The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets (8 page)

Just as the first evening we spent tenderly examining each other’s bodies—an act with implications we were far,
then, from understanding—was never mentioned, neither was what we did to Heather, or what Heather did to me. In school she made every effort to pass by my desk, sometimes giving my hair a little tug; I would look up from a spelling test to find her looking at me, unblinking, and she would grin and grin and grin. I spent the months after that waiting for a knock at the door, or to be summoned into the living room to find my father and the preacher, a balding man with hairy, stubby hands, talking in low voices about me, about Heather.

The knock never came. One day Heather showed up at school with her arm in a sling and did not take unnecessary routes to pass by my desk; the next day she was gone. That Sunday a crowd gathered outside the church, waiting to be saved, speculating as to why the doors were locked.

For weeks and months, the marquee displayed the same message:

WE ARE
NOT PERFECT
JUST FORGIVEN

S
ome nights I listen to my ragged breathing and remember: in the space behind my eyes, memories appear Technicolor. Pink and yellow light shines through the visions in my half sleep, as if they were constructed of rice paper, and I try, with such an aching, to replicate the smell of chlorine, to recreate the laughter of those long gone, to set these stories in my head in stone so they can be done with.

Some nights I remember peaches. Tonight is one of them.

Jackson had a job at the market one summer. He was seventeen, I was almost. The sunflowers in the front of the store were larger than any I’ve seen since, and the ancient cashier with the cigarette voice was named Paula. No: Linda. She called me rosebud and complimented my wrinkled sundresses. The bathroom was in the right front corner; it had only one stall and I can’t remember what the hand soap smelled of but I promise myself I will before I
sleep. Jackson worked four days a week—or was it five—and his work shirt was never clean. It smelled definitively of him, even from where I would stand, across a display of clementines touted for peeling easily. I pretended I was a customer, crossed my arms and sighed over the selection of fruits and vegetables.

But what’s the
difference
, I whined as I fingered the donut peaches, and he smiled patiently with the left side of his mouth curving up like it had since we were kids. You see, ma’am, if you can believe it or not, and he’d pause with mock astonishment, these were cultivated especially for a Chinese emperor—and now I can’t remember the name of the emperor but I decide I will, before I fall asleep. Never mind the name. Remember the donut peach. You must, I tell myself. Must.

They were cultivated for a Chinese emperor, Jackson would say, who loved peaches but disliked the mess, so they designed the
pan tao
, the flat peach, which fit right in between his mustache and beard. It occurs to me between ticks that he may have made this up. No, no, he couldn’t have. Go on.

What about this one. I would say, it
looks
funny. Should the skin look like that? All white like that? Don’t judge a book by its cover, ma’am, and he would laugh politely, this here is the arctic white and I might say it’s finer than the rest of them. Oh, really? Why? Well, first you’ve got less fuzz, he’d say, and I’d acknowledge this with a
huh
and hand on my hip. They’re just about the sweetest peach you’ll get, but they ripen more quickly, so you eat these guys up once you get home, ma’am.

I force myself to remember, now lying on my side: freestone: the flesh falls away from the pit when you bite into it. Clingstone: it refuses to.

Inevitably my peach facts run out and I lie awake, feeling unsettled, knowing that there’s so much I’m forgetting. I get up.

In the bathroom I undress and examine myself. I arrange myself horizontally in the bathtub, and I turn the shower on and wrap my arms around myself, feel the water from its great height of origin. I try, this time, to remember nothing at all.

T
he first time we touched each other, I was seven, Jackson eight. My father, in a particularly good mood, had offered to take the boys off Julia’s hands, take all of us to a swimming spot he knew of. She hated my father, or maintained that she did for a large chunk of my childhood, but there was nothing Julia valued more than a moment away from the physical and psychic tugs that issued from her sons’ mouths day in and day out. (
T is for Tired
, read the alphabet book James would be assigned to write in school that year.
If we are bad Mom gets tired
. It was accompanied by a drawing of Julia, her hair in curlicues branching in every direction, her eyes the X’s that signified dead, and three pink triangles that represented a bathrobe. In a moment of black humor she taped it to her bedroom door, and we heard her and a girlfriend cackling about it late one night in the kitchen.)

School had started, but the weather had not changed: an unbearable incongruity. In protest, I wore my blue bathing
suit, which had begun to pill around the crotch, underneath the brand-new denim and gingham blouses my father had bought me for the first week of classes. The first days, as always, seemed like a sort of play: surely they were not asking us to add and subtract numbers when just days before we had reigned the uneven sidewalks with games that lasted after dark. My father was nothing if not indulgent, and sensing this, put us in his large boat-sized car with bouncy seats the Sunday before the second week began.

We made our way up the winding hills of Marin County, me sticking my head out the window pretending I was a happy golden Labrador, my father singing along to radio. Buddy Holly.
Every day, it’s a-gettin’ closer
: I could tell he loved that song, and had for a long time. James sang it:
Everyone says go ahead and catch her
, instead of
ask her
, as if it were a ballad of capture the flag.

