Why I'm Like This (2 page)

H
AD
I known what high school would be like I would have asked my parents to set me adrift on an ice floe at puberty. You can be scarred for life by the fact that no boy in a leather-and-wool varsity jacket held your hand in the twilit ring around the football field at a night game. Or combed your long hair out with his fingers. Or tackled you repeatedly during snowball fights. No level of personal or financial success will ever alter the fact that the tousle-haired, sly-smiling boy who sat two rows behind you in trig never played catch with your flute with his friend, and then, when he gave it back to you, draped himself on your locker door and said, “So, why don't you play me something?” And even if, by some completely anomalous blip in the world order, the tousle-haired,
sly-smiling boy actually
did
steal your flute or, if you didn't play the flute, your biology book or your hat with the pompom, and then asked you the question that wasn't really a question but something else, some spark just before the moment of ignition, but you didn't get the gist of the whole thing, had no experience, were too taken off guard to get it right, if you said, “Oh, uh, well, I don't know, um, sure, I guess…?” and then he just smiled his sly smile and said, “Forget it, see ya in trig,” all this being actually worse than no chance, this being the rare chance blown, as I said, you can be scarred for life.

When I was a junior in high school, Kevin Parker asked me to slow-dance to “House on Pooh Corner,” a song I knew all the words and guitar chords to. My normal range of activity at high-school dances consisted mostly of standing around with my friend Mary Beth, making fun of the cheerleaders French-kissing the jocks during “Stairway to Heaven.” “They're not even dancing,” we would say. Occasionally I would fast-dance with a boy on the fringe of cool or on the JV basketball team, or clump up with my gang of girlfriends and try to look as if we were all having the time of our Honor Society lives. I had adored Kevin Parker since the early grades, lapsing only briefly to have a crush on his friend Mike Petersen, a boy to whom I'd spoken maybe ten words but whose smile made my hair hurt. Mike Petersen's family were Mormons and kept a year's worth of canned goods in their basement in anticipation of the Apocalypse. I used to
ride my bike past their house on River Road and stare at it in wonder. It was so small; a year's worth, wow. At the end of sophomore year they moved to Salt Lake City and my affections reverted back to their original object.

So, one night at a school dance, Kevin Parker, between girlfriends, or maybe just out of pity, maybe it was a pity dance, took me by the hand and like Moses leading the Israelites from bondage, led me from the shadows of the folded wood bleachers out onto the light-dappled (mirror ball) gym floor.

He put his hard body right up to mine and dropped his blond head near my shoulder and ran his hands all over my back and up and down my sides. What was I supposed to do? No, really, what
was
I supposed to do? My head was on his chest and my arms around his neck and I was a frozen-solid block of ice. Didn't move a muscle above my waist the entire song. I was like a robot who has come to the end of its capabilities. I frantically probed my engines for further instructions. There was only this: slow-dancing comes with a different model.

As the last strains of “House on Pooh Corner” faded into the opening chords of “Brown Sugar,” Kevin Parker whispered, not unkindly, in my ear, “You can wake up now.” I was fifteen.

I'm going to make a suggestion. You can take it or leave it but here it is: try never to give a man the impression you are asleep when you are not. This may change one day, but for now it is sound advice.

That summer, I taught canoeing at a YMCA camp on the Aspetuck River. For weeks before camp began my mother repeated over and over that the son of an old college friend would be working there, too, and that I should look out for him. I could vaguely recall the son of another of her college friends as being short and spindly and beady eyed, and I was so tired of hearing his name, Jamie Karlin, Jamie Karlin, that I vowed to have nothing to do with him on principle, the principle being to reject anything my mother ever suggested. Little did I know that soon I, too, would be repeating, no, chanting his name over and over and over and over again, until the vowels and consonants had bored themselves into my skull as into a tree trunk, the deep grooves of which I might trace for the rest of my natural life.

Jamie Karlin was heartbreakingly beautiful. Looking at him was like looking into the sun. I could only do it for a moment or two at a time before my eyeballs burned and my head ached. He was a golden shining thing, a supernova, a young lion. To break him down into his parts, his wavy blond hair, the golden, fleecy cilia that covered his arms and legs, his
mouth,
would be counterintuitive; you wouldn't parse a rose or a bald eagle or the last day of school.

