“You’re right, it’s not good enough,” he agreed. “You wore your damn leggings.”
He gave me a wink before moving into the throng of students, unreachable. He became my teacher again.
✵
On the phone, the night before this class excursion, he’d created aloud a scene of him giving me a ride home after the field trip. I giggled at this fantasy and wondered if any piece of it, even just a shard, could come true.
What happened was this: after the field trip, me, Tammy, and Mary took the bus to Jerry’s Deli. Mr. Ivers was due to meet us at the bowling alley, an event that both Tammy & Mary’s parents had sanctioned. I knew I could say anything about my afterschool wanderings to my mother and she would believe me.
After we ate, Mr. Ivers met us at the adjoining bowling alley. I made some excuse to remove my leggings in the women’s restroom, my legs naked under my wool shorts. No one seemed to notice.
Tammy dominated the conversation. I watched her friendly rapport with Mr. Ivers. Mary seemed more inert, needful of being pulled into the joke or conversation, a bit wary of all the silliness. I remained my observant self, though I involuntarily felt myself laughing deeply and often, thanks to Tammy’s presence. I felt thirteen, which was becoming more rare. We are bowling, I thought. This is safe. I’m having fun.
Tammy’s mom arrived to pick up Mary and Tammy after two games. They both lived close to the bowling alley, south of Ventura. I felt my mouth readying to announce that I’d be riding the bus home. It’s okay, I don’t need a ride, I rehearsed silently.
“Oh, I can give you a ride. It’s not a problem,” Mr. Ivers said in front of the girls as they got into Tammy’s mother’s car.
I glanced in their direction, the girls who were getting safe passage home. They didn’t seem aware of the innuendo that had flown around the four of us in the last two hours, the times he had leaned over to whisper in my ear. Maybe they accepted it as part of Mr. Ivers’s demeanor. To me, he seemed a little too daring, combustible. I worked hard to disown these little comments, pretending I couldn’t hear him. I flashed him looks that said Quit it! They might hear you!
But they were gone, and I was walking with him to his old green Porsche.
“So, down Laurel Canyon?” he asked, opening the door for me.
“All the way down,” I said, folding myself into the small, low seat.
“I like the sound of that,” he growled, and started the car. His aging Porsche made a loud chugging sound that reminded me of the cars on tracks at Disneyland.
“Hey, you don’t think they got what was going on, do you? I mean, c’mon, I don’t think they’d know sexy if it bit ’em in the ass.”
I paused. I really wasn’t sure, but knew I had to maintain that no one knew anything.
“I don’t know. We don’t really talk about stuff like that,” I answered, looking out at the other cars in the lot. Mercedes, Ferrari, BMW. A lone station wagon. Vanity plates.
“Yeah, why would you?” Mr. Ivers asked me. “You’re light years ahead of ’em!” He pulled out of the parking lot. “Wanna ride, little girl?” he joked as we turned on to Laurel Canyon.
Alone with me, he suddenly couldn’t stop talking.
“God, seeing you lean down, with your ass just right, releasing the ball—in a fucking bowling alley, I can’t believe it. I was getting so hard!”
“You were?” I turned to look at him with fear and fascination.
“Yeah! Didn’t you notice? I couldn’t stand up. I had to stay in that fucking chair with the little desk on it or it would’ve been over—totally obvious.” He put one cupped hand over his mouth and bellowed into the air, “Ladies and gentleman, the man on lane five must leave the premises immediately, no hard-ons allowed in the bowling alley!” He laughed. I smiled and stared straight ahead.
“You really have no idea what you do to me, do you?” he asked after some silence.
I didn’t reply. There was something important about never fully acknowledging what was happening between us. It was the thinnest bubble, a membrane I might burst if I settled on it for too long. I wished for more and more miles between his barreling green Porsche and my house.
“You know, Wendy, I’m hard now.”
With one hand on the wheel, he used the other to lift the cuff of my shorts so it rode the top of my thigh.
