“Are you a slut, or are you just plain thoughtless?” I heard Mother shout from the top of the stairs. I was in bed. On the landing, just on the other side of my bedroom door, Mother was not visible to me, but I could see her clearly in my mind’s eye, clad in a nightgown, hands on hips, glaring into the dark below as the creaky front door inched open. Mother was a light sleeper, and, until all five of her children were accounted for, she roamed the house like a ghost. She had taken her post on the stairs in order to intercept my sister, Charlene, who had now missed curfew by several hours.

My sister, I knew, had spent the better part of the night with her boyfriend. Recently, sitting cross-legged, knee-to-knee, in the middle of her canopied bed, Charlene had confided to me the story of her first sexual experience. This being my sister, I did and didn’t want to hear. Five years her junior, I knew little about sex, but I was curious. I wanted to know about sex, just not her sex. But I’d have to take what I could get. “Mark,” she whispered conspiratorially, “when I saw that thing pointin’ at me, Lord, I thought something was wrong with it.”

Erections, it seemed, had escaped my sister. Growing up with four brothers, how had she missed this basic physiology, I wondered. I tried to picture the scene, even as I tried not to picture the scene. This was the late 1970s, and toe socks with brightly colored horizontal stripes were in fashion among teenage girls like my sister. I could see Charlene’s toe socks spread eagle above her, her boyfriend, his dick at attention, striding across the room in her direction. Her socks, my sister explained, had played a key role in the encounter. “I’m keeping them on until I get married,” she assured me.

* * *

For Boys Only is the sex-ed guide Mother gave me when I turned thirteen. Written by Dr. Frank Richardson and published in 1952, this yellowed volume must have been a book my grandmother had given my uncle Allen, when he had become a teen around the time of its publication. As the tattered dust jacket explained, “It is written by a doctor in easy, plain everyday language that doesn’t try to ramble around or moralize over the facts that are a perfectly natural and necessary part of this startling but fascinating process of growing into manhood.”

And it was startling and fascinating. Framed as talks delivered in a high school chapel to a group of boys, with names like Jack and Harry and Tom, Dr. Richardson’s book explained the facts of life. As his narrator, the “Doc,” put it, “I talk to the fellows for a while, and then they pop any questions at me they want to, and I try my best to answer them. Some of them are really humdingers with no holds barred.” Jack and Harry and Tom were boy’s boys. They weren’t timid, sissy boys like me. With words like “gee,” and “golly,” they spoke with easy candor to each other and to the Doc. I’d never witnessed such openness, least of all among other boys.

But as a confirmed sissy-boy, I understood that I was not, nor would I ever be, Boy Scout material. My interest was not in nourishing my spiritual and moral character through love of the out-of-doors and an earnest vigor in working for God. Rather, I loved to accessorize.

My father was mostly mute about sex. His version of the facts of life was so indirect that I missed the topic altogether. Before my first middle school sweetheart dance, he asked with some solemnity, “So, is there anything you want to ask me about?” My immediate thought was, “Yeah, can I have twenty dollars?” It took me several minutes to realize that he was asking me to ask him about sex.

It was different with Doc Richardson. He was direct. “You remember I told you that the testicles make these sperms and store them in the body, floating about in a thick whitish fluid called semen,” he explained. “Whenever the storage tanks get too full, they empty themselves. Sometimes they do this at night, when a boy is dreaming about sex matters. Sometimes they do it without any sign at all except that the night clothing or bed clothes may be wet or discolored. This may happen several nights in succession, or as seldom as several weeks apart, or, in some boys, hardly ever.”

Huh? What can happen when you dream about “sex matters?” I was certain that if I had not read about nocturnal emissions, I never would have learned about them. With growing curiosity, I read on and waited in hopeful anticipation for my first wet dream.

I wondered, too, if my older brother John knew about this yet. He wasn’t much of a reader. When I asked if he had received the same book from Mother, he confirmed that he had, but he didn’t seem to have found it as startling or fascinating as I had. “I read the chapter about girls,” he grunted. That was all he would say on the subject.

About being gay, Dr. Richardson had nothing to say. There was no mention in For Boys Only of men having consensual sex with other men. There was only an opaque caution about illegal “monkey business,” of adult men corrupting young boys. When Tom said, “What I can’t understand is what makes older fellows, and sometimes even men that you’d think were decent people, try to get boys to let them do things to them that they know they ought not to,” Doc didn’t use the word pedophilia, but that’s what he seemed to be talking about. “It would take too long to tell you,” he demurred, “why some men get their satisfaction out of ruining young boys, and getting them started doing the same sort of thing with other youngsters. They are mentally ‘off,’ of course, and they really ought to be taken away for treatment.”

