She began to cry. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
A week later, as she drove me to a doctor’s appointment, she had gained more courage.
“So it was that night when you and your father went to that baseball game, when I said I had the flu, that she first came into my bed.”
I worried about what I might hear next. I pressed my body against the car door. I didn’t think it was okay to ask her to stop, since she needed to tell someone, and she wasn’t—I hoped—telling this to my father.
“That first night, we just held each other.”
I could tell that she wanted me to ask her when they first kissed, or when something first really happened. But I didn’t. I realized that my father would have asked these questions, and I pictured him late at night on the couch, watching TV, knowing more than he needed to and still wanting to know more—specifically, the moment he lost her. All three of us were learning that he never really had her.
“I’m not lonely, kiddo,” my father said late one night before the divorce. Worried about him, I had gone downstairs to join him in front of the TV. “How could I be lonely? I got you.”
—
The next morning—my period steady but now painless—I asked my father if it would be okay if I hung out with a friend for the afternoon. Jess rented an apartment a few blocks away from where he lived, and she had suggested I come by and see some of the books she was reading for school. I felt guilty as I asked him. I was meant to spend my weekends with my dad, and I didn’t know what he would do without me around. But how could I not hang out with Jess when it consumed every part of me, and when I wouldn’t have to worry about my mom’s prying?
My dad popped waffles out of the toaster, put one on each of our plates, and peeled an orange for us to share.
“That’s fine. I have some errands to run that would be boring for you anyway. I have you for dinner tonight, though, right? Promise?”
“Maybe we can go see a movie, too,” I said. I wanted him to feel that what I was doing was obligatory for my age, that I couldn’t help it, that I didn’t know any better than to hurt him in this very small way.
Jess’s apartment was kind of like any other teenager’s room, except she had a kitchen stocked with things like Oreos, ramen, spaghetti, and tuna fish. She had even made a pitcher of red Kool-Aid and put out on the table a little bowl of crispy, spicy peas (wasabi, she told me later). The kitchen opened up to the living room, which had a yellow couch, a piano bench as a coffee table, some spider plants that crawled along the dusty edges of the floor, and a stereo playing Ravi Shankar. In her bedroom, which was painted a deep blue, there was a mattress on the floor, a full-length mirror, a set of plastic bins that must have held her clothes, a poster of a Black woman with an Afro, her eyes seemingly focused on something significant in the distance, the words “Free Angela and All Political Prisoners” over it. Jess had written underneath in large block letters: WHEN ONE COMMITS ONESELF TO THE STRUGGLE, IT MUST BE FOR A LIFETIME.
“What’s the struggle?” I asked.
“For me, all of it. Angela Davis is referring to communism.”
“Communism,” I whispered, and I took a last look at the bedroom and thought I saw a haze within it, as if stepping into it could mean entering another world.
In the fall, Jess had taken a history class on liberation struggles and that was where she encountered Davis.
“It blew my mind, reading her and getting to see racism as this systemic problem, rather than just individual. That with the common racist,” she tapped her hand on the piano bench, and I flinched, “it’s a poisoning that comes from this small percentage of wealthy people—capitalists—who are making money off of racism, so it’s like this plague that we’ve been tricked into and perpetuate. I mean, look at Asbury. All the money for this town went up some mayor’s nose, and no one gave a shit about it. Then some gay white guys from the city decide to try their hand at business where the rent is cheap, and suddenly lots of really cool gay people from the city are coming here. Here. And all the nervous closeted Shore kids start hanging out and spending their money and getting laid and making it cool. Then other artists start coming in, then college students. Next thing my homophobic mom will go out for a night in downtown Asbury and the only thing that will have improved is the five-dollar coffee, not the conditions of the people. See what I mean? Isn’t that amazing?”
I froze. I pictured the face of the man who had stepped aside, whose expression, I was certain then, blamed me. And I didn’t want to be blamed. I wondered if Jess thought I was racist, then decided that she thought that I wasn’t racist, which was why she was telling me this, but then realized that she would probably especially tell this to someone who was racist because that’s part of the struggle. I chewed the wasabi peas very slowly and began to sweat.