“Why don’t you just pull those shorts up a little, just enough so I can see a little more…”
He uttered a low moan and looked at the road, his hand on my leg, warm. I pressed my back into the seat, goosebumps lacing my arms, and I felt myself shifting in my seat.
At Burbank Boulevard he said, “Here, feel this,” and took my hand. He placed it on his crotch and I felt a large, firm something underneath the jeans he changed into for this afterschool activity.
This was the crucial moment. It always came to this. In the three or four instances when I had occasion to make out with boys, this is where it always culminated, my hand led to this spot, where it felt like a secret nesting animal pulsing underneath jeans, khakis, cotton.
I did the only thing I know how to do. My hand lightly pressed, cupped the hardness, rubbed my palm and fingers over it. I wondered if he liked it and tried to remember that I had done this before, just not with him. I shot looks at cars nearby as we continued towards Roscoe Boulevard, closer and closer to my house. I lost track of his litany of suggestions (“Ooh, yeah, right there,”) and compliments (“How can you make me feel this way?”). I tried to appear a normal girl staring ahead in the passenger seat of a green Porsche, one hand in my lap, the other on him. I let his free hand caress my thigh, inches from the crotch of my panties.
Finally, we neared my neighborhood.
“Can you just drop me off at the gas station up there?” I heard myself say.
“Of course. Yes.” He pulled into the station. Our hands found their appropriate places: I secured my book bag to my shoulder, he traced one finger around my knee and returned his hand to the wheel. The car chugged loudly in idle.
“Okay, see you later. Thanks for letting me give you a ride home,” he called out over the car motor as I slammed the door. I smiled, waved, started walking.
It was hard to say goodbye to this man for whom I was losing an identifier. He was no longer “Mr. Ivers.” His first name did not slide off my tongue as it did in my fantasies. There was the now-familiar empty space, a space where, as we parted, I inserted the language silently, the sentiment I believed I was living for, even if only in my imagination.
Smile, wave.
The green car slid back into traffic.
Bye, I mouthed. I love you, I said to the sidewalk.
APRIL
1987
“You know that this is not just all about lust.”
“Sure,” I said. “I know.”
It was eleven at night, our usual hour for talking that sometimes stretched into early morning.
“Because sometimes, I find myself wondering things…”
“Like?” I offered. I was hunkered down between the sheets and blankets of my bed, facing the wall, letting the phone touch my mouth, my chin, as I whispered into the receiver.
“Like, what it would be like if we got married, down the line. I mean, it’s not so far-fetched.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed he would say it again so I would know this was real. This can’t be. Married? Is he reading my mind? A tentative hand slipped over the front of my underwear. One ear stayed above the covers, tuned for noises outside my door.
“You’re amazing, and I just want to keep knowing you. I know you’re just gonna get more and more intense with every year, and I can hardly wait. It’s fucking torture. It’s a bad joke.”
I laughed softly with him, willing myself to sound as rueful as he did.
“Well, Mr. Ivers, you should know that
when I’m twenty-three, I’m going to be big-time,” I announced in response.
“What is this Mr. Ivers crap?” he asked. He sounded hurt yet amused. “Quit it. Call me Jeff. Can you do that?”
“Whatever,” I answered, blowing off this suggestion. It just felt too weird on my tongue. “Don’t you get the feeling, though, that there’ll be lots of people from my class who’ll make it big?” I paused to see if he was with me. “Like, maybe when I’m twenty-three,” I heard him sigh wistfully when I said the magic number, “I might open up the newspaper, and there’ll be Brian on the front page. Doing something amazing. Famous.”
“Yeah,” he purred, “and then you’ll fold up the paper and say ‘Fuck me, Jeff.’”
“It’s not all about lust, huh?” I chuckled in the new husky voice I achieved after hours of talking with him. I turned underneath the covers to face the other side of the room, switching the cream-colored receiver to my other ear.
