Island
to
Huckleberry Finn
, to
The Hobbit
, to
Lord of the Flies. A serious boy
, she would think.
A thoughtful boy
.
Hidden behind the bookcase—she wouldn’t have been able to see this—were old issues of my sister’s
Seventeen
magazine. I’d stolen stray copies over the years, desperate to understand more about the mysterious world of women: bra sizes, tampons, electric leg shavers. “Are You a Flirt?” the story headings read. “First Date Do’s and Don’ts”; “What Do Boys Want?”
My friend Peter would’ve had a ready answer for that last question. “It’s all about the sex,” he liked to say. “Sex sex sex. Who gives it, who gets it, who doesn’t.”
I believed he was right, and sensing Gabriella so close to me now, her living, breathing body just on the other side of the wall, only reminded me of how woefully inexperienced I was. At fourteen years old, I still had never kissed a girl. I had never even held hands with one. And the things Peter talked about, rubbing the photos in his father’s
Playboy
magazines while he described what you could do with a woman like that,
mm-mm
, seemed so far off in the future as to sound like science fiction. It wasn’t that I was naïve; I understood how sex worked, at least as well as Peter did. But such a great gulf lay between my understanding and my experience that I wanted all those things a boy was supposed to want in only the most abstract sense. When I tried to think of Gabriella as one of those women in the magazines, I couldn’t. She was more than a collection of shiny body parts, and my attraction to her was something greater and more profound—more pure, I would’ve said—than Peter’s
mm-mm
.
Sex sex sex …
How that little word troubled me. It suggested a whole other world still shrouded in mystery. I caught glimpses of this alien world from time to time, in the glossy photos in Peter’s magazines, or in graffiti on bathroom walls, or in stray glances and odd chuckles that passed, like secret messages, between grown-ups. But these were only glimpses, and I knew there was more to it than that. Lately, I’d begun to suspect that this world of sex was even bigger and more pervasive than I could imagine. It might’ve been everywhere; it was going on all the time, all around me, like a parallel life that was being played out, half seen, on the other side of a thin curtain.
I remembered the first clear confirmation I had of its existence. It came from, of all people, my father. It had been on a night like this. I was nine or ten years old, sitting up in bed doing my homework, when he knocked on my door.
“Can I come in?”
Slipping into my room, my father asked what I was working on. He blinked distractedly, his hands on his hips. The white corner of an envelope stuck out of his left pocket.
“That’s interesting,” he said. “Mind if I talk to you for a minute?”
He carefully closed the door behind him. He pulled out my desk chair and sat near the foot of my bed. He began by questioning me about my classes, my friends. He talked about when he was my age and what fun that was: biking all over town with his buddies, annoying their teachers, teasing girls.
“Do you have fun like that?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll bet you do.”
He slid the fingers of his hands together and squeezed them between his knees. He cleared his throat. When he spoke again, it was in a more serious tone.
Now we’re getting to it
, I thought.
“Your mother suggested I speak to you. I agreed that it would be a good idea. You’re getting older now, and typically it’s around this age—nine, ten years old—that a boy begins to develop a natural …
curiosity
about girls. This corresponds to a growing awareness of the human body and a recognition of the differences between the sexes.”
He took a breather, cleared his throat again, and pushed his glasses up.
“You’ll get this information in school anyway, but you might as well hear it from me now.
to
Huckleberry Finn
, to
The Hobbit
, to
Lord of the Flies. A serious boy
, she would think.
A thoughtful boy
.
Hidden behind the bookcase—she wouldn’t have been able to see this—were old issues of my sister’s
Seventeen
magazine. I’d stolen stray copies over the years, desperate to understand more about the mysterious world of women: bra sizes, tampons, electric leg shavers. “Are You a Flirt?” the story headings read. “First Date Do’s and Don’ts”; “What Do Boys Want?”
My friend Peter would’ve had a ready answer for that last question. “It’s all about the sex,” he liked to say. “Sex sex sex. Who gives it, who gets it, who doesn’t.”
I believed he was right, and sensing Gabriella so close to me now, her living, breathing body just on the other side of the wall, only reminded me of how woefully inexperienced I was. At fourteen years old, I still had never kissed a girl. I had never even held hands with one. And the things Peter talked about, rubbing the photos in his father’s
Playboy
magazines while he described what you could do with a woman like that,
mm-mm
, seemed so far off in the future as to sound like science fiction. It wasn’t that I was naïve; I understood how sex worked, at least as well as Peter did. But such a great gulf lay between my understanding and my experience that I wanted all those things a boy was supposed to want in only the most abstract sense. When I tried to think of Gabriella as one of those women in the magazines, I couldn’t. She was more than a collection of shiny body parts, and my attraction to her was something greater and more profound—more pure, I would’ve said—than Peter’s
mm-mm
.
Sex sex sex …
How that little word troubled me. It suggested a whole other world still shrouded in mystery. I caught glimpses of this alien world from time to time, in the glossy photos in Peter’s magazines, or in graffiti on bathroom walls, or in stray glances and odd chuckles that passed, like secret messages, between grown-ups. But these were only glimpses, and I knew there was more to it than that. Lately, I’d begun to suspect that this world of sex was even bigger and more pervasive than I could imagine. It might’ve been everywhere; it was going on all the time, all around me, like a parallel life that was being played out, half seen, on the other side of a thin curtain.
I remembered the first clear confirmation I had of its existence. It came from, of all people, my father. It had been on a night like this. I was nine or ten years old, sitting up in bed doing my homework, when he knocked on my door.
“Can I come in?”
Slipping into my room, my father asked what I was working on. He blinked distractedly, his hands on his hips. The white corner of an envelope stuck out of his left pocket.
“That’s interesting,” he said. “Mind if I talk to you for a minute?”
He carefully closed the door behind him. He pulled out my desk chair and sat near the foot of my bed. He began by questioning me about my classes, my friends. He talked about when he was my age and what fun that was: biking all over town with his buddies, annoying their teachers, teasing girls.
“Do you have fun like that?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll bet you do.”
He slid the fingers of his hands together and squeezed them between his knees. He cleared his throat. When he spoke again, it was in a more serious tone.
Now we’re getting to it
, I thought.
“Your mother suggested I speak to you. I agreed that it would be a good idea. You’re getting older now, and typically it’s around this age—nine, ten years old—that a boy begins to develop a natural …
curiosity
about girls. This corresponds to a growing awareness of the human body and a recognition of the differences between the sexes.”
He took a breather, cleared his throat again, and pushed his glasses up.
“You’ll get this information in school anyway, but you might as well hear it from me now.
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