You are twenty-one and preparing to change your first diaper.
This is not how you imagined it might go.
You are a counselor at a summer camp in a midwestern state, and the boy in need of changing is not your son. Years later, when you have a son yourself, you will better understand the intricacies of the process—how half the trick to diaper changing is keeping the kid from squirming.
But on this day, there will be no squirming. This boy could not squirm if he tried.
During the flag lowering, a fellow counselor whispers, The boy in the Med Shed requires assistance.
You nod. You believe you can handle it.
Already this summer, you have surprised yourself by handling all sorts of things—driving a tractor, a pontoon, a pickup truck. You have kept campers safe as they scaled towers, roasted weenies, and cannonballed into the lake.
What’s so hard, you wonder, about changing a diaper?
Once the flag is folded and properly stowed you make your way toward the Med Shed. You enter, open the door to the room on the left, and stare at the fifteen-year-old boy lying limp in his bunk. Only he is not limp. He is the opposite of limp. Rigid. Solid. Statuesque. A narrow rail that twists. His eyes flitter toward you, and you wonder if he wonders if you know why you are here.
You know why, of course, and since you don’t want to embarrass him, you don’t try to act like this is nothing, like this is something you have done a million times before. You haven’t (this much is obvious to you both), and you want to spare the boy the indignity of your act.
To your left are the diapers, and you feel your hand reaching toward them. Now one is in your hand.
Good, you think, halfway there.
But as soon as you pull your hand toward the boy you realize the logistics are lost on you. Your body stiffens, imitating his own. Surely there is some protocol for this sort of thing, but no one has ever filled you in on the details. There was no mention of this anywhere in your counselor’s training manual, and when you think back to the Red Cross–sponsored babysitting class of your youth, all you remember is that the practice dolls felt as inflexible as this boy.
You can feel his eyes on you now—doubting you, testing you—so you turn your back to him and scan the diaper bag for directions. There are none. Or at least none you understand. Changing a diaper, it appears, is as simple as folding an origami swan with both hands behind your back.
(Which is bad news for people like you who can barely fold the flag.)
From your place inside the Med Shed you hear the voices of children whose bodies were not born rigid. As if to prove it, they burst past the window, a stampede of limber legs kicking up dust. You can hardly blame them for their ignorance. And yet . . .
Would it kill them, you wonder, to consider the boy who cannot stampede?
This is not cruelty, you know, just kids being kids. And yet . . .
Might it seem cruel, you wonder, to the boy on the bunk?
You consider scolding them—Keep it down! Knock it off with all that racket!—but ultimately you don’t. You don’t even close the window.
Maybe, you think, he likes racket.
You will stay with that boy throughout the evening and much of the following day. He and you, you and him, you are inseparable.
Why you? Because the better counselor got sick and you are the next best thing.
But also because you’re falling in love with your boss—who happens also to be that sick counselor’s sister—which is why you volunteered in the first place.
You want desperately to portray yourself as an empathetic caregiver—a suitable spouse—and this boy gives you that chance.
Fast-forward a few years, and you and that sick counselor’s sister will wed just a hundred yards from that Med Shed, your guests circling the fire pit where you once sang ten thousand campfire songs. Tucked tight in your tux, you’ll stare out at them and see the ghost faces of campers whose names you now forget. And as you take your vows alongside the lake (“in sickness and in health”), not once will that boy cross your mind.
After showers but before lights out, a smaller stampede of half-busted boys makes its way toward the Med Shed. When they enter—complaining of bites and bruises and poison ivy—the creak of the door makes sleep impossible for that boy who sweats stone-faced in his sheets.
One after another, the campers come in search of cures for their momentary ailments.
I was running through the oak grove, one boy tells the nurse, when I was attacked by a swarm of mosquitoes . . .
I was running, he repeats, which hardly sounds like an ailment to the boy in the bunk who never has.
The nurse keeps an endless supply of calamine lotion, Gold Bond, and Popsicles, and somehow these are the only cures those boys ever seem to require.
Freshly healed (and with purple Popsicles dangling from their lips) the campers begin their long walks back to their cabins.
Out your room’s window, you and the boy can just make out their small shadows pushing against the dark. Eventually, you hear what appears to be dillydallying (“Dude! Check out this bug!”), so you shout for the boys to double-time it back to their bunks.
“I’ll time you,” you call out the window. “1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . .”
The fuse is lit, the campers run, their tennis shoes skimming the earth.
You turn from the window to watch the boy staring hard at the wooden bunk above him, his twig legs crisscrossed at the ankles.
“Hey, want me to close this?” you ask, nodding to the window.
His face is immutable: dark eyes, aquiline nose, slightly sunken cheeks.
“Maybe we’ll close it this time,” you say, and when you see no reaction—not even the flittering of eyes—you reach your hands toward the pane and press down.
The following day—your last day together—proves to be a scorcher. It’s so hot, in fact, that not even all the shade from all the oak trees in the grove can adequately protect you. Water is the only relief the camp has to offer, and so all activities are cancelled. All campers are to report directly to the lake with their sunscreen.
All the campers but one.
From your place inside the Med Shed, you and the boy hear a bleating “Marco!” followed by “Polo!” You and the boy hear the aftermath of the cannonballs as those campers fold their knees to their chests.
You offer an apologetic smile, as if to say, Hey, I get it. I’m an empathetic guy.
But you both know you don’t get it.
Don’t get what it’s like to be held captive by your body, to be forced to hold a pose indefinitely.
During rest hour—when the rest of the campers return to their sweltering cabins to write letters home (“The food is great! The lake is great! We love it!”)—you and the boy decide to go for a dip.
It’s just a lake, you think, what could possibly go wrong?
You follow one step behind as the boy hums his power chair down the path that leads to the water. He stops his chair just short of the sand, which is when you enter the scene.
You lift his small frame from his chair and carry him toward the water, cupping one hand beneath his knobby knees and the other beneath his back. Each bead of sweat clings to him, obscuring his face and collecting in his cheeks.
In that moment, all you want in the world is to give that boy what he wants. Somebody has told you he likes the water, and since you are in a position to give him that, you do.
From his place at the shaded picnic table, the lifeguard spots you headed his way.
He asks if he can help and you say sure, then you split the boy’s weight between you.
As the three of you enter the lake, you convince yourself that a boy like him must like buoyancy. That a boy in his condition must like the way the water turns everything weightless. Removes friction, eases grating, allows a body to rock in the waves.
Years later, you will all but forget those waves, that water, the whir of the air conditioner in the Med Shed. What you will remember most is the changing. How you struggled to work the angles as you pulled that diaper down. How his knees had proven too sharp, and how each time you spread his legs they snapped back like a bear trap newly sprung.
Back in those days, you were just some boy and he was just some boy, but when you finally do grow up and have a son yourself, every diaper change will seem easy in comparison.
At last you learn the protocol—not from any counselor’s manual, or any babysitting class—but from the sick counselor’s sister, your wife of three years, who turns your son’s legs to Play-Doh in her hands. For a thousand diapers you’ll observe the way she squeezes his ankles together with a single hand and wipes, singing a campfire song while she does it.
You will repeat this because it is the simplest way you know to show love—unmistakable, irrefutable, your pact.