“Lust isn’t what makes me want to call you as soon as I get home every day,” he said.
And I believed him. He told me it would be an awesome summer, so much would change, and that he’d show me exactly how he felt about me. I didn’t mention to him that I had my doubts, especially with regard to where his girlfriend would fit into the picture he drew for me. She occasionally appeared from seemingly nowhere to wrench him from everyday life and then drop him back in, angered and hurt. I wondered how much she would figure into “our” summer. I wondered if I could hook up with someone else that would get my mind off this man. The women in my fantasies became hazier, and in fact, were often contorting themselves into fantasies Mr. Ivers had illustrated for me.
And we kept right on talking into the night, as he lay into me about education, college, success. I wandered in and out of the conversation, dozing, dreaming until it was time to hang up the receiver and sleep.
And it seemed true that it was not all about lust.
I listened with rapt attention as he detailed problems. Issues with family, expectations he couldn’t seem to meet, the fucked-up relationship with the sometime/long-term girlfriend, and how he had a hard time talking to his friends about his personal problems.
As soon as he said this, I stepped up to plate.
I told him about my parents, their alcoholism. He told me about his father, whom he described as a recovering alcoholic. I practically glowed with recognition, this coincidental parallel between us.
I got a short, heartfelt lecture about how alcoholism was hereditary and that he hoped I’d take care of myself.
“Why?” I asked. I wanted to hear what I meant to him and I wanted to hear it now.
“Because I care.” He paused. “Because I consider you a good friend. And maybe because there might be a future for us.”
No adults except Mr. Ivers were privy to my crumbling relationship with my parents, whose own lives were falling like dirt through open hands.
I spent more time crying into a pillow than talking or thinking about my parents, their ongoing fights or silence, my father’s gradual disappearance from our lives.
I had decided that if my parents divorced, I must stay with my mother. I felt she needed me more than my father did. I was intent on staying at the same school as my friends, and my father would not be around to ask why the phone was ringing at all hours.
After learning that Mr. Ivers and I shared a common experience, I opened my journal to relate this revelation. I could tell him anything, and he, me.
Heaven, I wrote on the page. It feels like this.
MAY
1987
The written inscription read: To Wendy, Big 14!
The book was hardbound, sans dust jacket, with a sepia-toned cover and black binding. In a simple cursive, A Treasury of Khalil Gibran was embossed on the spine between two short, flowered scrolls. The writing and the scrolls were a dull gold color, lending the book an air of age and beauty I was not used to possessing.
I recognized that in his ballpoint pen scrawl, Mr. Ivers was attempting to maintain a friendly distance from me.
Read and enjoy! he wrote. This book was meant to be read and reread as you get older and wiser in the ways of the world. He used stale phrases like “passage of time” and “living of life,” words that I saw as condescending to my fourteen-year-old mindset, words spoken from adult to child.
I quickly forgave him upon reading the next sentence.
You have the ability to write like this—someday I hope you reach that point, the “you” underlined, the sentence open-ended, lacking a period to stabilize its sentiment.
There was no missive of love, no cordial regards or sincere closing; only Happy B-day, and below that, Mr. Ivers 1987.
1987
Sometimes I stood naked on the closed toilet seat in my mother’s bathroom. In the mirror over the sink I could see my body from my nose down to my calves. The shower blasted nearby, awaiting my entrance.
A tentative hand slipped like a curtain over one of my breasts. I watched the flesh quiver slightly and my knees trembled. I put one hand out and steadied it on the window frame next to me. The blinds were shut like so many eyelids. The door was locked so that I was alone with the mirror.
I put one finger to my mouth and traced my lips slowly.
I watched this body in the mirror: the flat, naked stomach, the brown shoulders, my pubic hair that seemed strange and messy on the landscape of smooth skin.
I looked down at the puffy toilet seat cover, gauging its ability to hold my weight. I turned so that I could see the curve of my butt. Something about looking at my body this way made me feel like there was a dam breaking inside me, slowly but surely.
