by Radclyffe
“Will you help me, A.J.?” he asked, and wiped at his face.
“Help you do what?”
“Set up the pool. We can use it for the rest of the summer.”
“Can we?” I asked. “I mean, will your mom let you?”
“I already asked her. She said it was okay.”
“Sure I’ll help you, Teddy. It’ll be great! Just you and me.”
“Don’t tell anybody that I was crying, will ya?”
“I won’t tell, Teddy. I promise.”
It took most of that day to set up the pool, and all evening to fill it, but our hard work was worth it. We had great fun, and I’d never felt closer to anyone than I did to Teddy that day. We had worked together like a team, and although I had the feeling that I was a poor stand-in for his father, I also had the feeling that Teddy really appreciated my presence. Without knowing it, I’d passed over into some new territory in Teddy’s mind, and he began to talk to me about things I had the feeling he’d never spoken about with anyone else. My new standing made me feel special and scared me at the same time. I wasn’t equipped to handle the width and breadth of what sometimes came pouring out of him, until it dawned on me that all Teddy really wanted and needed was someone to listen to him. I could do that, and I did.
Mostly what he talked about in the weeks that followed was his father. It seemed they had the kind of relationship that I knew I’d never have with my own father, that I’d seldom seen with any of my friends, and that I suspected didn’t often exist. Like so many of the things that we need to remember in a certain way, they often take on a life of their own. So it may have been with Teddy’s memories of his father—the idealized man he wished to hold on to and cherish. Or just maybe they did have something very special. It didn’t really matter. What did matter was the loss and acute pain. It had been two years since his dad had died and Teddy was just beginning to deal with it. His words often left me feeling frustrated and confused. I tried to relate, but found it difficult. That sort of loss still wasn’t in my vocabulary of experiences and emotions. My dad and I were hardly the best of friends, but I was suddenly very glad he was still alive.
I suspect I fell in love with Teddy that summer, or at least with the idea of being in love with him. What he felt for me I would never know.
The unrelenting heat continued on throughout August, and most days we spent swimming around in circles in the pool we’d put together, or playing badminton, or just hanging around up in Teddy’s room. Sometimes I felt guilty that we were spending so much time at his house. My mom hardly ever saw me anymore, although she knew where I was, and that seemed to satisfy her. On a number of occasions I asked Teddy if he wanted to come over to my house, but he usually just shrugged, or simply said no, or else he ignored the question completely. He seemed more comfortable surrounded by what he knew, what was familiar, and I would notice that Teddy’s mother (who didn’t react to most things), did seem much more relaxed when Teddy was nearby. Besides, Teddy had the swimming pool—the deciding factor in the sweltering summer.
I knew the time would soon come when our friends would return from camp, or vacation, and with that, Teddy and I would most probably go back to the way things were before—before propinquity brought us together and changed everything. I hoped I was wrong, only I knew better. Perhaps that was why Teddy initiated the game that day, and why I so willingly allowed myself to go along with it.
Teddy seemed different that day: distracted, moody, somewhere else. He was quieter than usual and made a big deal over who wore which snorkel and which mask, and that we had to wait until his mother went up to her room to take her afternoon nap before we could go into the pool again. He said it was because we had just eaten, but I knew that wasn’t why. It had never stopped us before.
“Watch this,” he said, putting the snorkel in his mouth and clearing his mask. He took the old skeleton key we sometimes played with in the pool when we pretended to search for sunken treasure and threw it up into the air. It entered the water with a small splash. Teddy dove down to get it, coming up just in front of me. “Now it’s your turn,” he said, and handed me the key. I took it from him and repeated the process. When I came up, Teddy was behind me. He put his hands around my waist and told me to swim. “Let’s see how long we can pull each other around the pool.”
