the time i solved a rubik’s cube

My hands ached after two long hours of fumbling with the Rubik’s cube my Uncle Preston had given me earlier in the morning.

“When I first got that cube, it only took me twenty minutes to solve it. Your mother and I were in the back seat on the way to the Cape — we were about your age at the time — and I turned to her and said, ‘I thought these things were supposed to be a challenge.’” He let a chuckle slip out of that shit-eating grin he was so fond of producing before walking his loafer-footed self out to the dock for his evening cigar. If he wasn’t the best putt-ing coach I ever had, I would never have put up with his smug ass.

My patience for the plastic puzzle cube was fading, as was the evening sun over Narragansett Bay. The screened-in porch seemed like the loneliest place on earth right then. My mind wearily wandered to its favorite destination in those days, the memory of Diane LePerrier. Diane and her cute little butt sashaying out of my family’s front gate after our first barbeque of the summer, off to Connecticut for two long months of equestrian training and, no doubt, trysts with boarding school boys. Diane was a full year older than me, and the last thing she said to me before she walked out of my life that summer was, “If only you were a year older…the things we would do.” I could smell the barbequed beef on her breath there, on the porch, and my cheeks flushed.

A look down at the cube revealed that, in my heated reminiscence, I had inadvertently come close to solving the puzzle. Energized, I moved the red square over there, the blue square over to that other side, and the green square to the edge of that other side. Then I twisted it so that the yellow square went over with the yellows and the orange square with the oranges. There was only one red square left in the green part, and with one swift crank of the hand, I found myself holding a completed Rubik’s cube.

Later that summer, I mailed the completed cube along with a simple note that read, “I may only be 14, but can a 15-year-old do this?” And to this day, I know that if her family hadn’t moved to Bel Air later that summer, I would’ve gotten to second base with Diane LePerrier. Even Uncle Preston can’t say that.