I remember standing on the gravel road in my green plaid bathing suit, my hair dripping dark spots in the dust, holding a note in my hand. The sparkling-eyed boy had just pressed this worried lump into my fourteen-year-old palm and gunned away on his four-wheeler. A handwritten letter is usually a triumph for a young girl: here, finally, an unambiguous gesture. But I felt the weight of obligation folded into a hard knot under my fingers and the gravel boring into the bare soles of my feet. In the palm of my hand were sentences like When you danced with me last night at the Community Center, why were you not really dancing with me? Why don’t you like me back? I’ve waited for you to like me for a long time.
Years later I write a letter to the sparkling-eyed boy:
“. . . I’ll bet you’re surprised to hear from me! I can’t believe it’s been seven years! Can you? So much has happened. . . . I hear that you got married a few years ago. Congratulations!!”
Would that I could wrap the exclamation points around my throat until I agreed to tell the truth about just one thing. Would it do, though, to turn all my secrets inside out so the thick skin is on the inside and the wet insides infect?
No, it would not. So I make it easy on him, writing a letter he will have no problem showing to his wife. I avoid even one “I remember,” even one claim on the vast stretches of time over which she can cast no shadow. Still, I feel greediness churn up the back of my throat. I have no right to even the smallest scrap of him, and yet here is my carefully fingered horde.
I am convinced—if he loved me first, he loved me best. I spent only summers in his corner of the Upper Peninsula, but wasn’t he waiting for me every June with a grin, his dimples integral flecks in my summer landscape? Weren’t we always working side by side in the stuff of the earth—the strawberry patch, the gravel pit, the hay fields? Wasn’t he strong enough to be always holding up his tenderest, most possessive heart in his rough hands, only to have me slap it down—“not now, not like that”?
I have proof: on my fourteenth birthday, he gave me a glowing wooden bowl he’d made with his own hands. A perfectly fitted lid opened with a slight popping sound to a picture of himself lying in the bottom, an unevenly cut school picture with sleepy eyes, hair cut straight across his forehead, one deviant tuft arching up, and two dimples boring straight through his cheeks to something good, unsure, and longing in the center of his brain. “Love, ——” was scratched on the back. Oh, didn’t I blush and squirm? Honestly, I was a silly girl, the silliest, courting the approval of scornful boys, arrogant strangers, grownups, and anyone else who couldn’t possibly matter. I didn’t want to have to see the sparkling-eyed boy so always by my side. Yet there he was, planted in front of me, cowlick and all, demanding that I notice something real, like the work of his hands on the body of a tree, or the hands themselves, connected as they were to the rest of him.
But I had just become a weak adolescent and wasn’t ready to give up the small powers adolescence affords: trying to level what I could, to build what I couldn’t. I took the bowl home with me, though, at the end of the summer and set it on the dresser in my bedroom, a scrap of tree to comfort my separation from forest and lake. In a few moments of clarity now and then, I thought of how happy I would be if that bowl could make my heart glow like its own piney grain.
I wish I could say that the bowl moved with me once I left home for school, and that it followed me from state to state, a familiar, solid thing. I wish I could say the bowl is sitting next to my bed, filled with fortunes from cookies, coins from Greece and China, ticket stubs, river stones, and one comical school picture, but I don’t even know where the bowl is, or the heart of the tree from which it was cut, or the heart of the boy who cut it.
“Do you and the rest of the gang ever find time to go swimming anymore?”
These towns of thirty or forty peaked a hundred years ago, when timber was the hottest thing going. And going and going until every tree not sawed off at the base had been knocked down in the rush to get timber down to the water and float it east or west through the Great Lakes. Pictures from this time are vivid—men grinning and sweating over two-person saws; eight, ten bucks strung up in a row, the snow dark on the ground below them; boys poking mounds of bounty-killed coyotes or wolves. And then the bounty was gone and there wasn’t much left for anyone.
