The sky was overcast and the air was hazy as the boat full of unsupervised children arrived on the island. We all stepped off with bags the size of our bodies, causing us to walk clumsily, side to side. Our names were called out with cabin numbers assigned to them. Chelsea—seven. Emma—seven. Bianca—seven. It was how I learned her name. Once we got to the cabin, I complimented Bianca on her backpack, and we walked to the cafeteria together without Emma. At thirteen, everything happens either in slow motion or in an instant. The boat ride seemed like forever, all that time before making Bianca my friend, but it only took me the length of one heartbeat to turn my back on Emma.
The first thing Bianca knew was how lame the camp was. It hadn’t occurred to me yet, but as soon as she said it, I saw what she meant. The first thing they had us do was learn a song; the boys were all the way on the other side of the campground; and our counselor’s name was Dimples. I mean, they’re treating us like we’re babies or something, Bianca said as soon as Dimples was out of earshot, and I half expected her to start smoking a cigarette. Bianca certainly had a physical allure, but she wasn’t beautiful the way an actress might be—her face seemed weathered in a sense, as if she’d just returned from a long voyage at sea, which I suppose she had. There was also an ease with which she spoke—she knew it all. The fact that she could properly identify lame things made me worry I might be next, but hiding my lameness gave me something to do. The truth was I loved being away from my parents and the mainland (a word I’d just learned), and my hair was already crunchy with salt. I usually had to fight to be that alive.
The second thing Bianca knew was the plot of the movie Welcome to the Dollhouse, which I’d never seen. So then he says to her, three o’clock, I’m gonna rape you, Bianca said, laughing. She said it was her favorite movie. She didn’t even bother asking me if I’d seen it—she just told me the plot from beginning to end over a chicken nugget dinner in the cafeteria. It was the first time I’d ever considered the path my food had taken to reach me: thousands of chicken nuggets had traveled across the ocean for this one meal so mediocre no one dared comment on it. Dimples’s ears perked up when she heard Bianca say rape at the table: What did you say, young lady? Bianca said, Nothing, god—long, like gaw-duh—and reached for my glass instead of hers by accident. I stared at the lipstick she’d imprinted onto my glass: she left proof of herself everywhere.
In the months leading up to camp, I’d had a recurring fantasy of having my first kiss there. I only knew what a summer fling was from watching Grease at Emma’s birthday party, but I knew the rules: it was passion with an expiration date. It was human heat inspired by earth heat, a kind of doubling that can only exist outside of one’s real life. And so it did: I thought about it every night, as a kind of preparation. I could see it so clearly—the cavernous cliff we would agree to meet at in the middle of the night, the look of shadows across his face as he approached me, the way I would touch him and he would touch me.
But once I got there, I only cared about the boys as seen through Bianca’s eyes. Who did she like? What did she want to do to them (always to them, never with them)? Who would she kiss if she had to choose just one? Probably Thomas, she said, and with that we left to find him. Our cabins were just yards away from the shore, but the boys’ cabins were up and over the hill, a hike too dark to take at night but just concealed enough to do by day. When we got to Thomas’s cabin, Will answered the door in a towel, said he didn’t know where Thomas was, said he wasn’t his babysitter. Whatever, Bianca said. It was as if she didn’t even want the things she wanted. What’s under your towel anyway, Will? Bianca asked, and added, Chelsea’s never seen a dick; let her see it. I held my breath and felt the waves hold theirs, too—the unknown has that kind of power. It was my one chance to see a naked boy, but then Bianca just laughed and let it go, and I never saw a naked boy until years later, when it was a naked man.
The third thing Bianca knew was a rumor: someone had filmed a movie with buffalo on the other side of the island years ago and never bothered to take the buffalo back to the mainland, leaving them to their private multiplication. So, what, they’re just over there roaming freely? I asked. Yeah, there’s like a hundred of them. Bianca had learned specificity made her sources seem believable—she never said I think or I don’t know, she was always declarative and certain. I didn’t believe the rumor but I didn’t say so, just asked her how we could get to the other side. Here’s us, she said, and here’s them. It didn’t look far, but we agreed to wait until the last night, in case we got caught.
