I felt justified in telling Veronica and Abigail about Mr. Ivers. They were the ones who meant the most to me, who I looked up to, the ones I wanted to know that I was in something dangerous and deep. I wanted to tell them particularly after Mr. Ivers went on and on about the girlfriend who left him. I had no such story to offer. I was a boyfriend-less thirteen-year-old, still wondering if touching myself every night and my past hobby of making out with girls in my bedroom closet would put me in hell.
I told these friends about the new development in my life, our teacher and I talking on the phone. Their eyes got big and their mouths fell open as I repeated the words, tallied the hours of phone calls. I swore them to secrecy, and their lips became tight with incredulous smiles, eyes shining with curiosity.
After telling my friends, I noticed something different in myself. It felt like a haze of dirt followed me wherever I went. I learned not to speak of my situation very often. My friends never spoke of it unless I brought it up, which was rare.
✵
Mr. Ivers, or Jeff, as he began calling himself, made me aware of bodily responses, like the prickles of arousal that his scripted, well-detailed fantasies spoken aloud created in me.
In my own fantasies, I envisioned us at candlelight dinners in restaurants I conjured up in my head, a collage of restaurants I saw on soap operas and TV movies. I imagined our legs tangled underneath the table, the way the shadows and our silent waiter might lend danger and seduction to our meeting, as so often happened in movies: scenes of secrecy, pleasurable and monumental undoing.
He made his fantasies known to me and I listened, admiring his courage to share what I thought were secret places requiring special access. I learned to chuckle huskily and not directly answer questions like “Are your fingers inside of you?” or “Are you squeezing your tits like I would if I were there?”
My body stopped short of responding to the choreography he directed.
I listened instead, absorbed the words and sentiment, and played along. He provided erotic frameworks; I closed my eyes and focused on the tingle in my fingertips. My body was still mine, private, its workings hidden and mysterious even to me. I was vastly more comfortable daydreaming on my own, filling in empty scenes with abstract female bodies for pleasure and even more abstract male bodies to assuage my guilt.
I continued to document the formation of this new person I was becoming on the yellow pages, as though Mr. Ivers was helping to create me with his words and I was compelled to transcribe the transformation. As with all my journals, dating from the time I was six, I made sure to include the details of every admission he made, the ways I implored him for more attention without ever, I imagined, showing my true hand. I recorded the minutiae of our phone conversations and the encounters at school with an eye for the drama inherent in them, and also with an eye for what I was becoming.
He kept asking me if I ever wrote about us.
“Are you kidding?” I replied. “No. Of course not.”
“Good. Because you can’t. If I found out you did—”
I didn’t want us to end, whatever the us was in the process of becoming.
DECEMBER
1986
That Christmas, I asked my mother for a copy of Lolita.
It arrived as all books given to me did: wrapped in Christmas paper, pages in the book revealing bills of various denominations—ones, fives, tens. Surprise!
It wasn’t the money I was interested in, though.
It had a white cover. The title was spelled out broadly across the top. In the letters were the stratified sections of a picture of a young girl, smiling, wearing a hint of lip gloss.
My mother’s writing in its opening pages:
My Baby,
Don’t get any ideas.
Love, Your Mom.
She didn’t ask why I wanted this book, didn’t know that I heard the name “Nabokov” in a song by The Police, about a situation that sounded strangely similar to the one I was in.
✵
After holiday break, I was trying to read Lolita, trying to follow all the words, but I was giving up on the French and getting exasperated with the English. I reread sections about Humbert’s fascination with prepubescent girls and wondered at them, myself. My body, I decided, was not prepubescent, which accounted for people’s eyes widening when I told them how old I was.
I sifted through the descriptions and decided Humbert Humbert was a sick man. I felt sorry for him as I turned each page carefully after several thick minutes of struggling to decipher this prose.
One afternoon, Eva and I were loitering in Mr. Ivers’s classroom after school with a few other students. I decided to take a seat at a desk in front. Eva was blah-blahing about the homework assignment. Another kid stood in the doorway, bouncing a basketball, yelling to someone outside over his shoulder. I whipped out the book from my bag and pretended not to notice when Mr. Ivers strode across the classroom and chided the kid with the ball about taking it out onto the courts. When he was done, I stared intently at the book, and then up at him, then down at my book. My eyes were scanning the book, then the linoleum, checking to see if his loafers came into my line of sight, signaling his nearness. I read, then reread, a single paragraph.
I looked up and asked, “Mr. Ivers, what’s ‘folly’ mean?”
I knew the answer but I wanted engagement, acknowledgment of some kind.
He sighed good-naturedly. He moved to the cabinet behind his desk. Out came an oversized dictionary.
“Oh, forget it.” I rolled my eyes and pretended to return to this book with plenty of other words I didn’t understand completely.
Eva was twittering someone’s ear off nearby. There were at least four other kids in the room, in their own bubbles of conversation. My mom was coming to get me in about thirty minutes.
Mr. Ivers set down the dictionary on the desk in front of me. He poked my shoulder with a finger, which felt like a dare.
“Is this word from the nasty book you’re reading?” he asked.
