A Light in the Dark
The summer I was fifteen, I fell in love for the first time. The bliss of that experience was short lived and what followed was a dreary emotional desert that left me wondering what was the point of living when we are all just going to die.
The summer I was fifteen, I fell in love for the first time. As was to happen to me for the rest of my life, it was at first glance. Just one swift look across the lawn, over the heads of assembled campers in their shorts and T-shirts, and I saw him standing at the edge of the group, a handsome young man in khakis and a seersucker jacket, the camp gardener.
He didn’t look like a gardener. His face was chiseled and a lock of shaggy brown hair fell into his eyes. He might have been a poet or writer. A Shakespearian actor in plain clothes. My heart caught in my throat as I stared at him, and (did I imagine this?) as he stared back at me. From that moment, for the six weeks I was to spend there, I could think of nothing but this man.
I was at a French-speaking camp in Bar Harbor, Maine. Our ages ranged from fourteen to seventeen and it was an unusual camp: no sports other than swimming, no silly games like Capture the Flag, no red or blue teams, no reveille or vespers… no, this was a bookish camp and the most important thing about it, in my view, was that we were allowed to smoke cigarettes. Already, at fifteen, I was a heavy smoker and spent much of my time planning the next opportunity to light up. Smoking at home was strictly forboden. My strategy was to wait till everyone in the house was asleep and then lean out the window and puff away, usually managing five or six cigarettes in a row with fingers so numb from the cold in winter that I could barely raise them to my lips.
Image: Taylor Hernandez
So to be in a place where I was openly allowed to smoke was heaven. And to have exalted feelings for someone like the gardener, the adrenalin rush of love coursing through my veins morning, noon and night, made the experience even more remarkable. The only problem was, I couldn’t be sure he loved me back.
We would blush and stammer and grow painfully nervous when we were around each other (usually at mealtimes), but it was rumored that he had a girlfriend and indeed, in the third week of our stay there, a woman of about his age (twenty-one) with bright blond hair and a curvy body, showed up and spent the weekend in his cabin.
Oddly, that didn’t deter me. I was living at the camp and the other woman wasn’t, so I would have ongoing opportunities to… to what? Snag him? Sleep with him? I’d never had sex with anyone before, had never even made out with anyone, so when I tried to think of what it would be like to lie in the gardener’s arms, I really had no idea other than that my heart would melt and it would be blissful.
Image: Svetlana Gumerova
What did I actually know about the gardener? Very little. He was a Princeton graduate, which gave him a certain cachet, and he would soon be going into the army, which, in my opinion, didn’t compute with his poetic good looks or bookish manner. His name was John, but I don’t think we ever referred to him as anything but “the gardener.” Certainly, I don’t remember ever seeing him handling plants or mowing the lawn or doing what a gardener ought to be doing. Instead I’d see him out on the front porch, bent over a book, hands in his hair. He was reading Anna Karenina, which I found very impressive.
Image: Cathal Mac An Bheatha
Anyone who’s ever spent a few weeks with a small group of people, all engaged in the same endeavor (in this case learning French) and all, whether they like it or not, suddenly involved in one another’s personal lives and dramas, knows that time stops, slows, thickens, becomes weirdly attenuated. And so it was that summer. That I would one day see John the gardener again, in a diminished and unkind light, was something I, of course, didn’t know at the time. To me he was a mythic figure, a mystery, a nut I had to crack. I was obsessed with him. I wanted to follow him around, be with him every minute of the day, be his love.
If I was playing with fire, I didn’t care. Probably in my mind the whole thing was a heightened daydream, a fantasy that would never actually play out in real life. And boy was I wrong. In the last few days of camp, things changed.
One afternoon I received a message to meet the gardener in his cabin, which was in a wooded area on the fringes of the property. My stomach must’ve dropped to my knees. Certainly I was shaking. Certainly I ran to the bathroom to check eye makeup and lipstick. To change into cleaner shorts, a tighter Tee. I was fifteen, remember, and the gardener was twenty-one, a six year difference that made all the difference. I didn’t know the first thing about birth control -- I’d never even been properly kissed. But my mind was made up, there was no question that I had to do this, and bravely I set out into the woods, so nervous that I chain smoked the whole way there.
The windows of the cabin were grimy and covered with vines and branches; it was impossible to see inside. I stared at the place for a minute or two, wondering if the gardener was actually in there or if this had been a joke. Sweat ran down my back as I smoked the last cigarette down to its filter. Then, slowly, I moved forward and knocked on the door.