* * *

That one might be taken away for treatment was a genuine threat in the house where I grew up. We were unruly children, who often frayed our mother’s patience. “I’d pay to have you sent away,” she fumed whenever we misbehaved. Then she would pile us in the back of her Country Squire Wagon to visit a terrifying place in town called “The Last Stop.” This was a crumbling Gothic mansion, painted garish shades of purple, turned home for wayward children. Presumably, it was “the last stop” before one was sent to the Regional Youth Detention Center. When Mother was really angry, with no other reason to travel to the remotest outskirts of town, she would drive us to the YDC. Gripping the steering wheel in a trembling rage, she’d slow, just long enough for us to get a good look at its menacing razor-wire. As we took in the scene, Mother would glare at us in the rearview mirror. “Some day, you’re going to end up there,” she’d threaten.

Eventually, Mother made good on her promise, sending my oldest brother, Joe, to the YDC after he was caught stealing a neighbor’s mail. Afterwards, he made a tour of residential treatment homes, hospital psychiatric wards, and state mental institutions, before being housed at the Anneewakee Treatment Center near Atlanta. “Annewakee,” we were told, is a Native American name meaning “land of the friendly people.” But Annewakee was anything but friendly. Years later, long after Joe’s release, news reports detailed how its director, a one-legged pedophile named Dr. Poetter, encouraged sex between staff and patients because he believed it was “good for the boys.”

While stealing mail may have been the catalyst for Joe’s detention, Mom was motivated by a darker fear. She worried that Joe might be gay, and worse still, that he might turn her other sons gay too. One afternoon after Joe was sent away, she took me aside for a solemn chat. “Has he ever touched your . . . privates?” she asked. I didn’t understand what she meant. Did she mean my “private possessions,” like the miniature Swiss Army knife I hid deep in the pocket of my Billy the Kid jeans? Like Granddaddy, who was never without his pocket knife, with its beautifully iridescent mother-of-pearl handle, I guarded this tiny red treasure. Even so, I wouldn’t have minded if Joe touched it. He and I shared everything. As far as I was concerned, he could borrow anything of mine. Just as his privates were mine, so my privates were his, just for the asking. I considered Mom’s query, but I could not remember a time when Joe had borrowed my knife. “No,” I told her, I didn’t think Joe had touched my privates. But he could if he wanted to, I added, anytime he liked.

* * *

Like Mother, my father was vocal in his opposition to homosexuality. Not long after returning home from Annewakee, Joe was thrown out of the house for good. Then my father sat me down and gave me a good talking to about the fiery torments of Hell that awaited a “known homosexual.” He instructed me to call the cops if Joe stepped foot in the yard. My father’s homosexual anxiety, however, had deeper roots.

Roaming the yard in search of something to do one August afternoon, I was knocked unconscious when the better part of a Loblolly Pine fell on my head. After a visit to the emergency room, Mother offered a stop at Toys “R” Us. There she bought me my first doll, a handsome Boy Scout named Steve. Now I was not a Boy Scout, nor did I wish to become one. I didn’t even know any Boy Scouts. All I knew was that they liked to go camping, something else I did not wish to do. Sleeping under the stars, in the woods, with bugs, snakes, and who-knows-what other creatures held no interest for me.

What captivated me about the Boy Scouts were their accessories: The ubiquitous Swiss Army knife and the endless assortment of colorful patches, insignia, and emblems. The tooled leather belt with the antique finish. The animal tracks bandana, with illustrations of common woodland footprints. The felt Campaign Hat with leather hatband and chinstrap and Universal Boy Scout Emblem Hat Pin.

My father was mostly mute about sex. His version of the facts of life was so indirect that I missed the topic altogether. Before my first middle school sweetheart dance, he asked with some solemnity, “So, is there anything you want to ask me about?”

At eight years old, I could not have understood Scouting founder Robert S.S. Baden-Powell’s ideal of “muscular Christianity” that joined physical fitness with moral rectitude at the end of the nineteenth century. But as a confirmed sissy-boy, I understood that I was not, nor would I ever be, Boy Scout material. My interest was not in nourishing my spiritual and moral character through love of the out-of-doors and an earnest vigor in working for God. Rather, I loved to accessorize.

Sporting a swath the size of a dollar bill shaved from my scalp, and a dozen fresh prickly-black stitches, I held Steve Scout in my arms for the first time. Along with Steve, came several accessories: A Scouting Booklet, badges, an Official Scout Uniform, shoes, a jaunty red neckerchief. But this would be only the beginning. Steve would need a tent, a sleeping bag, the Steve Scout First-Aid Backpack, the Steve Scout Campfire, and, come winter, Steve Scout Snowshoes.

