The grass growing in the shade of the porch is rich and green, the rest a sick yellowish-brown. In this particular snap shot, the minuscule, lush portion of the lawn has been flooded out with water from the hose. Pale brown liquid seeps up through the sod, puddling around the trees, ruining my grandparents’ already futile attempts at landscaping. The grey cement fence at the perimeter of the yard is soaked as well. Off in the distance, you see swamp coolers, oak trees, peach and pink trim on the houses. It is easy to get lost in suburbia.
Yet it is the focus of the photo that interests me here. Two little girls playing in the water. Both are blond, after their own fashion. Both are close in age. Myself at six, with “dirty dishwater hair” facing my four-year-old cousin, Sara. There are no bunny ears or picked noses, just our little-girl grins, with tiny white teeth. The business at hand is quite serious, in its own way. My brothers left long ago, to play with the boys across the street. We are the only children left outside, under the sometimes-watchful eye of my aunt.
My pink-and-blue swimsuit hangs loose around my torso, an attempt at frugality that embarrasses me. It wrinkles up along my torso, the spandex transformed into a punishing terrain. My cousin is wearing a pair of underwear, white cotton. The underwear, like my bathing suit, is also too big. It hangs off of her because it is, in fact, my underwear. Despite the desert sun, neither of us have a tan. The sun glints off the water on our skin and makes us look even whiter.
Children are to be kept out of the sun during the worst heat of the day. Las Vegas, with all its glitz and glamor, is in the business of pretending, and its inhabitants pretend they are living somewhere else. They water their prickly yellow lawns in the face of water conservation laws, plant trees instead of cacti. They keep their children pale and tame, protect them from the harshness of that arid world so they might grow up and plant geraniums and struggle to turn the landscape from brown to green. But if we were to spin camera around by one-hundred-and-eighty degrees, we would see a palm tree towering up against the face of a sandy cliff. We would see the pale sun burning against a slate sky.
It is a rare ritual. Indeed, it is the only time I will ever play in my grandparents’ hose despite the heat of the region.
For now, though, we are wild girls. Our hair sticks up at odd angles. Although we don’t know it, we are revolutionaries, ruining the pre-planned, sodded lawn. Rather than running through sprinklers or swimming in a pool, we pretend to be water-bearers. We know that we live in a village amid the wasteland, and we are bringing the sweet, cool liquid to the thirsty village of Las Vegas with my grandparents’ good plastic cups.
