A Brief History of Male Nudes in America (4 page)

I know long and lonely. I also know joy and comfort and being wanted. My life has taken a wandering path, and maybe I'm smarter because of this. Jean, my mother, thinks we're smarter for having moved to California almost ten years ago, though the day we packed the U-Haul van and left our unfinished basement home in Holton, Kansas, was a hard day, a day with a lot of crying and swearing and promises. I was sixteen then and our leaving for California seemed like a long, interesting part of a movie to me, but my nine-year-old sister Katie was downright scared.

I remember how Jean tried to turn it all into a joke, saying the only way to stop living underground was to move west. “Want to stay in a tomb for the rest of your lives?” she asked us as she carried out a box of Christmas decorations, tinsel and angel hair spilling behind her in a luminescent trail. For twelve years we had lived in the basement of a house whose upper stories, season after season, just never got built. Jean became sick of the dark, dank two-bedroom cigar box, of our sweaters always smelling like pee, and finally she grew tired of Eldon Hyde—a good-enough-looking husband but a poor architect, an idle carpenter, and, worst, a dreamless dreamer. Consequently, Jean drove the U-Haul west, I read the map, and Katie sullenly lost herself in the new Etch-a-Sketch Jean had bribed her with.

In its way, California was good for us. The long, slow, rocky coastline set us free. Soon after we arrived Jean took Katie and me to
Balboa Park and sat us down on a concrete bench in a garden steeped with bird of paradise and zinnias, where the colors rushed in high frequency and the air was glass, and she said, “We're three women now. Comprende vous?”

“We comprende,” Katie and I told her, and from then on Jean was Jean to us.

Ten years later, like faithful traveling companions, like people who do not lose each other even after the road, the three of us returned together to the Midwest for the Hillcock reunion. It was June. It was right after Katie completely stopped eating. We came in on a smooth flight, Jean and I tipping a few bourbons, Katie drinking mineral water from a tall plastic container she pulled out of her carry-on tote. Katie had the window seat because, as she put it, she wanted her money's worth.

Katie was worried about money, though that was only indirectly the issue in her life. After two years of studying to become an X-ray technician, she had flunked the test for her certification. “Flat out flunked it,” she had said.

“So what? You can take the test again in two months,” I told her.

“Look,” she said, framed by the bay window in Jean's pink and black ceramic kitchen. “If I don't know the bones yet, if my best X-rays are more like vacation snapshots, then it's over and I'm screwed. Trust me.”

“Come on,” I said, “you were scared. You blanked. You were temporarily insane the day of the test.” But I could see that Katie had already cast those two years into a dismal, untalked-about void that she called her past.

Toward the end of the flight into K.C. International we looked out the cramped porthole, over the wing, and down onto the endless farmland spread like a squared and colorful quilt, as strong in its way as the brown, slave-driven Rockies had been from the air an hour earlier. It's probably true that one place is no better than another. Whatever your location, your heart either pounds with tenderness
and love or it fails you. And yet, as I flew over the plains and down into the big, broken wheel of Kansas City I felt better, stronger. I don't know if there are currents in the earth or if some mountains hold power or if certain places pulse with an unknowable energy, but when I finished my third bourbon and unbuckled my seat belt, I felt I was really home.

The last three miles to the Hillcock reunion are on gravel road, and so my relatives slow down just a little, the flying gravel making its own song, dust layering the air brown and then pink. They know the road by heart: the sunlit curves and the soft, sloping shoulders and the old bridges that can spell trouble on a dark-enough night. Fall and winter, this road intimidates, but in summer it falls to its dusty knees, no more than a worn cowpath.

My aunts and uncles and cousins, my half relatives and step-cousins arrive, honking their horns, looking for shade or a level place to park. They drive rusted-out pickups, little dusty Toyotas, one-ton Silverados, and Buick Electras. There's a snub-nosed Ford Falcon next to the mailbox, and some dark-haired kid drives a burnt-out blue Triumph right up to the front porch. “Who is he?” Katie asks me, but I have no idea. He's tall like the Hillcocks, dark-skinned like the Schirmeisters, yet the face has the blonde, softly bearded look of someone outside of memory.

There are at least a handful of people at the reunion whom Katie and I cannot identify. Jean has eight brothers and sisters, all of them here, and they have in turn brought their children and their children's children until the family becomes one of those unruly word problems from math class: how many people does it take to fill a yard starting with one man and one woman who multiply, spring and winter, good times and bad, hit-or-miss, right up into a June morning?

I feel sure that the Hillcocks are a family who, in dire times, could continue to grow on only bread and water and radiant heat. They are
not giants. They have worries and fears, sickness and grim crack-ups. Something burns in them, though, low and steady, something that most of them are not even aware of.

My Uncle Samuel, for instance, simply cannot explain how he freed himself from the iron trap of an overturned cultivator. Caught in mud at the end of a row of beets, the big John Deere flipped and pinned him. He says his hands just kept digging for a way out, that he had no strength and that his life was not particularly a tender masterpiece worth saving to him at that moment, but his hands had a will of their own. With a crushed knee and a foot as useless as a flopping trout, he dragged himself halfway to the road, and the last thing he remembered seeing was the big, lilac, blockbuster sky.