When my lesbian Buddhist aunt arrived from LA on Christmas Eve, I was certain that Aunt Jean would bring an exciting new Steve Scout Adventure Set from the West Coast. It would be one we could not find at our local Midtown Mall, where the anchor establishments were a Post Office at one end and a Laundromat at the other. Aunt Jean’s Christmas gift would be as exotic as she was. And she was. That she was from California would have been enough, but, to a boy growing up in the rural Deep South, that she was both lesbian and Buddhist was intoxicating.

What’s more, Aunt Jean worked as a DJ, announcing song titles on the in-flight radio station for a major airline. Her voice was smooth, with a hint of smoke, washed clean of the Southern accent of her Georgia kin. Her dark hair and eyes, her sharp, square chin, these could have been my father’s. But there the resemblance ended. Unlike her country relations, whose fashion sense was dictated by the Sears catalogue, Jean was sophisticated, glamorous. In her rich, ginger-colored Ultrasuede shirtwaist dress and black knee-high boots, to me, she was like one of Charlie’s Angels.

Not only, according to Mother, had Aunt Jean burned her bra, but she and her girlfriend, Barbara, also burned incense, much to Mother’s dismay, in Grandmama’s Wedgwood egg-cups, while they chanted before a makeshift altar in the guest bedroom: “Nam myoho renge kyo, nam myoho renge kyo, nam myoho renge kyo.”

My father embraced his little sister with jaw-clenching Christian duty. He was visibly unnerved by Aunt Jean, grinding his teeth and clearing nothing from his throat whenever she spoke. “Uhn, uhn, uhn, uhn, uuuhn.” At the same time, he welcomed his sister’s return home as a chance to coax her to Christmas Eve services at the First Baptist Church. If he could just get her in the door, then maybe the Holy Spirit would lay a hand on Jean. Maybe she would give up girls and The Eightfold Path. Maybe she would cancel her return flight to Sodom.

Just as she feared my brother Joe’s corrupting influence, Mother was certain that Aunt Jean would poison us all. When Barbara leaned in to receive a chaste peck on the cheek from Aunt Jean after the Christmas dinner blessing, I watched beneath the table as Mother’s nails dug deep into my father’s thigh. Later, I heard angry whispers in the kitchen: “I won’t have my boys exposed to her and that Barbara making out at my dinner table.” Whenever Aunt Jean came to visit, the air in our house was charged, and I eagerly drank in her electricity.

My heart sank on Christmas morning when all Aunt Jean pulled from her tiny carry-on, her only piece of luggage, was a small, shrink-wrapped basket of dried apricots, with a gift tag addressed to “The Hall Family.” Seeing my disappointment, Aunt Jean explained that Buddhists don’t give Christmas presents. Then she added quickly, “It won’t be a Christmas gift, but you and I could go to the mall tomorrow.”

The next morning, Aunt Jean borrowed my father’s red VW Bug, and we raced to beat the crowds of post-holiday shoppers. When she offered, “You can choose one toy, anything—anything you want,” I made a beeline for Bob Scout. But when I laid his box on the counter, Aunt Jean hesitated. She seemed to be doing a quick calculation in her head. I thought of the paltry dried apricots. Maybe I had overshot. I could feel Steve Scout’s emptiness in my own stomach.

“It’s only $12.99,” I pointed out. “You said anything.” But Aunt Jean was not searching her wallet. She was making a different sort of reckoning. Aunt Jean recognized that toys like GI Joe were “action figures.” Steve and Bob Scout were not. They were dolls, just like Barbie dolls and Ken dolls. Aunt Jean could also plainly see that Steve Scout was white and Bob Scout was black. Not only was her Deep South, white, sissy-boy nephew playing with dolls, but now he wanted a black doll.

“Are you sure that’s the one you want, Sweetie?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve already got Steve. I just need Bob so he’ll have someone to camp with. I’ve got the forest fire observation tower all set up.” Aunt Jean looked uncertain. She tugged at her crocheted vest.

“Well, you get Bob, then,” she said, “and let’s put out some fires.”

The house was quiet that afternoon as Steve toured Bob around the campsite, artfully staged under the Christmas tree. The only voices in the house were theirs, from a backpack filled with prerecorded camp-talk, activated by a pull-string. “Let’s make camp, here,” Steve and Bob Scout repeated again and again. “I’ll roll out the tent, and sleeping bags. You cook the fish.”

Later that evening, I overheard more angry whispers in the kitchen. Afterwards, Aunt Jean told us, as she and Barbara quickly gathered their things, that their visit would have to be cut short.

Soon after Christmas, Aunt Jean sent me a note. She inquired about Steve and Bob. In San Francisco, in a neighborhood called the Castro, she explained, there were lots of nice guys like Steve and Bob. When I was older, maybe I could visit her and Aunt Barbara to see for myself.

