Pete said, “Naked…”
I added, “Ambiguous…”
“A bit too, what-in-the-heavenly-fuck?”
I was thinking about my grandfather climbing telephone poles. I was interested for the first time in how a family with a baby might fall apart. For ambition? Adventure? For a job?
Thirty years later, after my grandmother died and I inherited her journals, I learned more. The marriage was collapsing by the time my mother was due to be born. Someone else took my grandmother to the hospital. My grandfather stopped by Maternity to leave a box of caramel candies and a message: if the baby was a boy, he said, he would contest the divorce. This was in 1950. The baby was a girl.
Caroline sobered us up. “I don’t know what it’s about, Pete, but I can tell your heart is in it.”
He gazed at her, smiling wide. My friend had said the perfect thing in the moment, and had also hit on what I most wanted. I wanted to feel my heart, to feel it moving toward something that was not me. Seeing my peers with their bright canvases made me ache. I had no art, no imagination or devotion. Convention seemed to suggest a boyfriend was the solution. I thought about Shep and figured I’d give that a try.
A few weeks later, Caroline, pushing too hard to recover from knee surgery (a hockey crash had torn her ACL) and rehabilitate while rowing crew, fell into exhaustion. She had discovered that she was, pound for pound, a rowing powerhouse. Her bones were light and her stroke long, and now she was not just a beauty but a known athlete too. Colleges were paying attention. But she couldn’t eat enough to keep weight on. Her blond hair fell limp to her shoulders and never grew much longer. I noticed her looking thinner than usual, and when she held her tea at breakfast she shivered, even though the windows were open to the sun.
We walked together to Chapel, slowly—she was still in a brace. “I think I just need a nap,” she said. “But I can’t get any rest in Kitt.” Her dorm was my dream—awash in friends—but to her it was a zoo. “I just need some space. You’re so lucky to be in Warren, Lacy-o. You can just disappear.”
If only I could have borrowed her perspective on my own life.
“Come to my room after lunch,” I told her. My roommate would be away with her team, and I’d be at tennis practice. “You can have it all afternoon.”
When morning classes ended, I raced back to Warren House. I made my bed, brushing grit off the sheets, folding back the top coverlet, and tucking it all in tight. The flowered duvet matched the flowered pillow sham, and my mother had included a little flowered pillow in a complementary bloom. I pounded them all to expel stale air and make them look fresh. I lined up my shoes at the base of my closet and shut the door. Behind my bed was the window, at this time of year filled with new green. Finally, I tore a square from a notebook and wrote, Sweet dreams, and set this atop the pillows.
When I finished tennis practice, the day was withdrawing its warmth. It was still early in the season for New Hampshire, and as the sun lowered, the cold came back fast. I ran from the courts and sprinted up the stairs, legs goose-bumped. My room was dark, the light having moved. The bed was remade, and a new note read:
Best nap I’ve ever had. Thank you, kind friend.
I saved it, so I could remember how it felt to take care of someone I loved.
Shep’s lean top lip was deft, perfectly precise. I hadn’t had much practice kissing before, but where, in the preteen fumblings of my ninth-grade classmates, a boy had sensed an opening and pushed forward, tongue out like a hunting lizard, Shep understood that distance was sweet. He’d retreat the tiniest bit. We could make out against the stacks in the library and my back didn’t hurt from arching away from him. He held me upright and tight in his arms. I wanted more. He kept it this way. He was fastidious and his breath always smelled of mint. It got so I’d walk the paths back to my dorm with him—I, as an underformer, had earlier check-in, so he would drop me off—and I’d breathe as deeply as I could to catch the mint mixed in with the scent of thawing earth. What a blessing it was that Warren House was way off in the farthest corner of campus! It took forever to wander those paths. Beneath lamps, he’d stop me and lift my chin, and not care who saw us kissing right there in the dusk.
A decade or so later, when I was in graduate school in Chicago, I came across a feature about Shep in the non-celebrity pages of People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” issue. The rabbit smile was come-hither now, as I’d known it would be, and he had grown into his shoulders. People wrote about his family, his skiing, his Ivy League degree, and his work ethic. They wrote that he was a catch for any woman. I thought, You don’t know the half of it.
After a few good-night kisses, that spring when I was fifteen, I felt brave enough to ask Shep about the blue satin bra and our missed meeting in the old library. We were sitting on the low-slung sofa in his room, alone this time, trying to find things to talk about. I asked about Shyla to get him talking, but I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer.
“So whatever happened with, you know…?” I said.
He pressed that fine lip even finer and gave a left-handed shrug. “Yeah. That just wasn’t going to work out.”
I waited.
“It was just way too…” he said. He looked off across the room, toward his bed. I was imagining a lusty heartbreak. I was thinking I hadn’t
