It is hard not to feel ridiculous writing, thinking about a twelve-year-old boy who doesn’t even exist—at least not in the strictest sense. He is now a thirty-two-year-old man. Perhaps I should also feel a bit like a pervert, remembering his narrow limbs hauling him out of the water, how I could never look di-rectly at the folds of the boys’ bodies, their shoulder muscles swelling and tapering, their skin papering their bodies so closely. And I know very well I should feel like a soft-minded nostalgic, dwelling in these few memories of childhood. For all I know, the stuff of these memories might never have existed.
The cheesecloth of our minds is sometimes more like fishing net, only catching the largest, brightest, most struggling things; then we fill up a barrel, feed on it, and call that a life. And who knows what grows pike-sized? Some people forget whole marriages, whole vacations for which they saved for years, but remember the particular shade of teal of the miniature dump truck in which they hauled their small collection of plastic farm animals, remember it as well as their own mother’s eye color. But what else besides our faulty memories do we have to tell us who we are? Our jobs, mates, houses, furniture, snapshots, etc? Let me tell you—and I didn’t used to believe this—every single scrap of our magpie lives could disappear forever. Imagine your house and office burning down to soot, imagine the woman or man you call “home” retracting from your life like a glacier, and you have a start. We are left with only the freakish contents of our brains—our dreams that begin to seem like memories, and memories like dreams. And we are left with the short list of things our bodies can do and the long list of things our mouths can say. But that is all.
I remember the bodies of preteen boys, a whole twitching pack of them, but not in the way you might imagine—I wouldn’t even have known how to picture the soft matter between their thighs. My sister and I met them the summer before she started high school and I started seventh grade, and they were a revelation. I knew boys at school. My friend and I decided weekly which of the four eligible boys in my class we would have a crush on. We even kept track in a notebook—a bloodless, businesslike affair in which the crushee never even looked at us. But up here, cut loose from our herds, we found a group of boys that were our boys. They didn’t care if we wore the right brand of jeans—they didn’t either. They didn’t realize I was a geek. And we didn’t know who they were in school or around these tiny towns.
We met almost every day to swim off the county dock, suddenly stripping off our mismatched T-shirts and shorts until we were down to thin layers of nylon and our prodding, jostling skin. No wonder our parents were worried. We were almost peeled down, like milkweed pods, to the thousands of seeds inside us.
Preteen love might be our first act of deep self-betrayal. We seem to gather up all of the things that have so far converged to create a self, drop them into a bay, and watch them bubble down through layers of limestone. In other words, we evict our own mind, should we even have one, then desire only what and whom we’re supposed to desire. Or perhaps that was just me.
Of course the boy I settled on was in my sister’s grade, tanned and muscled, with sun-bleached hair, mirrored shades, sleeveless shirts. He brought the Def Leppard tapes and the jam box. He drove his dad’s ancient pickup with the other boys in the back. He was the coolly distant, sometimes funny, annoyed gravitational pull. I mutely worshiped him. But I wholly misunderstood boys. I thought boys might be like my father, I suppose, built for another century, admiring in women only perseverance, physical strength, quiet elegance, and devotion. I didn’t know most boys looked for the girl who promised the most with her eyes and the strings of her bikini, her head thrown back in an imitation of confidence. The most suggestive thing I did was unhook one of the straps to my one-piece swimsuit in the water, pretend it was an accident, and then ask this golden boy to rehook it for me. I never showed him any of my goods, but I got four seconds of his lingers on the skin of my back, more if they fumbled.
I pulled this ruse more than once. Water from my suit and skin darkened the gravel around my feet. My thighs pushed together suffocatingly at the top, my back stiffly straight in the silence as hook searched for eye. Tick. Tick. After asking for his help, no other words sat in a worried lump between my teeth, no words pulsed down to a barricade at my tonsils, no words even congealed in the white space of my brain. I was play-acting and I didn’t know my lines, but I hoped he’d find me nobly silent. And here is what gets me: It took years for me to wonder why I had nothing to say to him and most other boys. It took even longer for me to wonder what they had to say to me to make me laugh or think or admire them. I suppose back then I was a good animal, picking out the sturdiest, most admired, if dullest, mate. And I suppose right here and now I want more than that for the self I was then.
The sparkling-eyed boy was another species, but he was my species. He made faces, spoke in mocking voices, flailed his arms as he ran in circles around us. He was as silly and annoying and dramatic as I would have been if I’d let myself speak. Maybe he could tell, because he liked me from the start—he threw small stones at the ground near my feet, tried to throw me off the dock and beat me swimming back to its ladder; he made sure I was looking when he acrobated off the rickety platform someone had nailed into the dock years before. He knew no better than I did how to make someone like him. He annoyed the alpha male and he annoyed the alpha female, my sister; he didn’t have a chance.