“Okay,” I said, and put my face back into the water, continuing to breathe through the snorkel. Suddenly I felt Teddy’s left hand move off my waist and down my stomach to my crotch. He just left it there, waiting to see what I’d do. I didn’t do anything. I couldn’t. Desperately, I concentrated as hard as I could on circling around the inside of the pool, but my body had a mind of its own and before very long Teddy had the answer he’d been waiting for. He reached inside my trunks and began to fondle my now fully erect penis. Breathing through the snorkel was suddenly significantly more difficult. Then, when it was my turn to hold on to Teddy, I reciprocated in kind, finding his penis already hard and a great deal bigger than I had expected. I had to wonder if I’d be so fortunate in a few more years.
I could have floated around the pool like that all day long, until both of us looked like prunes, but after maybe ten or fifteen minutes (I’d lost all track of time), Teddy suggested we go inside. He said he had something in his room he wanted to show me. We dried off quickly and quietly entered the house so as not to disturb his mother, then gingerly climbed the stairs to his room. I didn’t know what to expect, and my heart felt like a jackhammer in my chest.
The room was heavy with expectation and smelled of chlorine from our suits. Teddy locked the door behind us.
“Take off your bathing suit so you don’t drip on the rug,” he directed me, while he stripped his off. I watched him as he did it. I took my suit off, feeling more embarrassed than I’d ever felt in my life, and rolled it up inside my towel. Teddy pulled back the sheets on his bed and got in. “Come in with me,” he said. “It feels nice.” I got in next to him and stared up at the ceiling, afraid to look anywhere else. I was too nervous to move. All I could hear was the sound of my own blood rushing through my ears. Teddy tentatively placed his hand on my shoulder. I knew I had to look at him. When I did he just smiled at me and pulled me over to him. Our bodies smelled of summer, suntan lotion, and the pool. Teddy pulled me on top of him. He held me so tight that I thought I’d have to stop breathing. Then he rolled us over onto our sides. That was when he kissed me. It wasn’t much of a kiss, but it was enough. We continued to hold on to each other, rubbing our bodies together until Teddy came. Teddy just lay quietly next to me, his face in his pillow. We said nothing for a long time.
“You won’t tell anyone,” he finally said, without looking at me.
“No,” I answered. “Of course not.”
I suddenly felt horrible. Not at what we had done, but because I had no one to talk to about what I was feeling, or about Teddy’s tears that day in the shed, or all the things he’d talked to me about over the last few weeks, or the fact that I somehow knew Teddy and I would never be together like this again. At that moment I thought I’d explode.
Teddy rolled over to face the wall.
“I think what I miss the most is when my dad would come into my room at night, before I’d go to bed,” he said quietly, and with more sadness than I ever imagined possible. “We’d talk about what I’d done all day, and what he’d done, and then he’d hold me tight in his arms for a few minutes and stroke my back until I fell asleep.” He was silent again before he added. “It was a long time ago. I was very little.”
I hesitated, unsure of what to do, but then placed my hand on Teddy’s back and began to rub him ever so lightly. That’s when I heard him say, I love you. But I was never sure if he was talking to his father, or to me.
My Lips
Joseph Aviv
When I’m two, my lips loosen in parted bliss as my mother tickles my back in slow rhythms. She coos in her native Hebrew tongue and traces her finger-rakes across my skin, stilling the rise
and fall of my soft torso. I delight in being her greatest dependent, the younger child. Julie, a year my senior, is a brave pioneer, paving the way for me, and I am a lucky boy without reason to fear the future.
Our father is gone when we wake, and the yard is fresh for play. When it rains, we watch with an almost religious awe, and, indoors, create forests of sheets and sofa cushions. I play dress-up with Julie, and our mother stands by the kitchen window, not allowing us to know her, a young stranger kept so far from home. Swimming in silliness, Julie and I will not realize that we, like the rain, have kept her inside.
*
When I’m three, my lips sing nonsensically into the space above our kitchen table. Perched on a high chair and with an occasional tug at the itchy elastic of a birthday hat, I faintly offer wishes to myself, Abby ber day do you, abby ber day do you. My mother has made a chocolate cake, and my father, always on the opposite side of the camera, documents the event. His father, a once-tyrannical dad and a retired dentist, is my eccentric, animated grandfather. He enters the room flailing his arms and shaking his hips, singing, “It’s birthday time for Josephy, it’s birthday time for the guy!” I watch him, fascinated in my high chair. A flustered toddler, I am hardly a “guy.” A combination of clown and hermit, he makes a strange guy himself.
