Skin Game: A Memoir (5 page)

But for my mother’s stubborn insistence, the rest of us would have sat happily through every meal each with a book propped up in front of our plates, and in spite of her best efforts there were still a lot of sauce- or jelly-stained books in our house. In our family, someone was always sprawled somewhere with a book. It was that kind of home, sprawling and slouchy and easy. We all wore plastic ponchos from K-Mart when it rained, and carried our clothes in backpacks when we traveled.

When I visited my school friends in their homes—a relatively rare occurrence, made complicated by the distance between us—I felt like some anthropologist among the native peoples, taking my mental field notes:
Ah, so
this
is how they live.

I assumed that every one of these homes was completely representative of the rest. They had living rooms we kids (meant to confine ourselves to finished basements equipped with bean-bag chairs and console TVs) entered as if making an illegal border crossing, tiptoeing across impossibly white carpeting, threading our way cautiously through furniture as stiff and formal as an etiquette lesson, oppressed by the hushed, lifeless atmosphere of a mausoleum. These homes had kitchens straining at the seams with a gluttonous plenty of milk and vegetables and sodas and brightly colored packages of Ho-Hos and Cheez Doodles and crinkly cellophane bags of egg noodles. The dads wore aprons that said “Chief Cook and Bottle Washer,” and they grilled burgers and hot dogs on backyard barbecues. The moms made deviled eggs and Betty Crocker brownies, and around the family dinner table every clink of silver on china rang deafeningly as the father inquired politely about our day, and the kids said, “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am,” and the mother passed chunky bowls of real mashed potatoes and still-recognizable vegetables.

*   *   *

My father, only half facetiously, proclaimed everything slopped up to us from the vast vats of the boarding-school kitchen “food of the gods,” but the rest of my family poked fun at the food, which we commended to the broad realm of things we classified as “Southern,” by which we meant the amusingly colorful and incomprehensible manners of a foreign land. Like bitter collard greens studded with pale floes of fat. Like those ancient, dusty pickup trucks. Like the women of a certain age who had their hair “done” once a week into stiff, unyielding, impossibly vertical masses of curls, and exclaimed, “Oh mah Lawd!” at the least remarkable bit of news, holding an alarmist hand to the chest as though warding off a heart attack.

Once again, we were in a place but not of it. We thought of ourselves as Yankees, expatriates of a lost homeland, the North, which I vaguely idealized as an urbane bastion of sophisticated pleasures and enlightened ideologies. This North was not quite the same as the actual North I experienced when we visited our relatives in Boston and upstate New York; that North was a place of sooty snow and abrasive accents that I could never wait to get back to Virginia from. And yet I continued to think of myself as a Northerner, until I went off to college in one of those quintessential New England college towns marked by diehard liberalism and the pointed spire of the Congregational church. At which point I began to think of myself as a Southerner, defending my home against the cumulative clichés wrought by
Gone With the Wind, Deliverance,
and
The Dukes of Hazzard.

Except, “You’re from the South,” people would say to me suspiciously, then: “Where’s your accent?”

I sometimes think not belonging, in my family, is in our bones.

7

When the boys stopped being for me simply the Boys, generic, it happened as swiftly and suddenly as the fall of a guillotine, severing my life entirely from what it had been.

On one of those almost painfully clear early fall afternoons when the warmth of the day is undercut with the slightest edge of the autumn chill to come, I wandered across campus, ambling along on some dreaming twelve-year-old’s mission. Some boys were playing touch football in the field overlooking the gymnasium, scrambling and shouting in what always struck me as the pointless chaos of a stupid game.

The ball slipped through someone’s hands and bounced, in that drunken, wobbling way of footballs, nearly to my feet.

“Hey,” said one of the boys, panting up next to me to retrieve the ball, “wanna play?”

If over the years the boys had mostly made no specific impression on me, I suppose I had likewise made little impression on most of them. Faculty kid. Maybe on a long hiking trip one of them might carry me on his shoulders, or after dinner some night a few of them might josh around with me, teasing me, or toss a Frisbee with me and my sister. So it was neither ordinary nor extraordinary that this boy would invite me to play.

