want you to think of yourself as that bus driver. Practice in your mind the steps you will take to stop yourself if you feel your brakes failing, so that you can prevent this kind of situation from ever happening again. If you prepare, you will be able to stay in control.”
I thanked Bishop Jensen for his counsel. I shook his hand, walked methodically down the church hallway to the parking lot, started my car, and drove home. Nothing inside me felt any better for confessing. In fact, what I felt in his office was what I felt in the backseat of the car that August night: nothing, nothing at all.
• • •
What I did not know how to say then was that the story was all wrong.
What if my body were not a bus with brakes that sometimes failed, hurtling me, thrilled and giddy, along with the onrush of some kind of sex?
What if, instead, I were just a doeling goat at the bottom of the hill, nosing about in the roadside blackberries, not entirely aware of my surroundings, not quick enough to know what to do when the brakeless bus of sex came hurtling down the hill toward me? Or what if I were just a child on the bus, and sex was like school, a compulsory education Inever signed up for? Or what if I were like the policeman standing back and watching sex happen, a disastrous collision I had no power to stop? Or what if I were a mighty freight train steaming ahead toward my own horizon, and sex was the runaway bus that kept crossing my path?
What if the problem of sex always came uninvited, time and again, fleets of someone else’s buses always losing their brakes, and me frozen in the roadway? What if it were always someone else’s thrilling hurtle rushing headlong into the inert matter of my body?
It took a long time for me to realize that the story was all wrong, a long time to be able to ask these questions.
It was only after my mind had caught hold of all the corners of all the dim memories: when I was six, the face of the neighbor girl’s father looming high above me; when I was thirteen, the neighbor boy catching me on the street in broad daylight on my walk home from cheerleading practice and forcing his grubby hands down my pants; what it was I had not been feeling in the backseat.
Then, slowly, I began to piece together an understanding of the problem sex had been, why it always felt inevitable and unchosen, something unavoidable to be avoided at all costs. I began to understand why my body felt like cold luggage, not at all like a pearl on a golden chain but more like a millstone, a constant reminder that my fate was to be drowned.
• • •
In the story I want to tell, there are no more drownings. I am waiting in the parking lot behind the church under the arc of a street lamp. I see my sixteen-year-old self leave the office of LeVar Royal. I see myself hurry down the steps, shoulders curled.
Would you like to go for a drive? I ask my sixteen-year-old self.
I hand her the keys.
My sixteen-year-old self gets into the front seat, takes the wheel, rolls down the window, and hollers, dark hair blowing.
We are driving in a muscle car, with shiny orange paint and an eight-cylinder engine. On the radio we hear the wailing guitars of the genius Wilson sisters of Heart, then witchy-wise Stevie Nicks.
We drive the long boulevards from the orange-grove hills down to the big industrial beaches bordered by power plants, concrete piers, giant piles of boulders, and long stretches of empty parking lot. The air is damp and salty and smells like mollusk.
We sit on the hood of the car and watch fires burn on the beach in great pits, then we walk out on the pier and watch the waves heave themselves on shore. Maybe we drink a Diet Coke.
Standing twenty feet above the heaving black ocean, not putting my arm around her, standing side by side, I tell my sixteen-year-old self:
It is not a doughnut.
It is not a rose.
It is not a plank of wood.
It is not a bus without brakes.
It is not a pearl on a
I thanked Bishop Jensen for his counsel. I shook his hand, walked methodically down the church hallway to the parking lot, started my car, and drove home. Nothing inside me felt any better for confessing. In fact, what I felt in his office was what I felt in the backseat of the car that August night: nothing, nothing at all.
• • •
What I did not know how to say then was that the story was all wrong.
What if my body were not a bus with brakes that sometimes failed, hurtling me, thrilled and giddy, along with the onrush of some kind of sex?
What if, instead, I were just a doeling goat at the bottom of the hill, nosing about in the roadside blackberries, not entirely aware of my surroundings, not quick enough to know what to do when the brakeless bus of sex came hurtling down the hill toward me? Or what if I were just a child on the bus, and sex was like school, a compulsory education Inever signed up for? Or what if I were like the policeman standing back and watching sex happen, a disastrous collision I had no power to stop? Or what if I were a mighty freight train steaming ahead toward my own horizon, and sex was the runaway bus that kept crossing my path?
What if the problem of sex always came uninvited, time and again, fleets of someone else’s buses always losing their brakes, and me frozen in the roadway? What if it were always someone else’s thrilling hurtle rushing headlong into the inert matter of my body?
It took a long time for me to realize that the story was all wrong, a long time to be able to ask these questions.
It was only after my mind had caught hold of all the corners of all the dim memories: when I was six, the face of the neighbor girl’s father looming high above me; when I was thirteen, the neighbor boy catching me on the street in broad daylight on my walk home from cheerleading practice and forcing his grubby hands down my pants; what it was I had not been feeling in the backseat.
Then, slowly, I began to piece together an understanding of the problem sex had been, why it always felt inevitable and unchosen, something unavoidable to be avoided at all costs. I began to understand why my body felt like cold luggage, not at all like a pearl on a golden chain but more like a millstone, a constant reminder that my fate was to be drowned.
• • •
In the story I want to tell, there are no more drownings. I am waiting in the parking lot behind the church under the arc of a street lamp. I see my sixteen-year-old self leave the office of LeVar Royal. I see myself hurry down the steps, shoulders curled.
Would you like to go for a drive? I ask my sixteen-year-old self.
I hand her the keys.
My sixteen-year-old self gets into the front seat, takes the wheel, rolls down the window, and hollers, dark hair blowing.
We are driving in a muscle car, with shiny orange paint and an eight-cylinder engine. On the radio we hear the wailing guitars of the genius Wilson sisters of Heart, then witchy-wise Stevie Nicks.
We drive the long boulevards from the orange-grove hills down to the big industrial beaches bordered by power plants, concrete piers, giant piles of boulders, and long stretches of empty parking lot. The air is damp and salty and smells like mollusk.
We sit on the hood of the car and watch fires burn on the beach in great pits, then we walk out on the pier and watch the waves heave themselves on shore. Maybe we drink a Diet Coke.
Standing twenty feet above the heaving black ocean, not putting my arm around her, standing side by side, I tell my sixteen-year-old self:
It is not a doughnut.
It is not a rose.
It is not a plank of wood.
It is not a bus without brakes.
It is not a pearl on a
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