More and more, my mother’s colleagues from the college where she taught were around, in our home, casually resting their hands on surfaces as they talked and laughed. Folding their jackets over the backs of chairs, leaning against our banister with one leg propped on the bottom step, and noting after using the bathroom, the spiced, earthy smell of our Mysore sandalwood soap. They somehow managed to occupy space in largely inconspicuous ways that drove me mad.
At first it was strange to hear adults I didn’t know say my mother’s name: Dolores. Their delivery had a tone I attribute to the formal informality of colleagues. Duh-lore-iss. Proper but acquainted. Or with a trace of French Canadian: Do-lo-riss. These colleagues knew her and saw her in ways I never had. Proctoring exams under the fluorescence of classroom light, carrying her lunch in recycled yogurt containers to department meetings, stapling flyers to corkboards and frustratingly unstapling flyers that had, she would recount later at home, covered hers. These colleagues’ experience of my mother felt in breach of my own; destroying in some twisted and greedy manner my claim to her. They were privy to her nerve, and worse than that, they were probably providing my mother with support. Why did anyone have to know what was happening in our family? How did they know my name or what grade I was in? Why was anyone talking about me at all?
More so, why did they have to spend time in our house, where the mood was perceptibly changing, migrating away from the gloom of a marriage lost to, in retrospect, the gentle warping I associate with joy. Even our vestibule’s Mediterranean-blue walls, where I’d kick off my shoes on terra-cotta tiles and hurry to the kitchen or my room—those walls appeared plusher. Like blue velour. The house was, once more, in possession of its many textures. It no longer felt like a shell.
Still, I was ashamed of having parents who’d fallen out of love with each other. Though it isn’t mine to privilege, their separation was my first heartbreak. My voice began to, at random, condense into a chirp, signaling tears. Quiet panic sloshed around inside of me like stormy waters, and for a whole year, mysterious stomach cramps would come for me in the night, like gremlins conspiring in that part of my gut I hadn’t yet distinguished was where I store secrets and where I hope dumb choices don’t clot, and where I encounter—here, I’ll say it—intermittent clairvoyance.
As a result, I began to worry nonstop about that which I couldn’t control and, more so, knew nothing about: like money. When I needed some, for, I don’t know, a ticket to see Titanic at the Cavendish Mall—again—I made a point of keeping tabs on whom I’d asked last. Because, quickly, my life required vigilant upkeep. Because, for some kids, when parents separate, the discreet incursion of agonizing about money or time spent, or learning to love just as much but showing it twice as much, of classifying belongings like photo albums or sets of plates, a teal vase, falls on the child whose inaudible awareness of adult pain undergoes what I experienced as a new charge. So, I strained to uphold a sense of equal. I developed a self-styled commitment to what was fair as well as nervous habits like pinching the cupid’s bow of my top lip or folding my arm behind me and pushing my fingers against the beads of my spine; the latter of which I still do.
But while I withstood those bumps, while I was angry, anxious, and at times embarrassed to be the child of parents who sat on opposite ends of the gym during my ballet recitals, I was also occasionally none of those things. I had preadolescence to contend with, which in its way felt like a highly radioactive time where I was vying with myself for a sense of self.
In the ensuing years, I had all but decided my childhood was over. I never wanted to be young again because I’d never truly felt the liquid energy of youth pool around me. Its alleviative qualities. This next period was marked by a dramatic break in how I thought. Or rather, how I started to plait my thoughts and overthink. And not as I’d done as a kid, fancying intricate scenarios through the slits of my neighbor’s fence, expecting miracles, mystery, creeps of skin. No. Now I was reacting to how the air between two people can communicate heat: how a boy could make me feel midflight. Illegible attempts were sanitized by how, at that age, titles and sensitivities amount to little. How timidity needles redundancy. Did he look my way? Was that a kiss? Was it not? Did it count? Is he or isn’t he my boyfriend? Do I like him? What’s there to say over the phone? How do I fill the silence? Happily discerning cluelessness from the slippery ledge of being complicit has never been my strength.
One winter, as some friends and I walked home in the snow, sliding our boots like skis on the slushy sidewalk, a boy I’d grown more and more attracted to ever since I noticed how he’d lope up stairs, two at a time—sometimes three—or how hard he pushed his pencil into his composition books, stopped me as snow whirled down and as everyone else crossed the street. He leaned in and kissed me. His lips were soft. Mine were chapped. Our cheeks were cold. I was so taken aback that I covered my mouth with my wool glove as if muffling my Wow. I sensed all over my body the jolt of something unanticipated happening to me; of someone else’s impulse pressed against my lips. How even the most innocent acts swarm with pleasure because our nerve endings, thank goodness, never mature. Never mellow. They remain prone-to. Tendrils that keep us—in the best way—shatterable. Wasn’t it lovely, I thought, to be caught off guard by the boy whose every mannerism I’d crystallized? Who I never anticipated was considering me.
But just as quick, as if being disallowed the phenomenal seconds that follow a kiss in the snow, I tasted a fleecy tuft in my teeth. Wool from my glove in my moment of Wow had hooked onto my braces. I felt sabotaged. When the boy tried to kiss me again, I backed away and kept my lips closed. I imagined the fuzz in my teeth looking like mold growing on my mouth’s metal wires. Mortified, I stared at my boots and felt the wreck of inexperience, like a curse, condemning me to even more inexperience.
A week later, I sat perched on that same boy’s top bunk, reading a magazine with my best friend, and needing to pee but too afraid to climb down—too scared to be seen climbing down a ladder. That certain scrutiny that races through you when you are bum-first and focused elsewhere—climbing into a public pool, down a bunk bed, up that rickety ladder to catch a rooftop sunset. When you fabricate, maybe, the burn of attention despite proof. When suddenly having an ass, no matter how flat or small, makes you feel immobilized.