The Youth & Young Loves of Oliver Wade: Stories (8 page)

Lifting weights was a good excuse to be alone, and before
long I had something to show for it. I put on muscle easily, and the ticks I’d
always had with things like numbers and lines lent themselves well to lifting.
Every quarter inch my chest grew felt like a fuck-you to Boyd and to anyone
else who would call me a fag.

At night after leaving the bench I would crawl up the stairs
to my bedroom and go online (my parents had finally installed my own line). I
would look at porn, I would go in anonymous
chatrooms
and talk to anonymous men. I would watch my buddy list, too. I had long since
unblocked Boyd, but since his name never appeared on my list I knew he hadn’t
unblocked me.

***

Senior year brought a new blankness and a deep
friendlessness. Then in late November, one year or a million years after he
told me he was in love, Boyd’s name reappeared on my buddy list. Boydyboy—I’d
forgotten what it looked like, doubted sometimes it had ever been real. I
watched the name but didn’t message him, and after a few minutes it went away.

For three nights that same thing happened. I didn’t know if
it was a signal. We hadn’t spoken in school all year. After some timid and
unsuccessful attempts to rekindle things with Itchy Chin Mike (now prom king),
I had fallen in with the stoners, at least during lunch when I needed a table
to sit at. The rest of the time I imagined my muscles were much bigger than
they were and I hulked silently down the halls, keeping to myself. Boyd and I
barely even looked at each other. Now this. On the fourth night of it I clicked
his name.

OwOw0:
hi
boyd
.

Boydyboy:
hello Ollie.

OwOw0:
how’s it going...?

Boydyboy:
up to my
fuckin
eyeballs in
college essays.

OwOw0:
already??

Boydyboy:
I’m trying for early admission

OwOw0:
oh, cool. what colleges are you looking at?

Boydyboy:
something far from
fuckin
Lee
is my main priority.

OwOw0:
I haven’t even really thought about colleges yet. I’ll
probably go to UMASS I guess if they’ll take me.

Boydyboy:
that’s way too close.

OwOw0:
I guess. or maybe someplace in Boston. Northeastern or
Shuster.

Boydyboy:
still too close. I have this high suspicion that my
future is going to really suck and the only way
i
can
hold that off is to get the fuck out of here.

OwOw0:
why do you think it’s going to suck?

Boydyboy:
if the past is any indication.........

I could push him to say more, or I could leave it alone.
Maybe I had learned to leave things alone.

OwOw0:
so where are you applying?

Boydyboy:
Oregon state, a couple places in CA.

OwOw0:
wow you weren’t kidding about going far.

Boydyboy:
nope.

For a long time we said nothing more and I sat watching
the cursor blink on my screen. I was sure nothing was going to come of this
chat but for whatever reason I was reluctant to let it end. Maybe if I kept it
going pure momentum would lead us to some kind of conclusion.

OwOw0:
what are the application essays to these places like?

Boydyboy:
the worst. I’m facing some serious bullshit.

OwOw0:
what’s an example question

Boydyboy:
hold on.

OwOw0:
Sure

Boydyboy:
I got one. here: “Tell us about a time when you
encountered someone who helped you discover yourself and your place in the
human community.’

OwOw0:
Yikes. Deepness follows.

Boydyboy:
I know right.

OwOw0:
so basically someone who helped you to know yourself more
clearly than you did before?

Boydyboy:
basically yea.

OwOw0:
Who is your someone?

Boydyboy:
I don’t have one yet. :-(

OwOw0:
do you want to know who mine would be if
i
was writing it?

Boydyboy:
shall
i
guess? ha

OwOw0:
you don’t need to guess. it would be you Boyd.......

So was Boyd Wren ever in love with me? I still have no
idea. When I bring all my experience to the question, I think he probably was.
And that makes me angry. Having the world fuck you out of your first love is a
hard thing to bear. By rights Boyd should’ve been my first kiss. He should’ve
been the first person I touched without clothes. Most of all I should’ve been
able to look into his blue eyes knowing he felt the same. In a different, more
perfect world I would’ve had those things.

Boydyboy:
OK.
i
don’t see why it would be
me but ok.

OwOw0:
you don’t? sometimes
i
wonder if
i’m
completely insane or if
i’ve
ever known you at all.

Boydyboy:
we’ve known each
ohter
since
preschool Ollie.

OwOw0:
that’s true. I’m sorry for things going so bad between us
after all that time.

Boydyboy:
well that’s just another brick in the wall now isn’t it
Oliver.

OwOw0:
everybody hurts. that’s what
michael
stipe says and it’s true.

Boydyboy:
still with the stipe.
somethings
never change.
i
need to log off now,
i’m
expecting a call.

