You can hear me?
Well as Andy mentioned, I feel scared tonight
in a way I don't usually about reading, but I like to read.
But I've never tried reading something
before it was finished.
You know, why those people likes to have it all real tied up,
but this is called "Writers At Work."
So I figured maybe in the spirit of the title, I give it a go.
Particularly since I assume that probably most of us in the room
are writers at work, yeah?
And so maybe you'll be as kind to me as anybody.
[LAUGHS]
To make matters worse, I just had three temporary crowns
put in the front of my mouth, two of which
popped out during supper.
So I look like something out of a horror flick and I lisp.
So oh well, on we go.
[LAUGHTER]
Watch, listen with your eyes closed, OK?
[LAUGHTER]
The book I'm writing has a tentative title, "House-Bound:
An Erotics of Place and Space," it's a kind of memoir.
And what I'm trying to do in it, I think, is to re-occupy
and represent my past.
Exploring its significance for me
not so much as a woman, as a female body.
And I think that's hence the subtitle, "An Erotics of Place
and Space."
The portion that I'll read to you,
it's from one of the central sections in the book, which
is entitled "236."
That's the address of the house I'm living in it at this point.
I'll read you just about the second portion, the second half
of that section.
It's done in short sections with spaces between--
I can't of course, visualize those for you
so I'll just sort of stop in between the sections.
They're pretty disjointed so you'll get the idea anyway.
All of a sudden, Mother gets married.
During nearly seven years of widowhood,
she's had plenty of dates, and even suitors.
The only one she's seriously considered however,
turned out not to like children.
He had a great deal of money with which
he planned to send us off to boarding school
as early as possible.
Mother, having grown fond of our company,
decided to keep us around a while longer.
This one has no way of knowing whether he likes children
or not, never having known any, but he seems willing to try.
In later years, I will marvel at the generosity of spirit
this willingness suggests.
A modest banker, unmarried at 41,
having lived with and supported his parents since he was 16.
How did he dare to leave his now widowed mother to take on
not merely a wife, but her two petulant, prepubescent girls
as well?
Perhaps, I'll think when I'm even older than he
was on his wedding day, he never knew what hit him.
He and Mother were introduced by mutual friends over a game
of bridge at the end of August.
On her birthday, September 24, she
removed the miniature Naval Academy
ring my father had given her and slipped on a diamond solitaire.
On October 23rd, they get married.
I'm terribly excited about the wedding
because I get to wear nylon stockings for the first time.
Sally still has to wear white ankle socks.
I have a white elastic garter belt
with a blue bird embroidered on the front.
All day, the garter belt slides downward over my skinny hips,
and my stocking seams twist up the inside of my thighs.
And finally, I get a hole in one knee so that the next day,
I'll have to go back to white ankle socks for Sunday school.
But at least I've had the experience.
I wear a turquoise taffeta dress with a crunchy crinoline,
and I swish thickly with every step.
Granna get so flustered at being the mother of the bride
again that she climbs into her dress
before removing the hanger, and stands
shouting "hunchback" 'till we work the wire free
of her plump shoulders.
[LAUGHTER]
We go to the church, and then come home again
for little sandwiches and wedding cake.
"Wrap a piece in a napkin and tuck it under your pillow,"
someone tells me, "and you'll dream of your future husband."
But the trick doesn't work this or any other time.
My future husband remains shrouded
for several more years.
Before the newlyweds go off to Split Rock
Lodge in the Poconos of Pennsylvania,
Sally and I approach them.
"What should we call you?" we ask
the man we've known for two months as Mr. Cutter.
"Oh," his eyes widen, "I don't know.
Would Daddy be all right?"
So daddy it is.
Of course, our own father was Daddy too,
but that doesn't seem to be a problem.
We're not likely to get the two of them mixed up.
After they've gone, I am wracked by grief,
unlooked-for and more intense than anything
I've ever felt before.
To make matters worse, I get sick,
the 24 hour grippe, we always call it,
and vomit on the floor.
Poor Granna cleans up and puts me to bed
and feeds me sips of ginger ale, but I yearn for Mother.
Of course, I say nothing, then or ever.
This grief, this new grief, the sense
that the known world has shifted and shattered,
that nothing will ever be the same or as good again,
will live in my gut like a silent parasite,
through more years than I can, at the age of 11, imagine.
When Mother and Daddy come home from their honeymoon,
we leave Granna to decide what to do with the house at 236
Larch Row while we move into the second floor
of an old white colonial with green shutters
in the center of town.
