The best thing about being thirteen is the first feeling of summer and the warmth of a man’s gaze. For the first time, I was something other than invisible. In the cold, tenebrous house, my uncle Louis sang a song that sounded like Barcelona and running bulls. Max, who is both my cousin and the man after whom I have modeled all other men, cut the grass with a manual lawn mower. He wove around the musky sheet that I’d laid out on the front of the lawn, right at the edge of Mallard Road, close enough to smell the burn of rubber as cars passed on through our comatose town. A van slowed at the bend in the road, where a scrap of cedarwood read “Lemonade $2.” I nailed the sign up to a birch tree last summer, hammered my middle finger on purpose to see if the nail would fall off. Though it turned a pasty, bitter yellow, it didn’t fall off at all. Funeral Home. The man inside the dead body van searched the space around me for a lemonade stand, or children perhaps. His dull gaze caught on my bare shoulders, he waved in the way that people do when they want you to know they mean it, with fingers folding one by one. Sometimes they sped up when they noticed the empty yard, sometimes not. Men are always looking for the next thing, looking around as though afraid to miss it.
I used to take the train up the Hudson River every summer, up to Rhinebeck where my uncle lived with his new wife, Pascale. Because she was an artist, a sculptor, she rarely came into the city, but often summoned friends and family up to the little yellow house on the water, to keep her company during the week when my uncle worked in Albany. In June, just when the thick, dull heat of city summers crept up the edge of unbearable, we all scurried into the countryside, my cousins and I, like so many mice from a barn fire. Since my father had begun drinking with sincerity, after the collapse of his architecture firm and the early onset of telling tremors, I came up to the Catskills earlier and earlier in the year, sometimes skipping the last week of school to do so. No one ever noticed, or at least they didn’t say anything about it. Pascale rarely seemed to notice much of anything, her halo of pale yellow hair muting out the sounds around her. I know now that those who surround themselves with people are often seeking to eclipse themselves. In the mornings, she made toast and left it piled on a plate in the kitchen. We all dutifully ate the dismal breakfast, though she was nowhere in sight, long since locked up in her studio at the end of the house.
It frustrated me considerably that the one thing that they all seemed to notice was how little I ate that summer. I had simply lost my appetite to the swelling sunlight and the sight of my hips straining against the polyester strings of an old bathing suit. Until I came to Rhinebeck in the last week of May, no one had asked me about it. When my uncle Louis came to pick me up from the empty train station in his orange Toyota pickup, he hugged me tightly around the shoulders, so hard that it bruised, and said “we’ll fatten you up in no time.” I was horrified. On the drive home, bumping along the beaten mountain paths, he stole furtive glances at me like he was trying to catch me in the midst of some sinful act. I knew that he wanted to ask me a question, about my father, about the lonesome train ride and the books that I’d been reading, but he said nothing at all. So often I find punctuated silences more frustrating than unsolicited questions. We drove past a swan that Pascale had carved into the stump of a tree and painted black, up the narrow driveway over which the spindly branches of cedar trees wove a fragile lattice, and all the way up to the back of the house, where my cousins were waiting with frosted glasses of German beer and expectant smiles stretched across their faces. Max then picked me up in his arms and flung me over his shoulder in one motion, oblivious to the musky, downy hair between my legs, so close to his face, my sore chest pressing up against his lower back. To be thirteen and waiting patiently for the rest of the world to catch up!
They ate pasta that night, with ketchup as the French do, waiting at any moment for Topher, the eldest, to arrive. Pascale’s twin boys were seated beside me, filling up the kitchen with the tangled babble of little children, eagerly enlisting me to join their fishing expeditions and insect studies. Every person there said something or other about the carrots I’d arranged carefully into a star on my plate. Aren’t you hungry? Would you like anything else? “Why are you doing that?” said the one with fine red hair, in the blunt, indelicate manner of children asking questions. Perhaps I said something in return, though I don’t remember now. It seems to me that most questions are asked with no expectation of an answer, but rather in the interest of making it known that one has noticed something askew: a show of perception. I took a bite of cold pasta to settle the audience.
In those days most people didn’t have cell phones, so there was nowhere to hide in moments of discomfort. Topher burst through the back door without knocking, calling for his father from the living room. We could hear his girlfriend begging him to wait from the car outside. There was a brief moment of wide-eyed silence as we looked around at one another, preparing to jump up with customary excitement, and carry on with the usual pleasantries. Topher worked weekdays in a paper mill up the river, but spent most of his weekends in the city with various women that he had known from high school. They all had stringy, long blond hair and stainless countertops, and were married to men from New Jersey and Connecticut. I assume that his girlfriend must have known- they lived together someplace near Red Hook- but she never said anything if she did, at least not in front of us.
