It happened that green and crazy summer when I was thirteen years old. A stolen first line, slightly altered, because I’m not much of a writer, but I have been something of a thief. And a liar. I might as well admit that up front. It was a lie and a theft that made everything go haywire that summer.
I cribbed the line from Carson McCullers’The Member of the Wedding. At the moment when it happened, or at least when it began to happen, that paperback was jammed in the back pocket of my denim cut-offs as I sat on the dirty, carpeted floor of the Swaffham Towne Drug, reading teen magazines. Syrupy tang of blue Slush Puppie on my tongue. Mosquito bites stippling my legs. I want to remember myself as I was then, a girl that is difficult to grasp. What did she look like? My prize article of clothing was a pair of Nike high-tops, kept hospital white with a bottle of foamy polish. Nikes weren’t cheap and I had to make them last. Everything else I wore was off-brand or hand-me-down: my wayward older sister’s Lee dungarees cut into shorts, a Michael Jackson baseball tee from Bradlees discount department store, a trucker hat with Pac-Man on the front clapped over my unruly mess of hair. I wasn’t good at hair, didn’t know what to do with it, how other girls achieved feathered wings and lift. But I had good skin. Everyone said so. ‘You have good skin,’ they’d say, admiring what one woman at the Jordan Marsh cosmetics counter called ‘peaches and cream’. I was a winter, dark haired with light skin that didn’t tan, but only burned and peeled back to paper white. I blushed so intensely, people would laugh and tell me I was bright red, making me blaze with deeper embarrassment. As for my body, it was an unknowable zone, an overlarge assemblage of limb and belly that felt like a thing of its own making, mostly disappointing, incapable of climbing fences or playing baseball, incompetent at dancing, too heavy in its steps. Heaviness had always been with me. When skipping rope in first grade gym class, the teacher scolded me to be light on my feet. By junior high, my mother prayed that I would stop growing: ‘So you don’t turn into a glump like your big aunt Beverly.’ My aunt Shirley, the smaller, told me I walked like a truck driver. I didn’t mean to. That was just the way my body propelled itself through space. My shape, that enigmatic packaging, had its own design and cared nothing about anyone’s objections, including my own. However the message came, the world confirmed what I felt, that my body was off in its most essential calibrat