Wenham is picture postcard pretty,
the sturdy steep old white clapboard first church
congregation all at one end of a little village green.
Across Main Street, the white clapboard town hall.
Next to it, the steep roofed Claflin-Richards' House
with its dark clapboard and tiny diamond painted windows.
The only structure remaining from the town's 17th century
settlement.
Main Street is lined with 18th and 19th century houses though,
set back under maples and elms.
Outside of town are vast estates with gate houses and stables
of hunters and polo ponies, but no one I know ever goes there.
Within walking distance of school, church, town hall,
and library, post office, and the homes of all my friends,
for the brief time we live here, I feel part of the social world
in a way I never will again.
I'm waiting for my period.
I know I'm going to get it because Mother told me
just before I went to summer camp
the summer I turned 10, following up her presentation
with the gift of a paperback called "The stork didn't bring
you."
[LAUGHTER]
In this knowledge, I'm luckier than my friend Sal,
the tall, rangy, redheaded girl who
used to go to North Shore Country Day
but has joined us for junior high.
So we're in the same grade.
She's two years older and has it already.
But her mother never told her, just handed her
a pad and a belt wordlessly when Sal whispered that she'd hurt
herself terribly down there.
My mother told me she enjoined me
strictly not to tell anyone else as especially my sister.
Telling was a job for mothers.
But in Sally's case, I make an exception.
And between me and the Kotex movie at school,
she gets enough information to cheer up a bit,
though she still throws up every month.
As for me, I'm impatient.
I'm at least a year younger than the other girls in my grade,
and I don't want to be left behind.
I, too, want to shriek and dive when
some boy grabs my clutch purse and threatens to peek inside.
Soft brown hair, I started growing in my armpits
and on my penivus--
I guess I need a little gloss here.
Earlier in the book, I explain that we had a family word.
I don't know where it came from.
My grandmother gave it for, I mean,
nobody ever talks about their Mons Veneris right?
I mean, have you ever heard a woman talk
about her Mons Veneris?
We called it-- for some reason.
At least, it had a name, better than the "blank"
that most people grow up with, a penivus.
All right, so I'm getting hair on mine.
[LAUGHTER]
Mother gives me a heavy old razor,
and Granna buys me a jar of Yodora to rub under my arms.
My breasts are beginning to grow too.
At first, I was scared because the left one started
to swell and hurt after Sally jabbed it with her elbow,
trying to beat me through the front door.
And I thought she'd given me cancer.
But mother said to wait a little.
And sure enough, the other one started to swell too.
So it never does get as big.
Mother buys me some white knit cotton
bras to replace my undershirts.
So now boys can grab snappily at the backs of my blouses too.
I hate these bras, though.
Not so much because they're uncomfortable,
riding up and down my chest with nothing
to hold them in place, as because they're ugly.
One night, Granna brings me a pink satin bra
that hooks in front, which somehow manages
to create a little cleavage.
And then I'm fulfilled, even if my bras aren't.
[LAUGHTER]
Trapped in a convention designed for some other woman's
bodily reality, I'll go on harnessing myself into one
and yanking it down from its stranglehold on my throat
until I'm nearly 30.
[LAUGHTER]
Fortunately, my period starts fairly early,
just before I turned 12.
I'm prepared.
My blue box of Kotex and my white elastic belt
with the metal clasps on each end
are stowed in my bedroom closet.
Then of course, I'm nowhere near my bedroom closet
when it starts.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm spending a few days with Aunt Jane and Uncle Kip.
I peer anxiously at a brownish spot
on the crotch of my underpants.
Oh no, it can't be.
But the next time I go to the bathroom, a couple more spots
have appeared.
And a couple more of the time after that.
I can't ignore them.
They're not going away.
Composing myself, I tell Jane I'll
have to borrow a belt and some Kotex.
I'm too embarrassed to tell her it's the first time.
And apparently, my composure is convincing
because she's surprised when Mother tells her later.
It's not much of a period, just some rusty streaks
on a pad for a couple of days.
No matter, I got it.
Not too long afterward, as soon as I come home
from summer camp, Mother sits me down on the living room couch.
She is wearing a white skirt with big pink red and navy
polka dots.
Her manner is subdued, serious.
She tells me that she and Daddy are going to have a baby.
They hope it will be a boy.
But if it isn't, they'll try again.
A baby.
Apparently, she's read that an older child is
sometimes upset and embarrassed by her mother's pregnancy
and her manner is tentative.
