Jaybird
We lived in the country. Ours was one of a handful of houses scattered around a small lake, thick stands of pine screening one lot from the next. We didn’t know any of our neighbors, though we picked up certain things ambiently. We knew the people next door kept their dog chained to a post; the water carried the dog’s plaintive barking and the toll of the hollow post when the chain yanked taut. From our pier we could see across the lake to the opposite yard, a fixed landscape of trash—broken, sagging play structure, washer-and-dryer set unplugged and left out to rust. We knew the children’s names from the parents’ calls to get your little ass back here and go help your mama with these groceries. But we never saw the parents or the children up close. If we passed them on a walk or got stuck behind their car at a red light, we’d never have made the connection.
We were not country people ourselves. Mom hadn’t wanted to live out here at all. Claire had tricked her into it when Mom was still pregnant with me, promising this would only be a summer getaway. But they never bought a place in the city, and then Claire was killed in a car wreck when I was three, stranding us here. Mom worked downtown for the attorney general’s office. My school, piano lessons, and ballet classes were all in the city. My friends lived even farther away, in the richer northern suburbs. Mom’s social life centered on a downtown bar called Lady Godiva’s. The summer I was eleven, she spent almost every night at the Dive, as she and her friends called it. She didn’t have to drive me to school or pick me up; I wasn’t enrolled in any camps or summer sports. I was supposed to be practicing my piano, but lessons were suspended until fall. I spent the whole summer at home.
I was sitting on the loveseat in the front room one night, reading Anne Rice by a table lamp. The room was longer than it was wide, like a train car running parallel to the road, with the dining table at one end and the piano, untouched for weeks, at the other. The silver in the sideboard clattered softly. I looked up from my book. This was the telltale sound of a passing car. Our house came right up to the road; cars were infrequent, but their proximity made each one a small earthquake. An invisible density moved along the outside of the wall. When it came level with me, headlights shredded themselves through the window blinds and strobed the room. The silence that followed was thick with suggestion. I shut the book and got up to stand by the window. I lifted the blinds, then unlatched the window and pulled it up.
Between the road and me there was only a narrow strip of grass and three steps leading up to the door. If a car passed slowly enough, its windows would line up exactly with mine, and either the driver or the passenger (depending on the direction of travel) would be right at eye level with me.
Warm air poured in from outside, but I was shaking all over. Slowly, I pulled down my gym shorts and peeled off my T-shirt so I stood in just my boxers. I went back to the lamp and switched it off. Now it was dark inside and out, except for the porchlight dropping a white angelic beam between the house and the road. Our trash cans cast gangsterish shadows beside the steps. Across the road, past our mailbox, was a barbed-wire fence and then woods. I couldn’t even see the wire in the dark. As in a Sims family’s lot, the mailbox marked the last post against a depthless void.
In the silence, my near-naked body was an exclamation point waiting for an intelligence to pass over and express it. What would I do? After a moment’s thought, I decided to moon the first car that passed. Mooning was a normal, boyish prank; even if I got in trouble for it, it would be the kind of trouble that marked me as a boy, a badge I had come to crave more than I craved praise. Mom had been bewildered at the prospect of raising a boy, especially after Claire’s death left her a single parent. Claire had played softball, built houses with Habitat for Humanity; she would have known what to do with a boy. To Mom’s relief, though, I hadn’t turned out to be a stupid boy like her brother, who’d put rocks in her E-Z Bake oven when they were kids. I had always been smart and polite, praised for my good grades, my talent for ballet and music and drawing. “I never have to punish him,” I’d heard Mom brag more than once over the phone.
Just the week before, she’d told me a story from college. One night, her boyfriend’s whole fraternity had gone streaking through the center of town. She was studying late in a diner when they all rushed past the window in a blur of bare flesh and sneakers. A waitress, who had just opened her mouth to ask Mom if she’d like more coffee, froze in contemplation with the steaming pot in her hand. “Naked as the day they was born,” she muttered.
At this point in the story, Mom blushed and muffled her laughter with the fingertips of one hand, as if recalling a transgression of her own. “Boys,” she said. “They’re so stupid. I don’t mean you, sweetie,” she added quickly.