But “No,” I said. “I hate football.”

“What!” he exclaimed, pausing in the act of scooping the ball up from the ground. “How can you hate football?”

He was dark-haired, dark-eyed, sinuous in a way I couldn’t quite define. I didn’t know his name.

“It’s stupid,” I said. “It’s boring. Nothing ever happens. It’s twenty seconds of running around and jumping on each other and then everyone stands around for the next five minutes.”

“How can you hate football? It’s the Great American Sport!”

“Yeah, well, I still hate it.”

My teachers were always writing on my report cards comments like
very forceful in her opinions; very independent and reluctant to take advice; strong-minded; strong-willed;
and
not afraid to raise conflicting opinions.
I had opinions, and I defended them like a terrier with a bone. I hated football. There was no compromising.

“Come on, try it. Just once,” said the dark-haired boy, whom I would come to know as equally stubborn and argumentative.

By now the rest of the boys, maybe six or seven of them, had drifted over. They stood around us, laughing, amused at this standoff.

“I don’t have to try it. I know I hate it. I hate it on TV. I hate it at school.”

“Look, you have to try it once,” said the dark-haired boy, standing squarely before me, one hand on his hip, the other cradling the ball. “You don’t get tackled,” he said patiently. “You just run around with the ball. It’s fun. How can you not want to play touch football?
Everyone
plays touch football.”

“I’ve never played it. I think it’s stupid.”

“Aaargh!” he said, raising the ball up in mock frustration, turning to his compatriots as though for reinforcement.

“You might as well try it,” laughed one of the other boys, blond, in glasses and a faded red short-sleeved sweatshirt. “He always gets what he wants,” he said.

I fell for it, thinking they were mounting some serious effort to convince me to like touch football; I was going to prove just how obstinate I could be by not liking it anyway. Instead, they tossed me the ball and then all of them instantly converged on me, dragging me into a group tackle, a harmless tumble of bodies on the damp October ground. Just the kind of teasing joke you would pull on somebody’s kid sister, but for me the world changed key—only the slightest shift in tone that would make all the difference. The feel of those strong arms wrapped around me branded my flesh.

*   *   *

After that afternoon, I’d find myself drifting with deliberate nonchalance after dinner toward the lobby outside the dining room, where my sister, fourteen, gathered a nightly audience of supplicants. This lobby was really a reception area bordering the administrative offices, where current or prospective students’ families might wait before meeting the headmaster, the admissions director. It was carpeted, with sofas and wingback chairs upholstered in the loud yellows and oranges of the seventies, and recent-vintage yearbooks on the coffee tables, and oil-painted likenesses of benefactors blandly overseeing all.

Wandering by, I’d imagine that I gave the impression it was mere coincidence, that I was just passing through the lobby on my way to other, important and pressing matters. But oh, what a surprise! Here was Mike or James or Robert, one of the same boys I had met on that football afternoon, and I supposed I might stop just for a moment, even though of course I had those other important matters to attend to.

Unlike my wretched classmates at school, these were the kind of boys you could dream of, with deep voices and easy, ropy young men’s bodies and the simple superiority of their age—fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old—bespeaking sophistications I could only half imagine. How could I have failed to notice them all these years? I wondered.

They still hardly noticed me. They came to the lobby in search of my sister. She had a sweeping, imperious manner and a blanket disdain for the lot of them that made all those boys mad for her. She could hardly step outside the dining room door before she gathered a retinue, boys materializing almost from thin air to circle her like so many electrons around an atom. We’d all laughed about it the summer before, how my sister had to make a mad dash through the thicket of boys, like a movie star wading through her adoring fans. The more she avoided them, the more they pursued. She had center stage, whether she wanted it or not.

She had chosen, however, a boyfriend, a senior no less, who could see the light from my sister’s window from his dorm room at night. The nature of their relationship, in that context, was hopelessly unusual. They never had a date. During his few free hours—the school was miserly in granting these—he could come and sit on our porch, or she could go sit on the fence with him in front of his dorm.