But I haven't read the same book.
[LAUGHTER]
I think the idea of our having a baby is thrilling.
And I don't care what my friends think
though, it turns out that they think it's thrilling too.
So this pregnancy becomes a kind of shared eighth grade project.
[LAUGHTER]
The other girls rush home and beg their mothers
to have babies too.
[LAUGHTER]
A plea that elicits considerable consternation
but no compliance.
We'll all have to share the same baby.
Mother makes herself some skirts with holes cut out
of the front and some wide tunics,
and goes around for months looking something
like a toadstool.
Then sure enough, she goes off to the hospital
and produces the cutest baby you've ever seen.
Fat, ruddy, with wandering blue eyes, and pale hair
like a blown dandelion.
Although he's got a proper name, we
call him Chip, my Chip-a-dee.
I love him more than I've ever loved anything else.
My dolls, my fathers, my sister, even Mother,
I am beside myself with love.
With a baby, our apartment on Main Street, already cramped,
will become impossible.
Granna hasn't yet sold 236 so Mother and Daddy arrange
to add on two bedrooms and a half bath
for themselves and the baby.
Granna will put in a little kitchen
and move into the two large rooms upstairs.
She papers the living room kitchen
in a small neutral geometric print, and the bedroom
in deep green, splashed with yellow and white daisies,
and settles in snugly, with her own little stove,
and refrigerator, and table, and television.
Though as a rule, she eats dinner with us.
This arrangement, throwing three generations of women
together with a male stranger and an infant,
creates a kind of ill-controlled but unacknowledged
emotional chaos.
At the center, stone silent, sits
Daddy, about whom everyone complains,
especially Granna, who is none too fond of men.
He bears our battering, is almost wholly
without recrimination.
Once, awash in a flood of adolescent whining,
he tells me to shut up.
A few years later, when while learning to drive,
I turn a corner too sharply, and the car lurches over the curb,
he clutches the dashboard and shouts, "Jesus Christ."
Two outbursts in all our years together.
The price of this restraint, however,
is a kind of emotional absence, as a result
of which I'll have trouble recognizing
that my words and actions have genuine power to wound.
The women whirl and collide in the surrounding storm.
Sally and I, three grades apart and in separate schools now,
spend little time together except after dinner
when we are required to wash the dishes,
and our childhood arguments turn rancorous.
Once, she wallops me over the head with a cast iron frying
pan.
She and I both fight with Mother in our different styles.
She erupts, shouting, and stomping, and slamming doors
to emerge shortly as sunny as the landscape
after a summer squall.
I vanish in floods of weeping.
And once I've closed the door behind me,
I can't get out again.
Sometimes, the hours go by.
I just do not know how to re-enter the social world,
and no one from that world is about to come rescue me.
Mother is very strict about that.
No emotional rescue.
Each episode cuts me further adrift.
We all fight with Granna.
When they're angry, mother and Granna
stop speaking to each other and use me as a go between.
"Tell your grandmother," says Mother,
and I trot up the stairs.
"Well, tell your mother," Granna replies and down I trot again.
Eventually, all this trotting strikes me
as not just tiresome but silly, and I get up
the nerve to quit the job.
Granna complains about us.
She calls me lazy and selfish.
But I'm not lazy and selfish, I'm 13, and 14, and 15.
My diary is full of entries like this.
"No school.
I'd have had a quieter day in school
for I fed and dressed Chip, put through two loads of wash,
burned rubbish, washed dishes, folded laundry, fed Chip
again, ironed, and even managed to write a letter."
But when mother is ill or away, granna
has the strain of being supervisor, I note.
Working five days a week at a job she never much likes,
she must find this noisy and disorderly household a strain.
The trouble is that we never confront these tensions.
We have our several outbursts, get over them as best we can,
and resume our routines as though nothing had happened.
On the whole, this process works and we all
remain functional, I suppose, because we
persist in loving one another despite our differences.
But the wounds fester, at least mine do.
I can't speak for anyone else's because they've never
spoken to me.
I wind up with emotional abscesses, sealed away
under scar tissue, which will one day
poison the lives of those in the new household I establish.
I'm scared of going to junior high, where
we'll have to change classrooms every hour.
Somehow, I'm convinced that in the company of two
dozen other students and with the choice of only eight rooms,
I'll go astray.
I do, in fact, go astray on more than one occasion
but never physically.
The three year curriculum is numbingly conventional,
English, Mathematics, History, Geography, Spelling, Science,
Music (Vocal and Appreciation), Hygiene, Physical Education,
even Penmanship.