He taught woodworking. One day he almost cut off his finger on the lathe and when he came home from the hospital that night, tired and sweet on painkillers, the other boating counselor, Chris, and I watched TV with him at his house. At one point for no reason he reached over and stroked the back
of my calf. Other people have memories of making out in rec rooms. What can I do?

Then, on a balmy night in late July, Jamie Karlin took me to a party, and afterward, while sitting in my driveway in his car, I nervously popped the door handle, engaging the car's interior light. “Isn't that kind of bright?” he whispered. “Sorry,” I whispered back, and then I said, “Good night” and “See you tomorrow,” and I got out of the car. No one ever told me that when a guy says it is too bright he means I want to kiss you, not Get out of the car and shut the door behind you.

And yet, the summer was not a complete disaster. On one of the last true blue days in August, when the oppressive midsummer haze had been blown away by some zippy cumulus clouds, opportunity knocked once more. At the counselors' pool party, Jamie Karlin asked me to rub sunblock onto his back. He had the most unbelievable, fair, freckly skin. Had I this moment to live again, I would have offered to apply the sunblock later, in private, with my tongue. At the time, though, I was too overcome to even speak. It was all I could do not to pass out. Mute, I sat down next to him in the cool grass that sloped above the pool and caressed his lanky, soccer-boy body with Coppertone.

I was obsessed with Jamie Karlin for years after.
Years.
I loved him like a dog loves a bone. Why do they do that? There is no meat left on it. Is it wishful thinking? Is it the idea that meat was there once and maybe it will be there again one
day? Or is it just nostalgia? Oh, that meat was good, remember that meat? Nummy nummy nummy. There I was, chewing my love down to a nub and then burying it and then digging it up and then burying it again somewhere else. And then digging it up. Didn't want any other dogs to find it! If nothing else, I was loyal.

And there
was
nothing else.

I did not have a romantic relationship with any of the great loves of my youth. In college, when boys I liked started liking me back, that is, when the moon was in the seventh house and Jupiter aligned with Mars, I often didn't know what to do with them. Still, I made out with a reasonable number of athletic, slightly grungy, flannel-shirted guys, because they were the kind I'd grown up with, the kind I couldn't have back then, but since my university was eight trillion times larger than my high school, the numbers were in my favor. Unfortunately, none of these boys turned out to be boyfriend material. Somehow, along with lanky and sexy, it seems I was often attracted to dumb. Well, not dumb, but
unwitty,
which is not a prerequisite for firsts but makes it mighty hard to go back for seconds.
Therefore,
I fell hopelessly in love with a series of smart, witty fellows who either weren't interested in my virginal self or scared me because I was my virginal self. Perfect. Nummy.

To top it all off, I was always friends with the girl all the men wanted. I'd like to say it was by accident, although that sounds naive, but I was naive. It certainly didn't do me any
good. Perhaps these girls sought
me
out. I was classic sidekick material, cute enough to be seen with but not cuter than you. My best friend at Andover summer school was a tall Texas girl with blond hair and stick-straight legs. She looked amazing in tennis shorts and was adored by all. I was her first Jewish friend. She'd never even eaten a bagel. We were like Candy Bergen and, I don't know, some short Jewish girl.

My first college roommate, randomly assigned to me, turned out to be a siren, beckoning men to their destruction with her arching eyebrows and C-cups. When her boyfriend from home visited her they had noisy almost-sex half the night while I had to pretend to sleep. She made out in the stairwell of our dorm with a guy I liked. She had walked out with him with the intention of telling him how great I was and then, she said, he jumped her! Imagine that!? Drunk, she went home from a party with another guy I liked, and after they dry-humped he threw up on her. Sure, I had to laugh, it was funny. Ha ha ha. We were inseparable.