OwOw0:
yeah. good luck finding your someone.

Boydyboy:
you too.

But like I said, I have no idea. Everything I believe
about it now is filtered through my own unreliable memories of hastily typed
words read off a blurry laptop screen when I was going on seventeen. Maybe it
was all in my head. Maybe he’s married to a woman now, a woman who had once
been the girl he was talking about when I believed he was talking about me.

Maybe, but still—I have what I had. I had the tingles,
I had the desperation, the butterflies, the lust, the happiness. I had the
fuck-up, I had the miscommunication, I had the fallout, and I had the broken
heart. That’s what first love looks like for almost everyone, right? No, I
never kissed him; no, we never connected that way. But it’s hard to deny that
these were all the moments of love, and there were a lot of them. Love is a
perpetual discovery, and for part of it you’re discovering that it’s coming to
an end.

***

After his name disappeared from my buddy list that last
time, I signed off. “Goodbye!” I wound up the cord and shut down the computer.
In bed I let my mind wander.

It wandered to Boyd and me, back when the ampersand was at
its most heart-shaped. We were in physics class, a few weeks into junior year,
outdoors on the football field, sitting on a modified seesaw attached to a
motorized turntable Mr. Gruber was using to demonstrate centrifugal force. I
was on one end of the spinning plank, Boyd was on the other; we’d been paired
because we had similar mass. While we spun, everything was a blur of nonsense
and confusion—classmates’
onlooking
faces like
some kind of abstract painting; the school, bleachers, trees just smudges that
didn’t seem to fully exist. It looked like my life, a confused mess. But across
from me, almost within reach, was Boyd, crystal clear, laughing, the only thing
that made sense in the spinning.

But it couldn’t stay that way; it was simple physics. When
the force got too strong we both tumbled backward off the plank and went
careening in opposite directions onto the grass.

OwOw0:
I felt pretty
nauseaus
after that
spinning thing today..... Still do...... *blows chunks*

Boydyboy:
yeah that was so nauseating... but fun though!

OwOw0:
Yeah, it was fun.

Boydyboy:
do you want to do it again
monday
??

OwOw0:
Hahaha
. I don’t know if
i
can!

Boydyboy:
you have to.
i
want to do it
and
i’ll
only do it with you Ollie
bolly
bo
bolly
.

OwOw0:
Fine, then yes.

Boydyboy:
:-)

OwOw0:
If I can handle it first period.

Boydyboy:
Baby :-)

OwOw0:
hey my mom needs to use the phone. Will you still be online
later? I can’t promise
itll
be soon with all these
fucking disconnects

Boydyboy:
If you’re here
i’ll
be on.

OwOw0:
Cool.

(Age
18)

THE WEIGHT LIFTER

Knuckles
knocked the hollow door as my father’s thin shadow
slid
across my bedroom wall. I was hidden b
ut
not hiding, not
exactly
. I was lying on the floor be
side
my
bed, on my stomach like a kid, writing—re-writing,
re-re-writing—the speech I hoped would make me a man. It was afternoon,
August, the day before college.

“Ollie,” I
heard him say, “I was thinking—” He stopped when he didn’t see me in the
room.

I pushed pen,
paper, clipboard into the newly empty space under my bed and raised one hand
over the mattress to signal my presence.

“Oh,” he said,
coming closer and peering across the mattress at me, “I— What are you
doing?”

“Pushups,” I
said, doing two and counting “Seventy-four, seventy-five” before standing up
and shaking out my arms. And from this I knew of course I’d been hiding.

“Good warm-up,”
he said. “Lots of stuff to move in the morning.”

He meant the
boxes, the duffel bags, the big Tupperware containers bulging so much I had to
shut them with duct-tape. I knew
it was too much; I knew my dorm room would strain to contain it all, and I had
no intention of bringing most of it wi
th me
. It’s just that once I started packing I couldn’t stop. Everything I
packed and stacked seemed like the counter-weight I needed to lever myself into
a new
life
. The final
weight was under the bed, a sheet of lined paper covered in ink that weighed
ten million pounds. Reading the words to my parents tomorrow would be another billion.
But I couldn’t really
start fresh
until
they
knew,
until I knew I was strong enough to tell them.

“I was
thinking,” my father said, rubbing his finger
along the dusty part of a
now-
empty bookshelf, “that we
could do a little fishing this afternoon. Since tomorrow you’re heading off.
Just the two of us.”

“I guess?” I
said. I reached to align a Tupperware crate a little straighter atop its bottom
neighbor. “I kind of have a lot to do still, though.”

He frowned,
just slightly, and
wiped
his dusty hand on his pants. “It’s an invitation you can’t refuse, Oliver. Put
on some shoes. Then help me with the boat.”