In the last year, we get Latin.
Boys take Industrial Arts.
Girls take Home Economics.
In sewing, we have to fringe and cross
stitch, place mats and napkins.
Mine are light blue with black and white stitching.
Long after all the other girls have gone on to blouses,
I am still picking out ragged stitches
and putting them in again.
The needle sticky with sweat, cloth crumpled, grayish.
When we get to cooking, my white sauce lumps.
I might do better at building a bookcase, though I doubt it.
The terror of all our lives is our English teacher, Hazel Ann
Bullis, an aging spinster with tight thin curls,
whose hand is forever diving into the neck of her blouse
to retrieve the straps of her underwear,
snaking off her hunched shoulders.
[LAUGHTER]
Her nose turns off and her cheeks sag so heavily,
they pull her lower lids down from her pale eyes,
giving her the baleful expression of a bloodhound
without its sweetness.
Sweetness is precisely what she lacks.
Its largesse of patience and humor.
She doesn't love us at all.
She never thinks we're funny.
She berates us regularly for our stupidity and laziness.
She repeatedly tells us the horrid tale of her friends
who ate under-cooked pork and died of trichinosis.
[LAUGHTER]
She even pulls Idgie Summitt's hair.
If she loves her subject, she does so for the wrong reasons.
She makes us diagram sentences, read Sohrab and Rostam,
memorize and recite "breathes there the man
with soul so dead."
I'm very good at diagramming sentences
and even at writing them.
So maybe she likes me better than most,
but it's a pale and watery affection.
Years later, as we reminisce, my friend Paul
will drop his gentle manner startlingly.
"Miss Bullis was a mean bitter old bag
who never taught us anything but fear."
I remonstrate reflexively in the voice my mother habitually used
to counter my own complaints.
But in fact, mother's voice is wrong and Paul's is right.
Late June, school is almost over.
Some of us girls are cleaning the library, which
is our old fifth grade room, lined now
with dusty shelves of the books our teachers
think we ought to want to read.
I've read just about all of them.
Not a passionate embrace in the bunch, except of black horses
swift as the wind and Irish setters.
The tall windows have been thrown up
to let in the hot bright afternoon.
Leaning out to shake my dust rag, I'm seized by the impulse
to clamber over the sill and stand on the ledge below.
"What she's doing?"
The voice squeals behind me.
"Look at Nancy, she's crawling out the window."
"Nancy, what are you doing out there?
Come in.
Come back in, you'll fall."
I'm not afraid of heights and I don't feel like falling at all.
I don't believe I can fly anymore.
I'm not tempted to let go.
I balance there on the ledge, one hand
hooked onto the window frame, and look down and out
at the bright grass two stories below the asphalt drive.
The cars in the parking lot, the dusty light
streaking through thick leaves.
I feel feathery and remote as though the girls behind me
had receded into a dark and distant world.
Their shrieks floating out the window
have attracted the attention of some boys walking by,
who look up, pointing with shouts of laughter.
I am wearing mother's full white skirt with the red pink
and navy polka dots.
And it crosses my mind that they can probably look up it
at my white cotton underpants.
The trouble with pulling some weird stunt
like this, something you know no one else would ever do,
something you wouldn't have thought you'd ever do yourself,
is figuring out how to stop doing it.
I feel frozen by embarrassment.
But I can't keep standing here, showing off my underpants.
I scramble back over the sill.
And after a few more squeals, everyone
stops talking about what Nancy did and acts as though it never
happened.
It did happen though.
They may never think about it again,
but it will stay tucked in some fold of their memories.
One more scrap of strangeness added to my already strange
reputation.
In a sense, I stay stuck out on that ledge forever.
Our real lives take place outside of school,
in that dim region crossed by electric flashes of attention
between boys and girls.
One Saturday evening a month the PTA sponsors a square dance.
We girls all put on felt circle skirts
with piles of crinolines underneath and sissy blouses.
My skirt, blue with silver metal studs,
doesn't have a poodle on it, alas.
And I never own more than two crinolines at a time,
one of white nylon and the other of pink net.
Even with such disadvantages however,
complicated by the attentions of Eddie Mulvey, who
barely comes up to my belly button,
I usually have a good time.
On Wednesday evenings, we go to a new dancing school
taught by Mrs. Warner, who never admits more boys than girls.
Even I get a boy to dance with.
She teaches us to tango, cha cha, lindy, not just waltz
or foxtrot.