And yet when we were kids there, long after the crowds of loggers moved on and the pictures dimmed, our bodies in water felt momentous. We were all daring slivers of import, diving from the county dock into the deep, cold water. Too alive with gall, we were, too pleased with ourselves and the touch of the world on our skins not to matter. Surely that’s worth remembering:
A dock and a fine summer’s day in a string of fine summer’s days. Here is one with red hair, glasses, and baby fat diving off the high, rickety platform. He requires the very most attention and receives the least. Here is one, a golden boy, kind but cagey, adhering to a TV-cool that has somehow trickled into the wilderness. He’s an alpha male in black swim trunks and sunglasses and is the first to know about AIDS and makes jokes about it, back when kids like him weren’t going to get it. Here is his brother, devilish and dumb, with terrible curls and tube socks. He splashes, cannonballs, and smokes with a pure heart. Here is their cousin, the sparkling-eyed boy, skinny, freckled, occasionally punched, usually dancing just out of reach, his eyes flecked with jokes, venom, and pain. Here is a pretty girl, dark-haired and slender. She doesn’t like getting very wet. She behaves as girls are supposed to, only more flirtatiously. She has suntan oil, a yellow bikini, and ready words. She punishes her sister with her grace. Here is her sister, sturdy in her green plaid bathing suit—almost her only summer attire. She is awkward and unconcerned, shamed and arrogant, permanently lake-bound. In her childish imagination, she thinks strength might be taken for beauty: if she swims out farther than anyone, if she is the last to come out of the water, she might become mysterious, otherworldly, special. But the only one who waits for her to climb out is the sparkling-eyed boy. He has followed her with his eyes all afternoon; she has followed the golden boy with hers; and the golden boy has looked nowhere in particular. They walk home together, waterlogged, lonely at the end of the day.
They have sullied the water with their needs. They apologize as the sun sets and begin again as it rises.
“I’m still in school. Can you believe that? You’d think I liked it or something.”
I realize there is little I could say about my life now that would make any sense to him. For example, I laughed the first time I heard the word reify—come again? as in “if it all over again”? or “once more with the if”? Last week I used reify three times in as many paragraphs.
Going far away to school and not coming back for any more summers was clearly the end of my comprehensibility for the sparkling-eyed boy. And perhaps this is why I write the letter, to straighten out my tongue, iron the unwieldy bumps it has acquired. Is this really what I want, though? To dribble what I have accreted through my fingers, eyeing wistfully what someone else might want me to be? Here is a buttered tightrope: It won’t do to imagine what I would actually do with the sparkling-eyed boy if I had him; what he would do with me.
“So I hear the construction business you started with—— —— is going well. My dad said you were even working on a few summer homes in —— last year.”
I am fifteen and still frustrating his advances when we drive with his best friend and my father deep into the northern Ontario wilderness. We are going for a week to the Esnagami fishing camp perched on a hundred deep and winding lakes. The boys have saved all year for this trip and my dad is paying my way. We drive past town and store, reservation and road, beyond the reach of irony and of plumbing, until only a seaplane can take us farther. In little aluminum boats we have our arms, the pole, and nylon line to bring the lake’s most concentrated twists of life struggling to the surface. Proud fisher-girl among men. We carry, we cast, we portage, we cook and eat fish over brand-new fires.
But one evening the sparkling-eyed boy picks me up in his arms by his cabin and runs down the hill to the water, laughing, threatening to throw me in. I laugh, too, and plead, though I don’t know what I am pleading for. His skin is so close to my own. He has grown so much this year—freckled, chestnut, and always laughing. He is holding me audaciously in his arms. His chest, his arms, are my secret pleasures, like the best part of the inner earth erupted and clasped around me. Where is the rangy boy inside of me who would have already punched his way free; where is the haughty girl who will condescend to be admired but never touched? The clean smell of his shirt has lulled them. I want to rest here in respite of who I’ve come to be.
“I think I’ll be coming up there for a week this summer. We should get together!”
We are finally kissing in the sparkling-eyed boy’s black Toyota pickup truck. He has pulled down the dirt road to the dump so we can look for bears, but now he calms the headlights, soothes the engine, and finds my mouth by the light of the stars. The skin on our lips, the wetness inside of our mouths are actually touching. The field between us is permanently violated. His fingers are in my hair, wrapped around my skull as if the outer shell were merely for crushing: baby fingers, soft baby skull. Here is my baby hand; here is his baby cheek. We are just babies through and through.
Only we are not. We are seventeen and eighteen and for the first time, in this moment, we love each other equally and well.
With my skull having been clasped in such a way, is it any wonder that my brain would answer, “seventeen, seventeen” were someone to ask, How old do you feel now? And now?
“Affectionately,
Amy”