On the day of the reunion Katie is already so far gone that the sky means nothing to her. In cutoffs and a denim workshirt, she has taken herself past pretty into the delicate realm of an outline. Food is a quick, efficient link to her life that Katie has cut. Her long, blonde hair lies passively over one shoulder. She moves from cousin to cousin, smiling and wide-eyed, loosening the hold this jagged, green world has on her. Not once have Katie and I actually spoken about what she is doing, and perhaps it is not so much a plan that she has as a place into which she is gradually slipping. The failed test—and I truly believe this—is not the issue for Katie. There is something deeper—a black thread; a twisted, luckless ray of light—that she sees running the length of her life.

“Katie,” I have said a million times before, trying to ease the something blue and indistinct in her. “Look out the window,” “Bite down hard,” “Breathe deeply,” “Make a fist,” “Color the leaves any goddamn color.”

Her response has always been a tired, dreamy look that, if it were not for her lack of acting ability, would represent a cool, haunting Greta Garbo.

Katie is under the big yellow and white canopy that has been borrowed from the Everest United Methodist Church and set up as the shady center of the reunion. She carries her bottle of mineral water—this
in distinct contrast to the ice-cold cans and bottles my relatives carry: Orange Crush, Coke, Budweiser, Coors. The drinking starts at 9 A.M. and proceeds happily, unselfconsciously throughout the day. Twice someone goes into town for more ice. My cousin Bee fills two baby bottles with Coke, then gives them to her eight-month-old twins who sit in their matching high chairs where they are quiet mirror images of themselves. Her twins, six-pound Halloween baby boys, are children numbers six and seven for Bee, who still manages to pour herself into a pair of faded Levis, though there are those of us who wish she wouldn't. To describe Bee as pear-shaped is to misrepresent the pear. Bee's hips spread like hefty parentheses over the sides of the fold-out chairs which have also been borrowed from the Methodists and placed at random under the canopy.

From a moderate distance—say, from the front porch or by the oak tree—it looks as if there is a small, miraculous circus in the yard and my relatives are the awkward knife-throwers and the left-handed magicians. Torn from use, having been folded too many times in the hands of the Ladies Bible Auxiliary, the big top canopy shivers slightly in the breeze like a threadbare tragedy waiting to happen on aluminum poles.

I walk and talk and drink like the best of them, though I cannot say that I really know my relatives. Mostly, we are in a gravitational field where we are pulled together by the idea of a shared name. I suppose there are lesser ideas that have held together poorer people. Day floats overhead, and the wet, penny-colored earth empties itself at our feet—we are that incredibly lucky. Jean says that luck has nothing to do with our lives. “It's guts,” she would say, “and stamina and using your good, old noggin,” and she would tap her head repeatedly to make her point. But when I think back to the days just before we moved from Kansas I do not particularly see Jean as an example of logic and decorum. I can see her standing in the rototillered yard that my father, Eldon, had decided to make into garden, and with a sweep of her hand she said he could have it all: the blue-black sky and the house that could never get itself up to where a house should be. Jean
yelled that all she ever wanted were some windows and a back door that didn't open into a face full of sod.

The basement bedroom where Katie and I slept had begun to show signs of seepage. In the corners and along the floor a coppery water gathered mysteriously. Eldon was in our room every other day with a tube of caulking. That's how I remember my father: blonde, silent, his pockets bulging with putty knives and nails and the tools of what, for him, was a dying art.

I think that even as we loaded the U-Haul Eldon didn't believe we would go. He made one last-ditch effort to keep us. He brought in a load of lumber—some pretty white pine—and stacked it seductively out by the driveway, but we all knew, deep in our hearts, that the wood was destined to warp and turn gray in the seasons when Eldon could not find the right words or locate his good hammer.

The Kansas sky is a lavender wave that extends from your outstretched right hand across countless miles eastward toward the muddy Missouri—the only American river I can never remember being mentioned in a song. It is not necessarily a kind sky. I have seen the brooding tails of tornadoes slip down from the clouds and rip northerly through Sedgwick and Lyon and Shawnee counties. I have watched Perry Reservoir shrink and harden into a wasp nest when the sky glazed over in late summer. But a sky like this at least tends to remind you who you are.

On that June day we are the painstaking makers of a party where ice quickly becomes the most valuable commodity. Four styrofoam ice chests and three cooling watermelons make their demands. Then, too, the kids have organized a touch-and-go ice war which lasts until Serina, a six-year-old beauty belonging to one of my cousins, takes a cold, hard hit on the cheekbone. Serina cries and swears she's going to die, but her mother holds her and tells her that it's not that easy.

Sitting under the canopy, dressed in the blue workshirt that bares
the pale
T
of her throat and upper chest, Katie, I think, would agree—she is taking the long, hard way out. Her shoulders, somewhere beneath that oversized shirt, have lately assumed the resemblance of handlebars.

“Close your eyes,” I have told her a hundred, a thousand times before. “Let it go,” “Make a wish,” “Turn up the radio,” but my advice has only been helpless, broad strokes.

I don't know what burdens we carry, why some of us are stranded on high ground and others simply washed away. I have looked for the answers, though, and I have spared no expense. For almost two years I paid Rhea Blanco, an overpriced therapist in La Jolla, to uncover what she said were my layers of blocking and denial. She sat me down in a leather chair and had me look at driftwood. I told her that I had been in and out of six serious relationships in the past three years, some of them occurring at the same time, and before that, there was a whole string of men and boys whom I validly cared for but could not, inevitably, stay with. Among other things, Rhea told me that I hated my father and that was why I could not be content with any man.