I can almost count us—five or seven boys were to make the march. Ah, memory—or research. I think there were five of us. The leader made six. The idea of seven comes to me because the five of us doing the march for the first time, the Tenderfoots, were dwarfs. Two were still physically ten years old although they had turned twelve: they were bright and quick, brainy. No bodily growth dimmed their intellects or powers of vision.
Where did we gather? Someone’s front lawn, I think. I remember we talked about how we were doing more than the statutory distance because of where we started. There were jokes about the humiliation of giving up. We clomped along. I don’t remember the running—the alterations of running with walking: it seems to me some of the younger boys skipped; and we were of such different heights that we couldn’t run with any order; and so we walked slowly for a while, and then faster, then slowly.
One boy had to give up or thought he did: he had a blister; he was one of the smaller boys—proud and temperamental, too. He didn’t receive much sympathy, but he wasn’t mocked, either—we stared at him; I don’t know why we didn’t mock him: either because this was Scouting or because we were well-bred Jews, you know, compassionate. It was one reason or the other. I remember him sitting by the side of the road in the weeds, an apple-cheeked kid small for his age. Do weeds survive pollution? Was he supposed to walk home or hitchhike: an occasional car did pass on this road but very occasionally. Hitchhiking wasn’t considered dangerous in the county: you knew what a safe person looked like and smelled like; if they had the wrong eyes or smell, you said, “No, thank you,” and if they persisted, you screamed. I don’t remember grownups talking much about children being molested—we children spoke of it once in a while: it is strange to remember the essential panic and curiosity we felt day after day as we struggled to grow up.
Anyway, we left one child behind or was it two? Did we assign him a companion? We young ones did not know what was going on, and it would have been pushy, like usurping control of the hike, to figure things out. Our leader had no interest in leadership: he had been made a leader against his will, I think, and he found it dull and had no particular talent for it; he would stare off into the sky or into the branches of trees—this was latish autumn, chilly and damp, a gray day—if you asked him a question. I think he had an older brother he was pretty much dependent on—not that it matters now.
We didn’t know how to walk distances. We discussed how to carry yourself—we put our shoulders back—we rose up on our toes—but none of our particular group was coordinated physically yet, not even our leader; and we progressed clumsily, in haphazard effort, muscular effort; at times, two boys—it was usually by twos—would find a rhythm, find a way of walking, hip joint, spine, ankle, knee, and foot; and they would sail along, sail ahead, ahead even of the leader, who clomped along at the side of the road, sad and dutiful. I had a nail in my shoe—I’ve never been lucky with equipment: I once had a pair of galoshes that leaked. The nail gouged my heel, and it was painful as all hell, but people were always worried about how sensitive I was—how much I noticed, what did I think of them, was I a sissy all in all, did intelligence make a coward of me: that sort of thing—and I was used to concealing pain: in this case I persuaded myself it was preparation for real war, but I hated the pain anyway as unnecessary and part of a fools’ march.
The route was laid out like a rough figure eight, and when we came to where the two loops crossed, we saw some other boys coming down the far road at an angle to us. They were not dwarfs. We knew them, but I don’t recall if they were from our troop or merely from the county somewhere. I think they were richer Jews—maybe merely older, with real legs, real hands. There was a twenty-mile hike, I think, for passing from some upper rank to one still higher; or maybe it was thirty miles.
The greetings echoed among the trees on that empty road. But they were not really good-natured. There was some discussion between our leader and their leader—the other leader was not bored and had on at least three lanyards: the ends were tucked into his pleated pocket, but I would imagine he had a whistle, a pocketknife, and maybe a compass. I suppose the ill nature of the greetings came from mutual suspicion: we were outcasts, prepubic; but the other group was crazed and low with Scouting. One forgets how satiric children are just before puberty, how harsh in judgment; and how strange the ones seem who after puberty are cheerful or enthusiastic and not gloomy and secretive.
The older Scouts were on a rigorous schedule, and yet two of them joined us. The mysteries accumulate and suggest to me the mysteries of that day as I lived it, of being on a road I did not know, doing a faintly foolish thing, among boys I did not know.