“What do you like to read?” she asked.
My mind went blank. I scanned her bookshelf and spotted a name I knew.
“I read this Elizabeth Bishop poem in English class that I loved. I was helping another English teacher clean out her room after school one day and I saw a copy of that book and took it home. I’ve read some of her other poems too, but I mostly just keep reading that one about losing stuff.”
Jess’s face went soft again. I checked her hair, which was puffed up … sensually, it seemed.
“‘The art of losing isn’t hard to master,’” she said.
“Yes!” I said.
“Oh damn, that ending,” she said, closing her eyes. “‘Though it may look like—’”
“‘Write it!’” we both cried out at once.
Then her Hoo! Hoo! filled the air, and that was when I leaned over and kissed her cheek.
—
She was a teenager then, too, and I’ll bet that Jess in her twenties, and especially thirties, wouldn’t kiss back a sixteen-year-old who quoted Elizabeth Bishop to her. But eighteen-year-old Jess did kiss me back. My tongue stabbed wildly in her mouth at first, until hers asserted a kind of quality control. Eventually, I got the hint to mimic her, to slow down, to take her tongue in my mouth like I was taking all of her into my mouth. I say this now with the kind of insight that comes after throwing away everything.
We kissed as we moved down the hallway, and I pulled away enough to tell her that I had my period, because I had seen that in a movie on Cinemax. The woman told the man, and then he stuck his hand down her pants to check, and they didn’t have sex. Jess didn’t put her hand down my pants in this moment. She just kissed my neck and said huskily, “I don’t care.” And then, “But feel free to use the bathroom if that would make you more comfortable.”
As I peed, I felt dizzy with the sense that my life was happening, the same kind of thrill of that first month of my period but much more intense. My pubic hair was sticky with blood, and I cleaned myself with toilet paper. This was the first time I had experienced my own slickness. I had to touch myself gently because I was swollen and it appeared that the whole apparatus could just cave in or tear. I found a fresh pad under the sink and affixed it to my underwear. This didn’t make me feel sexy, but I didn’t quite know what else to do.
While we undressed each other, I glanced at the poster and wondered if the eyes were watching us, like the Mona Lisa, but these eyes stared intently at something else—the revolution—beyond us. As Jess kissed down my thigh, my body tensed and I thought again how at some point even a revolutionary leader feels something like this, even the common racist.
“You cold?” she asked.
I nodded. She removed the rest of her clothes—her bush was not big like the woman in the seventies book from the store, was in fact a bit more kept than mine—left on my giant diaper, and rested her body on top of me. This was meant to warm me, as a kind of interlude, but I groaned as soon as we made contact in this purposeful way, and she groaned and locked her arms around me and we were moving.
I felt her pubic bone, then flesh, against my thigh and something mysterious, like the energetic express
ion of desire, and when she pressed against me it was really as if she pressed into me.
“What are we feeling?” I asked.
She pulled my underwear down and I met her thigh.
We started off rocking like this, and though it would seem so disappointing if it were filmed—so hetero, so chaste—it didn’t feel like any of those things.
“Can you come?” she asked.
She gently pressed her hand against my throat—she was introducing me to something else I wanted.
“Come, now.”
So I did. I thought of my mom as I came, her hand on my breast. I shook my head and my orgasm was interrupted. I felt Jess continuing to come on top of me.
We rested. The light changed to that odd blue, too light for headlights, too dim to see. Through the walls were the sounds of the other tenants making dinner. I dozed. Maybe I could move into this room and quote poems and eat wasabi peas and do this with Jess underneath the eyes of the revolutionary and learn how to not be to blame.