I can't dribble the basketball or connect a puck
with a hockey stick.
And if I turn a somersault, I faint with fear.
Dancing turns out to be the only physical activity
I'm ever good at.
Getting partners remains a problem, though.
People have started pairing off.
On a hayride one icy October night,
I sit up beside the laconic elderly driver, hunched
and shuddering while the others bury themselves 2 by 2
in the hay.
For a while, I go back and make out with fat Peter Stacey,
but that only makes me feel cheap and sad.
[LAUGHTER]
At a party in Judy Pearson's basement rumpus room,
we play spin the bottle.
And Roger Armstrong demonstrates to me
that it's all right to open your eyes while you kiss.
But I'm so miserable because no one there I want to kiss
wants to kiss me, that I rush upstairs
to call my parents for a ride home.
This wretched single state has a couple of consequences.
One is that I take to writing bad poetry.
Writing isn't a new venture of course,
though I've stuck mainly to prose.
After my friend Sal returned from a summer in the Tetons,
having fallen in love with a Jackson Hole dude
rancher named Peter, she commissioned
me to write a steamy novel.
I don't think either Sal or I knew just what she and Peter
were up to in their shared sleeping
bag under a starry Western sky.
The Stork Didn't Bring You was short on concrete detail,
but our hearts raced all the same.
Actually, I've been writing some bad poetry all along as well.
But now, it gets worse.
[LAUGHTER]
Ever after, most of my poems, even some quite good ones,
will be called up by the relentless yearning
after some man who doesn't want me, misery my muse.
The other consequence, more disastrous
to me if not to the literary world,
is that I fall in love with my science teacher.
A handsome, arrogant 24-year-old Navy veteran, Philip W. Natale,
Jr. I scribble all over my papers and book covers.
I go into a hectic trance at the sight
of his cropped blond hair, the white moons of his fingernails,
his smoky gray green eyes flecked with gold.
I think this is what dying feels like.
Desperate for his attention, I buzz and dart around his desk,
respond to his questions with a newly mordant flippancy,
erupt in fits of weeping at the slightest correction.
Inexperienced and not awfully bright,
he has no idea how to handle this scrawny 13-year-old fury,
except by punishment.
But no insults, no failing grades,
no number of hours in detention can quell my desire.
"He's mean to me," I record matter of factly in my diary,
and I adore him.
[LAUGHTER]
A dangerous paradigm, this feverish and fruitless ardor
that will enable me to write poetry
only if I feel like death.
April 11th, 1957, a gray afternoon
windy and raw, I've missed the bus again
and will have to walk the 2 and 1/2 miles home.
My friend Buddy, who lives about half way,
will walk with me as far as his house.
But first, he wants to help some little boys fly
model airplanes.
I hang around at the edge of the playing field
in front of the Buker School.
Kenny Kopp and Jack Hoggard come by on their bicycles
and stop to talk.
And lately, I've been noticing Jack a lot.
A tall, slim boy with even white teeth, a
turned up nose, dark eyes, dark hair spilling
over his forehead.
He's only in the eighth grade but that's all right.
There are only 10 9th grade boys to 20 girls and most of them
are creeps.
So the girls have been crossing class boundaries.
Perched on the front wheel of Jack's bicycle,
I chatter, and laugh, and toss my head
in a burst of self-confidence.
Suddenly from behind me, I hear an ominous crunch and whirl
around to see Rupert Lilly's old humpback black Chevrolet
rolling over the books I left at the edge of the drive.
No one ever uses this drive.
But here's pale, skinny Rupert, my art teacher,
with grayer skin, grayish hair, a bobbing Adam's Apple
above his grayish shirt, peering cautiously as always
through his windshield as his tires bump front, bump back,
bump over my books.
"My books," I shriek, "why don't you watch where you're going.
You squashed my books."
His grayish eyes peer at me through rimless glasses.
He's awfully deaf but too proud, or more likely,
too poor to get a hearing aid.
In fact, it doesn't cause real trouble
except when he fills in as an organist at church,
since his uncertain fingers are apt to slide one
key over and produce whole phrases, even
whole verses of cacophony.
As a rule, his deafening, it simply
means that he's seldom entirely certain what's going on.
My wails penetrate though.
"You shouldn't have left your books on the pavement,"
he says, in his mild rusty voice.
I'm shivering with irritation and embarrassment,
but Jack seems delighted by the incident.
All along, he seemed on the verge of leaving,
but now I settle back on his front wheel.