* * *

In my early teens, I had no notion of “gay,” and so I wasn’t looking for Doc Richardson to discuss the subject in For Boys Only. In retrospect, I understand that long before then I had had feelings for other boys, but I didn’t think of those feelings as romantic. Rather, I thought I just wanted to be like the cute, confident boys I admired at school. They were not my friends, only distant, mysterious objects. What I thought I felt for other boys was envy, not attraction.

I had much the same feeling for the boys who appeared one month in National Geographic World magazine. This was National Geographic for children, so the articles were about kid stuff. For a long time, I was captured by one story in particular, “An American Gymnast in the U.S.S.R.” “Few Americans have had the chance to train with Soviet athletes,” the story explained. “But thirteen-year-old Caleb Daniloff, of Washington, DC did.” In the article, Daniloff is pictured with classmates in a Moscow gymnastics school. Photos depict the young gymnasts in various poses. There is nothing sexual about the pictures. But there is a physical intimacy among boys that was foreign and strange to me, wholly unknown, and deeply captivating. One photo showed a boy in a perfect bridge pose. His hands and feet flat on the floor, his head and neck curving behind him, he thrusts his waist toward the ceiling. Another boy, his fingers spread wide and pressed firmly into the first boy’s abdomen and chest, is doing a handstand, his legs a rigid V in the air above his partner’s bridge. Their bodies are lean and taut, exposed in tiny shorts and tank tops. Pictured behind this pair is the American, Daniloff. He stands side-by-side with a Soviet boy. Each balances on one foot, the other foot, leg stretching up, up, held tightly in an outstretched hand. Their arms reach toward the ceiling. The two boys maintain their balance by holding hands with each other. I’d never touched another boy with such familiarity. At the time, I had no idea why I was so drawn to this image. But I could not take my eyes off it.

* * *

At the end of the winter break of my first year of college, I drove to Florida to pick up my friend Marcia. She needed a ride back to school. Our plan was to travel to my home in Georgia, stay the night, then return to campus near Atlanta the following day. In the car together, we did what we always did: We got high and sang along to Marvin Gaye and Lou Rawls.

I was twenty-one before I had my first serious boy crush. His name was Ethan. He had a beautiful, unruly mop of blond hair, which I suspected had been highlighted. His doe eyes were green as grapes, his smile electric.

The private college we attended was filled with well-to-do prep-school kids. They were high achievers, accustomed to excellence, entitled to it. They had credit cards and drove flashy cars. They had drugs of every description. These students, I was surprised to learn, studied as hard as they partied. The unofficial center of our small campus social life was a notorious club whose members were required to maintain a 4.0 GPA, even as they binge-drank and Hoovered up great piles of cocaine. At their parties, they doled out ecstasy like Skittles. In my small-town public-school experience, one could either be a top student or a drug fiend, but not both. It had never occured to me that the two aspirations might be successfully combined. I was intrigued. And so I studied diligently, and, to fit in, I bought a bong and a coke spoon.

Like me, Marcia didn’t belong. She was a scholarship kid, as unpolished as I. But she was smart and driven and always available to get high. Together, we studied and wrote papers late into the night, then drove the miles of deserted country roads that surrounded the tiny college town, smoking weed and singing “What’s Going On” and “Love is a Hurting Thing.” Marcia was unlike the genteel Southern women of modest, understated grace I’d grown up with. She was loud, brash, and direct, with a raucous laugh that filled a room. I was enthralled. But when she arrived at our house after Christmas, one look from Mother told me that she didn’t care for Marcia. The next morning, as soon as I made my way down to the kitchen, Mother looked over my shoulder and asked, “Where’s Marcia?”

I glanced back too, toward the stairs. “In bed, still asleep.”

Mother’s eyes narrowed. “That will not go on in a Christian home!” she shouted.

It took me an instant, as I shook off sleep, to understand her flash of rage. Mother had arranged for Marcia to take my sister’s now-vacant downstairs bedroom. My room was upstairs on the opposite side of the house. Mother imagined that we’d shared a room so that we could have sex. This was strictly forbidden. But I had no way of explaining why she was mistaken. Nothing could have been further from my mind. Yes, we had slept together in my bedroom, Marcia in one twin bed, I in the other. After a late-night ride around town, we were high as usual, and forgetful of the house rules regarding the sleeping arrangements of unmarried couples. Our infraction was, at any rate, less intimate than Marcia and I were accustomed to at college. There we often bedded down in my dorm room in a single twin bed. But it wasn’t what Mother assumed. Sex between Marcia and me was inconceivable. After all, she was dating my friend Steve, and they couldn’t get enough sex with each other. I was the friend to study with, get high with, and then fall asleep with. But not sleep with. Besides, Marcia had been telling me, almost since we met, that I was gay. I didn’t know what she was talking about. “Just because I like Patti LaBelle, that doesn’t make me gay,” I insisted.

