Lit Riffs (35 page)

juliana baggot

I
didn’t love the boys then the way I love them now, their lean hips, their hairless, muscled chests, their necklaces—a lot of Italian horns bobbing in the dips of collarbones—their loping gaits, their swelling pricks, their soft wet lips, and teary eyes, some were already deeply sentimental. Then I loved them with deep primal biology; I loved them because of an internal bent, a moist yearning imprinted heavily on my genes, perhaps passed down through my mother, stunted (and fattened, too) by her need for romance. I loved them like we were a country at war, like I was a bullet-wounded nurse, and sometimes I was compelled by a sweeping maternal drive. I had no choice. But now, bodies, bodies, boys, they are the home of my youth. Not a row house in Asbury Park, but the bodies of boys, sprawled out, adoring, that’s the place I was raised.

I’ve tried to convince myself that collegiate academia is more like rock and roll. I don’t get up in front of my students like some old crank in a mustard-crusted cardigan arm-flapping, a chirping prattle, memorized book dust. No, I’m the kind of professor always trying to reveal our dirty little secrets in something other than fat-headed lingo. For example, the first day of class, Feminist Studies, entry level, I gave a talk on Self-Esteem Warfare. Michael Hanrahan was just another student, second row, halfway back, a boy, unusual, yes, in a class always dominated by brassy young women. I started with: Self-Esteem Warfare was a plot hatched by the mediocre minds of desperate, well-intentioned high school administrators. Until this point, they had been alternately bawling and shrugging in the face of calamity: the deterioration of society via the loose morals of high school girls wearing frosty lipstick, bicentennial tube tops, MIA dog tags, and tight jeans. The notion is this: girls have sex with boys because girls lack self-esteem and are seeking approval and love that is insufficient in their lives. In other words, we ached for our daddies. Freudian Theory had made its glorious way to the masses—I do not recall for them Mrs. Glee with the rub-rub of nylons as she patrolled the halls; the eggy Mr. Flint picking at the dismal sour creep of his boxer shorts; the breathless tenacity of them all, charging to catch us, electrified by their own urges, really, for each other, for us, our then beautiful bodies, rubbery and buoyant.

Boys have sex because it feels good. There’s no stopping them. And, here we have the most logical example. Who could have stopped Michael Hanrahan, the boy who came in so very late each class that I told him I needed a written explanation? His car skidded across a thin plain of water, smashed into a telephone pole. He died driving too fast in the rain, his dick hard. And no one could have stopped him. It would have been un-American to try. (Maybe if he’d been relieved … maybe if there’d been a bullet-wounded nurse beforehand to tend to him.)

The administration set out to cure girls of their tragic flaw, this weakness not for pleasure or even an inevitable biological yearning, but for acceptance. It was a nationwide call to arms, but I focus on New Jersey, specifically Asbury Park. (No one this far north knows Asbury Park, the ghetto on the Jersey shore, boarded-up casino, The Adriatic with its old regulars in fishing caps, listening to lounge music under leaky skylights, the minigolf course overgrown except for patches of indoor/outdoor carpet, hotels looking like Eastern Block old-age homes, the old Tilt-A-Whirl, the abandoned fun house, auto body shops, auto parts, paint shops and detailing, signs like “New Jersey’s Hottest Nite Spot,” closed, the old Greek statue: the Patriarch of Eternal Graces or is it Infinite Love? All I know is the adult-movie theater thrives and the ocean is the ocean, big wide blue, the widest eye.)

I don’t tell my students that I’m talking about one girl, like me. I don’t even say: We will call her X. I don’t render my large mother or my witless father, or Mrs. Glee and Mr. Flint, deflated by another ball-busting school year, hunched over their gardens, hosing down their cars, because it’s summer. But nearly the end of summer. Because isn’t it always the end of summer? Isn’t there always a mist on the beach, a huddle of kids, arms stiff, hands in pockets. And girls, like X, like me, dumpling-eyed with ringing hips and punching hearts, strung out on screaming guitar and growling motors, aching. (My ass remembers the hot hood of a car.) And, the truth is, let’s set it straight, I was confident enough to get it. Weren’t there other girls who sat in their bedrooms, damp and listless?

