Andrew, the first. Seventeen years old, she straddled him in the vinyl backseat of his VW bug in the parking lot next to Juarez Autos, which now housed Starz Nails but then was only gravel overrun with bristly foxtails and tumbleweeds. Poor Andrew fumbled with her triple-hook bra while she joked to shroud her smarts and long chin and frizzy hair and the roll of fat at her waist. She wasn’t thinking of the boy beneath her. She had been saving for college, and she was almost there, ready to beat cheeks out of Sycamore to the university in Tempe, only an hour-and-a-half drive but a world away from Grandmother’s House of Repression. She was thinking about urban skylines, coffee, poetry, letters to the editor about global injustices, foreign accents, moody singer-songwriters, everything that existed elsewhere. Despite the dubious yearbook honor of “class clown,” she was a dreamy girl. She believed in things like signs, and ESP, and kismet, snarfed them down as if they were a side of hot, salty fries. But later for dreams. First, the virginity. Andrew pumped once, grunted, shuddered. He looked at her but ducked his head, his chin tucked in shame and vulnerability. He looked close to tears. She smiled hard and chucked him on the shoulder. “Wow, that was great!” she said, her voice as high and pitched as a circus tent. He dropped her at her house—the same house she would inherit when Grandmother died and in which she would live for forty-three of her forty-eight years. If someone had told her that then, she would have laughed and laughed. Hilarious. Then, she could only see that the lights were off and she could sneak in the window without Grandmother knowing she’d been gone. She slid between the two azaleas, whose magenta flowers had burned in a late freeze. The now-brown blooms crumbled and stuck to her pant legs. They flaked across the carpet like fish food.
Thomas was her first semester at Sycamore College, which had given her a tuition scholarship plus room and board—away from her grandmother, even if down the street; she’d save money and leave town before the ink dried on the diploma. A philosophy major, Thomas drank a twelve-pack every day and had the sweetest Carolina drawl. He slept with her even though he doubted everything, including his sexuality, poor kid. It did not go well. She could not remember that boy without thinking of Sam, who’d arrived in town a few years later to teach at the high school. Twenty-two years old, with the sleek, buoyant beauty of a seal. Once, early on, they drank too much wine and fumbled around in her living room before he pulled away, tears in his eyes. “Goddamn,” he said. “I don’t want to pretend with you, okay? I don’t want to pretend anymore. Do you know what I’m saying?” She did. “Would you like a cinnamon roll?” she asked, because she had learned she liked to feed people, and herself, when she was nervous, or sad. Happy, too. “I made them this morning,” she said. He laughed and cried at the same time. “Yes, please,” he said. And so they ate them straight from the pan, wiping their faces and hands on paper towels. She didn’t know yet how their lives would become entwined, feed off each other, a twenty-year-plus friendship that would fill them full to bursting.
But that was later. Next up was Matthew, whom she met in one of those themed secret-pal dorm games—he was Sid and she was Nancy. So punk rock. He wanted to start a band, said she could write the songs. Save the world with their angst and rock and roll. But soon he dumped her for a sorority girl, and she cried in her dorm bunk for two days. She wrote haikus about minor chords and tuning pegs.
James the Lesser gave her impetigo around her mouth about the time she moved Grandmother into the senior care home. She wrote a limerick about a young woman who wore a rubber Richard Nixon mask to conceal her scabby face rash and brought it to her poetry class. It did not go well. “Always with the jokes,” her professor said, her voice tired, waving her white sheet of paper in surrender instead of asking, again, “Why should I care? What is at stake here?”
James the Greater was tall and spindly-legged, a runner she met at the track. She had moved back into Grandmother’s house and started teaching at Sycamore High—a short-term assignment, she’d move on in a year or so—and was in one of her zealous exercise periods, when she still stuffed her chunky waist into brand-name jeans and hadn’t learned the wonders of drawstrings and A-lines. He did a dead-on impression of Ronald Reagan—It’s morning in America again—and he praised her fledgling poems and made her feel like a million bucks. She mistook this for intimacy because she was twenty-three, and he had eyes as blue as a gas flame. But when it counted—when she was late, and he said, “How?” and she said, “This ain’t the Immaculate Conception, for Christ’s sake”—he ran as fast and far as his long legs could carry him. She wasn’t pregnant after all, but she held onto his two hundred dollars anyway.
Thaddeus—not Thad, but Thad-deus—was from back east, taught at Sycamore High for a grand total of two years. Wire-rims, soft hands, read Kant and Hegel on their camping trips while she set up the tent and ate bags of wicked marshmallows and drank his wicked Rolling Rocks and wrote a villanelle about his goatee. Thad-deus had a mean streak. One night, after they’d been out drinking, he called her a stupid, fat bitch. Sam said, “We can break his kneecaps. I know a guy,” and she laughed too loud and made a giant batch of peach-walnut muffins she snuck out and ate over the sink in the middle of the night. When she visited her grandmother in the home, Grandmother said, “You don’t watch it, you’re going to end up washed up, a fat spinster with no one but that queer friend of yours for company. You’re going to die alone.” And she fired back, “Like you?” It was one of the last exchanges they’d have. She stormed out, but she stayed with Thad-deus for two more months.