by Amy Benson
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”
Guttering
The moon is the heart of the love of the world, I say from my dusty patch of grass next to my rented house in New Jersey—the Garden State, one long strip mall, one spreading cancer red zone. It wells in compassion, dries into a slivered ache, and wells again.
But the stars, oh, the stars are ever-dim, separated from me by more than light-years. Tonight I feel most acutely their feeble blurring. I have said occasional, hateful things to the sidewalk, the mirror, my date, because they won’t quiet the lights of the refineries for even one night. The starflecks in my veins are guttering out, and I am stumbling into walls, buying fashion magazines.
Tonight I cannot say, Isn’t it sad and funny and incontestable that we are piercing our eyes with streetlights and headlights and city lights and letting them bleed all over our sunken cheeks. Tonight I must put away irony because my heart is a sliver of an ache.
It is impossible to know the truth of the stars, to know the secrets of a leaf, to know how you look to anyone else in the world. It is impossible, that is, to keep your bearings once you have asked where you are. And yet, I can’t help but think that the sparkling-eyed boy has the wisdom of an insider. In my memory, his movements are sure; his heart is round and full, far as he is from bright clusters of humans. He lives with the stars and the trees and the water inside himself such that he needn’t ever think of them or even see them, as one might live and die in the same place without ever finding it on a map. Why fumble about for what is inside, holding your organs in place.
I was only a visitor to the stars, though, and the trees and the lake, the reeds, the mud, the
sumac, the tamarack, the mint, whitecaps, cedar, wintergreen, bracken, micah, silt, seaweed, and the stars, the stars. Every summer night I walked home from my grandparent’s cabin down the path, my head tilted back, feet left to fend for themselves. This was my dessert, an endless bowl of sugar crystals, deeper than I could ever sink my spoon. I brushed my teeth outside in the field even as I choked myself on the stars’ grainy thickness. But this was, as it turned out, a timed exercise, like a pie-eating contest. Someone held out a stopwatch every June and said: You have from now until September to have your fill. Over many summers, I stopped feeling a singing in my blood and little hairs raising on my arms at the sight of the sky. The sense that something important, dangerous, fathomless, must always be happening under such a sky, turned into a feasting, a gorging of sky to mouth, a race to fix starlight and portent in my blood. The sky was a showy display of plenty, a trembling nest of sparkle like a bramble quivering with ripe raspberries ready to fall and rot in the dirt. The first hint of death for me was the dimming of the sky come September, when I was again under the jurisdiction of vigilant suburban night lights. I learned that plenty had nothing to do with permanence, so the ripe stars had to be fixed in the bucket, eaten until the juice ran out the sides of my mouth and the seeds clotted my teeth. I learned the refrain: Take a last look, take a last look. It’s going to be a long time.
I can count the number of stars, now, in the uneven rectangle of sky framed by my roof, the roof next door, the roof behind me, and the roof across the street. And I do count them several times in the approximately seven minutes it takes to smoke a cigarette. It’s not difficult—there are only eight stars, and they take no comforting shape, no animal, warrior, or kitchen utensil.
The sparkling-eyed boy hardly ever looked up like this—small, steady sips for the boy with the well right next to his house. I rode home in his pickup truck with him one night, along the shore of Lake Huron. A rolling lake, it isn’t the deepest of the lakes, not the warmest or the most dangerous, the rockiest or the most useful, but it is, to me, the happiest. Its name is a people, like the sound of a bird, like a particular gray clarity, like pink, green, white, auburn rocks among the gray. He suddenly pulled over, mid-silence, pulled me from the truck, carried me down to the wet sand, and sank down, holding me tightly about the knees. He was silently crying against my jeans, and I froze. I couldn’t ask him why or touch his hair; I could only look up and find his heart resting in the Big Dipper, not a drop spilled. His mouth, the swath of Orion’s belt; his eyes, the North Star; his dimples, multiplied and flung to each horizon; his nerves strung out along the Milky Way, shifting, changing, fading and brightening.
Is this what I want from the sparkling-eyed boy, then? I want him to have triumphed where I failed. I want him to be an emblem of what won’t ever be possible: to be of the stars and not just a visitor to them, a longer for them. It was important, dangerous, fathomless, to stand over a crying teenage boy turning himself inside out on the sand. But I merely watched as if I were preserving the moment instead of living it. Time—the things we think it takes from us—allows us the dramas of our lives: Take a last look, take a last look. It’s going to be a long time.
Witness, Summer 1996
I spent my summers in the woods and the water and in the reeds somewhere in between. I staggered everywhere, drunk on sunlight and the colors green and blue, covered in burrs, mosquitoes, leeches, holding everything up to my nose with violent fingertips, tasting things that grew on the ends of branches. I carried heavy objects like logs, rocks, stringers of drooling fish, until my arms were round and freckled. I walked over grass and rocks and bees and rusted nails until my soles were too thick to know better. I knew the insides of milkweed, cattails, bull rushes, and gooseberries better than I will ever know anything.