I tell them that not all sexually active girls lacked self-esteem. The prior argument, even as historically recent as the fifties, was that a girl shouldn’t have sex because of biological consequences of pregnancy, of which she alone had to bare the brunt. My mother and father know this argument too well. My mother told me that she knew of a girl who’d gotten rid of a baby before she showed. She could have done that, but didn’t. She would stroke my hair, me, her baby, and say, “Look, here you are, the joy of my life.” But it never rang quite true, her soft sack under her chin wagging, not quite.

The pill did away with this argument. And a new one had to be fabricated. Self-Esteem Warfare was dirty pool. It allowed judgment not just on a girl’s abilities at self-restraint. No, it gave the girls sticks and asked them to poke at each other’s soul. Are you insecure? It asked. Do you like yourself? Are you some sad, lost girl that we should all feel so very sorry for?

I’ve gotten drunk with the other women in my department. After a meeting, we went out for drinks, under the guise of bonding. And I gave in, drank too much, told sordid tales.

Things that I don’t think of now, or try not to—driving someone’s Camaro into a chain-link fence for love. Little stories that end: You know how that goes, followed by a semicircle of silence and blank stares. And a mousy cardigan picked up the slack by telling the story, so boldly, of the first penis she ever saw. When she was a freshman at Williams, a frat boy whipped his out on a fire escape at a party. She got so flustered she cried. I don’t belong here. The other women cheer her on. They leer at the boy, now a man somewhere in an easy chair. How could he? Men are savage, blah, blah, blah. I didn’t miss my daddy. I would like to admit to nothing short of perfection: our cheeks were pink, our knees like wax fruit never bruised. Our mothers chirped like birds and our fathers kept map-folded handkerchiefs in their back pockets. But Asbury Park wasn’t short on grim reality. Some people develop a split personality; I developed a split landscape, shrugging off the boardwalk, worn and rotting, held together by rusty nails that could slice open feet, the roller coaster’s click, click, click and its labored whining motor, its seat belts frayed and busted, the gray, sickened ocean and wheezing gulls, for the terrain of boys. The administration was right. I was lacking. Things like love were insufficient. But this is always true. It’s the human condition.

Wasn’t it true for Michael Hanrahan? His handwritten note appeared in my mailbox:
Dear Professor, I’m in love with you. I find it hard to come to class on time because I get nervous and pace and loose track of time. Sincerely, Michael Hanrahan.

Loose track of time, maybe that was it, that alone. If time is a track, it is loose. His beautiful slip,
loose
, it’s why I asked him the next day to come and see me after class, in my office. Humans are weak. It isn’t Asbury Park’s fault, is it? Even though we all know that a town can rip the bones from your back. And my back was weak, ironically. I was that girl in the brace. Stiffened in a case, I wasn’t allowed to slouch unless I slipped out of it, out of the house, into the night.

And I did. I don’t recall names. I’ve worked hard not to recall names. I don’t go back. Funerals are the only exception—my mother’s enormous casket, the men staggering, legs stiffening, under its weight. I don’t carry yearbooks in a box when I move.

Let’s call him D, that first boy. I remember our radio-lit bones, our pearly oils, how the car, sealed shut, filled with steam so like a bathroom pumped with hot shower water I could only think of my mother, her big body, sausage-taut, rocking me on the tub’s edge. It’s what you do with a child suffering midnight croup. I don’t have children, but I know this much. Each cough clanged my ribs, my own voice was an animal bark and moan. Slowly my throat opened again, my body went slack with something near sleep, my hand a tiny pink star on her large sagging breast covered by her thin nylon nightgown. The car was hot like that. I cried out urgently. We both eventually relaxed, a cooling sweat. I rested my hand on the doll-hat nipple of his tan chest, a cure. It was the end of summer, like it is now. It began to rain, like it did when Michael was driving too fast. He wasn’t going home.

No one rushes home. He was going somewhere else.

D drove me home past unwashed churches, seam-rusted silos, a man caught in his headlights, shoveling a raccoon from the roadside. I stood in front of my house after he pulled off. Our house tilted forward, an errant tooth in the row, because my fat mother sat nose pressed to the window, staring out at the street; this was somebody’s idea of a joke. During the day she could look out on the kids with broomstick handles and halved tennis balls, and in the evening the dim, red-fringed windows of the lantern-strung Chinoiserie, where couples leaned together in the dull glow. I was fifteen. (I absorbed her desire.) She’d been waiting for me, dimpled, pale arms perched in an open window. But when I arrived, her face slid inside. She wouldn’t ask about the night. She was a nervous woman. (One night, she put her head down on her arm on the sill and her heart stopped, a dead muscle.) What could she have said? I was late. Shouldn’t she have said something?