The fourth thing Bianca knew was how to put a tampon inside herself. As soon as I saw the plastic packaging in her duffel bag, I thought, Of course. It suddenly made sense why she seemed so much older. A woman at thirteen, decided upon by a timeline that girls couldn’t know about but knew all about us. Bianca didn’t even mention her period—that’s how used to it she was. I wanted to ask so many questions, but I knew to keep them to myself. Someday I would have the opportunity to be casual about that specific shade of red. I had seen it in wastebaskets belonging to my mother, remnants of a miniature crime scene.
Bianca and the other lucky girls took their plastic packaging from their bags to their hands to their pockets with a kind of grace usually reserved for long-legged animals in the wild, a deer bounding through the grass out of sight, away from men. But the bathrooms were all the way up the hill, so one night, Bianca whispered in my ear, Chelsea, get up. I immediately knew that nothing was wrong, just that Bianca needed me, and my adrenaline pumped accordingly. I slid out of my sleeping bag noiselessly and met Bianca on the side of the cabin, where she said, I have to pee. I laughed—You want me to come with you?—but she was already walking to the water, so I followed her.
We pulled our pajama pants and underwear down around our ankles and then to the front, trying to pee at an angle that would keep our clothes untainted. We giggled as quietly as we could, a kind of uneven burst of breath more than anything. I couldn’t help but think about how we seemed like the only ones on the island at that moment, how the moon seemed sufficient to see her for who she truly was: a mystery shaped like a girl who seemed like a woman.
The next day, the counselors led a group of us by kayak to a nearby cove. Bianca and I had chosen matching neon scuba masks and laughed at how we looked in our gear. We hopped into the water, and she immediately swam away to explore some deeper area, joking about wanting to find a shark. I stayed where I was, floating facedown, submitting my back to the sun, a star that already made me pink and would now make me pinker. How was it possible that I didn’t see anything whatsoever in the water? Not even one fish, just seaweed waving back to mock me? Emma swam nearby, looking like my past, but I didn’t dare say hello. Teenage cruelty is singular in its ability to forget, and by then I was beyond recollection.
At dinner that night, Bianca talked about our upcoming buffalo adventure. Thomas wants to go, but I told him he’d fuck it up, she said. Yeah, he would definitely fuck it up, I said, happy that she didn’t think I was going to fuck it up. Her bravery was contagious—the more she breathed on me the sicker I got. It never occurred to me until much later that I may have been in love with Bianca, it only occurred to me that I had decided on her and made her my friend and that we would never be friends outside of this place.
I wish I could say Bianca and I traveled through the night and the tall grass, desire clearing our path, stronger than a machete. I wish I could say we held hands or kissed or touched in some way as soon as we were alone. I wish I could say we came to a clearing and saw hundreds of buffalo with their backs to the moon, as if we’d discovered a new land, a new time. I wish I could say we lay down in the middle of the abandoned movie set and stopped acting for once. But the truth is we made it only a few yards past the boys’ cabins before a campfire and a ring of counselors stopped us in our tracks. What are you doing out here, girls? one of them asked, and not even Bianca had an answer.
When I Turn
One of my favor
ite things to say is, I’m almost done. As a child, it was with my long division homework or my weekly chore of cleaning the bathroom counters with lemon-scented Soft Scrub and an old sponge. In college, I was in a constant state of being nearly done with studying and counting down my register at the store that sold overpriced cotton shirts. In a way, I feel I’ve always been training for this very moment: this time in which I never really complete anything.
I’m still trying to find that concrete indicator of progress. I suspect someone else might be the expert on my life, might be able to see what I can’t. Hope can come from anywhere, but there’s one pairing that never fails me: beauty and impossibility. Last week, I decided my friend, Erik, was both beautiful and impossible, and I felt it save my life in a way.