“It’s not nasty, it’s a classic,” I sniffed, pushing my glasses up on my nose with one finger.
“It’s about the young girl who wham-bams the older man, isn’t it?”
He smirked. I looked up at him like he was crazy, but my face betrayed me, softened into a quiet smile.
“What word is it, Wendy?” he asked, leaning over me to open the dictionary to “F.”
I was having a hard time breathing regularly. I wanted him to know this. He was so close to me now, his cologne driving me a little mad, and there was that tickle in my lower belly and heat rushing to my crotch.
“Folly,” I said, trying to appear calm. I listened to the outskirts of our conversation. Other kids in the class were talking, reading, doing homework. Nothing was askew. We were safe.
“Fondle?” he asked. “Fondle? You want to know what ‘fondle’ means?” He gently poked me in the shoulder again, chuckling. I could hear the purr in his voice, the one I was getting used to hearing on the phone almost every night. I could hardly take a full breath. If I did, I imagined I’d be taking in some of his breath along with mine, and there might be an explosion of flame.
“Whatever,” I said loudly, pointedly. “Folly. Folly! I found it. Here, right here.” I read the definition loudly enough for others to hear.
When I finished he slapped the large volume shut.
“Never be afraid to use the dictionary,” he said, smiling mysteriously, and returned the book to the cabinet. I looked at the back of his sweater and my mouth felt wet, slack. I breathed in deeply, as if preparing to go underwater.
1987
1987
Hours upon hours of talking about record albums, song lyrics, then looking up words in the dictionary, feeling as though I constantly need to catch up with him intellectually, the age difference suddenly feeling like
a chasm, until we get to the boiling point, the point where it all comes down to I’m so hard for you, you are IT, the most exciting thing at school and I’m in bed, muffling my voice under a pillow with the phone to my ear, hand in my underwear, talking quietly, assuring, chuckling with my new sexy voice and realizing the hold, the power I have over this person who moans and grunts and flicks his tongue at me through the phone like I have never experienced before. This is no kid, this is no boy, this is no finger fuck in the park, this is no rush of kisses in a dark movie theater. This is sex across wires. This is gut-wrenching first-time-ever oozing red love. This will be hot angry tears and hanging up the phone, later. This will be promises broken and fingers touching clandestinely in classrooms. But right now, this is power in the curve of my hip, the way I turn to face him, the mystery of my turtleneck sweater, power in the sound of my whisper, power in the arch of my back and pout of my lips. This is fire, air, drowning, gushing, purging. This is illegal.
HOME
1987
Vodka splashing in a tall plastic tumbler, over ice, covered in orange soda. Over the years the plastic of the tumbler got scratched, worn away from the acidity of its liquids.
Overturned bottles on the moss-green carpet, the lair underneath the sink where the bottles hid. The miracle of television, three in a house, covering over the silence or the sounds of rage.
The calendar of mortgage bills.
The magic in the wall of gold gilded mirrors. The magic in a fort built of blankets and tray tables, the nights the parents were in love and took to their bedroom.
The black wigs and rarely-used neckties in closets.
The king-sized bed for one, the hide-a-bed in another room that ruined my mother’s back forever.
The backyard’s dewy green lawn turned into a nest of brown pine needles and tumbleweed, the spiny thorned plants growing dangerous, the death of fruit trees.
The wayward ash from wildfires in the foothills. The pond scum, gutters bursting with packed-in dirt and leaves. The garage of shadow, webs, abandonment, oil on the concrete floor.
The decomposition of the patio, mushrooms growing in the carpet, records warped from sunlight and moisture when the ceilings fell away.
The wallpaper curling, smoke-darkened walls, fogged sliding-glass door.
Home.
EARLY
1987
In the 1980s, the Sherman Oaks Galleria, besides providing refuge for teenagers, also offered a variety of card and gift shops. I roamed their aisles reading sentiments embossed on the inside of pastel-washed greeting cards.
Cards with watercolor sunsets, lyrical words written in forest green or burgundy calligraphy; triple-folded cards with artwork on expensive paper; cards in the shape of seashells with glossy pink finish, or in the shape of hearts, purplish-red and desperate: I considered each one, picking up the card that spoke to me and would speak for me. I purchased almost one per week. I carried them home privately, in their slim white paper bags, closed my bedroom door, and chose a pink or purple ink pen. I opened my journal to serve as a hard surface, and composed the closest I could come to uninhibited love letters to Mr. Ivers.
Mostly, the cards were filled with questions. Are we really friends? Did he take me seriously? Should I be looking for a wedding card for him and his on-again, off-again girlfriend in the coming year? Did he really think I could write?
The things I felt like I couldn’t say out loud I articulated with song lyrics: Blondie, ABBA, Echo and the Bunnymen, Bruce Springsteen, all of these and more were featured in capital letters, each line of the song separated by slash marks and cited by title, artist.
I imagined, years later, after he’d collected a trunk full, that they might be burned in an inferno of blue fire. Or that he might cut them up into little pieces and let them fly, so that each was a white paper insect, on a solitary journey far from his hands, his body.
