Oola. Brittany Newell
up quickly at the blank wall of my bedroom, which would be, to my delight, superimposed with red squares. Older now, I found it easy to not blink. There was too much to miss out on.
Thus, the rest of the train ride passed in peace: the Frenchman reading, Oola drifting in and out of sleep, and me knowing just when to look up and witness bits of her (a wrist, her widow’s peak) turn blue.
SHE COULD HAVE STOPPED ME at any time. All she had to do was cry no fair! to call it off, hold up! to halt the game indefinitely.
Sports? I can hear her sneering. Know your audience, Leif.
All you had to do, Oola, I would patiently explain, was say enough.
Enough’s enough, eh? That’s one of those words that sounds weirder the more you say it.
Or just say no.
Ahh, I see. A wry smile. Now we’re talking about a different game.
It’s true that the thought of Oola murmuring no still has a licentious ring to it. I picture her at age fourteen, lip-glossed to hell and back, practicing saying it in the steamed-up bathroom mirror. Hold your horses, mister. No means no. It would take us a while to get to the point when she actually meant it, when all forms of touch merited an apology, when Oola wore long sleeves.
At the outset of the experiment, though, we packed and repacked our belongings with glee. We were on the road. We flaunted our passports, extravagantly mobile in a fast-condensing world. We didn’t even have to decide where to travel to next; an email from my mother so often directed our fate. From Austria we went to Romania, from Romania to Croatia, from Croatia to Dubai, from Dubai to Montreal, from Montreal to Vermont, from Vermont to the Orbitsons’ beach house in Florida, from there to the patiently mildewing cabin in the deep seat of Big Sur. We liked bouncing around, bound to nothing but each other; our digestive schedules quickly synced. We were American children and thus no strangers to false gods. Xanax, college, travel, core strength, hardcore sex … being together was one more monolith to cling to.
As a freshman in college I took a seminar called (De)facing the Face of God. It was faddish then to talk about nostalgia, though I wonder if this is the case for every class of eighteen-year-olds. I made it through four years at one of those preposterous liberal arts colleges where students design their own majors amid marble and maples and fuck frequently to ward off S.A.D. Fresh from the codes and clubs of a Connecticut prep school, I got a bit carried away. I started out strong with Critical Kiwi Studies and dreamed of a life as a poet-cum-shepherd in the wilds of New Zealand; sophomore spring I saw the light and switched to the ever-more-employable Philosophy of Porn. But when my academic adviser asked me to specify my interest—kiddie? kink?—I got cold feet. I settled, at last, on Contemporary Thought and Literature, because I thought it sounded vague enough to accommodate my then obsession with the understudied leitmotif of dessert in modern fiction. Some of my notes still exist from this period:
ice cream (choc) as default signifier of femme shame. originates w/ Sex & City?
mary gaitskill vs. lorrie moore: masters of sad pastry
devil f. cake=neocapitalist undertones?
PUDDING!!!!
As critical thinkers in the loosely grouped humanities department, we were expected, in this seminar, to be militants against nostalgia and its pearly ilk. Like cakes (!) in a bake sale, our memories were unwrapped and arranged on a seminar table, Loss of Virginity and the Moment That I Felt Alive and the Scent of X’s Perfume. Then, like naughty boys, we stomped on them. We squished Mother’s Cooking beneath our faux-leather shoes. “Don’t hold on to these false gods,” the professor coaxed. “Purge!” For some reason, no girls had signed up for this class. We hunkered down and listened to Chad’s tale of the Moment He Knew He Would Die. We analyzed Luke’s fetish for high school locker rooms, “which is weirder than it sounds because, well, I didn’t even play a sport.”
We watched IKEA commercials, spaghetti westerns, footage from Rolling Stones tours. “Lies!” our prof screamed. Mick Jagger’s face fucked the window behind him. “Lovely lies!” The college quad was swallowed by Mick’s lips, or, I should say, the concept of that hallowed pucker. We spent two weeks debunking the Crush, alternately named the Great Romance, Head Cheerleader, and/or the One. “I didn’t know it then,” Dale moaned, “but looking back, I think she was it.” I was floored by our collective lack of originality. Meanwhile, the teacher thumped Dale on the back. “Expunge,” he soothed, “expunge. It’s not Beth you love, it’s the figment of Beth. Clear out your attic. She’s for sale.”
Though we knew her to be fictional, we were all in love with Beth, sweet Beth, with her kneesocks and her scruples regarding pubic hair. Never mind the fact that she was forever fourteen or holding us back with impossible longing. Beneath the analysis, we thought only of her pubic bone, which Dale described as slippery. I pictured a moonstone, which had sat on a shelf in my childhood room (damn nostalgia!). It was a small seminar room and the steamed-up windows had always to be open, even in the height of December.
After class, I lay awake and thought of home, of all the things I’d loved and thus used up. Punk, Tay, Cape Cod in July—the professor’s voice haunted me. Send off those ships! I brushed the memory of cracked crab from my furthermost teeth and silently grieved for my golden retriever. Hadn’t her love been real? When I was young, Bubba had been the only one able to withstand the torque force of my hugs. “Ouch!” my mom—and, later, girls like Beth—would say when we held hands. “You’re cutting off my circulation. Quit it!”
Compared to other people, I always wanted more, more than expected, more than OK. Even as a little boy, I pushed too hard; I broke screen doors. While the other kids sniffled and dozed in the glitzy ruins of a fourth-birthday party, plunging their hands in their pants and unearthing entire pieces of cake with world-weary expressions, I trolled the perimeters, popping every balloon. It was in a fit of passion that I decapitated my teddy bear. Bubba had looked on solemnly.
“Born heartbroken,” the elementary school nurse had sighed. “Official diagnosis.” She was a buxom ex-hippie who taught Pilates to our mothers on Sunday and used us to practice her unpatented alternative therapies, healing our energies when we came in with scraped knees and having us chant boo-boo, boo-boo, until the pain suddenly subsided or we got bored. She cracked our little knuckles and gave us rosemary lozenges. “Empathic stomachaches,” she pronounced. “Poor little looker.” For a while, I loved her. I came up with endless reasons to be sent to her office; at least once a week, I pretended to have lice so that she’d sit behind me and comb my hair with a plastic drink stirrer. All this ended when the school, fearful that my itching was a liability, accused my mother of negligent parenting. She scrubbed my head with molasses-colored shampoo and made me swear not to go to the nurse anymore. “If it itches,” she told me, “keep it to yourself. Teacher doesn’t need to know. Just tell Mommy. No more nurse. Itchy equals ice cream. OK?”
I wagged my lying scalp: OK. She handed over the promised push pop. I ate it alone in my room, knees drawn to my chest. I wept, another pastime. There’d be no more conversations about chakras in a clean beige room for me, the nurse palpating my lymph nodes and using words I couldn’t know. I’d been exiled from her sterile harem of gadgets and chai, just as I’d already been exiled from the library (another sterile harem, with more bodily an odor as I shadowed the spinsters who shelved books for a living) for reading too much and needing fresh air. Forced outside, I stood on the blacktop and gulped down this air, which I found overrated, and still couldn’t seem to fill my lungs up. Even this, I wanted too much of. I’d received yet more proof that I was a vacuum, that that was what it meant to be a little boy: You drained people, like the banana-colored babies I’d seen sucking at the neighbor’s tit as if she were a playground water fountain.
“The babies are hungry,” my mom had said happily. Her adjective choice only horrified me more, and thus began my two-week anorexic spell that Mom will bring up to this day, shushing the table at Thanksgiving to tell