My father sits silently behind his video camera, zooming in. Grandma and Aunt Karen sit at the table, shielding their faces from my father’s camera. “I didn’t have time to put my face on today,” one pleads. “Oh you poor thing, Scarlet,” the other shoots back, placing her finger over a mole.
Later, Grandpa crawls on the floor, snapping his teeth like a crocodile, and Julie and I take turns on his back. There is a tinge of danger in the sharp, jerky movements and loud nasal voice that accompany his antics. Julie and I shriek with laughter when we sense the aggression rising in this large man body. It’s all play, but the proximity between affection and danger is a new thrill, a possibility.
*
When I’m four, my lips fold inward like kneaded dough. I realize for the first time the power of my words and the power of my silence. We’ve made the move to Israel, but I have not. My teachers do not acknowledge my words in English. It is their way of helping me to make the transition. Instead of asking for mayim, “water” in Hebrew, I remain thirsty. We take walks through broken gravel and orange orchards, through wood chips and plastic slides. Palm leafs and stray cats decorate the sandy ground plains of our new world, where I spend more time alone by the playground fence.
*
In bed, I wait for my mother, needing the tickly curls of her mane, the smiling eyes, the animated voice. When it is my father who enters, I try to brush him off, to pick him out like eggshell from batter. He does not know how to express hurt. If he is broken, he is also invisible. He is a fuzzy, unthreatening monotone. And I, demanding his leave, am impatient and hot-tempered, my thick brown hair needing to be smoothed. I continue to wait for my mother. When my eyes have closed for the night, sending me to an ocean of warmth, my mother will read her Hebrew mystery novel in bed, and she too will wait.
*
When I’m four and a half my lips stretch outward in a tightening circle, releasing shrieks of pain. Every morning, my nursery teachers try to calm me as my mother stands outside the door, waiting to hear the tears stop and holding back her own. We’ve returned to New York, to an apartment near the site of my father’s childhood. In Israel, bombs are scattering certainty, and my grandparents are mourning the departure of their American grandchildren. Julie and I hurriedly enter picture frames on their nightstands. We smile simple smiles, me with thick eyelashes and gaps in my teeth, Julie under a curly black mop of hair, eyes blue and curious. It is inconsequential to me that I’ve visited a bomb shelter this year, that I’ve worn a gas mask. I am more shaken by the crying that pulses through me on school mornings. When it stops, I explore the toys of the classroom’s perimeter, and I make crayon irises on paper, holding the crayons stiffly, but smoothing them across the page in a soft, raking rhythm.
*
When I’m five, my lips pout and yank my brows downward in selfish frustration. My lifted arms are met with apologetic refusal for the first time. Walking on my own feet becomes what I deem a premature necessity. We are in Disney World, and a secret intruder has removed our mother from us. Our father becomes newly present, mediating between myself and my mother, who grows faint and removed. A new sparkle in her eyes startles me, and I can’t reach it. She is distracted from my extended arms, and my father tries to hush me.
Julie leads me away into a fantasy of dancing puppets and lights that flicker in the dark. “It’s a small world” echoes in the black cave water of the ride. Julie smiles sweetly. In my torment, her ease is an inaccessible enigma of innocence and maturity. She is an example for my own growth, everyone says.
When back at home, tears collect in the corners of my nauseated, pregnant mother’s eyes. She lies imprisoned on our couch with pulled hair and other marks of her needy kindergartener. She is defenseless against my nagging and stunned by my inability to empathize. I have tugged on her, pleading for her to return into herself, to attend to me again, but I’ve failed and left her biting her lip to hold back the pain.