Because of my reputation, I was more or less suffered to ask more questions than most younger children were allowed to ask, but I was not in a mood to use my privilege: I was being one of the bunch. The
new boys were quite old and glamorous; one was skinny: in the end I did gravitate to the older boys and to the leader—I felt older than my age, and I was nosy, I believe. One of the newcomers noticed I was limping and I told him about the nail, but he didn’t believe me. An entire lifetime of people saying
I don’t believe you
suddenly weighs on me. Sighing, I sat down on a stone alongside the road and took off my shoe and showed him the blood on my sock; and then I took off my sock and showed him the wound. There was talk of tetanus from the nail, but one of the dwarfs said his father was a doctor and the nail would have had to have been exposed to manure to be dangerous. I had been told swearing was lip filth, but I did it anyway. I said, “Well, I didn’t shit in my shoe, so I’m probably all right.” This was considered pretty charming and was looked on as revealing a real sense of humor—life was simpler then—and it made the leader like me and the two older boys and some of the dwarfs: I had magically become a nondwarf in the course of the hike, a big shot. Liking led to talk of sex: the boys were walking more or less in a circle around me—some of them walked backward—and told me about fucking. I had heard before, frequently, but I was one of the more latent boys: it had never really penetrated, but now it did; I was disbelieving. “My parents wouldn’t do that,” I said. They had to in order to have children, I was told. “Not my parents,” I said, and then thought about my parents: “Well, they might do it in a closet,” I said. One of the older boys said, “Don’t you masturbate?” I did but wasn’t sure how that related to sex, to fucking; the explanations I was offered were unclear to me. An older boy said, “Didn’t you ever fool around with another boy?”
“What do you mean? We’re fooling around now.”
“It’s called homosexuality,” one of the younger boys said, “and it’s a phase.”
“It’s all right until you’re about sixteen, and then it has to be girls.”
“How come?” I said.
“Let’s go in the woods and look at each other’s pricks,” one of the younger boys said—one of the boys with no prick.
There was a sudden flurry of talk: did we have the time, and one boy had promised his parents he would never do anything dirty; and then we all went into the woods, the two newcomers, the older boys, leading the way.
We crashed clumsily among twigs and bushes until we came to a clearing, a mud-floored glade. The older boys and some of the younger
ones immediately took up positions showing experience—from summer camp or wherever—in a circle.
But there were two kinds of circle: clumped close together, the units, I mean, and more spread out. Somehow without voting we settled on a spread-out circle or oval—we were about an arm’s length from each other. I believe one of the older boys counted and then we all unbuttoned; and some boys revealed themselves at once; but some didn’t; and the older boy counted again, and at the count of three we all displayed ourselves.
It was very quiet. I thought it was all very interesting, but I was a little blank-headed, almost sleepy: I wasn’t sure why it was so interesting: but it was clear from the silence, the way the boys breathed and stood, from the whole atmosphere, that this was more interesting than the hike itself, this curious introduction to genital destiny.
Then it was decided we should all try to come—I think how it went was someone asked if I could come, and I wasn’t sure—I wasn’t sure what he meant: I really had an enormous gift for latency.
Some boys didn’t know how to masturbate and were shown the gesture. But before we began, there was a ceremony of touching each other’s pricks. No one in that glade was fully developed. The absence of cruelty became silently, by implication, an odd sort of stilled and limited tenderness.
Then the circle was re-formed—in the silent glade—and we all began to pull rhythmically: perhaps it was like rubbing at Aladdin’s lamp; perhaps we are at the threshold of the reign of magic and death. The glade was shadowy and smelled vinegary—it also smelled of earth. A few boys came—a drop or two. We cleaned ourselves with leaves and with a Kleenex one boy divvied up.
The leader looked at his watch and said we were ten minutes behind schedule.
S
O THEN
we hurried—we left the woods and went on with the hike.
There is no time for the rest of what I want to tell about the Boy Scouts.
M
OMMA
occasionally displayed me naked to visitors. My sister, Nonie, often offers me to girls who will play with her—they can play with me, play house.
They can dress and undress me. The other girl may become sentimental, impassioned and busy, speechless. I may touch her hair, rub my cheek against hers, kiss her, even on the mouth.
It is maddening to be liked, to feel things—a thick, suffocating blanket that teases me and makes me fall on it, and roll, flattening it—a comforter—and seeing it rise, seeing it fluff up again.
I might strut, my belly out: I like to have my belly kissed—patted; I might throw myself onto the girl’s lap, or into her arms, wriggle, then jump away, run off, hide; I may lurk in a hiding place: I will jump out, having become what the grownups call “wild.”
