Big Red over Bud Light formed the husk of his tongue. He offered it to me and I took it inside my mouth as if it were an honor to do so, as if we were being married in first the front seat and then the back. It was only my second kissing session, and I remember the sensations of the night—the beery cinnamon taste sudden in my mouth, the surprising gumminess of his skin. I feel, you understand, not just remember, the awkwardness of my body next to his, how my legs and elbows and neck had no idea how to turn themselves supple. He would remember nothing, I’m sure, of my dim freckles, arm hair, or wide-open eyes; this should make me angry, I suppose. He was quite drunk and I was sober, always sober. I had known only the soft, dry forearms of my mother and girlfriends, and his arms were nothing like theirs.
I was fifteen and he was the golden boy, not the sparkling-eyed boy. The details here are only shorthand to our shared experience. Conjure your first real crush, a crush so arduous it was like having a job—with heavy lifting, office gossip, and endless negotiating of nonexistent signs (Was that a longer-than-usual look my way? Did he play that song on purpose?). I had had a crush on him since I was twelve, but it had grown acute in the last year. In high school, more than 350 miles away, I had been writing his initials, MIT, with a little mitten drawing in the top corner of every single notebook page. I’m sure I humiliated myself in other, less spectacular ways as well. I cried over him, of course, and I practiced my trumpet, shut in our little shower house behind the cabin, working myself into a romantic apex as I figured out how to play radio love songs, eyes streaming at the wobbly notes of love unreturned.
This is the boy who, on the Fourth of July, at the community center dance in the small town twenty miles down the road, asked me if I wanted to go to the car with him to get some gum. Big Red, to quicken the pulse.
I have always had trouble mastering lust for lust’s sake—but I’m not boasting. I consider this a weakness. For me, lust has almost always had to mean something, to be justified. My need to be special has often overwhelmed other, savvier needs—for example, the need to read people appropriately or to learn from experience. If the boy I “loved,” miracle of miracles, wanted me, some deep recognition must have passed between us, I reasoned. He must have spotted my elusive saving graces. Sometimes, I failed to realize, a boy just wants.
Later that night, my sister and someone else came out to drive us home. I sat in the back seat with the golden boy, pinned under the weight of his sleeping head. I was mortified to be the one people might talk about (What did they do back there? Not much, actually), but I was also proud. I had won something. I had been chosen, finally, as his special girl. And with him passed out on my shoulder, having kissed me and, rather lazily, I later realized, tried to feel me up, I was already the long-suffering girlfriend.
Since this story must seem familiar, you probably already know how it ends, but I’ll tell you anyway. Two days later we all convened again on the dock for our swimming ritual, me sneaking looks at him, half-guilty memories of his foreign skin close at hand. I wondered what was supposed to happen next. How did people “go together,” besides mingling spit in the back seats of cars? I could think of nothing to do with him beyond that night. After everyone else left, he asked me if he could give me a ride on his motorbike the quarter mile off the dock and around to the beginning of our family road.
Riding on the back of a motorcycle is clearly a prelude to sex—the full-body embrace, calves to cheek pressed against his back, his neck. No one doubts a man and a woman riding up to a restaurant together on a motorcycle are slamming roughly together morning and night. I’ve only been on a motorbike that once, but I knew even then it felt like the sex I hadn’t yet had. To hang on for that brief ride, my inner thighs coated his outer thighs, my hands, water-chilled, molded his abdomen. I was restrained, though. It wasn’t in me to disbelieve what everyone seemed to be saying: girls who give too much away give it all away, every bit of power they doubtfully had in the first place. A fucked girl, in other words, is fucked. So I rounded my shoulders and kept my breasts off his back. When I got off, I could still feel the press of him along my legs. Definitely sexier than the back seat of the car. Of course, this is when he dumps me.
Eyes on the gravel, usually placid hands suddenly agitated . . . There’s this girl I’ve been seeing on Drummond Island. I guess we’ve been sort of going out. So, I guess that’s it. Just so you know. And that was it.
He was just a boy, worth, perhaps, half a chapter. When my good friend happened to meet him years later, she couldn’t believe he was the boy to whom I gave years of my earliest, purest crush; we were so incompatible. I should have been grateful to him, though. Maybe he seems a bastard, using me for my warm mouth and the scent of hair spray rubbed off at my neck—but he could have gone on using me. He might have later put his hands under my sweater, guided my fist to his crotch, unclenched my fingers and rubbed them up and down; he might have kneaded the muscles of my neck until they gave and then pushed my face toward his open zipper. I might have reasoned to myself: Well . . . I’ve loved him for so long . . . And I could have continued to use him for a bewildering imitation of love. But he didn’t let that happen. He looked at my frozen face and told me, No. Thank the gods for him, really.