*
When I’m six, Zoe’s tiny head attracts my lips. It’s like a warm ball of dough lined with soft peach fuzz. I can’t seem to kiss her enough, and I share in my mother’s delight. Julie and I sit on either side of my mother, soaking in the special voice and touch offered to the new baby. It’s been a while since we’ve heard this sugary voice, but it never disappears after Zoe’s birth. She will always insist on diminutive affection; she will fear growing up and fight it like a disease. When I am in college and return for visits home, she will cling to me, hiding in nurture and reassuring herself that the real world is still a world away.
Becoming an older sibling places me in an unfamiliar role, one that I ought to be very proud of, according to my relatives and friends of my parents. I grow fascinated with Zoe, my perfect little sister. We dress her in fuzzy winter hats decked with silk-rose garlands. In the winter I watch my mother transform her into an Eskimo bundle, a picture-perfect munchkin with lips that pout for a beloved pacifier. Zoe changes me. With her in my arms, I become aware of myself as a superior, a protector. I look to my mother and imitate her verbal gestures, squeaking to Zoe for a smile. The house is warm with a new tenderness that she’s brought, and we feel more than ever like a family.
On Saturday afternoons, we play with Zoe while my mother prepares brunch and my father sits by the computer or reclines on the sofa. Sometimes when my father lies down to read his dental periodicals, we sit on him or tug at his glasses, pulling them off his face and sometimes putting them over our own eyes. His matter-of-fact annoyance both embarrasses and encourages us, and we continue to search for him, to remove invisible barriers between us, to try to see what he sees.
*
When I’m nine, my lips strike me in my bathroom mirror as I brush my hair before bed. I think that they are red—lipstick red. We’ve eaten spicy tomato sauce at dinner. My lower lip is full, but hungry for stimulation. Ice cream, smacking, kisses. I tilt up my chin and watch my lips become seductive against my long, thick eyelashes. I am a nine-year-old boy feeling beautiful in secret. This feeling is foreign to Julie, I think, and I keep it from her. Julie has become a model big sister and a responsible, freckled treasure. My mother reserves special feelings for her, I think, which she releases in smiles and affectionate sounds offered at unpredictable moments. When she is pinning up Julie’s hair for a ballet lesson or painting her nails against tissue sheets on the carpet, a part of me becomes raw, and I bandage it with spunk and feigned arrogance.
In the car, on one trip to Staples for school supplies, I tell my mother that I fear I could be gay. I’ve heard the word only a handful of times, and it’s always felt foreign, irrelevant. But I’ve decided that normal boys don’t want to be beautiful. My mother assures me that I am
much too young to worry about such things. I’m not gay, just sensitive. I have two sisters, after all.
Rooted in my mother’s nest and shielded by Julie’s arms, I grow in a secret place, dancing wildly in my sanctuary and finding sleep still in the strokes of my mother’s fingers. Zoe, now a preschooler, quietly observes my hyper antics. Sometimes she joins me, leaping through the house and using silly voices to tease Julie, who sits in a practical quiet and rolls her eyes, secretly jealous I hope.
*
When I’m twelve my lips stiffen and resist themselves. Their inactivity spurs a new increase of motion in my brain. To my surprise, my body is growing into a guy. No longer a boy, I am faced with new rules of personal expression and social decision making. In a crowded cafeteria, guys sit in rows, the cute ones with spiky hair and athletic T-shirts. I’ve tried to put gel in my hair, but my brown waves will not yield to hard lines. I decide to train myself at home. The easiest way to be a guy, I find, is to be silent. Silence can imply strength. Julie teases me for the pseudo-spikes in my hair and the new Adidas wardrobe. She has found a comfortable circle of friends and dresses in simple sweaters. My mother must assume that I’ve begun my journey to manhood. I sense a distance between us, and I think she is trying to let go of me, to encourage my growth. I am falling inside, afraid and uncomfortable with where I am going. Stifled smiles and unspoken words accumulate and roll like marbles in my head, side to side in painful and distracting chaos. My lips, like locked doors, refuse to release them. They assume a new rigidity, a painful distance from the nights spent loosely parted against my pillow when my mother stroked my back.
*