She’d meant to correct an insult, but this felt like an insult in itself. What she meant, presumably, was that I was better than all other boys. But did this mean I was somehow not quite a boy myself? If so, maybe I didn’t want to be better. Her story had shown me the loneliness of that distinction. A smart boy was a lone dog behaving itself among people. A stupid boy was one of a pack, pelting through the night naked as they day they were born.
The obvious flaw in my plan was that I was alone. Mooning, streaking—these acts required accomplices. I had no one out here. The few boys my age were rednecks who could occasionally be seen ripping through the neighborhood on four-wheelers or fishing on the lake. They frightened and excited me in equal measure; befriending them was out of the question. But I had to disrupt the long plodding course of good behavior somehow, and, if I had to do this alone, then so be it.
First, I settled the question of Mom’s return. Every night, exactly once, I called her on her cell phone at the Dive. I waited to do this as long as I could stand. She’d decided I was mature enough to stay home alone, and I didn’t want to prove her wrong by revealing myself to be scared or needy. Only long after dark, when a car accident on TV, a possum’s grinning devil-face in the window, gained the power to unsettle me did I let myself pick up the phone. Some nights, I felt no fear whatsoever and had no urge to call, but this produced a fear of its own, that the one night I let my guard down would be the night something went wrong, so I always called anyway. Tonight, I would get the whole drama out of the way early. It was only 8:30.
I could count on one of three responses: she was leaving right now (she’d be back in one to two hours); she was staying for one more drink (back in two to three hours); or she’d be back soon. Soon meant I’d half-wake in the middle of the night to a clatter of keys on the kitchen counter, the bump of a chair or table as she felt her way to bed. Because I always slept through her leaving for work the next morning, these sounds might be my only sign of her existence for days. She was like a household god who was known only by the Tupperwares of lasagna and Hamburger Helper she left in the fridge and whose voice, slurred by its transit through the phone, could be heard once a night.
“I’ll be leaving here soon, sweetie,” she said now. “No need to wait up.”
For once, this was the answer I’d been hoping for: I had all the time in the world. I replaced the cordless landline in its cradle and returned to the open window. Hearing no cars coming, I decided to test out the position. I came up close to the window, turned around, hunched forward, and yanked down my boxers.
My butt, which I had never taken for an organ of perception, tingled alert. The downy hairs along its surface pricked up, tasting the air for signals. I had expected to feel like I was sticking myself out into the night. Instead, the outside surged into me, its whole vast consciousness that any moment might distill into a pair of headlights and pick me out of the dark. I seemed to be filling up with a warm, dense gas. My butthole slackened, as it did when I was stunned with embarrassment.
Though I didn’t remember it, as a little boy I’d apparently been a shameless exhibitionist. Adults remembered me peeing with the door open, running around the house naked, sprawling on the couch and pensively handling my little penis. Since I could remember, however, I’d been paralytically shy of my body. In locker rooms, I slipped my underwear on and off under my towel. For my fourth-grade play, The Emperor’s New Clothes, I’d had to cross my hands over my crotch in shock; even this pantomime of nudity had mortified me so much I’d shaken violently onstage. And yet here I was, pointing my naked ass to the open window. Maybe this present urge was nothing new, just the return of a forgotten state of nature, and my years of shyness had only been a brief, sad interlude.
I don’t know how long I stood there, knees and back straining, before I heard the distant crush of tires. They sounded like they were coming around the far edge of the lake. There was still plenty of time to abandon my stance, but I willed myself not to move. Soon I could hear the murmur of a radio. The air in the room contracted; the sideboard rattled its bones.
The headlights merged with my butt. Inside the beams, hard and twisty like the filament in a lightbulb, was a blip of sound from the car radio, briefer than a note, unrecognizable as either a voice or an instrument. For a split-second light, sound, and flesh squeezed into the same sliver of space, each element dependent on the others—the light caught my butt; my butt caught it back; the light enveloped the sound; the sound struck off my butt like a match flaring. The room went bright. When it dimmed, I was already at the other end, steadying myself against the piano with shaking hands, my boxers puddled at my feet. The image of my butt in the window, as it must have appeared to the driver for that one flash, developed like a Polaroid in my vision, rising and sharpening out of the same darkness the car was already receding deeper and deeper into.