When I was younger, I had thought myself in love with Topher. He played tricks on me, in the way that cousins do: put chewing gum in my hair, took the best pencils when we colored together. The first time that he had brought a girlfriend home for the summer, I was nine years old and standing up against a wooden beam in the foyer, trying to measure my height. I watched them crack open the sliding doors in the kitchen- the girl put a finger to her lips. They snuck into the bathroom and I heard the shower running. I wondered at their strange behavior; in the manner of children my explanations veered towards the practical- did they wash each other’s hair? But despite this, just underneath, I felt that something ominous and threatening was taking place, felt the sting of my own naivete burning up in my throat. I hear her laughter still, ringing across the bathroom tiles, promising the great pain of great expectations.
This girl was different, he said to his mother, whispering hurriedly as the clicking of her taloned footsteps approached the door. They had met in a laundromat- or a hardware store?- someplace people found themselves despite having other plans. And so it must be fate, or something like it that had brought them together. She whirled into the kitchen like a great tumbleweed, all wild hair and spindly limbs, various grocery bags twisted and tangled on her skinny arms, like a spider caught in its own web. She said “It’s so nice to meet you” and looked down at me with a smile, almost pitying in its glaring immensity. I felt then that she was trying to remember something, a name perhaps, or a moment in her history, so distant and unimaginable to me. She had a sharp little face, an angular chin tipped over her long, white neck. Something sad crept across her soft, brown eyes. People often looked at me that way, like I held something between my hands that belonged to them, that they wanted back.
“Nice to meet you too,” I said, and meant it in my own way. She stood there awkwardly, with her hands crossed over her ample chest, while people asked her questions and offered her different things. She ate the pasta, with ketchup, standing up.
I stood up before everyone else, anxious to rejoin my post on the side of the road. All that afternoon I alternated my attention between a biography of Che Guevara and the cars slowing down at the bend. I admired the well-born Argentinian doctor’s surrender of his comfortable life to fight foreign battles on foreign, nameless battlefields. There was an anecdote that I especially liked, that told of a battle in Pino del Agua, during which Che- I referred to him in my head by first name only, as comrades do- showing exemplary mercy, delivered first aid to Batista’s wounded soldiers. I had a theory then that has proven itself since in praxis, at the most handsome of us are drawn to the very ugliest corners of human suffering. I wondered if women had whistled at Che when he walked down the street with his AK-47 and star-studded beret, if he enjoyed it. My fingertips left brown spots of tanning oil on the pages of the book. My cousin again took up the lawnmower.
Max was thirty-one and I had long since abandoned all fantasies of a pure, sexless marriage. By then I was privy to certain strains of gossip that circulated throughout my family, rumors that he followed his mother about wherever she went, that he had never had a girlfriend, that he periodically had “episodes,” a vague term left purposefully undefined, presumably to preserve his dignity- or mine. There was “something wrong” with him, though it seemed, inexplicably, as though no one had made the slightest effort to find out what it might be. He busied himself constantly with menial tasks, returning frequently to his mother for approval. The only indication of pathology that I could discern was a harmless habit of muttering incomprehensible words to himself. Perhaps if I could have heard him, I would have been afraid. I teased him in my own way. I occasionally turned my body to face him, catching his darting eyes. When he approached my little swath of grass, I ran my fingers up and down my legs, salt and oil gathering beneath my fingernails. I don’t know precisely what my intentions were; this was a game that I liked to play with the most meek and pathetic of people: my aunt’s youngest son, a disabled friend of the family, the mailman with the wandering eye. All the time people are watching.
I was untangled from a dim, lustful dream by the sharp chirping of Pascale’s voice. She was calling my name. My eyes felt sealed shut by the weight of sunshine, but when I cracked them open, the sky was a hazy deep violet and bats sailed like kites over the tops of the pine trees. I could sense someone watching me from very close, a warm breath mingling with the newfound freshness of dusk. If there’s one thing I hate most, it’s breathing in the warm moistness of someone else’s air. Max was kneeling down beside me, so close I could smell the sweat and flecks of grass on the nape of his neck. His yellow polo shirt was crusted with what looked like barbecue sauce, and he wore a puka shell necklace that left imprints on his skin like tiny footsteps. How long had he been watching me? The expression on his face reminded me of the Christmas that my parents had gotten too drunk and forgotten to put presents under the tree, and I had sat by their bedside for hours with tears gathering in the corners of my eyes, waiting to ask what I’d done wrong. I don’t remember how that whole thing ended, except that I received some kind of butterfly breeding kit, and the butterflies never emerged from their chrysalis.
“Are you coming,” he said expectantly, as though he’d asked me the question a million times before.
“Am I coming where?”
