12-05-06

When my mother was fifteen, she was a foot taller than all her girlfriend and her back was often spotted with red marks from the boys who followed her after school and threw pebbles at her. During my last year of elementary school a boy knocked me against the wall of the gymnasium and said, “I love you,” and it scared the living shit of me so I started running, even though we were in the middle of gym class and I was four turns away from being tagged for the relay race, and I figured running was running, all the same, who cared what direction you were supposed to go in, as long as you kept those legs moving. So I ran straight through the gymnasium door, and I swear, I goddamn swear, it’s really not such a stupid trite thing for movies to show the scene where the protagonist bursts through a pair of doors and opens his or her arms wide into the blindingly bright light. It was that way, exactly.

I ran through the gymnasium doors, into the long hallway, skidding past the band room, past the various art rooms, past the main office where the hunched over ladies worked and barely blinked or looked you in the eye when talking to you, or handing you some kind of form, and I ran right through the double doors that led into the small lobby, straight into the last set of double doors and right into a blinding white nothing. Bam, bam, bam—I hated boys. I wanted them dead, I wanted to develop muscles that could kill any boy who lurched at me, any boy who teased me or tried to write things on the back of my stockings with white out pens, and I wanted to kill the adults who peered at me with their pocked faces and asked me if I wanted to get married and move out of my parent’s house and would I like to marry that boy or that other boy who, of course, was the son of whoever was asking me these questions, who was, of course, sitting right there, across from me and pretending to look at the ceiling cracks, or the bitten off part of his cuticles. The whole affair, the whole charade of pretending boys who were my age didn’t immediately make me convulse with disgust and complete terror only made me love the boy who sometimes gave me a Starburst at the video store more. It made me jealous of my sister that she was already the age that I would have to be if I wanted to kiss a boy who was in high school, or better yet, in college, or the very absolute best: A GROWN MAN!
“Mom, I hate boys my age. I want to kick them in the legs, but I think I inherited a really weak body from you,” I told her, one day, at night after dinner, when my sister Cindy was upstairs doing a project, and my dad was downstairs putting in some numbers and bills into this new accounting program he had gotten. Our basement downstairs was filled with computer monitors and keyboards and mouses and hard-drives and so many cords and outlets and plugs. There was a constant hum that covered the smell of our washed laundry which we also kept in the basement, hung up in the door next to my dad’s computer room, where the furnace was, and where my dad rolled up sheets of insulation with gloves and pushed them up against our unfinished walls, and told me that I ever tried to touch those pink insulating sheets, if I even went anywhere close to it, I would be itchy from that moment on for the rest of my life, and if I was planning to live a long life, then boy oh boy, it was going to be one long itchy life.
Most of my friends now have computers that are so small and sleek. The grayish, beigish Dell and Compaq hard-drives that are still packed into my dad’s computer room look so antiquated to me now. It looks so sad—a sign of my father’s permanence mixed in with decline. I constantly wanted new things and every now and then I would get them. My father wouldn’t even buy himself a new pair of sneakers until the hole in his old ones got so big that a small pat of his big toe was nearly ice blue with frostbite after a long hike through the top of Bear Mountain to find my brother on an overly cold November morning. I didn’t want my father to let me have the things I wanted, I didn’t want him to spoil me to the point that he could make self-aware of the fact that I was increasingly ashamed by him, the shabby clothes he wore, the over-the-top outdated computers he was still using. I stopped going to the computer room when I was sixteen, except sometimes to just stand there, looking at the only private space my father ever had. Sometimes, I stood there and cried for him quickly, and then dried my tears. I did not want him to ever know I did this.

When I told my mom that I hated boys and that I wanted them dead by my own physical prowess, she smiled and wrapped her beautiful long thin hands around my cheeks.


when movies show the scene where the protagonist bursts through a pair of doors and opens his or her arms wide into the blindingly bright white light which then envelopes his beautiful, flawless face. It was that way, exactly.