We had to park on the edge of the road, which sat essentially on a cliff, and get out of the slightly tilted car on the side of traffic. We all chained hands and pretended not to be scared of the cars whizzing by, appearing from around the curves. The path down was sometimes uneven and at those points my father reminded us: “Three points of contact.” That meant have at least one hand and two feet, or two hands and one foot, on the ground or a steady rock or whatever you can find. This phrase still comes to me, sometimes, my father’s voice didactic but soothing.
Three points of contact
.

They were called the inkwells, the pools of water that flowed into ones below them by miniature waterfalls. We
took turns jumping off the rocks into the deeper pools, marveling at being suspended, if briefly, in the air above the water. James played a secret game with himself up by the trees, his lips pursed and spitting sometimes as a result of dramatic sound effects. My father, treading water, placed his hands on the small of our backs while we floated and looked up at the early September sky: it was better, somehow, than our beloved August’s and July’s had been. I remember that moment as a blinking cursor, as if our buoyancy gave us the freedom, the permission we needed to press the boundaries we did that evening.

My father had taken us out only under the condition that we study for our spelling test that evening. We sat on the floor beneath the open window of the brothers’ bedroom, still in our bathing suits, taking turns drilling one another, but my mind kept returning to Jackson sneaking up underwater and nibbling my toes.

“S’hot
,
”
he kept complaining. Tired of his whining and likewise heated, I removed my bathing suit, simultaneously proud and embarrassed. “Now you,” I insisted. We balked at the silliness of our naked bodies and began the scientific exploration, sitting cross-legged on the carpet, parallels of gender and the entire universe as we understood it. What he had was much different from mine: I held it in my hand and let it drop, held it in my hand and let it drop. In retaliation he began to poke at me. Quick, tentative jabs, the tiny pink knob that would be with me forever listening, waiting. If this was wrong, it was only because, like our classmates taunted,
secrets don’t make friends
, and this was certainly a secret.

Julia was in the kitchen, washing dishes, and James, we thought, asleep in front of the television. It was Jackson who saw him in the crack of the doorway, who grabbed his arm and dragged him in.

“Why are you naked?” James asked.

“Because it’s hot,” Jackson tested, and it seemed for a minute that James would believe it, before he drank in the particular pink of our cheeks and guilt in our eyes and catch in our breaths. Before he got to the “o” of Mom, Jackson’s hand was over his mouth and he’d wrestled his little brother to the floor, made him promise not to tell. James was crying, and it occurred to me later it was not for the threat or the physical force, but because he had just witnessed something private, that he wasn’t a part of: he felt, for maybe the first time in his life, alone. Like tourists tracing their fingers over the maps of the underground trains, wondering at how vehicles of the same origin so quickly split into branching.

We did not continue our experiments, nor did we mention them. But in the bath, beneath the bubbles, I touched myself and tried in vain not to feel my fingers, tried to understand why it was so different when someone else did it. I rubbed my crotch back and forth on the monkey bars at the park down the street, and though the metal was foreign, it was not the same as someone else’s flesh.

(When I brought it up years later, Jackson denied its truth, looked at me the way people might look at an academic who has written a lengthy book on a subject so pigeonholed, so inaccessible, that the time and research
involved seem at once pathetic and awe-inspiring in how unfathomable the reality. A memory so fierce as mine leaves one lonely.)

When my father caught me masturbating under the dinner table, he was gentle: he explained that it was perfectly normal but meant for private settings. When I grew up, it would be something very special to share with someone else. Nonetheless, my face grew red and I cried from shame. Later in my bedroom, I rubbed myself hard and wished determinedly for the time when someone else would be present for this warmth, this friction. And I knew, even then, whom that someone would be.

The secret, shameful feeling about sex that I’ve grown to have, which it’s now clear Jackson long suffered, grows as I go farther back in eidetic memory, deeper in roots. It’s been a part of my life longer than it seems it should have, which did not occur to me as good or bad until the latter lit up in bright lights—the type that shine through symbolical windows and keep one from sleeping.

O
ur childhood was a love affair like any other. Were I to choose my details wisely, I could submit them in present tense to a romantic advice column. We went through ups and downs, lapses in communication, periods of feverish adoration, epochs of lasting alienation. During the week he was gone one summer, I hung my quite long hair over the edge of the stone wall on our porch as if in protest, awaiting his return. Surely the act was in some ways Rapunzel-inspired but also a demonstration of the similarities between human relationships and the skin that hangs around our faces though long dead. Because yet they are dead or at best dying, strands of hair are worshipped and brushed and in some idyllic cases gathered in blue or yellow ribbons. Long hair is at best respected and at worst wondered at in the way old, strange things are: it is proof. It is history. And in the time of children, which is punctuated oddly and cataloged eccentrically, a week without Jackson was no less than a crater. What needs not be said,
of course, is that the longer hair gets, the harder it is to brush.