A few nights later, having elicited another soon from Mom, I went out to the pool in my swimming trunks and turned on the light at the deep end. The night was mild and humid, the water a little chilly at first, but after a few minutes it was as bland as the air. I slipped off my trunks. The water cupped my crotch and butt. There was nothing between me and the water, me and the air I came up to drink, a thick, syrupy liquid carbonated with stars and cicada chirps. Again, I felt the world surge into the zone I had exposed to it. My limbs and torso hardly felt the current they made, but my dick, balls, and butt thrilled at their own density, their power to displace water. I did a lazy backstroke, staring up at the sky. The trunks were a cloaking device I had shed. My skin sent unblocked signals through the water, up into the air. No consciousness signaled back at me—God, Claire, a satellite—but it was enough to know the channel was open.
Day had once come as a relief, a respite from my long vigil by the phone, but the next morning I woke quaking with a now-familiar anxiety. I looked out at the lake and the beckoning pier. It was 10 a.m. and already hot. The air was still, the sky a hazy white. I stepped barefoot onto the pier, wearing only my trunks, spread a beach towel over the boards, and lay down on my back. The sun pressed evenly on every inch of exposed flesh. My attention floated to the parts my trunks covered. The same warmth that bathed the rest of me smothered them like a trapped animal inside the thick fabric and netting.
I lifted my hips and lowered just the back of my waistband. My butt touched down bare on the towel. With each breath I took, the front of the waistband slipped down a little against the pressure from the back. The first pubes I’d sprouted that spring needled against the sagging elastic. I longed suddenly for another person, even one of the neighborhood boys, to tug the trunks off me against my will. Pantsing—another boyish rite I’d observed, like an alien studying human culture, in the movies about college that played endlessly on TV.
Maybe I could be that other boy I imagined, just for a moment. I sat up, gripped the waistband over each hip, gritted my teeth, and tugged. It was not as clean a motion as I’d wanted; I still had to thrash the trunks off my feet, almost kicking them into the water. I lay back down and shut my eyes. My crotch felt like the fresh skin after a bandage is removed; the sweat there was cool. Rather than melt into the democratic heat, the area asserted its separateness, hoarding all the sensation in my body. Now it was as if the rest of me was clothed, blunting the sunlight, and only my crotch was exposed.
True nudism would probably entail a long, slow dissipation of this feeling. This struck me as terribly sad.
There was a tree limb in the center of the lake where turtles lined up in the summer to sunbathe. I heard the wet plop of one turtle pushing off into the water, then, a few moments later, felt the ripple he’d made kick weakly at the legs of the pier. I listened for the bark of the dog across the water, the ping of his post, but heard nothing. He was probably sprawled on his side, dazed like me by the sun, big pink tongue lolling.
I wondered what I would look like if I could see myself from the opposite bank. I saw a boy painted in miniature against a miniature pier, in the distance a miniature house half-sunken in crape myrtles and camellia bushes. The windows were painted in, the sun’s glare effacing the rooms inside. Alone in that house all summer, I was clumsy and huge, the source of every noise and soiled dish. I’d been by myself so long, I had no idea whether I was growing or shrinking, cute or ugly, funny or awkward. Out here, I was tiny and exact, each feature carefully rendered with a single-haired brush in proportion to my surroundings. Maybe I would come out here every day, at the same time, until I had forged myself into the permanent landscape.
“Penny for your thoughts?” Mom asked me across the kitchen table. It was Saturday morning; she’d made waffles.
“Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know. You seem different somehow. Pensive.” She chuckled.
“I’m not.” It wasn’t a lie. My desire preoccupied me, obsessed me, but it had nothing to do with my thoughts at all. My body had become so tactile and receptive, it was almost translucent. Even the features of the house that were so familiar I’d never really noticed them—the model’s arched neck and heavy eyelids in the poster for an old French perfume, the couch’s rose upholstery still breathing a faint scent of piss from a long-dead cat—now flowed into me in a vivid, irreversible rush, mixing with my insides. It wasn’t just to avoid explaining what I was doing that I deflected Mom’s questions. It was to protect her from being sucked into that flow herself.