I saw something sexy, something I wanted, and yet it was here, it was my own.
Behind many veils, shadows I carefully placed in my memory, I replayed briefly, almost wistfully, how I used to lie underneath Abigail on her bed, playing the girlfriend to her rendition of boyfriend, the door closed, our breathing noisy and excited as we kissed passionately. Fear crept around the memory, squelching it, and I absently switched my thoughts to those of the magazine articles littering my bedroom. I stared hard at the shapes in the mirror. I compared the size of my breasts to my butt. I wished my boobs would transform into C-worthy cups. I turned so I was looking at my profile and stuck my butt out to examine it. My hand outlined its smooth shape, the muscle underneath, the curve from lower back to fleshy mound, to the hidden place underneath, where the skin was soft and indented. I let out a breath and knew, instantly, the kind of desire I might inflict on someone else, and the way I wanted to inflict it, like a masterful chess move. The knowledge slipped away just as suddenly, as my eyes examined a slight dimpling in the flesh, the dreaded foreshadowing of something that right then I wanted no part of.
My mother’s heavy steps sounded on the kitchen floor. I hurriedly stepped down from the toilet and moved to open the shower door. When I turned back I saw my face full in the mirror amid the steam. I leaned close and puckered my lips once, then relaxed. I tried a smile I wanted to test on Jeff, something for the classroom, something that could hold all that I wanted to be, what I thought he wanted me to be. I saw my expression go from fourteen to ageless, my mouth parted slightly, looking strangely sexual and yet silly, the look reserved for demure Playboy bunnies that I had glanced at, quick as a flash, in magazine racks.
A moment later I recognized myself again. I stared into my own eyes for a moment and turned, stepping into the shower and closing the door solidly behind me, letting the steam engulf me.
JUNE
1987
Shake it, shake it, bay-beh, the synthesizer-enhanced voice of David Bowie crooned over and over.
The volume was turned up high, unusual for me, the girl who frequently turned down the volume on her mother’s stereo. I chalked up her loud listening behavior to lack of consideration and
immaturity, and the fact that my father was inexplicably away from home for longer periods of time, and therefore no longer around to complain.
On this June day, I replaced the needle on the 45 for the third time, sang along, and flopped down on my bed to replay Mr. Ivers’s—Jeff’s—first visit. From my bed, I glanced around the room, contemplating which images from my bedroom he took home with him, pondered over, discarded.
After approaching every room as if my mother might be hiding in one (and hearing constant reassurances from me that she was safely at work, a half-hour’s drive away), he entered my bedroom.
He remarked on my collection of James Dean postcards, photos, and the black and white poster next to the television set that featured a smiling, cocky Dean. My fiber optic flower lamp had been plugged in absently, a feature of my room that he chuckled at, pointing out, “Ah, yes, interesting. Goes good with smoking out, eh?” I guessed he must mean marijuana, but I was still sort of inexperienced with it. I nodded like I knew what he meant.
Photographs of the eighth grade camping trip with my homeroom were displayed next to my bed so I could see them as I drifted off to sleep. The photos had a golden hue to them from the angle I chose. There were the faces of Veronica, Abigail, me. Veronica and her dyed black hair, her sleeveless mock turtleneck and silver chains and necklaces. Abigail, who I was disliking on an alternate-day basis, peered out from underneath bleached white hair, the strands of her bangs crispy with the black mascara she used to create dramatic streaks.
I looked at her face in the photo and felt a frown form on my lips. I stubbornly suffered through Abigail’s fits of rage and deep sorrow as she negotiated her first relationships with boys and overused the word “love.” Her attentions to me shortened, became more pointed, and I was feeling the distinct sense that I was someone she felt she could take advantage of, and that this was something we both knew but didn’t talk about. We also didn’t talk about our own diverted attentions toward Veronica. I pondered this realization as my finger touched the gloss of the picture. A hazy thumbprint appeared over Abigail’s face.
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