Nonie and I go out into the wind. Giant paddle wheels of wind, atop the ridge, huge, skeletal vanes, turn; and as they do, lift and flutter everything.
I am coated and trousered, suspendered, snapped and zipped, buttoned up, hatted, mittened, choked in thick, warm, puffy masses of insulation.
I am artificially pudgy—imprisoned.
I manage to get my hat off: my scalp crinkles: my whitish hair whips and snaps: my nose stings in the icily gliding and flapping air.
While I do this—remove my hat with my mittened hands—I drag my
feet: Nonie says, “You walk just like a baby—oh, you don’t know how to walk right—you’re so dumb.…”
My big wind-invaded-now jacket. Sun and wind tease my eyes. I squint. I turn my head this way and that—see things—jerkily—disconnectedly—passages, corridors of the day.
Our side porch is built on brick piers hidden by evergreens. Nonie has to pull and hold back branches of the yews for me: she knees me forward, pushes me with the side of her lower leg, toward a break in a trellis made of green laths (nailed on the diagonal). The laths that are broken end in naked wood, unpainted, splintery, shrill like the flames of kitchen matches. Most pains are at least in part like being burned by fire. I am into the windlessness of here-under-the-house.
The house stretches above me wood-walled, monstrous, apparently tilted, echoing.
It is almost hot under here (for me in my heavy clothes, bareheaded, squatting: very little heat comes from the house: it must be the airless-ness, the motionlessness of the air here).
Nonie, partially visible through the lopsided graph of the trellis, is huge: her head is invisible. The light is horizontal, weak where I am—is stronger on her. She stoops. The watery inner light laps at her knees, her hand that reaches inside to hold on to a pier: bent over, she enters.
On the ground is an inordinately fine blowy dust—blowy if you breathe on it; a dustlike dirt it is, undisturbed by wind: it is frailer and dryer and nastier than any other dust I’ve ever seen. It covers yellow-brown ugly dirt, nasty under-the-house dirt.
A plaid automobile rug, old and smelly, is under here with us; and a dented kettle lies tilted in a small hollow. There is a spoon, a mop handle, a dirtied doll, a hole: around its neck, in fissures, dust drooped, occasionally whispered, slid, and fell.
The comparative lightlessness, silence, secrecy, and morguishness suggest very loudly
IT’S-TIME-TO-PLAY-NOW.
When we played in her room, she would end the game by announcing, “You’ve been bad—I have to spank you.”
She would turn me over.
My bared bottom would seem to develop vision, to look up in a way at the air and at Nonie’s uplifted hand with the doll in it that she intended to hit me with. It seemed her hand, in turn, was an eye looking at me.
If the blow was soft, then all right: Nonie would fasten me up again: time would continue. She might try to do schoolwork and she’d fall asleep—let me say it this way: one day she climbed up on her bed, sat on it cross-legged, opened her schoolbooks, and fell asleep, sitting up: she snored very faintly, a young girl’s snore: I tiptoed back to my own room.
But if when the doll hit me, it was as if I had a covering of dust, smartly disordered and scattered—but each particle glowed and had in it a bit of feeling which I felt; or if it was as if I was like a piano, strummed, jangled, chopped at—unsuspected elements in me would race and twang, I would be filled with sounds—and all this then resolved itself into an ache, a stone or a wall, with no face drawn on it, a sheer obduracy, then I was caught up in an unendurable storm of
nonsense:
much of the world was unreadable, was nonsense, newsprint, foliage, an adult running in a hallway—I heard noises, saw blurs: I did not know it was an adult, I did not realize anyone, or anything, was
running.
The linear, the comprehensible, was tender—was meant for
a child.
One was very shy about
nonsense
—at least, I was. Nonsense was
another world.
Small, stinging pain was beyond sense:
Nonie hurt me:
incomprehension, adrenaline, and pain flowed together, side by side; or rather formed, materialized at once, in the vial, the singular unity of a child’s body. There were not too many substantial choices, automatic or conscious ones, but the repertoire grew as I did, as days passed, leaving a residue of captions, guesses, that the nights, and night dreams, played with—the nights were full of study. On one occasion, in Nonie’s room, the child’s face twists, he prepares to howl—“Don’t be silly: we were only playing,” she said, and she hugged me.