Then I remembered my dad and I pulled myself up. Jess suggested I wash my face before heading home, and tie my hair into a bun so that my dad wouldn’t smell her when he hugged me. When I walked away from her apartment the streets looked wider and whatever chill was in the air stung the raw skin around my chin. If she knows whether she loves someone after the first time she has sex, shouldn’t she have told me she loved me right then? I hadn’t asked her how that worked and now I was missing a crucial piece of information. I was gripped by a new kind of fear that seemed more devastating than anything I had experienced before: that I could love someone and not be loved in return.
The next morning I told my dad that I couldn’t spend the day with him, that I had to study at a friend’s house, and this time I was filled with such urgency that I didn’t even feel guilty for leaving him alone. In fact, I resented him for his loneliness, for the fact that he loved someone who didn’t love him back, and I didn’t want that disease to live in me, to ever live in me.
—
I didn’t tell my mom about Jess, not because I didn’t know what to talk about, but because I decided not to talk to her at all.
“Is something going on,” she asked one night, standing imposingly in the doorway of my room. “Are you dating someone?”
“No. Don’t ask me that,” I said firmly, violently.
She looked stunned. Her breasts swayed as she turned, and she didn’t ask me again until the next night during dinner.
“Someone named Jess called for you,” she said, watching me for a reaction.
I gave her none. I chewed the tough meat on my plate until I couldn’t anymore, and then spit it into my napkin. I took a bite of mashed potatoes with a spoonful of peas. My mouth was too full to speak.
“Honey, is this someone that you’re, I don’t know, dating?”
“Mom. No.”
“Because I found this book under your bed, with these images—you don’t need to hide it. You don’t need to hide who you are. I don’t think I need to tell you that you can date whoever you want.”
A buzzing rage vibrated over my head, and I pushed away from the table.
“I’m not like you. The thought of it—it repulses me.”
My mom picked up her glass and she looked ready to throw it at my head, but instead, she slammed it down on the table and let out a sob, a sound so terrible and long, one that I didn’t want in my ears, so I let it rush through me and tried not to feel it. Something inside me that the moan should have penetrated stepped aside and never quite stepped back.
—
The next day, after school, I saw Jess. In class that day, she told me, they’d done an exercise where they had to get in pairs and say a cultural group—Chinese, Indian, African American, Mexican, Caucasian—and state all the stereotypes that came into their heads.
“It was so hard. I was forced to look at what was inside of me, and it was awful,” she said. “There were a few white students who left the room, and I wish I could be like, ‘You aren’t a bad person, but you have to look at this. It needs to burn so we can see more clearly.’”
We were naked and I had my head nuzzled under her chin and I held on to her tighter. I stared at the poster: WHEN ONE COMMITS ONESELF TO THE STRUGGLE, IT MUST BE FOR A LIFETIME. I was determined to tell her that I loved her. I was going to tell her. I opened my mouth to say it, finally, when she removed herself from my arms.
“You’re holding me a little too tightly,” she said, and patted my hand.
I turned away from her and allowed my hurt and discontent to fill the room.
“Darlin,’” she said.
I loved when she called me that, but I wasn’t ready to respond. There was something I was noticing. She’d recently acquired a night table where we’d taken to burning a candle while we were together. It had burned down to the very base of the holder, and I became so transfixed by the flame that the sob left me.
Suddenly, it wasn’t a candle anymore; it was just a flame, and it looked so tired leaning its weight against the edge of the base. It leaned like it knew it was about to end. I was too young—no, too privileged—to truly know about things and their endings, how suddenly they come, but I felt it in that flame. I grabbed another candle from the drawer, because it felt important to me, I cannot explain why, that I use that flame to light another candle. And for a few brief moments, the flame existed in two places, on my new candle and the dying one.
“Do you have scissors?” I asked.
She kissed my shoulder, then got up. I heard her rummaging around. I wanted to tell her to hurry, but I didn’t yet know I could make demands of someone that I loved who might not love me back. She handed them to me and I used the scissors to gently nudge at the side of the wax, removing the still-lit disc, which balanced on the blade of the scissors as I inserted the new candle. The new flame seemed silly and young. It was this dying flame that I loved. I thought that it might make it for a time. This flame was the strongest thing I’d ever seen.