“To the bar with us,” he went on. “We’re going to The Beach Bar and everyone else is going to come. Pascale wants to know if you’re going to come too. There’s gonna be food.”
I searched his face for some acknowledgment of my age- a complicit smile perhaps- but it was blank and empty as a cloud. “Yeah, I guess,” I mumbled. “I mean I don’t have anything else to do.”
From someplace behind me, Topher’s girl began to laugh. I craned my neck back to glare at her but she was looking at her chipped blue nails, chuckling to herself. Fuck her. She reminded me of the girls that hung around the Coney Island boardwalk, their sharp hip bones and ruby red belly button barbells poking out from beneath homemade belly shirts, their nearly pretty heads nodding to the beat of whatever drug was pulsing through their veins. Sometimes they offered to braid my hair on the beach, a gesture that was more for them, it seemed, than for me.
I stood up too quickly against the sunburn weighing me down and nearly fell over. She chuckled again. For a moment I wanted to wrap my hands around her long, pale throat and strangle her slowly. I wanted to watch her eyes darting back and forth, her hands clawing frantically at the air. I thought about the Coney Island girls, how they were found sometimes bloated and blue, floating beneath the crumbling pier, or limbless in the waste barrels behind the chemical plant on the outskirts of Luna Park. My mother had told me once, a long time ago, that it was normal to want to hurt pretty things.
I tried to slink around her through the doorway, sucking in so as not to brush up against her. But she grabbed my shoulders and dug her nails into my skin, leaving little half moon imprints. “It’s going to be so fun,” she said. “I’ll buy you a drink.” I exhaled, hard, until my stomach touched hers and she pulled me in for a sharp, tight hug.
I’ve been back to that bar many times since then, but it never looked the same to me. They were having some kind of special on tropical drinks that night, and everyone wore leis and hung about the tiki torches reeking of citronelle, in an effort to escape the mosquitos. The bar was one of two on the artificial beach by North Lake; the entrance gave way onto the parking lot, and you had to walk through a sort of corridor of plastic palm trees to get to the covered patio where round wooden tables and tree stumps formed a circle around a sandy dance floor. The ground was covered with white sand, imported from some beach in Southeast Asia probably, except for the dance floor, which was compulsively swept every few minutes by a pimply, sweaty teenager. There seemed to be no one in charge, just two or three waitresses in bikini tops and daisy dukes popping gum and pouring drinks from spigots. In the corner, near a shack that seemed to be the bathrooms, a couple was arguing about the merits of crop fertilizer. Only here, I thought to myself.
By the time we chose a place to sit, each person passing off the process of decision-making to another, Pascale was tearing at her cuticles, visibly delirious with the anxiety of having to order a drink from the blissed-out bimbos behind the bar. She looked at me for help: “Will you get me a Mai Tai? I’ll let you have a few sips.” I happily obliged. The girl behind the bar had dark, wet blue eyes and wore a vacant smile like an accessory. She kept the change even though I hadn’t told her to. But when she returned with two cups I instantly granted her absolution.
“I made too much,” she said lazily. “Bring this to your mom and tell her it’s on the house.” As I walked away I heard her say: “I’m just going to assume you’re eighteen, okay?” On the way back to the table, I quickly drained the little plastic cup. It was strong and sweet, and I swallowed a profusely pickled Maraschino cherry by accident. Immediately I was overcome with a warmth and ease unlike anything I’d felt before. Something about this felt like self-encounter, as though I were connecting deeply with the person I was meant to become. I’d had a few sips of other people’s drinks here and there, but nothing like this. I felt at once like the words were just waiting to tumble out of me, like I alone held some vast, mysterious power over everyone and everything in that little bar. As I sat back down, I tried to fold a napkin into an origami swan with my mind.
Uncle Louis lit a cigarette, and then Pascale lit one too. The couple abruptly ceased to argue. The girl turned around to face us, waving her hand back and forth before her face and coughing loudly, so as to be heard over the music- some half-baked brand of white guy reggae. Max had somehow obtained a bottle of yellow Fanta, and was drinking it with a straw. Underneath the table, the girl was scrolling through pictures of coconut cocktails, and poking at Topher’s ribs expectantly. Somehow it felt to me as though I had left them all behind in a world for which I’d never again be homesick. I’d moved on into a higher plane of being, and I watched them benevolently from where I stood. Topher stood up quickly and stumbled backwards over the tree stump on which he’d been seated. He kicked it and walked away.
The conversation was about an upcoming trip to Martinique. Pascale wanted to know about the locals; had anyone met anybody from Martinique? The girl began to rattle off facts about the Caribbean that she had picked up from a magazine. Pierre-Henri wanted to know: was there anybody like that at my international school in the city?