“That’s okay,” she said, smiling playfully. “You don’t have to tell me.” Maybe she thought I was talking to some girl on the phone all day. “But sweetie, you do look a little flushed. Just be sure you’re wearing sunscreen when you go outside.”
I looked at her credulous, sleep-splotched face, the long Mickey Mouse T-shirt and black tights in which she’d slept and would probably spend the whole day. I took a syrup-logged bite of waffle. Its sweetness, with my new sensitivity, tasted obscene.
Sometime I was bound to go too far. I was sitting on the couch one night, watching a movie on TV about a bunch of college kids, played by sexy actors in their twenties, who were going to run a mile naked at the end. My mind swam from one sexy actor to another. I’d plundered Mom’s liquor cabinet for a gin and tonic. Knowing nothing about measurements, I’d mixed the drink to taste, a taste that strongly resembled cough medicine. With one hand I lifted and set down the glass; the other fished around in my boxers. I knew I wouldn’t get to see any of these sexy actors fully naked—even if the theatrical cut featured full frontal, which it almost certainly didn’t, this was the cable edit, where the most I could hope for was a flash of a butt here and there.
The longer I sipped and watched, though, the less this mattered. The boys were egging each other on to dumber and dumber debaucheries. They threw their arms around each other, and a comforting weight dropped across my shoulders. Had I been drinking beer as they were, I might have been able to enter the scene wholly, but there was none in the house. These boys inhabited a warmly lit world that blessed their horny stupidity, erupted in a single cheer when they shed their boxers and bared their smooth, compact butts. In this world, the stupid boy was king, the only principle was pleasure, and the only sin worthy of exile was virginity, of which one could count on being absolved by the story’s end. The blessing of that world traveled to me through the screen, dissipating like starlight by the time it reached me. I knew perfectly well, even then, that that world was not the one waiting for me in high school or college or on the other side of my own virginity. Still, its light shone on what I was about to do.
In the old toy chest in my bedroom, I found the V for Vendetta mask from last year’s Halloween costume. Already naked, I slipped it over my face. I wouldn’t bother with shoes or socks; I’d been walking around barefoot all summer and had the thick calluses to prove it. My route would be a rough circle along the streets that bordered the lake; that way I would never have to stop or turn around, just keep hugging the rightward curves until I was back in my own driveway. I was unlikely to encounter anyone on the street this late at night. If I did, I would just keep running.
I went out the back door. It was a clear night with no moon. I could barely make out the place where our concrete driveway joined the asphalt road. I stopped and stared up into the empty sky. In the moon’s absence, I seemed to be standing on its barren surface myself, pulling in oxygen through my mask. A snatch of a song floated through my head, as if from the open window of a passing car. And I think it’s gonna be a long long time. But there were no cars, no human sounds at all. I was completely alone. Then some wind swirled through me, and I was running.
The night air streamed warm around my butt. My dick and balls jounced through the dark. Even when my eyes had started to adjust, the mask cut off my peripheral vision, so I felt rather than saw the neighborhood flow by me on either side, bristling with trees, then the silent thicknesses of the widely spaced houses, some with a single porchlight on, some with a TV glowing in a window, most completely dark. When I turned my head to see them, they were like masks themselves, expressions unaltered as a butt-naked boy shot past them.
A few yards ahead of me, a lumpy shape bobbed along the edge of the road, in time with the motion of my own genitals. My feet gripped the asphalt; my heart shot up into my brain. I stood there catching my breath as the possum humped its way across the street, benignly intent on some errand that did not concern me. It took a moment to get my body started again, but soon I was back in my groove. I was approaching a steep, sudden dip in the road. When I was little, I always took it at a sprint. I liked to feel my feet start churning by themselves to catch up with my downward motion. The words of a poem Mom had read to me would fly through my head: Christopher Robin goes/Hoppity, hoppity/Hoppity, hoppity, hop./Whenever I tell him/Politely to stop it, he/Says he can’t possibly stop. For old times’ sake, I took the hill at full speed. My legs flew out before and behind me, not propelling me at all but only shoring up my freefall against the pull of gravity.