Every Labor Day, when I had to return to school, I begged to be left up there instead of returning to Detroit with the rest of my family. It didn’t work. In a vigil of mourning, I pressed my face to the car window during the seven-hour drive home, watching blankets of pine turn into fields, turn into house upon house, my chest heaving on emptiness. I hoped I would quit breathing entirely when we pulled into our driveway, but my lungs managed to crinkle and swell, crinkle and swell. I wanted to prove my loyalty by being permanently inconsolable, even by the porch swing, my favorite part of the house. That, too, never quite worked. I became well practiced at dividing myself into pieces, my favorite piece cut out every fall and set aside until the next summer.
I went to college and left that self behind to carry on without me, reeling under the pines. For four years I didn’t even go back to visit, my pale and tender feet safe in black socks and heavy shoes. And this very fact terrifies me—that we could love so wholly and so variably. We are dangerous, it seems, walking around with so many, many selves catching and refracting the light or lying pale and eyeless in the caves of us. How can we hope to love any thing or person in the same way forever, or expect them to love us? How can we ever even explain ourselves or account for our actions in transparent language?
There was a boy I left, too. You know him as the sparkling-eyed boy; I knew him that way, too—he liked to kill warm animals with his bow and arrow. He liked to fish with hooks and hand-held nets and lose himself in the woods on his four-wheeler. He liked to lay his hands on things and transform them: wood into furniture, ripe hay into bales, my hand into his hand. He used to say he would never live in a trailer, he wanted to go to school, he could see himself teaching shop. But I couldn’t imagine him somewhere else, losing any part of himself, having to make himself up from scratch.
Seven years after I’d last seen them together—this boy, this place—we met again, and I am desperate to remember any clear detail about this first meeting. It seems that the moments we’d most like to play, rewind, play, rewind, and play again until the tape runs thin are the moments most unreliably recorded. In these first few reunions with the sparkling-eyed boy, I can see the participants, watch their lower jaws drop and reconnect, tongues moving subtly against their teeth, but I can hear nothing, and they look like they’re under water and I’m holding the wrong end of a telescope up to my eye.
…
I can tell you what I remember.
Exposition: I was twenty-five and visiting the Upper Peninsula for a long summer weekend with my sister and her young daughter. I had taken no time off from school—I was freshly graduated from a three-year MFA program and about to enter a Ph.D. program. I didn’t know who I was besides a student, but I thought I knew who the sparkling-eyed boy was. He had stayed and been preserved in tar. He was a living fossil to me, held up to a tawny light, named, well documented, carried in my pocket as if I had the right to rub my fingerprints over him or bury him in my palm.
The dreams featuring him had begun a few years before and were the kind that filter into your day, your week, and make you feel a mist of well-being and then the sudden, clammy loss of it all at once. Eventually, he began to become a small part of my writing. My friend joked that I had found a muse. And he drove a pickup truck.
Rising Action: About a month before our visit, I wrote him that awful letter (“I can’t believe it’s been seven years! Can you? So much has happened!”) all sterility and exclamation points, as if I had been settling accounts before my death, smoothing the way for a terminal visit. (“We’ve been friends for a long time. Your wife won’t mind if we visit, right? Let’s get together!”) And then, when I was actually there, I did nothing. I was too scared to call him, to find out how he had reacted to the letter, to how I’d left him without word, and to the seven years I’d been away. I was going to let this visit slip past and let myself slip into yet another collection of selves without finding out how this old one might have finished.
But my sister knew nothing of the regrets, the dreams, the stories, and she’s always had the knack for talking over awkwardness, so her tongue intervened. I found myself in the sparkling-eyed boy’s best friend’s house, sitting rigidly in
a chair, a patchy smile on my face. His friend was on the phone: “Hey ——, whatcha doing? . . . I told you I’d help you do that backhoeing tomorrow night. . . . Yeah, after we finish with the O’Dair place. . . . So get your ass over here. Bring——, too. We’re havin’ some beers. . . . Guess what. The Benson girls are here. [I cringed at how that turned us into caricatures, an afterthought—easily summed up, easily dismissed.]. . .Yeah, both of them, Janet and Amy. Okay, see you.” A few minutes later I managed to ask, “So, are——and his wife coming over?”
I think I went to the bathroom three times in the twenty minutes before they arrived. My hair, naturally a light brown, was dyed black then and was straggly from a day at the beach, my lipstick had gone the way of the lake, and my eyes were bloodshot—like a dog’s at the vet. I didn’t want to come out of the bathroom: I tried brushing my hair with his friend’s wife’s brush, ratting it into some kind of shape. I tried running cold water and pressing my chilled fingertips to my eyelids. Sure there was no feature he would recognize, I wished I had the sharp edges of a nametag on my T-shirt: “Hi! My Name Is Amy!” But I had to come out, and there he was—tall, almost grown-up-looking, married, with a six-pack of Budweiser and a terrible mustache. But that smile—he was smiling the smile I always thought was just for me. It was the only manifestation of the joke we’d been sharing since I was eleven and he was twelve. His deep dimples, his crinkled eyelids, told me we were still sharing it and it was still funny. Apparently, I need someone to look at me like that—even when it’s meaningless, even when it’s cheap or dangerous—because I was suddenly smitten in a way I hadn’t known I was when I was seventeen. I didn’t have a name for it then, and so I’d let that self sift through my fingers. Though at this first reunion I could have named the feeling I had when the sparkling-eyed boy walked through the door nostalgia or anxiety about my uncertain future, or, worse, proprietorship, I chose to call it love.