I saw a shrink for a time, I’m not ashamed to say. I was desperate once in my life, had to fight the urge to step into traffic, lean too far over the railing of a bridge over a New Jersey river. I pictured again and again pieces of my head spread on the wall behind the tiny futon that used to be my bed, a small, chill gun I didn’t own dropped to my lap. This is bad ethics: I shouldn’t let the people who will worry about me know this. What does it serve to speak about those urges that have nothing to do with making life more complex? Suicide is the ultimate simplification, the rest from difficulty and industry. And shouldn’t the project of our lives be complexity? Doesn’t this story locate moments that bloom or fester with dis-ease? As children, we learn the dimensions of the things around us in 2D. Then, in adolescence, we learn those things all over again, in 3D. We learn that, say, principles, rules, states of being, people, are reversible; that when you flip something inside out, you might forget what it was a moment before, it is now so unlike itself. Then, what we didn’t want to know, the reverse of all of our expectations, becomes tenacious memory.
Anyway, the doctor, my “lady,” as I called her, once asked me to remember experiences from my childhood in which I witnessed anger. Oddly, it wasn’t my father’s frequent, slow-burn pouting that came to mind. Nor my sister’s whipcord insults, her door slammed in my face. Nor was it, of course, my own icy retreats. It was the face of my usually gentle, kind, and padent mother twisted up, her cheeks and eyes flushing red. Her voice, when she finally got to me on the road (moments after the golden boy had sputtered away) and grabbed my upper arm until her fingers practically met through the skin, sounded at once strangled, heartbroken, and (did I imagine it?) triumphant.
I was not abused; most people weren’t. But I was—we all have been—marked by fallible people, since there is no other kind. And we do not learn democracy, if we learn it at all, from the way we process experience. For what stays with us, perhaps even defines us, are the anomalies, the irretrievable bad acts of good people (not the habitual misdeeds of troubled people). It is our own goodness that gives us the power to be terrible. I am in my therapist’s office learning to unmake the things that have made me, and I remember my mother’s rare anger first. The reverse gesture. The star falling out of the sky. It seems hardly fair that the best one of our family unit should be remembered for the moment she fell through herself, through the careful web of her own forbearance.
Imagine holding gauze to the skinless stomach and chest of a man, picking stones and glass, bugs and the wheel of a Matchbox car out of the flesh below where the skin should be. Imagine working an ER and seeing women open like carrion, having given their eyes and hearts and pancreases. Or the skulls of men made liquid, the features of their faces turned inside out. Motorcyclists all. My mother was a nurse, and what authority she was denied elsewhere she wielded freely for the sake of our health. She had told us many times, with eyes rolled up as if already seeing us without legs or scalp or teeth, never to ride a motorcycle. But I hadn’t thought “motorcycle” when I saw the empty space on the back of the golden boy’s meager dirt bike, and the dirt road had been empty as always.
From where our private road begins, it curves along the shore about thirty yards, shielded by high grasses and raspberry brambles and saplings. It is usually a cool, quiet place unfolding to a short sequence of Bensons’ cabins in various states of disrepair. For me, it has always held the promise of oasis, of the return home. But that day I had to walk back through images of my failure. I had been used, and there was nothing special in me. My mother, though, having watched me get on the motorbike, was waiting to show me just how special I was to her.
They were right—he was right, she was right. But they were terrible, too, coming at me in brutal succession, with both betrayal and shame, and I cried in the shower until my eyes swelled nearly shut. He might have told a prettier lie; she might have slowed her drive to my arm once she’d seen my fallen face.
Surprise—when you expect one thing and get another. The moment in which someone makes you see the richness of his or her potential, or reveals the way the world resists our imagined narratives. Churches would have us believe that faith is terribly difficult. It is not. We are built for belief, for blocking out contradiction, for the all-or-nothing, for trusting in only one aspect of a person or experience at a time. To resist the easy slide into death we must learn complexity, but it is difficult to remember—at all times—that everything is always also its opposite. Every romance has a bundle of tawdry motives; every act of love has a flesh-parting pinch. To remember the inside-out days and find them good takes everything we have. But it gives us even more. I am pathetic I am brave. You are narrow you are fervent. My mother is angry she is generous, grieved, doing the best she can.