Up ahead, the road forked right and climbed steadily back uphill, which would keep me on my track around the lake. I’d always stopped here and taken the turn. But the hill kept plunging, and this time I could think of no reason not to follow it down. After a while, the road started to level out. I took little stamping steps to slow myself down, like putting out a fire with my feet. One moment I was on asphalt and the next, like a surprise stair in the dark, I was on lower footing, bare dirt.
The knowledge of my mistake exploded into white light around me. The porchlight my trespass had triggered lit up the dirt path at my feet, which led to a house I had never seen before. Unlike most of the other houses in the neighborhood, whose sidings had faded and mellowed into the landscape, this one was boxy and newish and made of red brick. A frantic look around showed me that I had passed the mailbox in my mask’s blind spot a few yards back. Lined up in the dirt beside the front porch were a black pickup truck, a four-wheeler, and a blue tarp covering what looked like a jet ski. My body felt an absurd kinship with these objects—all of us sprung from hiding in the same flash. Then I saw the dog. It too was out of place, a brawny German shepherd in a neighborhood of gangly mutts. Seeing me, it seemed less to stand up on its own power than to be pulled erect by a magnet, tail and ears pricked. Every cell in my body willed it not to bark, but the silence that held us also held me still, so when it did bark, my heart overflowed with gratitude. I spun and ran. Forgetting the place where the dirt changed to asphalt, I jammed my toe on the step and went splaying into the road, skinning the heels of both hands. I heard the porch door skitter open. Above the barking came a man’s scolding voice. “Jaybird, shut up that hollering.” By then I was in a flat-out sprint toward the base of the hill.
“Hey!” the man called out behind me. I knew he was no longer talking to the dog. “What kinda pervert…? Yeah, you better get your nekkid ass out of here, before I shoot it!” Only when I had crested the hill and was back in total darkness did I ease up enough to notice that my big toe was throbbing with pain. I kept on in a limping jog, the air swimming around me like the atmosphere of a new planet. I considered my future. The man in the house would find me and kill me. Or I would go to juvie and be put on a sex offender registry for the rest of my life. Or—the best hope I could muster—I would get home, lock the doors, dispose of the mask, take a shower, and spend the next few weeks—months, if necessary—shrinking the incident in my mind to the size of a compact pod that could be ejected into space, so it would never have happened at all.
Though I ached to be home, I took a circuitous route back, to throw anyone who might be following me. I was rounding a curve along the lake, in the opposite direction of home, when I saw headlights lick the ankles of the trees up ahead. There was a ditch on the lakeside. I stepped off the road, flattened myself on my belly in the surprisingly cool, dry clay, and tried not to think of water moccasins as the car rushed by over my head.
I saw no one else. After the turn the night had taken, I was almost afraid I’d get to our house and it wouldn’t be there. When it did emerge at the end of the road, it was too much there, too sharp and bright. Mom’s station wagon gleamed white in the carport. Lights were on in all the windows. I’d forgotten to call Mom at the Dive. I froze at the edge of the driveway. My only option was to go in, though this was suicide. Remembering that I was still wearing the mask, I pulled it off and tossed it into the woods. I crept up the driveway, plotting my move. I would run. I’d open the door as quietly as I could, and then I would bolt through the house and upstairs to my bedroom and get straight into the shower. Maybe, having failed to find me in the house, Mom would be out looking for me by the pier or the pool.
The back door was still unlocked. I eased it open and closed it gingerly behind me, standing now in the computer room. It was empty. I took a deep breath and ran. I ran through one brightly lit room after another. Mom had turned on every overhead light and every lamp. The back hallway rushed by, Mom’s bedroom on one side, then the front room with the piano and the dining table: empty, empty. I hit the kitchen and hung a left into the living room: the stairs were just past the couch. Mom was sitting there, staring off into overbright space. I was almost to the stairs, but she must have been gathering her strength for this moment. She sprang from her seat and caught me by the elbow.
“Don’t you run away from me. Where the hell were you? Look at me. Where are your clothes? You’re bleeding! Oh God, you’ve got dirt all over you. What the hell happened? Answer me!”
