Because it was our family’s first house with two floors and a basement, it was also my first backyard. My first rhododendron, which blossomed fat and white, blushing pink right before the petals molted. My first lilac bush too. The flowers’ sweet, heady smell would last on my fingers long after I’d cut the stems and carried around the cone-shaped whorls, sometimes doing laps of our block, pretending the lilacs had been given to me by some imaginary admirer. So dreamlike was this admirer that true-to-life details of who he might be weren’t of consequence. He was unrealized. A feeling. Many feelings, actually. A shimmering buildup of Boy. The sort of montage-person we conjure as kids, scraped from that corner in our imagination devoted to believing a character on TV—in my case, Gus Pike from Road to Avonlea—and the guy at the video store were maybe the same person.
The backyard was also my first acquaintance with a wood-paneled fence. Well actually my first acquaintance with those slits between the panels—my aperture—where I could spy our neighbors doing boring things like water the grass or race inside to grab a ringing telephone. No matter how dull whatever I observed was, a fairly hectic and illicit surge would course through me. The devotional quality of someone going about his or her day, of having to stand on her tiptoes to secure the corner of a bleach-stained towel on her clothesline or pace and pause, pace and pause, while talking on his cordless phone, was an intimacy I’d never deemed intimate until it belonged to a stranger who had no idea I was bearing witness. The thrill of a quick look provided me with pure, almost hysterical voltage.
The inground pool came with the house and was, as my father had predicted, his burden for us to enjoy. Our first summer there, the pool company who drained and refilled it with a hose fished out two or three bras they’d found at the bottom of the deep end. It was rumored the bras belonged to our neighbor’s teenage daughters, who would go skinny-dipping once the previous owner—an older woman named Madame Dorée, whom I’ve resolved must have looked like Anne Bancroft with less sting or Maria Callas with less agony—was fast asleep. The found bras, which I never saw but pictured elementally, presuming they were neon pink or lacy and black, like filigree culled from our pool’s gross winter grime, were the height of teenage girl trouble. Right in our backyard! The proximity both scandalized and, of course, intrigued me.
Older girls, like babysitters or a friend’s sister in high school, were pedestaled beings with perfect jean jackets. They were white girls mostly. Close-talkers with side-swept bangs who never appeared too wowed by anything, because they had yet to and might never encounter what it means to be denied. I coveted their casual nature, believing their incuriosity was a sign of self-possession; of not harboring some secret longing to be seen. Seen alone, not in comparison or as other, or through the bewildering construction of compliments that seemed to only further other.
What I noticed first was their hands. These older girls had chipped nail polish like shrinking enamel continents on each finger, in colors like baby blue or black. They wore big sweaters, which they’d pull over their hands and rip open holes like harnesses for their thumbs. On those thick digits I’d spot their silver thumb rings that seemed fastened on the way flange nuts thread onto screws.
Even their bad skin conveyed a type of beauty that desperately drew me in because it wasn’t beauty alone. It was notional. What I perceived as built-in unhindered-ness. Like ripping and ruining one’s clothes at one’s pleasure. Drawing with ballpoint pen on the rubber sidewall of one’s Converse—a truly satisfying motion, actually. It was things done just because. It was disinterest. Inconceivable amounts of it. How exquisite I thought it would be to not care.
These older girls were impulsive. They dyed their hair on a Monday night. They threw parties when parents were home. As I remember, a good amount of these white girls wanted to become marine biologists. Their copies of Sarah McLachlan CDs or Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope were well loved and scratched, skipping in unison to the grinding bump bump bump on “I Get Lonely.”
These older girls’ mannerisms were big and loud, and slumped too, as though they’d portioned a limited quantity of enthusiasm per week. They could exert influence—I’ll never know how—by merely arriving to school with wet hair that would air-dry by second period. In comparison, these older white girls made the rest of us appear like we were waiting in perpetuity. For what? It didn’t matter. The rest of us were girls-postponed.
In groups, their attention was coaxed elsewhere. Fatigued by whatever buzz was proximate, they observed in its place someone in the periphery, like that boy on his skateboard whose cheeks would get flush on autumn days—blotchy like deli meat. If you ever passed him in the hall, he smelled like an unwashed fitted sheet. At lunch, he vaulted off and grinded on curbs, rarely speaking to anyone and wearing a seemingly empty knapsack that looked like a deflated pool toy strapped to his back. While nobody knew much about him, there was an older girl who was likely intent on holding his hand and meeting his dog—now old and slow, but who still followed him from the pantry to the fridge to his basement bedroom because this dog and this boy had been buddies for years. This older girl was hoping to sit on the edge of this boy’s unmade bed, expecting tenderness only to receive none, and gaze at the reproach of his dresser’s vista: loose change, the glint of empty gum packets, a picture of him from camp with a girl from Ottawa she didn’t recognize, a stereo, CDs, weed crumbs, the bald head of his deodorant stick missing its lid. She’d spy his copy of 1984 and desperately wish they were in the same English class.
These older girls created landmarks out of picnic tables. Or wherever they’d congregate at recess to smoke. Adjacent places. Adjacent to where they were meant to be standing. Like just beyond the bus stop. Like in the parking lot next to the pizza place. Under an awning. Under an overpass. Behind the rink. It wasn’t solely that everywhere they went people followed, but that these older girls knew to show up mid-throng. When there would be cigarettes to bum, a boy’s sweatshirt to borrow on a windy day, someone else’s fries to stave off eating at all. Someone else’s Cherry Coke. These older girls would steal one sip because there was always, somehow, a straw bent in their direction. They had a knack for arriving just in time to: know all the words. When the song was well into its chorus or nearing Left Eye’s verse.
These older girls seemed satisfied by suggesting someone scoot over. They’d often plop themselves on a lap, or lean their weight into another white girl’s body with the kind of collapse that courts attention. These older girls’ comfort with one another was physical, though I’d mistaken it all those years ago as psychic. They knew nothing, or so it seemed, about the prickling and pining so innate to me; about deeply honed unease. These older white girls petted each other.