From my perch, anxiously ignoring my bladder push against the round button of my jeans, I watched as the boy placed his cat inside an empty brown pillowcase. He proceeded to swing it like a pendulum, faster and faster, and then whip it around, whirlybird. “I play this game a lot,” he told us, smiling. “She doesn’t mind.” That poor cat, I thought, but said nothing. That poor cat that was being launched in the dark, confused and scared.
That evil boy. That whole display of unfeeling; of complacency’s cruelty. Shame was a scorch, and my immovable, self-conscious self, who so desperately needed to pee, was instead staring at this boy torture his cat. I tasted the fuzz from my wool glove—the memory of it—and felt helpless again. Displeasured and stuck like an anticlimax; like a candy bar jammed in its vending machine coil. I’d forgotten about the kiss but remembered in its place how natural it was for me to feel wedged.
Beyond boys, this period was also marked by regretful decisions, some never to be repeated. For one, I heinously overplucked my eyebrows. Looking back at pictures, it’s as if I had vandalized my own face with a thin-tip Sharpie. My eyebrows were reduced to faint wisps, weird and bowed; obvious gaffes, crooked like filaments. My smile, subsequently, photographed deranged. Two hewed mistakes floating above my eyes.
Some other decisions were more prescient. I began to misinterpret my friendships with girls in my class; assuming a mutual bond where, in effect, all we were doing was sharing secrets and using them as our metric for closeness. If she knew everything about me, then we were best friends. BFFs. Forever and ever. Keepers, not of each other, but of the privilege we derived from knowing. We were each other’s vaults, misplacing our longing or encountering it as boredom. We pried. We made pacts. Intimacy wasn’t only affection but advantage.
Funny how in adulthood, the opposite is sometimes considered true. Nowadays I spend time, in excess of it, wondering about my friends—about our folds of perception: “Does she know that I know?” A secret she’s keeping, for instance. Or news she’s not yet ready to announce. Or the way an unkind thought about someone we know might pass through her mind between bites of roast chicken; that I won’t press her to share, because I’ve likely had the same thought. Our innermost selves become, over time and out of love, a universe of nonverbal prompts. Those free clues we call inklings. A vague intelligence for speaking without saying anything at all. Or maybe with age we become more paranoid. Less vulnerable. Regulated by what’s unspoken and, in turn, reluctant to delve. Maybe our connections form in tandem to us laying brick and mortar, building emotional walls that eventually surpass us.
Often it happens naturally, and a relationship I feverishly jumped into discontinues. Whatever gave rise to our correspondence—a season, it’s possible, like summer’s wine-laced inanity and our insistence on walking far in flimsy shoes, or the quickening that flows from connecting over some zeitgeist thing, like a book about women and solitude, like that tapas place with cheap food and red tablecloths—has dried up. Or maybe in adulthood we are more inclined to ration intimacy than carry it around like a trophy to give away intact. Our unreason and instinct miraculously combine, and loving her means also trusting that she’ll share, if need be, what needs sharing.
Though I’ll never know if I was ever perceived as an Older Girl and by whom, my memory of those years, of what was appealing about those white girls, is less and less absorbing. Less silvery, and nearly impossible to conjure. I was so young and so spellbound by movie beauty and so vulnerable to magazines. To the way magazine girls with freckles had figured it out: beauty that was somehow boyish, I reasoned.
It’s taken me a while to reshape many of these notions because I was then, and still am, a late-to-bloom girl. Expectant like a card trick. The girl who for years wore a sports bra as her everyday bra, and would wait for the bus practicing my Liv Tyler pout, badly wishing for even a shred of her courteous Liv Tyler cool.
During my first session, five or six years ago, my therapist lightly amended a declaration I was making, with the words For now. The revelation was immediate. A tonic. Like when clouds part outside, and inside fresh beams of light reinstate the day—those six letters marked a huge shift. Because, as girls, we held on tight to Forever. It was compulsory: the most critical, tender quota. For now, however, is a far more rational unit of measurement, and perhaps one we should encourage much earlier in life because it doesn’t require the insurance of a necklace or bracelet, or any token really. It connotes nuance and the balm of receptivity. It has little to do with girlhood’s insistence on wide-eyed hopes for the future, or feeling like an easy mark, and, in my case, ceding so much power to those older white girls. What For now proposes instead is the give and grace of compassion.
*
Ick, ick, ick, my mother said, still wearing her nightgown and wrinkling her face at the dead squirrel. I glared, irritated. I knew we were going to be late for school. But from my window, as I watched my mother delicately retrieve the dead squirrel, it occurred to me that the squirrel suddenly looked saved. The droop of its body in the blue net, like the droop of a child faking sleep, slyly hoping to get carried out from the car and into bed. Drooping, I understood, was a kid move. Was this dead squirrel a kid squirrel? Still new to the world and unaccustomed to the spring of its bushy, plumed tail. Had it drowned while playing with a buddy? Chasing each other up the maple tree or across the telephone wire that stretched from our house to the alleyway where Joanna, Marisa, and I felt teenage long before we were teenagers because we were hanging out in an alleyway.
Maybe the squirrel had tried, in panicked and walleyed horror, to climb out from the water only to scratch its claws against the pool’s smooth, rounded edges. Shaped like a kidney bean, our pool looked borrowed from Bedrock City. Prehistoric, retro, like nothing we were used to. The sort of passed-down aesthetic I found alien and luxurious because the pool, like the whole house, had touches of what I considered the most movied place: midcentury Los Angeles. A “Mamie pink” and black-tiled bathroom, for instance. A lavender one too, with his and her sinks. Carpeting in most rooms and sliding louvered closet doors.