Either she hadn’t been drinking or fear had stricken her sober. Her alert face and lucid voice were as out of place as the lit-up house at the end of the road. If I looked at her directly, I knew I would cry, so I looked down at the floor instead. That’s when I saw my toe. The nail had split down the middle; one side had jammed into the nailbed in a mess of blood. The sight of it merged with my dirtiness and nakedness and Mom’s grip on my arm and I started to cry anyway. She steered me to the couch and sat at my feet, waiting out the tears like a temptation.
“Sweetheart,” she said, low and implacable, when I’d stopped to catch my breath, “you have to tell me what happened. Whatever it is, I can’t help you unless you tell me. I’ll sit here all night if I have to. You can even hate me for it; I don’t care. I’m your mother. I can take you hating me, but I cannot, I will not, let you keep this from me. Do you understand?”
Had she suggested any one of the possibilities that must have been flickering through her mind, I would have immediately confessed to it. What had actually happened was still so unreal that the facts were immaterial. The experience was a vast formless mass that could be fired into any narrative at all at the slightest suggestion, and I would believe it just as much as Mom would.
But my mother was a good lawyer. She didn’t lead her witness. She just sat there, waiting. After a while, I said, “May I please take a shower first?”
“No, you may not. I don’t know if you need to be—” She withdrew the hand that had still been clutching my arm. “—examined.”
“Examined?”
“Well, I don’t know, sweetheart! Help me, for God’s sake.” She started pacing the room, her brow creased, her mouth set in a pained frown. She looked like a little girl thinking very hard. Knocking against a chair, she saw the quilt thrown over its arm and flung it at me. “Here, you can cover up with this.” I wrapped it gratefully around myself.
“I could be liable, you know,” she said, “for whatever the hell this is. Does that concern you at all?”
Despite myself, I felt a flicker of indignation. For all she knew, I had been snatched, beaten up, and God knew what else, and she was making this about her?
“All right,” she said when I didn’t answer. She was headed for the phone.
“What are you doing?”
“What do you think I’m doing?” She took the phone from its cradle. “I’m calling 911.”
“If you call 911,” I said, “I’ll have to tell them the truth.”
I hadn’t known what I was going to say before I said it. My voice came out strangely calm and reasonable. Mom stood blinking at me with the phone in her hand.
“Well?”
“I mean, they’ll want to know where you were, right? So, I’ll have to tell them you were out at the Dive all night and I was here by myself. That would sound kinda bad, wouldn’t it? I mean, I’m not saying you’re drunk, but you have been drinking, haven’t you?”
She looked at me as if I’d gotten on all fours and tried to bite her. “Who are you?” She took off down the hall, still holding the phone. Her bedroom door slammed. I knew she wouldn’t call the police now—probably just my grandmother or one of her friends. I almost felt sorry for her that she didn’t know anyone out here, that she couldn’t start calling numbers or knocking on doors to get to the bottom of this.
My eyes fell on the dead face of the TV, the remote on the ottoman. Nothing was stopping me from picking it up, turning on the TV, and going about my night as if nothing had happened. I was not someone who got grounded: the punishment simply did not exist for me. So, I had the sense I was grounding myself as I went through the house turning off all the lights, rinsed the dregs of my drink out of the glass Mom had failed to notice, then climbed upstairs to shower and put myself to bed. I stared at the ceiling for a long time before it hit me that those must have been Mom’s headlights sweeping over me as I lay in the ditch.
She took me to work with her the next morning. After so many indistinguishable days on my own, the drive into downtown Jackson had a piercing singularity. The government lawns and white columns hurt my eyes; my body had forgotten the sensation of riding in a car. One by one, Mom’s coworkers peeked out of their offices to tell me how tall and handsome I was getting. I willed my mouth to smile, my eyes to stay on faces instead of falling to the carpet. I detected a note of suspicion beneath their smiles and small talk. Now that I was almost a teenager, no longer the little boy come to delight the secretaries and pester the lawyers, it was possible I was here as a prisoner under guard. Mom stationed me at a desk in the law library. I tried to read my book but couldn’t focus under the accusing stares of attorneys general past and present in their framed portraits above my head. Down the hall, a secretary answered the phone, “Criminal division.” It sounded not like the department where my mother worked, but like a line I had always been on one side of and had now crossed.