And when Buddy's ready to leave, Jack
walks along, balancing my books and his bike.
The next day, six different people
whisper to me that Jack Hoggard likes me,
but I don't dare believe them.
That would be like wishing for your own hi-fi with all
the most popular 45s--
Blueberry Hill, and Party Doll, and Love Letters in the Sand--
at Christmas.
You know you won't get them so you don't even
let yourself think about them, otherwise,
you die of disappointment.
7:10 PM, the telephone is for me.
"Hi," says Jack.
" You didn't believe I liked you, did you?"
[LAUGHTER]
"No."
"Well, I do."
This is how simple it is to get into heaven.
[LAUGHTER]
I live in heaven for about 10 weeks.
During that time, Jack and I are nearly inseparable.
He lives about as far out of town
as I do but in the opposite direction.
So ours is a restless courtship.
We ramble through the weeks of forsythia,
and then of apple blossoms, and then of lilacs.
We talk as though we'd spent all our 13
years under vows of silence.
We hold hands and dance as we dance the forbidden way
with our arms around each other.
We go off into the woods and kiss.
You can kiss for a long time, I discover,
if you don't hold your breath.
We lie in the new grass of a field,
making whistles of blade stretched between our thumbs.
We kiss some more.
Suddenly, my stock goes up, a phenomenon
that may serve as a kind of adolescent validation of Levi
Strauss' theory that women are commodities whose value depends
on their scarcity.
Belonging to the handsomest and richest boy in the school
certainly seems to confer desirability.
Chef Abbott, whose love I'd have died for a year ago,
is suddenly dying for mine.
While Alan Woods and I are studying science,
he kisses me unexpectedly and asks me to go steady.
I feel giddy, giddy, giddy.
Still somehow, I know to scribble in my diary,
better enjoy it, it won't last long.
I am not cut out for the role of what Granna refers to
as the "belly of the ball."
[LAUGHTER]
All the world may love a lover, but that
doesn't include parents.
Our parents go nuts.
They're never sure where we are.
We keep wandering off.
We show up an hour late.
They take away our telephone privileges.
Mother forbids me to use my bicycle for two weeks
and instructs me to meditate on my sins.
[LAUGHTER]
Embedded in this cliche is the germ of the matter.
They don't know what we're doing.
We're kissing.
I make one of those vows children make repeatedly
in the face of parental injustice
and break nearly as often under the pressures
of parental responsibility.
When I have children, I won't sniff suspiciously
around their love lives.
As it turns out, I'll make good on this one,
so good as to embarrass myself silly.
Coming home one afternoon, I see an unfamiliar bicycle
in the front of the house.
My son Matthew, who's been failing courses,
so he's supposed to come home alone after school to study.
"What's going on here?"
I demand as I opened the door.
Stepping inside, I see two pale bodies disentangling themselves
on the living room couch.
"Oh," I say, "I see."
[LAUGHTER]
I flee for the kitchen.
Slowly pour myself a glass of seltzer water,
dial my daughter's number, start to chat aimlessly.
"Mom," she interrupts, "I'm studying for biochemistry test.
Did you want something in particular?"
"No, not exactly.
I'm just trying to give Matthew and Poppy enough time
to put on their clothes."
[LAUGHTER]
"What?"
she starts to giggle.
I start to giggle.
Some years later, even Matthew and Poppy will giggle too.
They probably thought the worst thing in the world
had happened, getting caught having sex
by your mother, right?
But the catching, I assure them, is just as bad.
Maybe parental suspicion is just a duplicitous form
of self-protection.
[LAUGHTER]
Graduation from junior high, I wear a white organdy shirt
waist--
who knows whose-- and it may be--a Mamie Eisenhower
carnation.
The June night is hot, is filled with mosquitoes.
Mother has forbidden me to cry, but I do anyway.
Sobbing into my sodden lace handkerchief
until Dickie Russell gallantly offers me
his more substantial one.
One day, he will become a funeral director.
[LAUGHTER]
Pammy holds-- it's true.
He is.
[LAUGHTER]
Pammy holds the graduation party in
her spacious, shadowy backyard.
Jack and I dance for a while, and then
wander deeper into the shadows, where
he holds me upright against his thin boy's body,
and wipes my tears, and kisses me until I have to go home.
Except for a handful of phone calls and casual dates
a year later, which serve only to reopen my love like a wound,
we are never together again.
And I will not be happy again in just this way.
You can only ever have one love, untainted,
and untutored by loss.
[APPLAUSE]