Authors: Dan Skinner
Memorizing You (38 page)
“They say fashion goes in cycles and things always come back.” I reminded her.
She held up a garish paisley print shirt. “Really?
I shrugged and grinned. “Guess not.”
She refolded them and set them in the hall. “I’ll take them to Goodwill in the morning.”
I had jeans from every decade: striped, hiphuggers, bellbottoms, denim, bleached, stonewashed, torn, and pre-worn. I hadn’t realized how much jean’s fashion had changed over time. Goodwill.
“It’s odd,” she remarked as she got into another box, “how, after all these years, we’re still together. Not in the way that I first imagined, but here we are together every day just as if we were married. Life is strange. I would have never imagined this.”
“I’m glad we are. I don’t know what I would do if …” I amended my words. “I’m glad you’re here.”
We went back to our tasks. We had twelve boxes in the hall to get rid of so far.
Rosemary squealed from the corner. “Look at this!” she exclaimed, peering into a freshly opened box. She had to cut packing tape off it to get inside. She pulled out an old LP album. Jefferson Airplane. The box was packed tight with many of them.
“Holy Hell!” I’d completely forgotten that I’d packed them. Carefully packed them. They’d been there since I had moved from my folks.
“David, we played these albums as teenagers. Mine bit the dust long ago!” she pulled out another and inspected it. “You’re a pack rat. Do you get rid of anything?”
I chuckled. “Apparently the device to play them on. Unless there’s a phonograph buried in here somewhere.”
She nodded. “I wouldn’t put it past you.”
She pulled out another to inspect it. I recognized Donovan’s
Sunshine Superman
.
My mind skirted a vague memory of its importance. to the panties.
As she slipped the black vinyl disc from the sleeve a flurry of folded note paper and a black and white photograph fell to the floor.
“What’s this?” she asked, picking up the spilled contents.
Voices whispered in my head from a distant past.
She unfolded and read one of the notes and covered her mouth. She glanced at the picture and bowed her head. Then gathering them altogether, she looked up and handed them to me. Her eyes were glazed.
I took them and saw the tremor in my hands. The notes he and I had written to each other nightly and promised to destroy. I’d kept them all. The picture of the two of us, Ryan and myself, in makeup and women’s attire at Judy’s party.
More voices joined in. I could hear them all. I could see the scenery. I could smell the smells.
The gaunt face that greeted me in the hospital room with his mother showing him the family album. The terry cloth robe falling open on a chilling thinness. The lack of recognition of who I was clearly in his eyes. The eyes that weren’t the same. My feeling of loss.
“I hope you’ll come back, David. When I learn to play the games.” Talking to me like I was a perfect stranger. As if he were a child.
The crumpled body at the foot of the stairs. The door open and snow blowing behind him. The blood running from his ear. The pallor of his flesh.
His nose nuzzling my hair as we stood in the barn laying out the plans of our life just before they were taken away.
“I realized you were my shelter,”
he had said.
“You are where I can read my happy ending. Where everything is okay. I just wish I could thumb- to the panties.
I remembered the words as if he had whispered them to me across the room.
His sheet-creased face burrowed into a pillow as Connor bumped into the bed and accidentally woke him after our night of getting high and dancing. Connor thinking he had passed out before seeing us have sex. Ryan’s funny way of dismissing the intrusion into our privacy. The hand wave.
“Rain check on the sex watching.”
Sitting in our usual spots on the porch of my folk’s house at night as the window squeaked open and Mom handing us each a soda like she knew the roof was our favorite rendezvous spot.
I saw him sitting at the foot of my bed reading my comic books when I was sick. Patient. Worried. Caring.
Seeing his beautiful blue eyes as we kissed in demonstration for Connor and Monica at their party. How we amazed them with the genuineness of our feelings for each other. How it had aroused them.
Pulling me defiantly into the bathroom as his father shaved where he personally brushed my teeth and made me gargle mouthwash before leaving. Flaunting the fact that we were hiding directly under his nose…and directly in his presence when he forbade us to be together. The look of the imp written all over his features. The delight he took in the secret knowledge that we had pulled it off.
The striptease he had done for me to Herb Albert in his father’s study as we drank his scotch. His nakedness playing over me in the dance. The way his tongue traced my chin to my lips. The smell of liquor he breathed into my mouth.
The three of us—Ryan, Rosemary, and myself—sleeping intertwined in my bed. Rosemary pretending to be our teddy bear. The sense of security of a friend and lover sandwich.
Our romantic interludes in the barn. Shedding our clothes. Climbing the ladder to the loft and melting into each other. Every smell filtered to my nostrils as fresh as if I stood there now. A place that no longer existed. is killing me.”
The look on his face the night of his birthday party. In the garden. When he lifted the lid on the jewelry box and took out my present of the necklace of one heart split into two halves. “Two souls…one heart…”
The weekend of Judy’s party when we were first accepted by everyone as a couple. The drinking. The pot. The bullhorn announcement.
“She called me your boyfriend,”
he said giggling and grinning.
“Yes, she did. My boyfriend.”
“
Wow, that is such a wonderful thing to hear someone say,”
he enfolded me in his arms.
“I’m your boyfriend!”
The make-up, the women’s silk pajamas, the kiss that would become the picture that fell out of the album sleeve that I held in my hand. The first shedding of our total innocence. First sex. The surreal feeling of how we had become one.
When he told me the sad story of Frank the sparrow.
The secret notes we wrote that that were in my hand at that moment. The sly grin he always wore when he delivered one to me.
The gigantic oak on the walk back to my house where we would pause in the shadows of the night to find the privacy of a kiss. The glitter of his eyes in the night. The tender touch of his lips. The feeling of his stubble against my skin.
The raspberry-stained kiss in the garden. The first kiss.
How he taught me to swim at the lake. The look in his eyes when he told me things I didn’t know about myself. The real color of my eyes.
“They’re not just blue. There’s some green, br that was twice the sizeofy fy own, black.”
That my ear looked like a perfect tulip petal. How I sat close to the table when I ate and turned my fork upside down to eat. That in the small of my back I had hair that grew like golden feathers. It was like he had studied everything about me. It overwhelmed me to have him find me so important.
The night he took me in the shower with him and forced me to look at him as he looked at me to get over my physical shyness. The beauty of that flawless body standing so close to mine. The kindness in his eyes as he helped me over my anxiety. How I told him I thought he was beautiful and he said the words that would forever change how I felt about myself.
“You devastate me, David. You always have.”
The sight of him crying with my mother over reading the ending of
A Separate Peace
. The red splotched face that did nothing to mar his beauty. As if Michelangelo’s David had cried.
The very first night he fell asleep in my bed after a night of studying and my mother found him wrapped around me as we slept. The feeling of him pressing himself in closer. The warmth. The happiness it gave me.
The Fourth of July he played tag football with my dad to the delight of my mother and myself. How he lost to my dad at a game of gin rummy. How his face glowed in the light of the porch.
The camp-out in his backyard. All the beautiful images of him cast against the firelight and starlit sky. Romance never had a mindful of such glorious pictures. How I confessed my secret to him and he embraced it with such sensitivity.
The day we first ran together and in the city’s morning light, and he gave his confession to me. How I felt seeing a strong man look so emotionally vulnerable because of truth and the eagerness to share it with a friend.
The day we introduced ourselves to each other at his family’s house. The expression on his face when he read his fortune on the tail of a Bazooka gum comic.
“What you want is sometimes in front of you.”
How his eyes locked on mine afterward.
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