Image: Adonyi Gabor
Image: Filipe Almeida
With a grave face, the gardener immediately opened the door. He was as nervous as I was. We stared at one another for a moment; then he drew me in, closing the door behind me. I caught a quick glimpse of a bed, stacks of books, clothing strewn around the room. I wanted to ask for a glass of water, but before I could do that he placed his mouth over mine and began a sweet, suctioney kiss. I felt his tongue push through my lips, the slimy wriggle and twist of it around mine. A few years before, an older boy had tried to kiss me at a country club New Year’s Eve dance I attended with my parents. That boy had stuck his tongue in my mouth in a violent way that made me want to puke; he’d shoved his fingers into my bra and was playing with my breasts when my father appeared on the shaded terrace where we stood, yelled at the boy (I was only thirteen), and led me back into the banquet hall.
The gardener’s kiss was nothing like that. It was slow, tender, romantic: an exploration. He held me close for a moment, searching my mouth with his. Then he led me to the bed. It felt like love, the way he looked into my eyes, caressed my face, began to remove my clothing. In seconds, the Tee was off, the white cotton bra unhooked, the navy blue shorts unzipped and pulled down to my thighs. Heart whirring, I let him do what he wanted to do: fold his hands around my breasts, tickle his fingers down my naked stomach to the forbidden area where I could feel the pressure of them probing my most secret parts. He didn’t enter me, he had too much sense for that; but he removed his penis from his pants and made me run my hands over the length of it, squeezing harder and harder till he came with an explosion of hot gooey liquid that looked like spit or egg whites as it landed on my stomach.
I don’t remember how long I stayed in his cabin after that or what we talked about. Camp would be ending in two or three days.
Probably we exchanged addresses, though he couldn’t have been sure where he’d be because of entering the army in a few weeks. For my part, I wasn’t sure of my next address either: I’d be starting boarding school in the fall and my life was in flux. All I knew was I’d found my true love, the other half of my soul, which was both wonderful and bitter, as I now had to pack my trunk and return home to my parents. It was only the end of July. August yawned ahead of me.
Image: Elina Krima
Image: Leyre
I don’t know if I can properly convey to you the horror and ennui of those post-camp weeks -- being snatched from the heights of love and deported to a dreary emotional desert where time crawled and nothing mattered.
The truth is, I was a spoiled, wealthy, white girl who, in the entirety of her short life, had never experienced even a moment of real deprivation. With the gardener gone from my world, there wasn’t a single thing I wanted to do but sit in my room and daydream. I was an addict deprived of her drug and it was painful. My parents had no idea what I was going through and insisted I accompany them on a furniture-buying trip to Austria and Germany. Sounds terrific, right?
Wrong. I shlepped through the streets of Vienna and Munich, following my parents from antiques store to antiques store, bored out of my mind, convinced I’d die if I didn’t get my hands on a pack of cigarettes. At the time, I thought nobody could be as miserable as I was. But I sank into an even deeper despair a few weeks later, when I left for boarding school. Up till then I’d been at a day school that only went through the ninth grade, so I had to switch and I figured that, since this new school was both Quaker and co-ed, it had to be fairly progressive. Here I was disappointed. The place, in the way it treated students, was like a prison camp. If you walked a few feet beyond the main building with a boy, a teacher would come out and yell at you. If you wandered anywhere near the woods, teachers patrolling the area would appear out of nowhere and sniff at your clothes to see if you’d been smoking. Every morning there’d be an inspection to make sure you were in proper attire (skirt, tights, sweater, jacket). At meals there’d be a bleak feeling; the prefect at our table, an overly chatty girl of sixteen, for some reason always wore a trenchcoat and it turned out she was three or four months pregnant.
I learned that a girl had hung herself the year before for the same reason.
While I wasn’t pregnant, I was very affected by the negative atmosphere of the place and started going downhill almost immediately. I simply didn’t thrive there. In the mornings I had to force myself out of bed. I stopped eating. I stopped reading. I didn’t see the point of life -- why continue if one was going to die anyway?
Image: Lucas Pezeta
Basically I flatlined. I didn’t care about anything. As alive as I’d been with my crush on the gardener over the summer, I was now dead inside. And it was dangerous.