Around noon, Mom stood in the doorway. “Hal and Mal’s for lunch?”
It sounded like a peace offering: this was one of our favorite restaurants. I forgot a little of my dread in spooning a chocolate-covered mint out of the glass bowl on the host stand, settling myself in a vinyl booth beside Mom under old New Orleans Jazz Fest posters and ordering what I always had: an open-faced roast beef sandwich with fries and a Barq’s root beer in the bottle. The sandwich came on two slices of white bread already disintegrating under thick gravy. Mom stared at her untouched tomato soup as I ate.
“Penny for your thoughts?” I tried.
“I don’t know what to think,” she said. “I mean, I don’t know whether to ground you, call the cops, or send you to a psychiatrist.”
“How about none of the above?”
“That’s not funny. How’s your toe?”
I flexed it inside my shoe; it gave back a pleasant ache. “Fine.”
All day she’d looked past or around me, as if, having seen me naked, she now couldn’t see the clothes on my body. Now her gaze settled somewhere over my left shoulder. She looked completely exhausted. “Would you just tell me what happened? I’m at the end of my rope here.”
I saw then that I had a kind of power over my mother. As long as I kept her in this state of suspense, half-believing something terrible had happened to me and half-believing I’d done something stupid and possibly illegal, I stripped her of every power in her arsenal: to punish me, protect me, avenge me, even ignore me. I don’t know if it was mercy or fear that made me throw this power away as soon as I saw I had it.
“Nothing happened. I was bored, and I thought it would be fun to go streaking.”
Had I blinked, I would have missed the flash of relief that preceded her outrage. “Streaking? By yourself? Out in the country? What in the hell possessed you to do a thing like that?”
I looked down at my plate. “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
“Sweetie, this doesn’t make any sense. Who gave you that idea?”
There was only one true answer, which was the last one I could give. I wondered if she even remembered telling me the story from college. She’d pronounced streaking with a disdain she reserved for those fads of my generation that were most foreign and idiotic to her.
“I mean, who have you been talking to?”
I pictured the perfect scapegoat: a boy my age, or a little older, rough and country, a bad influence. I could almost see him, almost name him—Hunter? Zach? Caleb?—but the image did not resolve. “No one.”
She pushed back from the table, sighed. “This isn’t like you.”
“Maybe it is.”
I looked her full in the face. I could tell she still saw me naked; I was assaulting her with it again, only this time by choice, and again I saw the look she’d given me last night. Who are you?
“There are things you don’t know about me.” Like everything else I’d ever said to hurt, it was something I’d heard in a movie somewhere and never in real life.
“Yeah,” she said, “I guess you’re right.” Her voice was flatter, resigned. “So, what happened to your toe?”
“It was dark. I tripped.”
“You’re lucky that’s all that happened. Sweetheart, don’t you know what kind of people we live around? Those rednecks will shoot your ass as soon as look at it. Streaking. My God.”
She made a scoffing sound that skipped into a laugh that gathered momentum and wouldn’t stop. She sat there for a long time laughing with the fingertips of one hand over her mouth. It was a meaner laugh than the one that had ended her story, a laugh that disowned its object.
“You think that’s funny?”
“Of course not, sweetie.” With some effort, she arranged her face into a serious expression. “I’d kill anyone who laid a finger on you. Didn’t you see how distraught I was when I thought someone had? Can’t I have a little laugh after all that?”
I still hadn’t told her about the neighbor, what he’d threatened to do. This was all I had left; it gave a small, sore comfort, like flexing my toe.
“Sweetheart?” She was inviting me into her mirth, but I would not come inside no matter how cold I got. Her laughter slowed, stuttered, and stalled out in an exasperated sigh. “God,” she said, “why did you have to give me a boy?”
Charles Ramsay McCrory is a writer from Mississippi. He holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where he was the 2019-2020 Senior Fellow in Fiction. His work has appeared in Oxford American, Evergreen Review, Mississippi Review, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Chicago.