compatriots
“TELL ME EVERYTHING,” I said on our first date.
“Sure.” He took my hand as we walked past the hockey arena.
“Your hands are huge,” I said.
“Once my mother caught me playing with matches, and she punished me by putting my hand in the fire.”
“Once I bit my sister, and my father came home from work and took a bite out of me, here,” I said, pointing to my right forearm.
Survivors, we were. Compatriots.
We met in 1976, at a high school dance. It was the era of Pierre Trudeau and glam rock and the Sex Pistols. He was the boy from out of town. I was the girl who wanted out. Like young people of every generation, we thought nonconformity and the acquisition of authentic wounds to be essential to our freedom. Our scars were there, waiting inside us, scars of disease and damage, but we didn’t yet know how they might undo us.
Richard lived on Blue Mountain, the hill west of Collingwood, Ontario, Canada. His was the place of bohemians, fringe people, adventurers, and artists, the place where I escaped to walk through fields of wild poppies, imagining another, wilder self I might become. I lived in the town nestled in the valley below, next to Georgian Bay, a tiny shipbuilding community full of first-generation immigrants—Scots, Irish, and Italians—a town that would, in our youth, morph into a ski resort for Toronto’s privileged class, who could afford a weekend chalet and a ski pass.
I was a month shy of my seventeenth birthday and already bored with everything about that place: its parochial conversations, its hockey culture, its lack of books. My friend Wendy, a blond minx I’d bonded with the day I’d arrived from Kentucky a decade earlier, had made plans to graduate from high school early and leave for the city. I knew that I had to raise funds for university myself because I was determined to make my own way. I wouldn’t allow myself to become indebted to my authoritarian father, who had ruled my childhood. I was $5,000 and one year of senior classes from my goal of perfect freedom. I waited tables and babysat children and wrote fantasy lists in my journal, which I hid in the back of my closet, in a cigar box.
1. Find the perfect university.
2. Study literature.
3. Buy a car.
4. Travel.
5. Meet interesting, smart people with whom I can have fascinating conversations.
This was why, when Wendy and I arrived at the high school dance in our frayed bell-bottoms, scuffed Frye boots, and shiny lip gloss, we were dateless. Second-wave feminism had swooped us up, and we had no intention of betraying our dreams. En route to the dance, for about ten blocks down narrow chutes made by sidewalk snowdrifts, we drank bootlegged rum mixed with the Pop Shoppe soda our mothers bought by the caseload. The last dance of the year was to feature a band called Liverpool, who played regurgitated Beatles music that was, we thought, so like the fading hippies: a symbol of lost hope. We smoked a cigarette down the last block, blowing white rings into the icy air, the buzz of the booze warming us. Inside the wide glass doors, I took our ski jackets and stored them in the prefects’ room—I’d elected to take on the role of prefect for its obvious benefits of getting away with more while pretending to lead others—while Wen scoped out the scene. In five minutes she swept down the locker-lined hall and took my hand and steered me straight to the folding tables near the front door, where a long line of students waited to pay a few dollars for admission to see the facsimile of the greatest band of all time.
“Don’t look. The guy with the curls,” Wen said, her back to the line so I could seem like I was glancing without gaping. Wendy was tall, with a mass of blond tresses, not easily unnoticed. I was Skipper to her all-Canadian Barbie: tomboy-skinny with flat brown hair to my waist, bright green eyes, and a shy smile. We’d spent most of our young lives up in trees, and since we’d come down, we really tried to understand what the adult game was about but found ourselves mostly rejecting its conventions. Pippi Longstocking, Anne of Green Gables, Scout—these were our girl models, and we saw no reason to abandon their fortitude just because we were growing breasts and desiring boys. Furthermore, no man really counted unless the best friend approved, but we never withheld affection for rebellion, adventure, and impulse, thus only the truly dangerous ones were ever scuttled. I pretended I wasn’t checking out her man.
“He’s cute!” I whispered.
“Hell, yes,” she said.
Then I saw the guy behind him. Dark hair past his wide shoulders, six feet tall at least, in faded corduroys. He took off his ski toque and ran his hands through his bangs. The girl selling tickets said something to him and he smiled, somehow easy and elegant at the same time, etching dimples into his snow-tanned face.