Image: Louis
Image: Oil portrait of Suzanne by Nicole Jeffords
At Christmas vacation that year, I went skiing in Stowe, Vermont with a girlfriend. Instead of staying at a lodge with a nice big fireplace in the lobby, we stayed with a local ski instructor who let out rooms. My governess, Suzanne (yes, I had a governess!) was our chaperone. I was still in a state of despair, still asking the same age-old, worn-out question: what was the point of life if we were going to die anyway?
One night toward the end of our stay, my girlfriend and I asked Suzanne to drive us to a local tavern where a lot of younger people hung out, and where, we told her, we were going to meet some friends. This was a lie. We just wanted to get out and have a little fun. Obligingly she dropped us at the steps of the tavern, but we didn’t see anyone we knew, so we headed back out into the cold. Our plan was to hitchhike up the road to another tavern. We stuck out our thumbs and a harmless-looking, middle-aged man in a small sedan stopped for us. My friend got in first, next to the driver; I climbed into the passenger seat. I don’t remember any conversation. It was a freezing night and the roads were icy. We’d been in the car less than a minute when I spotted a car stalled on the side of the road a few yards ahead. We were headed straight for it.
This was in the era before seatbelts and I didn’t have time to brace myself. As our car plunged into the one on the side of the road, I was thrown through the windshield and back again, landing on the floor where I blinked my eyes to make sure I could see (thank god I was wearing contact lenses). I spat out teeth, but wasn’t feeling any pain.
When someone opened the passenger door and pulled me out, I saw blood on the snow and asked if someone had been hurt. I didn’t realize that “someone” was me.
Image: Joel Filipe
I was taken to a hotel just there, near the scene of the accident. Aside from the broken teeth, I had no idea I’d been hurt. Suzanne was called (I could hear her screaming in the background) along with the ski instructor, but by then I was growing fuzzy and my eyes didn’t seem to be working properly. A hotel guest who was a physician had been summoned to the lobby, but he didn’t dare touch me for fear of malpractice. He sat next to me as we waited for the ambulance, saying “There, there,” over and over again. I must have looked pretty gory with my ripped-open face. They’d cordoned off the lobby, but what no one knew at that point was that a major vein at my temple had been severed and I was bleeding out.
Image: JR Korpa
Image: Matt Kochar
It seemed like a long time before the ambulance arrived. I was in shock and felt no pain. I don’t think I even knew how badly I’d been hurt. But then something very strange happened. As I was being lifted into the ambulance, I realized I was dying, that the life flow was ebbing from my body. I felt extremely relaxed about that. I was about to die, to go someplace else, and I told myself perhaps I should think about God as the blood seeped out of me and the lights of the world grew dim.
That was odd. I was from a secular Jewish family, had been brought up without religion. Talk of God in our house was unusual; for us spirituality lay in painting, books, music. And yet as soon as that word -- God (G-d for Jews, the word so holy it couldn’t even be spelled out) -- as soon as that word echoed in my brain, I felt my spirit peel away from my body and take off in the dark.
Any sense of time or space dropped away. There was simply me, the essence of me, flying through a vast, unquantifiable, all-consuming darkness toward a light.
I don’t think I will ever have the words to properly describe this light. It was a Being. It was luminescent. It shimmered and shone with knowledge of me, everything I had ever done or thought right there in the light it projected, a misty, beckoning, pulsating light that knew me inside out and pulled me toward it with the strength of gravity. I wanted to go to it, to be reunited with it, to live with it forever.
And yet, as soon as I got close, I was pushed back down toward my body…. and then, pushed back up, rising through darkness one more time to approach the Being and feel its kindness, peacefulness and wisdom wash over me. I had the sense that it told me something I’ve spent my whole life since trying to remember and understand, that there was communication between us. But while I knew that the Being of light was real -- more real than anything I’ve encountered before or since -- I wasn’t allowed to remember what it told me.
I don’t know how long the meeting with this Being lasted. In the end everything went dark and I woke in a hospital with a masked surgeon leaning over me. In the days that followed, I learned that my entire vein system had collapsed and that I had indeed passed into the territory of death. For weeks after that, people kept telling me how sorry they were (my face was horribly swollen, half my head was shaved, a long red scar darted across my cheek). But, as terrible as I looked, I didn’t care. I’d gotten my answer. I knew that life continued after death, that things happened in a dimension that was as real as the street I lived on. I didn’t have to continue with my teenage anxiety over the point of existence. I already understood.
This story was originally published in six parts on March 23, 2020, on nicolejeffords.com.
Cover photo: Michael Weidner