“I hear that the massages are really just a front for prostitution,” said Topher.
“Well it’s a good thing you’re not going then,” the girl giggled.
Max blew bubbles into his drink, watching it foam over. He looked up at me and asked: “Will there be monkeys?” I shook my head- I didn’t know. I had been to Aruba once with my friend’s family and had never seen any monkeys. In Belize, my father and I got into a jet ski accident and spent three days in the hospital. Hadn’t seen any monkeys there either.
“This is so sweet,” Pascale exclaimed, holding the drink out in front of her and puckering her nose and mouth exaggeratedly as though she’d just been offered something truly unpleasant, like a rotting carcass. “You have it,” she added, turning to me, and her face relaxed at once, exaggeratedly, a placid, bemused half-smile splaying out over her tight, waxy skin. Topher’s girl, whose name I still did not know, raised her eyebrows encouragingly, like a teacher waiting desperately for the correct answer. Max was giggling uncontrollably. Just as I reached for the drink, Pascale began to squeal and flap her hands in a deranged sort of way. Three heavily made-up middle-aged women had just walked into the bar, and were taking big, wobbly steps over to our table as though wading through water. Pascale rose quickly and introduced them with a flourish. The shorter one was Magalie, and wore some kind of tan wrap dress that matched her skin and made her look like a hot dog. Then there was Mireille- Michelle?- who had been to Martinique and was disappointed at the lack of white sand beaches. And Pauline, tall and disjointed looking, whose makeup gave her the appearance of a funeral parlor’s best work.
At first, they ignored me, chirping on about Caribbean islands and cheap cruises, ordering Pina Coladas to “get in the mood.” I was thinking that my new sneakers were full of sand, and there was sand between my legs and underneath my hair. There were sunflowers spray-painted on the ceiling. Some of the petals were paler than others where they had run out of paint. I was surprised when I finished my drink, and felt I had slipped somehow from the precipice on which I’d been standing, had narrowly missed the window of opportunity to be transported into a different realm, and felt myself trapped there, sitting on that stump, with my knees pressing up against the bottom of the table. I rested my chin down on the table and thought about the monkeys.
“Do you like cherries?” Mireille- or Michelle- impatiently wiggled a blood-red cherry in front of my vacant eyes.
“Oh, she’s drinking tonight, can’t you tell?” The girl wiggled her shoulders to the rhythm of a ukelele. “Are you going to dance with me?”
The women laughed. Uncle Louis laughed. His eyes were swollen and red-rimmed, bulging as if at any moment they’d boomerang like a cartoon character’s. “Go ahead, dance,” he howled. He mocked my look of hesitation, folding and unfolding his arms exaggeratedly. “Do you need some liquid courage,” he said. He pushed a glass of brown liquor across the table with the tips of his fingers. “Here, take it,” he offered, his eyes glinting with the promise of a challenge. “I can’t promise you’ll like it, but it’ll definitely do the trick.”
The women laughed. Topher’s girlfriend mixed the remnants of her drink in with the brown liquid. “That’s better,” she said, “try it now!”
Max, who had been drawing pictures of monkeys with a crayon and a paper menu, looked up in alarm. Our eyes met, and I recognized the aching helplessness there, the words that would not come. He shook his head as if to say “no, you don’t have a choice.”
So I drank it. And then I drank another one. I stood up on the tree stump and danced to a Guns n’ Roses song. By then the bar was full; there was a group of firefighters in sweat-soaked wife-beaters, some high schoolers with a hookah, a few dark, greasy men smoking cigars at the bar. Everyone clapped. I was proud. I craned my neck back to look up at the sunflowers, closed my eyes against the strobe lights and danced with my hands weaving around me, like a belly dancer, like Bathsheba. I opened up my mouth and imagined myself a sunflower, drinking deeply from the fleeting sun. A girl came up behind me and put a fedora on my head. My uncle cracked his tie like a whip and whistled. I wished I’d worn my shoes that lit up when I walked.
Later I went outside to smoke my second cigarette with Pascale and Louis. There was a missing panel in the boardwalk and I tripped. My knee was badly cut up. A couple smoking pot poured some vodka over it. We laughed. I put the cigarette out in the sand, vowing to smoke the rest later, but I forgot. Back inside, they were stuck on Guns N’ Roses. Someone had put on “Sweet Child Of Mine.” Everyone, it seemed, was singing along. When I walked in at ‘childhood memories” they pointed at me. One of the bartenders, a girl with a sharp hook through her nose, pulled me up onto the bar and held my hand as I stood up shakily. I closed my eyes again and opened my arms wide; the crowd roared, someone threw plastic flowers from a broken lei. I was the sun and they were the dark, vacant faces that tracked my movements and drank my light.