“That one,” I said, as if I were claiming him. And I was.
We staked our positions to observe the boys’ movements. They seemed to be best friends who shared jokes, affection, and a sporty style. But who were they, really? Where had they come from? And most important, how were we going to get them to notice us?
A few dances into the night, Wendy was already in the arms of the boy with the curls, and I was dancing at a polite distance with a sweet kid with freckles. I looked over my dance partner’s shoulder and saw the boy with the long hair and faded cords watching me. I winked. He threw his head back and laughed. Strong jaw, fast instincts, imperfect teeth. I liked all of him instantly. He had big bones and effortless grace, the kind of ease I longed for. It wasn’t love at first sight. I didn’t believe in such things. But it was the kind of lust I’d rarely experienced. I didn’t want to seduce him so much as I wanted to document his steely muscles, understand why his pelvis balanced like a pivot above long, long legs, and crawl behind his eyes to observe his film of the world.
One song later, Richard and I were dancing to “Penny Lane,” communicating in hip thrusts and elbow jerks. Two hours later, in the backseat of a two-door car, we perched on the knees of the boys from out of town while their friends drove us to Wendy’s house, where I was staying for the night. I took every opportunity I could to hang out with her permissive family. She lived three houses down from me on Beech Street, in the middle of a residential grid of tree-lined avenues named for trees. This night, our curfew was an hour later than my curfew would be at home, and better yet, I wouldn’t be questioned about the car in which I’d been riding with boys.
Richard walked me to the back steps, where we always entered our homes. The back, with its boot trays off the kitchen and its solid stairs that avoided the neighbors’ watchfulness.
“Can I call you?” he asked.
I gave him my number, which he memorized upon hearing. “Thanks for the dancing,” I said.
His eyes came close to me then, and his arms went around my hips, and I registered their weight. Something in me calmed. His ease transferred. With his thick hands on my back, I felt effortless and free. Exactly the way I wished to be but never could achieve, my mind constantly jockeying my many responsibilities. His lips touched mine, and they were tender, warm, sweet. I hoped he couldn’t hear my heart beating through my Wonderbra. His fingers stroked the hair at the nape of my neck. No one had ever touched me there, not even me. The nape had been absent of touch, and he had discovered its need. I enshrined that sensation as if it were an artifact of my aliveness. He turned and walked back to the car full of boys, and I watched his hair, which bounced with his steps.
Richard called me the next night. We began a conversation that would endure for decades.
The following Saturday, he picked me up in his aunt’s Volkswagen, and we drove to the local bar, the Arlington Hotel. I posed with a fake ID and got kicked out in a few minutes. Instead of listening to a bar band we walked around on wintry Hurontario Street. I had a chance to study him up close. Broad, athletic, with shoulders like a linebacker’s, a shock of black locks, and bright blue eyes, he was well-read and down to earth, a brilliant raconteur.
On that first date, we stood in front of a furniture store and its window display of La-Z-Boys and rocking chairs.
“What kind of home do you want?” I asked.
“One with music,” he said. “And you?”
“Children,” I said. “Five of them. Really well loved. But not a lot of stuff. Just each other.”
We were playing house. We knew that we were young and likely wouldn’t last. We wanted to talk in ways we hadn’t yet allowed ourselves. We wanted to speak of all of the things we hadn’t been able to say to any other. We entered into an unbounded dialogue each night.
“Get off the phone!” my father yelled.
“Okay, I’ll call you back,” I’d say to Richard, hour after hour. I learned to lift the receiver of the upstairs rotary phone from its cradle and dial slowly, muffling the circular spring with a pillow, and then drag the phone into my room, where I closed the door and whispered, so I wouldn’t be heard. In those conversations I learned he was book-smart: intelligence was how he’d distinguished himself when he was moved from school to school, thirteen over the course of his childhood, although he’d skipped the second grade. Loquacious, magnetic, with a quick wit inherited from his Brit mother, Richard was a yes man, one who could get a yes without ever asking a question.
