Read Online The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets by Kathleen Alcott - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Kathleen Alcott
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tested, and it seemed for a minute that James would believe it, before he drank in the particular pink of our cheeks and guilt in our eyes and catch in our breaths. Before he got to the “o” of Mom, Jackson’s hand was over his mouth and he’d wrestled his little brother to the floor, made him promise not to tell. James was crying, and it occurred to me later it was not for the threat or the physical force, but because he had just witnessed something private, that he wasn’t a part of: he felt, for maybe the first time in his life, alone. Like tourists tracing their fingers over the maps of the underground trains, wondering at how vehicles of the same origin so quickly split into branching.
We did not continue our experiments, nor did we mention them. But in the bath, beneath the bubbles, I touched myself and tried in vain not to feel my fingers, tried to understand why it was so different when someone else did it. I rubbed my crotch back and forth on the monkey bars at the park down the street, and though the metal was foreign, it was not the same as someone else’s flesh.
(When I brought it up years later, Jackson denied its truth, looked at me the way people might look at an academic who has written a lengthy book on a subject so pigeonholed, so inaccessible, that the time and researchinvolved seem at once pathetic and awe-inspiring in how unfathomable the reality. A memory so fierce as mine leaves one lonely.)
When my father caught me masturbating under the dinner table, he was gentle: he explained that it was perfectly normal but meant for private settings. When I grew up, it would be something very special to share with someone else. Nonetheless, my face grew red and I cried from shame. Later in my bedroom, I rubbed myself hard and wished determinedly for the time when someone else would be present for this warmth, this friction. And I knew, even then, whom that someone would be.
The secret, shameful feeling about sex that I’ve grown to have, which it’s now clear Jackson long suffered, grows as I go farther back in eidetic memory, deeper in roots. It’s been a part of my life longer than it seems it should have, which did not occur to me as good or bad until the latter lit up in bright lights—the type that shine through symbolical windows and keep one from sleeping.
O ur childhood was a love affair like any other. Were I to choose my details wisely, I could submit them in present tense to a romantic advice column. We went through ups and downs, lapses in communication, periods of feverish adoration, epochs of lasting alienation. During the week he was gone one summer, I hung my quite long hair over the edge of the stone wall on our porch as if in protest, awaiting his return. Surely the act was in some ways Rapunzel-inspired but also a demonstration of the similarities between human relationships and the skin that hangs around our faces though long dead. Because yet they are dead or at best dying, strands of hair are worshipped and brushed and in some idyllic cases gathered in blue or yellow ribbons. Long hair is at best respected and at worst wondered at in the way old, strange things are: it is proof. It is history. And in the time of children, which is punctuated oddly and cataloged eccentrically, a week without Jackson was no less than a crater. What needs not be said,of course, is that the longer hair gets, the harder it is to brush.
Seen through another lens, the image of a little girl, craning her neck and spilling her hair toward her father’s meager garden a few feet below, declaring that she misses her best friend, a little boy from down the street she’s grown up with, is sweet. People like to be reminded of the child’s pure compassion. It’s this fierce, often pathetic mourning of love so innocent, which for good reason cannot exist in adulthood, that drives people to buy those posters of two six-year-olds pursing their lips on a beach about to kiss, or sharing the sound of the
We did not continue our experiments, nor did we mention them. But in the bath, beneath the bubbles, I touched myself and tried in vain not to feel my fingers, tried to understand why it was so different when someone else did it. I rubbed my crotch back and forth on the monkey bars at the park down the street, and though the metal was foreign, it was not the same as someone else’s flesh.
(When I brought it up years later, Jackson denied its truth, looked at me the way people might look at an academic who has written a lengthy book on a subject so pigeonholed, so inaccessible, that the time and researchinvolved seem at once pathetic and awe-inspiring in how unfathomable the reality. A memory so fierce as mine leaves one lonely.)
When my father caught me masturbating under the dinner table, he was gentle: he explained that it was perfectly normal but meant for private settings. When I grew up, it would be something very special to share with someone else. Nonetheless, my face grew red and I cried from shame. Later in my bedroom, I rubbed myself hard and wished determinedly for the time when someone else would be present for this warmth, this friction. And I knew, even then, whom that someone would be.
The secret, shameful feeling about sex that I’ve grown to have, which it’s now clear Jackson long suffered, grows as I go farther back in eidetic memory, deeper in roots. It’s been a part of my life longer than it seems it should have, which did not occur to me as good or bad until the latter lit up in bright lights—the type that shine through symbolical windows and keep one from sleeping.
O ur childhood was a love affair like any other. Were I to choose my details wisely, I could submit them in present tense to a romantic advice column. We went through ups and downs, lapses in communication, periods of feverish adoration, epochs of lasting alienation. During the week he was gone one summer, I hung my quite long hair over the edge of the stone wall on our porch as if in protest, awaiting his return. Surely the act was in some ways Rapunzel-inspired but also a demonstration of the similarities between human relationships and the skin that hangs around our faces though long dead. Because yet they are dead or at best dying, strands of hair are worshipped and brushed and in some idyllic cases gathered in blue or yellow ribbons. Long hair is at best respected and at worst wondered at in the way old, strange things are: it is proof. It is history. And in the time of children, which is punctuated oddly and cataloged eccentrically, a week without Jackson was no less than a crater. What needs not be said,of course, is that the longer hair gets, the harder it is to brush.
Seen through another lens, the image of a little girl, craning her neck and spilling her hair toward her father’s meager garden a few feet below, declaring that she misses her best friend, a little boy from down the street she’s grown up with, is sweet. People like to be reminded of the child’s pure compassion. It’s this fierce, often pathetic mourning of love so innocent, which for good reason cannot exist in adulthood, that drives people to buy those posters of two six-year-olds pursing their lips on a beach about to kiss, or sharing the sound of the
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