I watched him
leave the room, and when he was gone I knelt and pulled my speech out from
under the bed. The time for hiding it seemed past, the time for delivering it
not quite here, so I folded the pages into a square and put them in my pocket.

My dad’s
back was shit, and when he said
Help me
with the boat
, what he really meant was
Put
the boat in the pickup while I stand around holding the end
. When I was
younger, smaller, it meant powerlifting the front end of
the
flat-bottomed rowboat up to the edge
of the pickup truck’s bed, jiggering it enough so my dad could
push
it forward and in. But after spending
all of senior year on the weight bench in our basement, I hopped up into the
bed, reached down and heaved the boat up with one hand, easy. At the other end
my dad tripped forward as I pulled the boat away from him faster than he was
expecting. Inside of it poles and tackle-box rattled against
its
green plastic floor. I spread an
oil-stained blanket across the end so it wouldn’t scratch up the cab. Then I
put a hand on the side of the truck, swung my legs over, and landed smooth in
the gravel of our driveway.

“Well look at
you,” my dad said, putting in the oars. I cam
e around and lifted his end
of the boat with one hand so he could close the tailgate underneath it.
I could tell he wasn’t sure
if
I was showing off or was just enjoying
being strong.

We rode to
the lake mostly without talking; the radio played
at a volume that
excused our silence and
the
fishing equipment clattered in the boat behind us. I was busy thinking about
the speech in my pocket and was eager to get
home and re-write
it again. That morning when I was
cleaning out my closet I had found the handwritten name-tag of
a
boy I’d been obsessed with in middle
school, plucked from the trash and s
aved
all these years as a secret keepsake. I
’d decided I needed to
include him in my speech. It felt important
to me that my parents know how far back this went, that this was not recent,
that I had carried this.

“Your mother’s
going to be a basketcase starting tomorrow, you know,” my dad said with a laugh
as we turned into the lake parking lot. The tires crunched across the sand. “We
should’ve had another kid to replace you.” He paused. “She’s going to want a
puppy.”

“I’ll only be
like an hour away,” I said. UMass was not far from Lee.

“Distance is
different for mothers, though,” he replied. “It’s like dog years. There are
mother miles.” He smirked; he liked this. “Mother miles,” he said again,
pleased, and he turned off the truck.

Together w
e
carried the boat down the concrete slip and set it on the still, honey-colored
water. When I
was stepping
aboard he snapped his fingers and said, “Oars!
We c
an’t go far without oars.”

Holding the
boat in place with my foot, I turned and watched him walk back up the slip
toward the truck. He was rubbing his spine with one hand, the place just above
his butt where he’d had
back
surgery
last year. I wondered if he’d tweaked something getting the boat down.

“Dad, hold on,”
I called, tugging the boat back onto the concrete enough to keep it from
floating away and then jogging up the slip. I found him trying to shut the tailgate
with his knee while balancing the heavy oars across his shoulder. I took them
from him, then put my palm on the underside of the tailgate and lifted as he
was lifting
. I don’t think he noticed
.

Water lapped
the flat front of the boat while I rowed. I always rowed;
rowing
ha
d
always been my
job
.
I rowed fast in the general direction of his pointing, and soon my shining
biceps were strain
ing
my
t-shirt sleeves. I hoped he was noticing. I liked my muscles; they made me feel
good, secure, someone to be reckoned with no matter who I was.

The lake was quiet. There was no one else here as far as I
could see, only us and the water striders that skittered across the surface on
needle-thin legs. When I was younger we often had to share the lake with lots
of other boaters, but over the years many had stopped coming. The lake had
grown weedy and too full of the types of fish nobody wanted to catch. We hadn’t
been here in a long time either. I wondered why he had wanted to come.

My dad casted
here and there; he never seemed to have a strategy. He would watch the bobber
for a minute or two and then reel it in regardless of whether it had bobbed,
though it often did. Within a half hour he’d caught a couple of kivvers, thrown
them back.

On one cast I
saw him wince—maybe because it was a bad cast, but probably because his
back hurt. The line went half as far as he was
probably
aiming for, and ended up stuck in a
patch of lily pads. He worked the pole for a minute trying to get it free, then
he sighed and said, “We’re
gonna
have to go over there.”

I rowed us
while he reeled in the slack that grew in the line. It was a sunny day, hot but
not extreme, with a touch of breeze, enough to cool you but not enough to push
the boat.
When we arrived at the patch h
e handed me his pole and then, leaning over the side of the boat, he
started pulling at lily pads. I leaned the other way
to balance us
, though in flat-bottom boats like this
tipping
was practically
impossible.