Chinese, I thought to myself and waited: a laundromat, a plate of dumplings, a cartoon drawing of a face—I don’t know where I’d even seen it, which is to say I’d always seen it. I didn’t want these images, and I heaved them off, felt them dissolve into that empty place that my mother’s sob passed through the night before. I watched the wick fall over and go out.
“No, no,” I said. I pressed my hands onto my chest. “No, no.” Jess put her hand on my thigh, but I couldn’t feel it. “I don’t want to see that.”
“What? The candle?” she said.
“I’m not ready.”
“It’s not about being ready.”
“I wasn’t ready.”
“But it’s good. We got this new candle now, and it’s brighter.” She kissed each eye; she kissed my lips. “You just hadn’t noticed the other one until the end. That’s okay, because now you’ll pay more attention to this candle. We can watch it burn together.”
She held my hands too tightly and I looked at her lips and I could see that there was more that she wanted to say and now I didn’t want it, I didn’t want another word, or for Angela Davis to look at me in that cluttered, Nag Champa–scented room. I felt the edges of cramps coming on, like a white hand with long pink nails squeezing my uterus and pulling down. I asked Jess to drive me home.
“Can I walk you to the door?” she asked when we were outside my house.
I was in so much pain, I barely shook my head. I didn’t want my mom to see her. I could never tell her about Jess. I didn’t want to see the disgusting delight in her eyes, or the dimming in my dad’s. I didn’t even look at Jess to say goodbye. Somehow, I found myself standing at my front door, my hand shaking as I unlocked it.
That night, as I writhed on the floor, waiting for the whisky to take effect, I decided that I wouldn’t see Jess anymore.
It was so easy to let go.
There are certain rules you learn early.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank Wendy, Ann,
Rae, and Melissa for the support, strategies, and medication that has kept me here and full of desire to see this moment (and all that’s to come).
For deep reading, critique, and friendship towards this manuscript and me, I thank: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Anca Szilágyi, Nancy Jooyoun Kim, Michael Heald, Lacey Jane Clemmons, Jennifer Natalya Fink, Michael Heald, Paul Lisicky, Rebecca Brown, and Melissa Febos.
I thank Brian Lam for bulldozing the wall and taking this book on—and so many writers at Arsenal whose work in print helped me to imagine this one there, too. Thank you to Shirarose Wilensky for encouraging me to probe deeper to find something new and dazzling in these stories, to Jazmin Welch for the gorgeous design, and to Cynara Geissler and Mandy Medley for brilliantly getting this book into readers’ hands—a profound task, all.
Thank you to Amanda Kirkhuff for a perfect painting.
Since this is my first published book, I offer gratitude to various mentors throughout my life: Kat Grausso, KT Langton, Peter Trachtenberg, Vijay Seshadri, Rachel Cohen, Joan Silber, Rebecca Lee, Karen Bender, Monica Lewis, Nicole McCarthy, and especially, Betsy Teter.
Thank you to Artist Trust for funding and time to work on these stories at Centrum Artist Residency. Thank you to the MacDowell Colony and to the brilliant residents there that August and September 2015 when the initial manuscript was completed—a special nod to Ian Miles Gerson and Jeremy O. Harris for cracking the blood-filled egg.
Thank you to the Hub City Writers Project.
Thank you to Theresa and Jackie, Talia, Bekah, and Sydney, Cara and Ben, Courtney, Eli, Frances, Bunny, Anis, Chelsey, Nicole, and Emmett. To my students, Hugo House, Seattle Arts & Lectures, and the sprawling and inspiring Seattle writing community.
I thank the Mannings née Manzellas, the Giustis, the Gallos, and the Natellis.
My biggest thanks to Erin Sroka, Roderick McClain, Ever Jones, and Harlan Fern McClain: the chambers of my heart.
Shannon Perez-Darby and Daniel Hanson, thank you for helping me change the narrative of how it is possible to love and be loved.
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