Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Later, in January. Nine years old. Saturday morning cartoons. Parked cross-legged on the gold carpet in front of the television, a cereal bowl next to me, spoon resting in a small pool of milk. My parents had visitors from out-of-town, another married couple, friends of my mother’s from her graduate school days at Madison who slept on the pull-out couch the night before. Steve, the husband, came into the TV room from the shower. He wore a thin green towel wrapped around his waist and nothing else. He looked as though he’d just stepped out of an old Newport cigarette ad. Pale blue eyes. Tanned skin, a dusting of hair across his chest. The smell of Dial soap and Old Spice. “What’s that, Bugs Bunny?” he asked.
I nodded, something tickling in my belly. Road Runner beeped but I’d lost interest. Steve crossed to the suitcase propped open next to the television. He bent over it, his back to me, and pulled out a pair of white socks rolled tight in a ball.
A thought came: Look under the towel.
Of course I knew what was under the towel. I’d spent many hours at swimming practice; I’d seen other boys and men naked. But not Steve. I wanted to see under his towel. He rifled through the suitcase. Almost against my will, my body moved, my torso bending forward till my head was near the floor. The towel was too long. It grazed the hard muscles of his calves. I sat back as he turned around, innocent, a boy absorbed in cartoons. Wile E. Coyote ran off the edge of a cliff. He hovered in the air, turned to me with wide eyes, and plunged out of sight.
We spent that day driving around town, shopping, sightseeing, my father pointing out the state fairgrounds and the red brick buildings of the U of M campus. It was dark as we drove home. I sat with my parents in the front seat. Steve and his wife Sharon were in the back, with Mark. Sharon was blonde, fair-skinned, rather thin, rather pretty, the kind of girl who’d been nominated for Homecoming Queen but lost to her best friend.
Our headlights reflected off patches of smooth ice. My mother turned around to say something, but a moment passed in silence. Then her voice in a whisper, near my ear, “Aww.” I turned and peered over the seat. Steve was sleeping, lips slightly parted, his head resting against his wife’s left shoulder.
“He looks like an angel,” my mother said. Mark looked over, brows knitted, then turned back to the window. Sharon smiled but I wasn’t looking at her. His soft eyelashes and strong, stubbled chin, relaxed in sleep. My father, his hands at two and ten o’clock on the steering wheel, kept glancing in the rearview mirror. I pulled myself up to my knees and watched over Steve, his chest rising and falling, and I wanted something I couldn’t name. Through the windows patches of streetlight slid across his face, and with them something in me moved, an unfamiliar desire, wanting something from the sleeping man that I knew I couldn’t have, knowing I shouldn’t keep staring, everything happening so quickly, his face hidden now in shadows, Sharon smiling up at me as I turned, settling back against the seat, my shoulder pressed against my mother’s side, staring at but not seeing the dark, familiar streets of our neighborhood.