“Since when did this become a Christian home?” I shot back to Mother. Marcia and I loaded the car in silence and made a quick exit. Mother didn’t speak to me again until sometime after Easter, when my father phoned and begged me to apologize. “Apologize for what?” I insisted. I wanted him to say what he thought I’d done, that I’d had sex under his roof—with a woman.

* * *

I was twenty-one before I had my first serious boy crush. His name was Ethan. He had a beautiful, unruly mop of blond hair, which I suspected had been highlighted. His doe eyes were green as grapes, his smile electric. Men and women alike pursued him. Everyone who met him seemed smitten. But Ethan was aloof, unavailable to all. Whether he was gay or straight was uncertain. Some days I would observe him sunbathing in the courtyard of our dormitory. I longed to stroke the angry purple scar, which marked the exit of his appendix. One evening, I surprised him at the sink in the communal bath on our hall. He was applying mascara. I wanted nothing more than to become that brush.

Just beginning to take my first tentative steps out to gay bars, I was elated one night to see Ethan in the same Midtown dive, Burkharts. He was leaning against a wall, drinking a seventy-five-cent draft beer, observing the scene, just as I was. Afterward, we began to talk and to acknowledge one another on campus.

As summer approached, I learned that Ethan had gotten a job at Cafe Intermezzo, an upscale coffee shop and bar, but he did not plan to start until after he returned from visiting family at the close of the term. Ethan didn’t know I knew about his new job. To be near him all summer long, while he was away, I too applied for a job at Cafe Intermezzo. I’d get hired and begin right away, while Ethan was gone. Then, when he started at the cafe, I planned, it would appear that he was following me, rather than the other way around. By then, I’d already know the ropes, and Ethan would depend on me to help him get acquainted in his new position.

In the meantime, I moved out of the dorm and into my first apartment. It was a tiny two-room basement flat in the home of blue-haired widow from Derbyshire, England. She had a vicious German Shepherd who pursued me every time I stepped foot out the door. But I chose this particular apartment because it had a fireplace. Whatever its drawbacks, come winter, I could imagine how romantic it would be, my first boyfriend on the futon in front of a blazing fire.

Cafe Intermezzo was opened late at night, in the heart of Buckhead. It was the last stop for posh crowds concluding a night at the theatre or out on the town, with fancy desserts and cocktails. Wait staff began early in the evening and worked until 2:00 a.m. After unwinding at the bar over drinks of our own, Ethan and I would go out to nearby dance clubs until dawn. If I was lucky, Ethan might suggest sleeping over at my place. As we spent more and more time together, my crush deepened. But so did my shyness. Whenever Ethan stayed over, I kept to my twin bed, while he slept alone on the futon, just feet away, by the empty fireplace. In the dark, I felt a deep ache as I listened to his slow, even breathing.

* * *

Thanks to Doc Richardson, I understood the mechanics of sex, but I could not imagine how it all got started, exactly. In my teens, I sometimes overheard conversations among peers about having sex. Some couples in high school behaved like old married folks, they’d been fucking for so long and with such regularity. But how did they get together initially? I couldn’t guess.

When I finally did find myself in bed with a woman for the first time, I was as surprised as she was. Sarah had visited the college writing center where I worked as a tutor and confided in me about a boy she had a terrible crush on. She was invisible to him, she lamented. His name was Ethan. While I did not reveal my own love-sickness for the same Ethan, I shared her palpable ache. Somehow we ended up at the newly-built Ecolodge near campus. While the encounter was fumbling and awkward, I was relieved. I was having sex with a woman. In spite of the insistence of friends like Marcia, this was clear evidence that I was not gay.

Not long after that, at a sprawling dance complex called Backstreet, I met a boy visiting Atlanta from Minneapolis. I watched while other men stalked him around the club. They shared my opinion of his handsome good looks. I would have to act if I was to be the one to capture his attention. Too shy to introduce myself, I sidled up next to him at the bar, making sure my bare arm lightly brushed his. My knees nearly buckled at the spark. Without turning toward me, he flashed a wry smile at the mirrored wall behind the bar, his eyes mischievous behind long, thick lashes. When Daniel introduced himself, I fell in love with his voice. Unlike my Southern drawl, Daniel had the polished Midwestern dialect of a television news anchor. I could have listened to him talk all night long. As he unspooled the contours of his life, I learned that Daniel had been a child gymnast, and later, an Eagle Scout. I’d never kissed a man before, but that night on the dance floor with him, I seized the opportunity. His lips remain vivid in my memory. They were full and insistent, his tongue curious. We kissed for hours. As the music thumped in our chests, we were so involved that other patrons gathered round several deep to watch. I’d never been kissed like that. This, I understood crucially, was what Doc Richardson had left out of his sex-ed guide, For Boys Only.

