“I know that,” I said indignantly. “I’ve seen Renoir’s late paintings.”
UNIFORM
DALTON STUDENTS WERE REQUIRED TO WEAR a uniform, available only at Stewart’s, a department store in tony, WASPy Birmingham, where the streets were lined with expensive German cars or Jaguars, and shops selling imported British tea and jams.
In Stewart’s, the staff dressed in tailored knit suits and stood off to the side, speaking in tasteful, quiet tones only when spoken to. The air was perfumed with wood varnish and the walls were decorated with black and white photos of classic roadsters. Here you could buy such exotic articles of clothing as wool coats with wooden toggles, cable knit sweaters, plaid ties, or “boat shoes” whose wearers might wear them on actual boats.
Like poor relations, the Dalton uniforms were hidden in a special section at the back. “He’s in high school?” the saleswoman asked in a doubtful voice. “He might do better in one of our junior sizes.” We found a tight polyester blue blazer that fit like a straitjacket and stiff grey wool slacks that scratched my legs.
“Cute,” Mom said, but didn’t sound very convincing.
Watching my unending reflection in a three-sided mirror, I felt like a victim of multiple personality disorder, with all my various selves staring back at me.
SENSITIVE
DR. DON WANTED ME TO PRACTICE standing on our front porch, for one minute, then two, then three. He loaned me an egg timer shaped like an angry tomato for this purpose. So I took it out there and stood with my eyes closed.
Faintly in the distance, I heard the angry buzz of a lawn mower, or maybe a hedge trimmer sawing away stray branches. I recalled Dr. Don’s promises that I’d be safe standing here, but he didn’t know Mark, who might appear on his porch and wound me with a frown, or raised eyebrow, or a blank look in my direction.
This exercise was supposed to get easier with time.
Back inside, Mom was explaining on the phone why I was suddenly switching schools: “It isn’t a snob thing. He’s just sensitive. At his old school, he attracted bullies.”
Sensitive, I thought. It sounded like code for something much worse.
THE STORAGE ROOM
THE TROUBLE BEGAN WHEN OUR TORAH teacher chose Mark and me to travel to the gym storage room, to return a stack of prayer books she’d borrowed for class that day.
A single naked bulb on a string lit the dark and dusty storage room. The dull metal shelves were filled with deflated dodgeballs, bruised field hockey sticks, and stacks of prayer books, both the new versions we’d started using this fall as well as the outdated ones, without those stickers that covered up the prayer “Thank you God for not making me a woman” with “Thank you God who made me in His image.” Some of the kids, though, still said, “Thank you for not making me a woman.”
Mark shoved the books onto a shelf above a sack of field hockey sticks, then flexed his arm. “I’ve been working out.” He slapped his bicep. “Rock hard. Feel that.”
“No thank you,” I said, and my yarmulke slipped off. Before I could retrieve it, Mark grabbed my hand and placed it on the bicep, which was rock hard as advertised. My fingers probed his warm skin, red and frighteningly firm.
“Let’s see yours,” he said, so I let go and flexed as hard as I could. “Soft,” he said. “Soft as the inside of a girl’s thigh.” He flexed his arm again, and this time I squeezed his bicep without any invitation. Would I have one like that next year, when I was his age?
“Touch it as long as you want,” he said generously, and I quickly let go, prayed I wouldn’t get an erection. The books were successfully put away, but Mark stood in front of the door to the storage room. “Be honest. Have you ever done anything with girls?”
I said that I had.
“With who?”
“Whom, not who,” I said on instinct, then offered a name: “Adrienne Cohen.” Adrienne had been my babysitter when I had needed the services of a babysitter.
“Never heard of her. How do you know this Adrienne?”
I thought fast. “I saw her standing on her lawn. I thought she was cute. So I asked if she wanted to go record shopping at Harmony House sometime.”
Mark seemed pleased. “You’re lying,” he said.
“Honestly,” I said, which I knew sounded desperate.
“No one says, ‘honestly.’” He edged closer to me. “Unless they’re lying.”
“I told her to meet me at Harmony House.”
“No one meets anyone at Harmony House except faggies.” He bumped his hip against my hand, so I jerked it back and a squeak escaped my throat. “Tell me the truth. I’ll have so much more respect for you if you say, ‘Mark, I was lying. I don’t know anyone named Adrienne Cohen.’”
“I really do know her,” I said. Unfortunately, my voice cracked.
“So what did you do with this Adrienne?”
“We frenched,” I said.
“What does that mean?” He giggled a little. “We frenched.”
“Aren’t we done here?” I reached for the door, and he grabbed my hand, put it on the front of his pants, then rubbed it there. “Did she do this to you?”
His jeans felt rough and, where I was rubbing, very full.
“Don’t,” I whispered, anxious to get away yet curious to know what exactly he wanted me to do. “Please.” But my hand went on moving as if separate from my arm, my brain. Mark crowded me against the wall. His body blocked the light, and the door.
“Don’t let go until I say so,” he told my ear, his hips grinding rhythmically into my right hand. “Or I’ll tell everyone you’re a fag.”
I felt lightheaded, as if I were disappearing from that room. The outlines of my body were dissolving, and what was left of me floated above the two of us, free and weightless as a ghost, so I could slip through a crack or pass through a wall.
Mark let out a painful moan. Oh, no, I thought, I’m screwed. I was afraid I’d hurt him somehow and he’d hit me. But then I saw the mess on the floor.
“You’re disgusting, you know that?” He jerked himself out of my reach and ordered me to clean myself off as he yanked up his pants. Then he ran back to class. My hands still throbbing with the feel of him, I followed his orders, wiping my hands on an unwashed wrinkled jersey. But his smell, a strange mix of sea salt and spoiled milk, remained on my skin.
This is not me, I wanted to scream. I didn’t ask for this. I screwed my eyes shut and tried to focus, prayed that I might like what he liked, not the healthy resistance of the hard bodies of men, but girls and their soft slippery skin and slimy insides, whose briny scent Mark had described for me in nauseating detail.
I made myself imagine fingering various girls from my grade as Mark had boasted of doing, but my fingers kept getting lost in the weeds. I tried mimicking Mark’s talk, “I felt her up. I squeezed her tits.” I recited those words like the blessings we recited each morning in services, hoping with practice they might sound firm and convincing. Thank you God for not making me a woman.
At least for the rest of that day and the next one, Mark did me the courtesy of not even looking my way, let alone talking to me. Maybe, hopefully, he was so disgusted by what he’d done, he’d never speak to me again.
But then two days later, I opened my locker, and a slip of white paper with Mark’s handwriting fell