“Goddamnit,”
he grunted. “Can’t see where it’s hooked.” One hand went to his back while the
other yanked at weeds.

He wasn’t
enjoying himself very much, I could tell—his back hurt and now he was
going to lose a lure somewhere in th
at slippery green
tangle—but I didn’t get the
sense that he wanted to go back to the truck. He had wanted to come out here
with me today; the fishing may have been an excuse.
It seemed
reasonable that if there were mother
miles, there were father miles too. Maybe they weren’t quite as long—cat
years to dog years—but they were there. I wonder
ed if he felt they
had always been there.

While I
watched him, thin and struggling, I
began to feel like I should tell
him about me right here in this boat,
on this lake
.
For
the first time it felt possible not
to do it with a speech,
not to
wait for the car ride tomorrow,
not to
say it to the backs of
my parents’
heads while we drove, so near to being safely an hour of mother miles
and father miles away
.

He heaved a
mass of lily pads up into the boat—their stems pop-pop-popped as they
snapped beneath the bubbly surface—and pulled them onto his lap. Slimy
green stems dangled against his legs and shoes.

“You’re
getting wet, Dad.”

“This is a
good lure.”

I knew I’d be prouder of myself if I told him here, if I did
it face to face and man to man, if I acted as strong as I looked and as strong
as I wanted to be. Prouder if I found I didn’t need to
act
, if I was simply
up to it
.
Then the hardest part of my life
would be over. Forever after, no matter who I had to tell, it would always be
easier: I would know I was brave enough to tell my dad, and what could compare
to that?

I felt as still as the water all around us, but inside I was
a wave rolling in, getting ready to break. N
o other place or time could be right now that I
understood
what
telling him
here and now would give me, and so I
felt a sudden desperation to get the words out. I felt
them—there
were only two; pages of them had been reduced to only two. I felt them start to
journey
from my mind to my voice
,
words on paths familiar from a million
mental
rehearsals but
never once ever said out loud, not even in the dark, not even in front of a
mirror. I knew I would cry but I didn’t want to cry until afterward, when I
would know the tears would
not be tears
of fear but tears of relief, and of pride.

They were on
my tongue, those two words. I swear they were. I sw
ear.

“Ollie,”
my
dad said
without raising his
eyes. His fingers were busy working the clump of fishing line and lily-pad
stems, though I could tell the lure wasn’t his real focus. His voice was
serious. “Your mother and I, we—” And he paused.

Startled,
my
words had retreated and I
was
imagin
ing
the hundred possible ones he might say
next.
We’re selling the house. We’re
having a baby. We can’t help you with school.
We’re getting a divorce
. I could tell from the look on his face
that whatever it was it was big
. And so h
e had hijacked my moment. I was angry but my anger
told
me how much I wanted the moment back,
how much more with every passing second. If I couldn’t tell him right now I
would tell him in the truck, because I wanted to tell him. I wanted to know
that I was strong.

He looked up
at me then. His fingers were entwined in the tangle but all of his attention
was on me. “Ollie, we know you’re a gay man, son.”

I
flinched. It was as if he
’d
hit me.
Lily pads were rocking
in the waves that rippled away from the boat.
My breath
fled
me
in a hot cloud and tears spilled out of my eyes as if they
’d been
waiting there, and maybe they had been
. I can’t say there was no relief in that moment, in hearing those words
said with that voice, in knowing I was finally out
. And yet these were
not tears of relief
. I was still
holding his fishing pole and it slid through my fist up to the reel and the
other end
dipped
to the
water.

“OK,”
my
father
said gently, “then I was
right.” He put a hand on my knee and gave it a squeeze. “We wanted you to know
we know, so you won’t have to go into your college life with a secret. Secrets
will hold you back, Ollie. I mean, we have some concerns. We have some worries
about this. This is new terrain for your mom and me. But all of that is better
than—” He narrowed his eyes. “Ollie?”

“But I was....
I was
....
”

“Ollie?”

I
squeezed
the oars to keep my hands
from
shivering
. “How did you even...?”

“Know?”

I nodded,
shrugged, something, it didn’t matter. I felt tiny.

“One morning,”
he said, as though he were reading
me a bedtime story,
“I was trying to print something. And
the printer already had something in its memory. It was that old printer,
remember? It was so bad. When I was trying to clear the print jobs three pages
came out, the same picture three times.” His eyes returned to his fingers as he
worked the tangle of stems. “It was of two men. With no clothes on. It wasn’t
dirty
, exactly. But— Well, I guess
it looked
sweet
.
That’s
how I knew. By the sweetness. If it was a raunchy picture I
might’ve thought it was a joke
, s
omething you were going to use for a prank on your friends. But—
And I was surprised, Ollie.”