 

I finally had sex and it didn't change anything. Or rather, it changed everything. As good as sex was, it had a way of bursting the bubble. My early loves were based on a stomach-roiling mixture of visual cues and wishful thinking. I wanted something that was substantial only in my imagining of it. Domesticity, even the barest minimum that is a result of waking up together and requiring showers and food, felt awkward and contrived. This is because after you start hav
ing sex, you go through a period where it is easier to have sex than it is to have a conversation, which could and ultimately did lead to the unpleasant discovery that the object of your attraction is an idiot. Wait, we've come full circle; sex didn't change anything again.

There was a guy I slept with for five months. We had almost nothing to talk about but he could come to orgasm twice without ever pulling out, like that Doors lyric, “Love me two times…I'm goin' away.” I was both sad and relieved when he ended it. At the time, the acid test for me was whether or not a guy had read
Ethan Frome,
and he failed. One night he fell asleep on the bench in his entryway with a piece of toast in his hand.

I had a boyfriend who yelled at me for mopping his bathroom floor because I couldn't stand to walk barefoot in there. He wrote a terrible play about boarding-school jocks sodomizing the sensitive freshman and didn't give me a part in it. He thought art for money was crass so he lived in an apartment his parents rented for him and eventually ended up in TV. He went to sleep listening to sports radio, like my grandfather listened to the stock quotes. He broke up with me by disappearing for two months without a word.

Then I had a boyfriend who routinely abandoned me at his friends' parties, parties where I knew no one. Unless someone interesting was paying attention to me and then he would slither over me, like a creeping vine, to share the light. He would seduce me and as soon as I was seduced he would
complain that he felt boxed in. He forgot to bring his credit card to the restaurant on Valentine's Day and then never paid me back. He took an eternity to come. The day I figured out that sticking my finger in his anus did the trick I bought myself a new hat. I tortured myself with him for a year, on and off. The off was when I intuited that he was sleeping with a colleague at his glamorous, high-powered job. Not a remarkable feat, the intuition, that is, since I heard him talking to a friend about her on the phone, sorry,
my
phone, while he thought I was still in the shower, sly dog. The woman was wafer thin and had long red curlicue hair. Every man I know was in love with her at some point or another. So, of course, we became friends. I gave the guy a second chance but it ended anyway when I came to the realization that his grammatical errors would eventually drive me out of my gourd.

And there were other guys all during the black hole that was my twenties. Like the one who stood me up at my birthday dinner. And the one who wanted to caress my breasts until I thought my head would explode. (Note: Head explode is not a euphemism for something good.) And there was the handsome lawyer from Baltimore. He had a big truck. No, really, a truck.

Why would I have sex with such people? Beats me. I had to have sex with somebody. I needed practice/I got a late start/it felt good. I couldn't spend my whole life waiting for some soul-crushingly beautiful boy to give me just enough
rope to hang myself with. At some point I had to let there be more. Sex is what grown-ups do with their pent-up longings. They don't just pine away; they can't be nostalgic for something they've never had. Well, I can, because I have a very good imagination, but most people can't.

I was so used to the agony and anxiety of unrequited love that I thought that agony and anxiety
were
love. It wasn't enough for someone to make my pulse race, he had to make me sick. One boyfriend, Mr. My Filthy Home Is My Castle, actually gave me migraines; he was my hero. The pain of it all was also an antidote to the tedium, masking the most banal of connections with time-sucking, brain-freezing uncertainty. Why talk about politics or books or anything when you can talk about whether or not this is a relationship? Or why not just have sex. Ah, again you see we've come full circle.

My stomach finally stopped hurting the morning after my first date with the man who would become my husband. I woke up at seven kicking my feet under the covers, a little scissor-kick dance, a dance of lightness and ease. I did not know then that I would marry him, but I knew that I would be all right. There was a whole new breed of man out there, a gold standard, and I had finally tapped the vein. It was actually possible to go out to dinner, go home and have sex, wake up, shower and have breakfast, conversing
throughout
, all without being either bored to tears or in tears. Of course, there are still times, yes, when I wish I had to worry whether
or not he is going ask me to dance or sit next to me on the bus on the way home from the class trip to Mystic Seaport. There are times when I wish I could worship him from afar and listen to Paul McCartney's
Ram
twelve times a day because it is his favorite album. I miss the idea of the agony.