walls around our charmed upper-middle-class enclave in the city.

Maureen was already on her second boyfriend at Bromwell Elementary. But we were headed off to Junior High now, and I needed to catch up.

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Aside from me, the Patterson family was solid in stature. Dad had his big stomach and wide bottom, Mom, full chest and broad thighs. But I was built differently: sapling thin, all poking out ribs and collarbones and spindly, bowed-back legs like a stork.

“You’re likely to blow away in a windstorm!” Mom teased.

“You’re built just like my mother,” Dad snipped. 

Audrey in her form-hugging T-shirt just sneered. Pathetic.

I came to think that being thin was the worst thing you could be in my family. 

I didn’t yet realize there could be something worse.

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Maureen was anxious to move things along where boys were concerned. She’d been practicing make out techniques on her pillow, she told me, just like the girl in Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret. But I wasn’t so sure what the rush was about. I’d never had a boyfriend, had barely even talked to a boy. The thought of kissing the mouths of any of the boys in my class at Bromwell made me gag. And making out with a boy? I couldn’t even imagine it. 

I’d seen Audrey “making out” with her boyfriend, Len, enough times to know that was not for me. Len was a tall lanky boy with a blond afro and enormous Adam’s apple, who sometimes rode the bus home with her from Academic Prep. I caught them more than once on the basement sofa, mashing their faces together as he frantically kneaded the front of her shirt. It was an ungainly display. And then, some of the things Audrey told me she and Len did when no one was around were almost just too disgusting to envision: how she put her hands down his pants and rubbed his “thing” while he worked his fingers up inside her “hole.” If that’s what having a boyfriend meant, you could count me out.


Still, it would be nice to have boys notice me and think I was pretty. 


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 “I mean, Morey is huge!” said Maureen. “You’re going to meet all kinds of new people. You know what you should do? You should cut your hair. I’m growing mine out, but you should cut yours. Get a new look, like Dorothy Hamill.”

 My long stringy hair was pretty lifeless, it was true. Yes, a Dorothy Hamill haircut! That could change everything. As I walked home from Maureen’s house that evening, I held myself erect like a skater, picturing a perky bob of hair, flipping about, catching the eyes of boys as I glided through the halls of Morey Junior High.

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I’d heard Dorothy Hamill trained in Colorado Springs. Close by. Maybe she was there that afternoon it happened, the day my dad pulled Audrey out of the shower. Maybe she was perfecting her routine for the Ice Capades, spinning and spinning in a cotton-candy leotard above this world above us all. But I was there and Mom was there the day Dad pulled Audrey out of the shower. I saw Audrey’s body, pink from the steam, red where Dad had hit her. I saw her round breasts, exposed, as she thrashed against his grip. I saw Mom standing in the hallway white legs in white shorts knees slightly buckled mouth a thin firm line. Immobile.

I was used to Dad’s violence, we all were. The back of his hand, the sole of his shoe, the grip of his fingers in your hair before your head went into a wall. But this was something different. Dad in the shower with naked Audrey. Something perverse. And I spun on the carpet screaming stop stop stop to an audience that didn’t respond.

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Summer ended and seventh grade began. I got that Dorothy Hamill haircut after all, but I didn’t bother to style it. It slumped like a bowl of soup poured over my head as I boarded the bus for Morey Junior High. It didn’t matter. By then I had stopped caring, stopped talking even. Even to Maureen. Any thought of getting a boyfriend had been blacked out from my mind.

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Did you know Dorothy Hamill suffered from depression? I read that somewhere. And yet, there she is, sparkling and smiling for us all. Part of me feels sad about this, part of me admires her all the more. The things a person can survive. It just goes to show.


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Emily Rich is managing editor of the Bay to Ocean Journal, published by the Eastern Shore Writers Association.  She has taught memoir writing at the Bethesda Writer’s Center and through the Lighthouse Guild at Salisbury University. Her work has been published in The Pinch, Cutbank, Hippocampus, Delmarva Review, and Little Patuxent Review, among others. She’s twice been listed as a notable in Best American Essays. She lives in Trappe, MD with her husband and three hyper Labradors.

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