Daniel was slight, a few inches shorter than I. Looking down into his dark eyes made me feel tall, confident. I was delighted by this new sensation. Holding his face between my hands, I kissed his eyelids, gently plucking them up with my lips. In the early hours before dawn, after he’d stepped away for a moment, Daniel slipped up behind me, wrapping his arms around me in a fierce embrace. He was small, but powerful. I felt an opening inside me, like a taut spring had been released. The feelings of comfort and security were overwhelming. I was on the verge of something, which was a great mystery to me, even as I was about to enter into it. Although I never saw Daniel again after that night, for the first time, the romantic touch of another—a man—felt right and natural to me. With certainty, his lips, his embrace told me who I was.

Mark Hall is a professor of rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies at the University of Central Florida, where he directs the University Writing Center. His creative nonfiction has appeared in Flashquake, JMWW: A Quarterly Journal of Writing, Chelsea Station, and The Timberline Review.

Photo Credit: Nkosi Shanga

Yoga

I have bad memories of ballet class, and isn’t yoga like dancing in a way, teaching the muscles how to lengthen, how to lean, how to turn elastic as rubber bands? All my springs are coiled tight for bouncing. My love even calls me Tigger sometimes. I watch her step out of the studio from my warm perch in the coffee shop across the street. Steam rises from her body. Steam rises from all the yogis’ bodies in unison, in pseudo-cirrus reverie. They are shrouded. They are turning to clouds. They wrap scarves around their long, exposed necks, all of them, thin and elegant. They tuck their bony feet deep inside fleece-lined boots. I only have eyes for one of them, but I am watching all of them. Icicles dangle from the eaves, pointing down like arrows as if to say, See here: these bodies have melted into their most fluid selves.

I am solid. I hold a latte in my hand, which I have just ordered so it will be hot for her when she steps inside. The little bell above the door tinkles softly. Her cheeks are still burning from the heated room and the fire that yogis are taught to stoke inside them. I want to kiss her right here, right now, always, but she is not like that—not one for spectacle or display. She is always water flowing away from a scene. I am still land, of course, still solid, but I follow her everywhere with my eyes and with the secret compass lodged inside my throat.

Eventually, I follow her to yoga class. She doesn’t have to ask. People have crossed oceans for love, scaled mountains for love. Why is a mat my mountain? I notice, and then try not to notice, that when I hollow out my back in Cow and raise my chin, my clavicles still sink into my skin. No sharp crescent-moon rises out of the flesh. I notice, and then try not to notice, that when I lift myself into Wheel, there is nothing of the full circle about me. I only creak and cringe.

But there she is on her mat, doing beautiful things with her body. In a small way, we have scaled this mountain together. I feel so grateful and so vulnerable at once. What to do now? My sternum is full of suggestions, that hard ridge above my soft heart. Stop anticipating. Stop analyzing. Just breathe. She touches my hand in Savasana—only a light brush of her fingers, but it is enough. I lie supine and gaze at the stars.

*     *     *

Song

I have bad memories of singing. Not the earliest, not the baby song or the toddler song—nonsense burbling as echo from the womb. Nor even the kindergarten song—sitting crisscross applesauce on the worn carpet, pudgy hands clapping a beat, the wheels on the bus going round and round. But shortly after. When the world began to scowl. Hands clamped to ears. Sidelong smirk. So I shut up after that. Whispered and lip synced whenever singing was required.

But here I am, somehow, in a roomful of women, on a summer Tuesday evening, making strange noises with my breath. We’ve trilled Yoo Hoo! to each other in British accents, and held our hands to our soft bellies while murmuring yum… None of it feels like singing, so we’re able to let go and laugh—yet all of it is singing. It turns out singing begins in the body, becoming aware of the body as an instrument of sound.

And since the body is the instrument, we grow powerful and vulnerable at the same time. When your body is the instrument, any wrong note, any discord, feels as though you, yourself, are wrong. Singing is all about tuning your body, attuning to the slightest shift of posture: the lift of the ribs, the well of the pelvis, the slight rise of an eyebrow. You need to become liquid with song—not the ordinary solid cage of muscle and bone.

We’re in a room with a piano, a small stage, and rickety chairs. It’s the Bellingham Academy of Arts for Youth, and any minute now, children are going to stream in to rehearse The Music Man. I remember watching that movie with my parents and bouncing in my seat, leaning forward and aching to sing: Till there was you… vowels warbling up into the stratosphere.

I am not allowed to fail. I gather other people’s expectations like daisies in a field. I weave them into plain but respectable garlands.

In a few months’ time, I’ll be performing with some of those children in a recital. The youngest will go first, singing the Tigger song, and then the 8-year-olds, and then me: so nervous in my cowboy boots and twirly skirt. But there will be no stopping it: I’ll stand up to the microphone, and my teacher will sit at the piano, smiling her encouraging smile. I’ll launch into it, diving, as my teacher says, into the song that already exists in the air.