Are actors good people? I asked him as we ate cheese and olives on the patio of a house in the Hollywood Hills where he was dog-sitting. He asked, I don’t know, am I? And I asked, I don’t know, am I? and then we were spinning, faced with our morality or lack thereof, and it was Hollywood, so it wasn’t the right place to decide, anyway.
I hadn’t been back to visit Los Angeles since I’d moved three years prior, but I loved the ways in which the city was so itself—everyone seemed to have the same television bone structure (good-looking but forgettable), and even my cab driver practiced his screenplay pitch on me (which was actually quite good).
I’m beginning to understand my curiosity as a form of destruction. I approach with my questions and my desire to know someone, but I always take it too far, stay out too late, get a little too close. I said to Erik, I wonder what’s blocking you from writing the next song, and he said, I don’t know, but I have a feeling you’re about to find out. We barely knew each other outside of our work, but it had brought us together, and then it felt as if we could ask any question, so we did. Even the dogs, begging for cheese: Are you a good girl? I asked the terrier, and she ran down the hill.
We realized we both had green eyes and one of us called it a curse, but I think we were just looking for things we had in common, little ways to stay bound, distractions from the people we already loved, new homes away from our homes. A kind of need had already formed. We aligned our hands to see how far up my fingers went on his and then the champagne was gone and the dogs had gone to sleep and the only thing left to do was kiss. I felt I could handle anything, I wanted to fight, but the only available war in Hollywood was tenderness. I fought the only way I knew: with more.
When I met Erik for the first time, seven years ago, we shook hands in the backyard of a house party in Austin where someone had made a bonfire out of gasoline and two old chairs. We were distracted by the flames, but someone said, This is Chelsea, and Erik shook my hand and then he put his hand back in his pocket and I didn’t see him again for seven years. I just remember thinking how self-actualized and whole he’d looked when I saw him onstage later that night in Austin, and I remember thinking I could never know someone like that, much less be like that.
I know it’s dramatic to say he saved my life, but I don’t know anymore, I don’t know what I need. We met again at a time in our lives when we were both almost done—me with my book, he with his record—and we needed something forbidden to bring us home, a siren to guide us in from the sea. One of us had a beautiful voice, the other had a bonfire memory, and we rearranged ourselves until we forgot who was who. The setting sun made the sky look so new that night that I began to momentarily love nature again.
Isn’t it remarkable the way knowing one person can alter a life? If you’re really lucky, you’ll find someone who reminds you of yourself. Not the version everyone knows, but the part of yourself you thought you kept hidden: now you see it in him.
When I was ten, my parents decided we needed a larger home, but instead of us moving, my father said he’d build it. Men can decide things like that. He’d worked in construction and said it would take him a year. Soon, he was putting men in the back of his Toyota pickup and pouring concrete in the backyard. I watched from the living room as the gray sludge oozed from the barrel and my father helped to smooth the surface. How did men know the things they knew? Once the concrete dried, my father went about building the rest of the room himself.
Last year, my father and I went to visit my grandmother in her nursing home. Her arthritic fingers curved toward her wrists, transforming her hands into something else—clawlike. I remember one Thanksgiving, years before the nursing home: I watched in wonder from the kitchen table as her gnarled hands opened cans of cranberry sauce. Becoming hungry, I asked, What time is it? and she licked her index finger before lifting it into in the air and looking beyond me, as if she was concentrating on a draft of air. One forty-seven, she said, and it took me hours to notice the clock behind my head. It’s a gift to allow a child to believe in magic. I thought, She must really know the world.
In the nursing home, she repeats her favorite stories. My father knows most of them to be true, but then, every third story or so, she’ll say something like, I can’t wait for eighth-grade graduation next week, I hope they pick me up on time. Or she’ll tell us about the baby she just had, and how cute he is, and how she thinks she’ll name him David, which is the name of my father, who is sitting in front of her with his mustache and gray hair. She’s in a kind of loop, but the light is beautiful and she is mostly happy and what else can I do but tell her I love her and then leave?