Or this story. He was the son of a single mom, a child of poverty and violence, abandoned by his father, beaten by an uncle and several drunken stepfathers, but somehow he found the mulish will to become the first in his family to be accepted into college, where he planned to go in the fall.
“I’ve never met anyone with a mind like yours,” Richard said. “Can you come out here to my place one day?”
Two weeks later, I told my mother I was running errands and dashed off to his house on the mountain. I drove the Chevy station wagon my mother insisted was “robin’s egg blue” but was really an opaque metal beast that rusted orange in the salted snow, its back end scarily skidding over patches of black ice.
Richard lived in a nondescript chalet at the base of the Apple Bowl ski run, close to the lodge at Blue Mountain Resort years before investors scooped up nearby land to build condos, restaurants, gift shops, and amusement rides. His house had burned to the ground the year before; the fire had killed their three dogs and destroyed every object of family life they had. This was why the clothing he wore looked borrowed. He’d been given everything by neighbors, who knew his single mother could scarcely afford to rebuild the house.
Now, at eighteen, he lived alone. His sister stayed with her boyfriend in a nearby town; his brother was on an exchange trip in South Africa; and his mother had left for Bermuda, a place that seemed to offer her a greater sense of freedom than what she experienced in North America.
Richard met me at the door of his silent, cold house and brought me to the kitchen, where he was eating peanut butter and crackers and drinking milk. Clean dishes were stacked in the drying rack. Dozens of his mother’s plants lined the windowsill, most of them still alive. He made me a mug of Earl Grey and we sat on a worn brown couch and held hands and talked. He liked to talk more than anyone I’d known, fanciful discussions that wove from personal lore to politics to philosophy. We kissed a long time, and then he showed me to his bedroom: a twin bed, a poster of Bruce Lee, a polar bear print, a dozen medals and trophies from his high school—including Athlete of the Year—and a stack of textbooks. He was a ski instructor in winter, a tennis instructor in the summer, and a vigorous player of football, basketball, volleyball, badminton, and table tennis, so sweaty gear was de rigueur. He’d cleaned up for me; this would be the last time I saw his bedroom floor free of clothing. On the ground near his bed was a well-worn copy of The Sensuous Man. Here is an expert’s guide to becoming the kind of lover that every woman dreams of . . . the cover said. He was studious, even about sex. I hadn’t a clue about my own body, had been waiting for someone lion-hearted enough to unlock its potential. I didn’t dream of a lover who would sensually transport me, unless that included a one-way ticket out of town. That year I’d turned sixteen and had intercourse with my dime-bag drug-dealer boyfriend mostly because my girlfriends were having sex, and I wanted to check losing my virginity off my list. Since then, I’d had sex with a guy friend who was decent and funny. But now I wanted an orgasm. I wanted to discover if there was a man who cared about the clitoris. The earnestness of this mountain boy had lots of promise.
My arms went around his waist. When I touched his body, I felt ribs. I was thin because I smoked and was a teenage vegetarian. Richard was thin because he was starving. He deposited his mother’s welfare check, paid the mortgage, insurance, and utilities, and whatever was left he used for groceries. Most of the adults in his life knew that he had no car, that he was fatherless, and that his mother had absented herself, and they found ways to provide him with meals several nights a week. Richard learned early to live alone, and with few resources. Like most young men, he was constantly ravenous. He appeared to be surviving by his wits.
“How do you get home?” I asked, as we lay curled in his tiny bed. His school was nearly twenty miles west, in a district that served rural students.
“Hitchhike,” he said. “If I want to play sports, I have to. The bus leaves early, and I have to stay late. I’ve hitchhiked every night for years. How about you? How do you get places?”
“Today, I lied to my mother and took her car. I have a few hours.”
His feet hung off the end of the mattress—he’d grown too tall for his childhood bed. He asked if he might explore. Everywhere.
I answered, “Please!” with a look I now imagine—decades later, and through the obfuscation of this particular memory, for who can see oneself?—as entreating. Every gesture he made was gallant. No man I’d met had held me with such devotion. If a woman’s first orgasm can be said to mark the loss of her virginity, then that winter afternoon, I gave him mine.