I’d never spent hot afternoons with boys before, their bodies stripped down to saturated swimsuits, so I can remember their thirteen-, fourteen-year-old bodies as if I’d made a study of them. But I insist that it was not lust that makes me remember the alpha male’s smooth, caramel-colored skin, a layer of padding heralding softness to come, and the sparkling-eyed boy’s tight, freckled skinniness, his limbs hanging loose and too long for his frame. (The alpha male would later play football; the sparkling-eyed boy, basketball.) I can see what they wore then—tube socks, jaggedly cut-off jeans, baseball jerseys. And how they held themselves—the alpha male at the end of the dock, elbows on his knees, slow complacency in his every curve; and the sparkling-eyed boy’s constant movement in and out of the water like a narrow Labrador. His shirtless torso and paleish, hairy legs I remember most poignantly: they were vulnerable in their boyishness, but so starkly free of vanity, they were transcendent.
Yes, the sparkling-eyed boy’s thirteen-year-old body—a body I did not desire at the time, a body that no longer exists—is precious to me. It was a child’s body trembling at a crossroads, wanting to take on the sturdier powers of a man, not yet knowing he’d gain the needs of a man, too. There is something sad and permanent about the loss of a child’s body into a predictable adult’s. It’s as if for a moment at that age the “way of all flesh” might be only a cynical rumor, as if puberty might have promised wings or tails, or violent colors, or otherworldly grace, and then stonily reneged. When I see him now, he is more than himself. He is still lean, but the twitching gangli-ness is buried under height, weight, experience, surfacing only in the resdessness of his mouth and the sad edges of his eyes. His body has been made to fulfill the narrow obligations of the life he has found himself leading. As has mine, yours. You see, and here it really is, we were at that point—all of us have been there—where we could have been anyone, could have decided the most curious things, drawn strange dialogue bubbles over our heads. But every day we had to shed possibilities like hundreds of baby teeth yanking free and scratching down our throats. And the adult teeth came in, real, immovable, carrying their own kernels of decay. We were twelve, thirteen, and we were already losing.
I had realized this a few years before, one night when my parents came in, first one, then the other, to say good night and a prayer. I loved them so fiercely at nine that my chest was crushed by this sudden wisdom that fell on me: I knew that I was growing up and that meant I was going inevitably to change and I would grow distant from my parents and they would no longer be the center of my world. I was so afraid of this premonition that over the next year I dragged all of my neglected dolls and stuffed animals from basement boxes and played with them with manufactured enthusiasm, trying not to monitor my genuineness; and I couldn’t let my parents leave a room without a rib-cracking hug from me. But I knew I was only acting with Joycie, Barry, Dressy Bessy; just as I knew that the smiles I turned on my parents were mixed with a pity at their inevitable loss of me.
Can you pinpoint that moment? When you made a choice before you even knew that choosing was possible, or the terrifying nature of choices? You made a choice that seems ominous now—the flattening of a globe to a map, the map whittling down to directions on the back of a napkin, to one single street sign you’ve stolen and nailed to your wall. You made a choice that wasn’t you, but it slowly became you. So here was one of those moments: I was eleven-almost-twelve, and my sister and I met our first locals up north. There were roughly five boys in front of me, and I had a choice. And even though the sparkling-eyed boy’s heart vibrated through his every twitchy movement; even though his was a pained little soul open to me, legible; even though I could speak whole words to him, I chose the alpha male to moon silently over for years, as the sparkling-eyed boy chose to moon noisily over me. How can you take having a self seriously when it leads you so dramatically astray? It’s true, we have to accept who we have become, but what is this thing I spend time with every day, this thing that is, in fact, “I,” that is “you”? I realize the very question is passé or moot or childish, but doesn’t it bother you? We could have been other selves, and we chose without any sense of the consequences. I chose a premade romantic model, I chose the option that would keep me from being chosen, I chose to be afraid of my own tongue, body, brain—and the choices stayed with me for years. What can I be now? What makes a self? What collection of selves did I bag up, weigh down, and toss into the St. Mary’s River on those impossibly clear summer afternoons, so saturated with light and water and trees there was almost no room for us? I want to understand what I gave away and what I have left. I should feel lucky, I suppose, that we can even remember the taste of possibility, even if we don’t get to swallow. But I am merely hungry, and I remember the look of the sparkling-eyed boy’s ribs showing through his freckled skin. In those small fragments of memory, a lie I like to tell myself: we could have been so many things.