Oh, give me a home… And then the lesser known verse: Oh give me a land, with its white diamond sand, and the light from the glittering stream/ where glideth along, the snowy white swan, like a maid in her heavenly dream… And though I know my pitch is in flux, every round “o” floats from me like a bubble (so many songs, it turns out, rely on that long “o” sound, a vowel that opens the back of the throat so music can rush in). Then the audience will join me on the chorus, raucous and alive: and never is heard, a discouraging word, and the sky is not cloudy all day…

But for now I’m just humming, deep in my belly, feeling the way the core muscles support every sound. I’m holding my hands at the side of my ribs to feel the way they can expand, and stay expanded, on their own. I feel the stickiness of my lungs as they adhere to the ribs in order to hold more breath. I’m standing on one foot—wobbly, unbalanced, laughing—to ignite the muscles of song.

*     *     *

Failure

“No environment could be better for young women who have feared it all their lives,” Sister Ann Cornelia says as she writes Failure with a flourish on the board. Here I am, somehow, in a roomful of others like me: all of us soon-to-be freshmen, soon-to-be fourteen, future Valedictorians and National Merit Scholars. Or so we’ve been told. All of us promised since infancy that we were fit to be Ivy League.

“Most of you have never been pushed to your fullest potential.” She faces us now, chalky hands pressed against her middle button firmly. She is small and round and sure of herself. Her clothes are dark with white smudges like a winter sky. “But the day will come when your best won’t be good enough. You will fail at something here, for once—I promise you that—and you will be better for it, forever.”

Not me, though. I am not allowed to fail. I gather other people’s expectations like daisies in a field. I weave them into plain but respectable garlands. At Holy Names Academy, my first year, there are only flowers, and I keep collecting them, the way I have learned to do—not stopping to smell them anymore, only bending to pluck, then tuck them in my temperate bouquet: A after A after A. But the next year, there is chemistry. The next year there are numbers doing things I don’t quite understand. There is also Bridget who shares the lab desk with me: Bridget who writes poems on graph paper, Bridget who braids her own hair, Bridget who wants to go to alternative school in British Columbia.

I have chemistry with Bridget. Any way you say it, the statement is true. We start tie-dyeing shirts together. We start writing and casting a play. Soon, I am borrowing hats with crush velvet flowers that flop carelessly over my eyes. I forget I am a Virgo and pledge my devotion to a less exacting sign.

When it arrives, the F appears almost neutral, like a fingerprint that hasn’t been scanned yet—just a lone blue letter centered at the top of a page. It is both unexpected and entirely deserved. I cannot argue with it, this F I have earned through relentless non-attention, and yet I have to lean against the wall to keep from tipping over. My legs are wobbly now, my joints unhinged.

“So what?” Bridget says. “It’s just a letter. Let’s tear up our tests and make streamers!” But alas, I am not the kind of girl who can part ways so quickly and completely with convention.

My lungs are sticky as I try to steady my breath, as I lean over and somberly whisper: “I don’t think we should see so much of each other anymore.”

*     *     *

Success

It’s ridiculous, really: A PhD. A “Doctor of Philosophy.” In my family, doctors (real doctors) are revered; we submit to their authority and do anything they say. And of course, the unspoken Jewish expectation: you’ll meet a nice boy, a doctor maybe, why not? It’s expected of young girls, young women. Sure, you can go to college, but don’t make a habit of it.

I’ve met nice boys, but they’re not doctors or lawyers or shrewd businessmen. They are novelists, poets, teachers, carpenters. None of them are Jewish. Their beliefs fluctuate from day to day. We drink lots of coffee and take long walks. We hold hands. We walk along rivers and mountains and lakes. We walk to funky cinemas with disco balls rotating in the ceiling, making everything sparkle.

Philosophy, in Greek, means “love of wisdom.” So I suppose I’m about to become a “doctor of wisdom,” or a “doctor of love.” But I’m neither of these things. I’ve stumbled into graduate school in complete ignorance, as if I’ve been sleepwalking, inching slowly backward down a dark alley. It’s only now, minutes before my oral exams, that I’ve begun to wake up, take my bearings, turn on the lights. How did I get here? Where am I?

I’m sitting in a windowless classroom, waiting for my professors. I’ve brought a bouquet of irises and tulips; I’ve brought pastries from the groovy shop downtown. Are these bribes? Perhaps. I’ve dressed like an adult, in a nice skirt and shoes with a heel. I’ve even put on lipstick. But my fingernails are bitten down, and there’s a big pimple on my chin. The seams in me always show.