The basement’s bare bulb shined through the window wells; and the dark house, belly-lit, seemed to hover just above earth like a spaceship. My father lingered underground, wide fingertips running over the greased gears of other people’s clocks and toaster ovens, a side job. Through the open upstairs windows, where curtains billowed like veils, I could hear my mother from their bed, calling his name, calling. But he didn’t come. And then her face appeared again in the window. An urgent whisper, “What the hell’s amatter with you? Why aren’t you coming in?”

“I’m taking my time.”

I didn’t want to go inside. I had a little brother and two little sisters who wrestled their clammy sheets in a shared bedroom while I stayed outside. I was somebody else now, my back brace hung to twist on a hanger in my closet, a broken cocoon, old skin. I felt like everything had changed. It seemed possible for the house to heave from earth in a whir of chewed screens and shingles, dust ruffles and dust. It didn’t. My father pulled the chain on the basement bulb and turned on the front-porch light. In the slow dilation of morning it burned like a golden pear, like fruit on fire.

And so I became the girl you see in a pack of boys. High, windblown from riding in the backseat. Someone’s arm slung around me, one day this one, another day that. (A mercenary, a tender nurse, a mother, angel. My father once said, “Be kind to boys. They’re not as tough as they seem. Don’t break their hearts.” He was drunk, confused. He’d cut his finger with a paring knife. I was twelve. I promised.) They needed me more than I needed them. Doesn’t it take a certain confidence to take in these boys, knowing their bound to become Atlantic City bus drivers? To offer some small condolence of the body before they go on to install parts at a Chrysler Plant somewhere? I was a soft spot, a comfort. And none of them had that. Or some did, I suppose. But I wasn’t drawn to them.

Once there was a cake and we were drinking rosé and we were at that lake. This was toward the end of it, summer, yes, and the end of all of it for me. There was a fight. A bloodied face. A boy running into the lake. Arms outstretched. One staggering onshore, calling him back. (See, they loved each other, too, not just me. They howled for each other. These beatings were born from the steam of desire and pride.) One passed out in the grass. And another one was with me under a tree, bare dirt. There was a cake, but it wasn’t anybody’s birthday. I was riding this one boy. So pretty, and when we were done, he sang “Happy Birthday.” And his voice was rough, but nice. I said, “Were you a choirboy?”

And he just smiled. “I can sing.”

And I sat up, topless, skirt bunched at my waist, and saw the other boys, and I couldn’t keep them all safe forever. The song had stitched my heart. The boys were dangerous. Each one was shining lit from within; their souls were torches. I had to let them go, let all of it go, and it was hard to do. And maybe even then I knew it was wrong to let it go, despite rhetoric to the contrary.

I loved it: the dirt, the cake, the skin, the cars, squealing tires, the radio pitched and reeling. But I was already seeing it through a certain head-tilted gaze. I knew it was something else. That there was a larger swirling, what? Import? Implication? I was reading it. I couldn’t stay in the body even though I tried.

Michael Hanrahan, second row, he was there as I show slides of Tibetan women hauling timber like crosses on their shoulders, and then of the veiled bedouin. I could feel him twist in his chair. I could see him, leaning in, watching me, my body carnival-lit, a reflection of color when I moved across the wide screen. I proceeded to the Gimi men in their gourd masks sticking their tongues through pigs’ teeth. I made the appropriate American correlations: consumer debt, spiked heels, football fanatics. Did my mother ever make such connections? When the
National Geographic
arrived each month, she put it in a wicker basket next to the toilet with its dreamy bright blue water, and she’d stack the old one in the attic, neatly, each month rising like a child, by quarter inches. Did she ever imagine her life splayed in captioned photographs: the female of the tribe taking a pot from the stove, ladling beans and chopped dogs onto plates? (Isn’t that what we do in these classes?) Would they have said she seemed invisible, that we grunted into our food? Once, she slapped my father, pleading, “Talk to me.” He said nothing, steam rising from the beans to his red cheek like a Raji at the base of a bus-sized tree trunk where he has lowered hive after hive and now sits stunned from bee poison, the roar of a million angry wings in his ears, and my mother, by the sink, cried like a Raji woman wringing honey from a comb.