by Amy Benson
It’s lonely never knowing a story, having no one to tell your own. Maybe someday I’ll hand the sparkling-eyed boy a thick shuffle of these papers; but he will hand me nothing.
And yet what I have done with words to the smell of lake water; to the sweet ache of my friendship with the sparkling-eyed boy; to my father’s better impulses, crushed; to my own sadnesses, which might not seem so sad if I didn’t dress them and prop them up in a circle around me, sometimes makes me sleepless with regret. I must say to myself: You have changed irrevocably your stories, his stories. You have misunderstood, misrepresented, misspoken, misstepped, missed, missed. Leave the sparkling-eyed boy alone. Spare the petrification of his sinewy limbs, his healthy organs, glistening lungs, perfectly taut kidneys, which you have no right to imagine, the impulses of his brain, which you will never rightly imagine. When you return this summer to visit, close your eyes as you pass his house set back near the woods. Pretend it is still a field of tall weeds and wildflowers untouched by human tool for a hundred years since the first settlers tried doggedly to farm the rock-choked soil. Imagine your adolescence without his russet head next to yours, the imprint of his gaze holding you up, his fingers teaching yours to bale hay. Imagine there is nothing he could write to you that you want to know.
Keep quiet and still.
Not another word.
Two Stories of Frustration, Summer 2000
1.
I have a stupid heart—though not stupider than most, I suppose—assiduously trained to string itself out on heartache; bereavement as a drug, satisfaction as a poison. I am a rock-and-roll cliché. Hell, I’m a country music cliché.
It is now Monday, and on Sunday I visited with the sparkling-eyed boy’s best friend and his best friend’s wife and new baby. It was a lovely visit. His wife was welcoming and mercifully loquacious. Their baby, milky white and dozy. They trusted me to hold it, touch its warm head. We drank beer from cold botdes; we parted friends. But the point is that he would have seen the sparkling-eyed boy today on the job. He undoubtedly would have told the sparkling-eyed boy that I had stopped by. Thus, I conclude, he might have stopped by our cabin on his way back from the construction site. Just to say hi, just to catch up. But it is seven-thirty and I have not yet heard the telltale crunch of gravel under the wheels of his truck. So I’ve walked a mile down the shore to the county boat launch, which has a cluster of benches looking out over the water. I have sought my mourning bench.
I can imagine him in his truck after work, his hands and knees and shoulders habitually aching from rough use. He might absent-mindedly pick at a callus on his palms perfectly shaped to hold a hammer, level; sander. His neck must be salty, his T-shirt stained; he’d have only one hand on the wheel, fingers lifting in acknowledgment of passing drivers. He knows probably ninety percent of the drivers on the road, or they know him.
It’s always this way: I can imagine every detail of his body—even those I’ve never seen—but the scaffolding of his brain, his decision-making process, stymie me. Of those people we lose, we lose their minds first: that is, our ability to predict how they might respond to anything, to place in order the things that they hold most dear, and to know how they have rewritten their own pasts. I don’t know why he hasn’t come to talk to me. Fear, anger, wisdom, indifference, the thought of his own baby waiting for him at home?
I would like to imagine that the water here forgives my melodrama drop by drop. And if I knew how to listen, the water might tell me, “I am deep and gray, ruffled by wind, and saturated with more sadness than you can imagine. Some I have brought on myself and some has been flung into me. Count yourself lucky that your eyes still flicker, that they can scan the opposite shoreline, or gauge the distance from wave to cloud, that your fingers can still curl into your palms, gouging them in anticipation of what will not come.”
But, it must be clear, I am incapable of listening. I am thinking, Perhaps he’ll come right now and I’m not there. Perhaps he’s waiting to visit me tomorrow night, or the next, letting his anticipation expand inside his rib cage. Perhaps he remembers something about my voice he thought was special. Perhaps it has made him shy.
I get up and fall back into the narrow clutch of tree and shoreline, my own voice loud in my ears.
2.
I have a good friend (the only friend who has met the sparkling-eyed boy) who is very smart and very difficult to fool. I call her up after three days at my father’s tiny cabin, in the land of the sparkling-eyed boy. He still hasn’t come, of course, and the silence of the gravel road is like a vacuum ready to suck my eardrums clean from my head.
“Help,” I say. “I’m pining away to nothing for him. I’m so very sad.” I am asking for her to work her miracles: putting my perspective into a better perspective. And also to not laugh at me—that I could be made sad by a boy right for me now in no way. The most taxing request, I’m sure.
“Well, it’s not really about him, is it?” she says, getting warmed up.
“I know,” I say. She offers a strong and bad-tasting medicine. Like a toddler, though I know how it’s going to end, I turn my head to the side at the last minute: “No! I am at least partly pining for him, for what is objectively the sparkling-eyed boy.”
“Hmm,” she says. “I believe that the affection, the nostalgia you hold for him is real, but the pining? You want some drama of the heart. You’re pining for something; you’re not really pining for him.”
“Yeah. But I wish I were.”
[Laughter.]
Neither of us asks what I’m pining for. We don’t have to. She’s familiar with this language, too. We know I could be pining to know that I can, to need something so badly I can be sure I’m alive. Because it feels good to feel bad sometimes. So much better than feeling nothing.
Her last words on the subject are “Remember, Amy. These are real lives here.”
She means, among other things, his wife of seven years, his baby born last November. She means I might not be the only one capable of manufacturing a romance. She means if he knew I was telling myself I needed him, he might think he needed me, too.
“Well, I’m not going to do anything,” I say. I mean I’m not going to call him, drop by his house, corner him at his current construction site, ask him to tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me.
But she says, “Of course not” in a tone that implies I already have.
The Bodies of Preteen Boys
In Defense of Nostalgia
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.
Inside-Out Days
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.