From my perspective, it seemed as if they were perpetually in the throes of some highly charged emotional confrontation just out of my earshot, she gesticulating angrily, he shaking his head, and the sound of their voices drifting faint and unintelligible to me. I thought this must be the mark of a Serious Relationship. I assumed these confrontations were fraught with great meaning and import.

Her boyfriend used to enlist me as envoy after their fights, my job to plead his case and argue his merits. I felt very grown-up and important to be made privy to such rarefied matters.

“Tell your sister, God, I just love her, and she’s, she’s making me crazy,” he’d say, and when he said this his face would tighten up in a grimace as though his suffering caused him actual, physical pain, and I could see how desire and torment were bound up together in his need for her and I thought,
No one will ever love me like that.

*   *   *

My sister’s life seemed like the most glamorous thing in the world. She was in ninth grade in the big, cheerleaders-and-football-team-and-pep-rallies public high in Charlottesville, with exotic acronyms instead of boring old homeroom and lunch:
T
eacher
A
dvisory
P
eriod and
L
unch
A
ctivity
P
eriod. I couldn’t imagine that she had ever suffered a moment of gawky, giggly pubescence; we had been children together, and then one day I found I had been left behind and she had rematerialized, wholly realized, as this coolly sophisticated creature who wrote her journal in French and deigned to submit to the ardent entreaties of her lover as a queen might bestow a touch of her hand upon a grateful subject.

When my sister hung out in the lobby after dinner, with her boyfriend and his friends, a small crowd inevitably coalesced with her at its center. And there I’d be, excited and bewildered and milling around the edge of things like the family mutt—everyone pats you absentmindedly on the head but no one takes particular notice of you.

Here my sister was reaping the whole teenager swag and booty, just by virtue of being born two years ahead of me. Not for the first time, I reflected on the injustice of always getting stuck in what amounted to the understudy’s role by the blind misfortune of birth order. I was doomed, I thought, always to be the little kid hanging on the periphery. I felt as though my twelveness announced itself in every detail, in my blue jeans gathered and belted to scrawny, boyish hips, in the perpetual tattoo of black and purple felt tip on my hands from notes and reminders I’d written to myself, in my waist-length tangle of hair, which I only intermittently remembered to address.

Twelve was such an in-between age, too old to be excused on the basis of youth, too young to be allowed the privileges of age. Still sitting at the children’s table on holidays, but expected to set an example for the younger kids. Twelve sounded like a little kid’s age, a footed-pajamas and in-bed-by-nine-o’clock age. I longed to be thirteen, to have that magical “teen” tacked to the end of my age that would grant me access to … well … I didn’t know quite what. But something I was certain I was missing now.

After I’d considered the problem of the long months remaining until my thirteenth birthday the following summer, I began arguing that fall—to anyone who would listen, but most particularly to those boys—that I wasn’t really twelve at all.

“I’m really already thirteen,” I said. “Because you have to count those nine months when you’re alive but just aren’t born yet.”

I thought perhaps I could exempt myself from twelve by sheer force of argument. If I were thirteen, officially “teen,” then wouldn’t those boys come to the lobby in search of me as well?

8

Ensconced in the bathroom at home, where I could scrub it all guiltily away almost as soon as I’d applied it, I dabbed on my wrists my mother’s Love’s Lemon Fresh scent, I smeared on my eyelids pollen-green shadow left over from my chorus role in last year’s school musical. With a disposable razor spirited from the linen closet, I shaved my legs, rushing, expecting at any moment to be apprehended in that compromising position, so that the razor jumped and skittered up my shinbone to leave a little hopscotch of bleeding nicks. I wrapped the disposable carefully in the fold of my towel and when no one was looking thrust it into the far depths of the closet again, where no one would find it used and suspect me.

My relationship with girlness was tortured. “You do that like a girl,” my sister and I might sling at each other as the lowest sort of insult. Girlness I’d always considered a contemptible amalgam of ruffled curtains and Barbie’s Dream House and those ridiculous underwear with the days of the week embroidered on them. Girlness was mincing and squealing.