I’ve always equated completion with death, and now I become attached to ongoing problems as if they might carry me somewhere. I’ve always loved men I couldn’t quite hold, could never fully understand. It was like loving the same stranger over and over again. I can’t be sure I’m not still in some sort of loop.
Careful with him, someone who seemed to know Erik said, as if he were a dog that bit someone once. I remember the men I’ve loved who pawed at doors in the middle of the night. I’d stay home so I wouldn’t miss it, I’d stay up so I could be the one. Men like that change their mind in an instant, and so they can only be held for a moment. I used to bake apple pies, as if it were the 1950s, and in a way, it did take me back in time. My days then were filled with slow-motion hope playing like a long movie as I braided the dough. At the end of the day, the pie was almost done and I was about to know if it was any good.
At a library talk about drawing, a woman raised her hand to ask a question: How can we document the forms of people as they move in and out of view? How can we, in a way, keep them? There was some good answer, but now all I remember is the question.
Parties have never saved me, but I’ve never stopped thinking they might. What are you working on? Is your book done? New York is great because everyone’s too tired to hide their contempt, but they know they have to ask something. It’s understood here that failure is contagious, so being almost done only works for so long. At a party at someone’s rich friend’s loft, the keyboard player said, This is a song about the artist’s struggle, and then he played the worst song I’ve ever heard.
The summer I first moved to New York, it rained for twenty-two days in a row. In Arizona, where I grew up, it was all bone-shaking thunder and flash floods that sent even SUVs downstream, but New York had the kind of rain that endured. It was satisfying, really, to wake up each day and still feel the weather matching my sadness, as if the clouds had something to do with courtesy. I’d spent the last two years thinking I would fall out of love with my man in no time. My grandmother asked me if he was the One, and I laughed, knowing with all of myself that he was very much not the one. But I’d ignored the facts all my life, this was no exception. I was in love with a man who didn’t love me back and it was often wonderful. But then he was really gone, and the rain seemed to mourn with me, and I started to think the pain would last forever. Even then, I accepted my life. It will just be sad from now on, I thought. This was the new way. I was so lonely I began regarding my broken heart as the most beautiful thing in my life. Soon after that, it was gone, too.
This is how I want to remember you, I
heard him say, and then I was the one to keep the sound. Echo, echo, I use you as a thing to call out to in my sleep. I don’t need an answer, just a name, just a turn of your head when I say it. I’m happy to be warned of beauty, but I will not listen. I aim my whole world in that direction, I don’t care what comes after.
I pouted on the flight back to New York, thinking maybe I’d never see Erik again. Why would I? A beautiful thing is beautiful because it can disappear at any time, or turn on you, or you could turn on it, or you could touch a hand you don’t know and feel religious. The poets of the world could be dancing in another room to pop songs and we could hear the overflow. The details are hazy, so I fill in the scene: one poet is on crutches; another poet is crying in the bathroom, saying the room out there is full of people she once loved; I’m about to take an airplane far away from him; X, X, did I say his name enough, This Is My Friend X. Every song is on the verge of ending but not every song is beautiful, every human is on the verge of dying but I am not in love with everyone. I am in love with temporality, with the way we looked at each other for one night.
Someone at the party asked me if I’d seen the flower moon last week and I said yes, even though I hadn’t. I had wanted to see it. A lie can be a sort of correction. In a year, maybe I’ll think I really did see it.
I’m afraid to lose the thing I decided could save me. He’s a muse because he’s something I can’t control, can’t fully write down. I see what isn’t there, I hear who isn’t speaking, I do not touch him, I believe him into being. Mine! I say, holding a thing I found. My insistence makes it even less mine, and soon I find I did not want to own the feeling at all, I just wanted to know it, and I do. (I knew you.)
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