I knew that he probably disposed of these letters, lyrics, and yearnings as soon as they had been read. They might disappear into trash cans, holes in the backyard. A match used to light up a bongload might also serve to burn my handwriting away into nothingness.
I, on the other hand, kept copies of some of the letters. Carbon paper suited my purposes. Some letters remained unsent, planting themselves in my journal.
I don’t know why/I love you like I do/All the changes/You put me through…
He was smart in that way. Letters read, discarded. No evidence.
✵
The classroom began to feel heavy with temptation, pleasure, disappointment, or ruin. The daily aftershocks of our clandestine relationship were shooting off the charts. The pendulum could swing violently one way, softly the opposite way, until I felt unraveled and wanting.
I was thrown into a rage of jealousy if Mr. Ivers spoke in class of his girlfriend, which he sometimes did. I might ignore his lecture, or leave class abruptly when the bell rang, instead of lingering. There were days when the small act of passing a piece of chalk from his hand to mine shook me to my core. In the midst of the classroom our fingers met, he tickled my palm quickly, grabbed at my fingers. There was a long, deep stare, a wetting of my lips in nervousness, a letting out of breath when I suddenly had the chalk in my grasp, my heart racing, wondering why I received it in the first place.
I attempted to quell the onslaught of heat that made my stomach light, legs weak.
I had the small cylinder of white chalk, and there was a class of students around me that carried on their own conversations and did not let on that they could see or feel the tide that threw me this way and that, or the erection Mr. Ivers had suffered, hidden by his pressed slacks.
I was scared for him.
I felt like he wasn’t hiding us well enough, even as he expected me to keep my part of the secret. I knew the complexities of my classmates’ teenage minds. The swell in the girls’ blouses, the bulge in boys’ pants, the hormones raging in a teenager’s little finger, let alone body—anything was enough to set us off. Innuendos, crude and lascivious, thrashed about the classroom and the schoolyard. I suddenly felt left out of its wake, walking on air above such crassness.
I was submerged in a different ocean of innuendo. Mr. Ivers and I developed secretive looks and behaviors that quietly forced our attractions underground, but just below a malleable, ever-changing surface.
“Wear your black skirt tomorrow. No tights. Sit in the front row and casually uncross your legs. I’m dying to see what’s underneath, Wendy. Just look up, look me in the eye and you’ll see.”
I wore my black skirt. I wore tights. I sat in the second row and prepared myself for his disappointment. I wondered what it might look like, this disappointment, as I made teeth marks on my ballpoint pen caps.
He was never disappointed. Instead, in the middle of lectures he punctuated with exclamations and rhetorical questions that made the class laugh with him, he looked directly at me. When the class carried on without him, laughter continuing, another snappy retort from Brian in the corner, a guffaw from Tony—through it all, Mr. Ivers held my gaze. Mere seconds passed, loaded with an energy I was becoming more familiar with, my eyes locked on his, my lips slightly parted, and his intense charge, the current that connected us from halfway across the room.
When he broke the gaze to reassert a friendly control over his classroom, he made sure to glance back every so often. I drank up the last bits of attention and refocused on my desk, my papers. My gaze shifted to Abigail, who sketched in the corner of her pages, or Veronica, who was hunched over her desk, chin in hand. I tried to gauge their awareness, wondering if anyone caught the current midway, checking for any curious looks at me or at the teacher.
None.
Mr. Ivers continued his informal lecture on commercials and propaganda, and introduced our next project, to create a commercial to perform in front of the class. What this has to do with English, I
did not know. But I liked the idea. He seemed a smart man. Everyone liked him.
I smiled to myself and went back to writing on the naked pages in front of me.
MARCH
1987
Spring.
Field trips whisked us away from the stuffy classrooms into the world at large, the world I was becoming more independent in. The teachers accompanied us. My classmates and their small talk and pranks left me feeling saddled by their awkwardness but nevertheless eager to be outside.
One field trip took us to a play and after, to the Santa Monica Pier. The day felt hopeful, as though it would provide some semblance of adulthood, the freedom outside of a classroom, walking in the world with only a few adults per several students.
I found myself sitting next to Mr. Ivers at the play, which irreparably erased any image or impression I might have had of the play, including the name or the content or the venue. The most memorable moment in that pocket of time when the lights were out, actors moving upon a stage, my hands stationed in my lap: his voice, as he leaned over to whisper softly, “I feel like slipping under your skirt.” His cologne lingered near my face, an invisible veil that made me swoon.
After the play, our class traipsed down the pier.
“Well, we made it to the beach,” he said to me. I flashed on the conversations, too numerous to count, that featured fantasies of meeting at the beach, spending a day, or even a few hours staring at the ocean together, picking up shells, just talking without having to punch buttons or hold pieces of plastic to our ears.
“Hmm,” I answered. “This isn’t good enough.”
I wanted the empty beaches up the Pacific Coast Highway; we were at the pier with its arcades, hot dog smells, and shops that sold postcards of thin, blonde, tan women in bikinis. There were too many people around us, and they reminded me, painfully, of our true identities, even as I wished them away so that it was just us, only us.
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