I’ve been studying, spending long hours in the library with Montaigne and Hazlitt and Lamb. I know Didion and E.B White as if they’re old friends. I’ve made flash cards. I’ve memorized quotes. I’ve constructed arguments about representations of the self on the page. But success seems unfathomable, unthinkable, for a girl who’s never had any idea where she’s going. At this moment I feel blank as a new notebook. Nothing has been inscribed.

*     *     *

Manicure

I had dressed like an adult since I was a child, a miniature version of my mother. At eleven, she gave me a tube of lipstick just her shade, rouge, mascara, and powder. She said people might mistake us for sisters and smiled at the thought. By the time I was twenty-one, I was weary from a decade of make-up and polish—the way my mother insisted we must make up for something, the fact we were not “natural beauties.”

No more high heels, I vowed. For another decade at least, not even a dress, not once. I cut up my stockings. I kept my hair short and my face bare. Perhaps others assumed I was marking myself and my love affair with a woman. Perhaps they even inferred that I was “the man” in our relationship. Evidence: hadn’t I also purchased a Pierre Cardin tie, a blush-worthy impulse buy? But I think it was adolescent rebellion at last, years overdue—this stalwart refusal to gussy.

The day before our wedding, also years overdue, my beloved suggests we get a manicure. Our best friend is with us. She knows a place. “It might be fun,” she laughs, “to do something girly together for once.”

Now the most important women in my life are sitting side by side, having their nails done, chatting softly and choosing a color. They are lesbians. They are feminists. They are not worried about the implications of a little gloss and tint on their hands. So why am I? “This your first time in nail salon?” the man at the counter asks. I nod, sheepishly, but still I linger near the door, resisting the chairs and magazines. The seams in me always show.

“Your turn, Miss,” a young woman beckons. Her face is an open door. This is my chance to be normal, to be one of the girls, to participate in the rituals of femininity that have so long eluded me. This time, I can even do so on my own terms.

I place my hands in hers, gingerly, the way I will place my hands in my beloved’s tomorrow, when we stand before the small crowd to exchange our vows. “Your nails are very short,” she observes, a diplomatic alternative to ragged or gnawed. “I will soak your hands first, then push down your cuticles so we can see the moons. Yes?”

All at once, years of longing and fear and other feelings I don’t quite recognize are streaming from my eyes. I blot them quickly before we begin. “You are all right, Miss?”  I want to say how my mother isn’t coming to my wedding, how my mother doesn’t believe in my love. And I want to say how sad I am to be so relieved that she won’t have a chance to ruin everything. But instead, I nod my head, less sheepish this time: “Yes, please, I want to see the moons.”

*     *     *

Highlights

I lean my head into her hands and instinctively nuzzle them, like a cat. My eyes close and I hum quietly—a resonant yum—while she massages my scalp with lavender oil. These days, I get touched like this only by professionals: my hairdresser, my massage therapist, my chiropractor. My skin tingles at their touch. I feel a quick flush of shame at my pleasure.

She lifts one lock of hair, then another. I feel the gentle tug on my scalp, but even when I open my eyes, I can’t see what she’s doing; without my glasses I’m a blur in the mirror, a faint outline of head and shoulders draped with a black cloth. I know she’s pondering what to do with me today. My hair is at the in-between stage where nothing seems quite right.

How about highlights? she muses, almost to herself. Highlights? My hair has always been what I call “chestnut”: brown but with an undertone of red. At certain angles, it’s had a sheen to it, though my bangs get frizzy or oily, depending on the day. Most often they hang in one lanky bunch above my eyebrows. I’ve managed to arrive into my fifties without dyeing my hair, the gray strands barely noticeable until they spring up like coarse wire. I’ve never wanted to get caught in the hair-dyeing cycle, roots showing like flags of age that must be quickly hidden.

But lately, the gray hairs have been accumulating—quietly, like radicals gathering for subversion—and so I now suddenly see wide swathes of them when I brush my hair or push my bangs back with a headband. I see them, but I don’t see them, averting my eyes. It’s not a stylish wing of gray, like Susan Sontag, or a silver sheen like Helen Mirren. My gray is unruly, dowdy, stripping my hair of whatever vital spark it once possessed.

We’ll do it subtly, very natural, she says, gazing at me in the mirror. I can’t see her eyes, but she’s smiling. Her hands cup my shoulders, firm but gentle, as if she’s about to steer me the right direction on a trail. Yes?

How can I resist her, this woman who has examined every inch of my head? This woman who washes my hair and smoothes it against my scalp, who is always happy to see me, who wants only to make me lovely? We’ve talked about everything and nothing. But if I say yes—if I agree to be highlighted—will I still be myself? Will the highlights announce themselves, tell the world I no longer trust my own body to act in its best interests?

She’s waiting for my answer. The phone rings, and I hear the snip of other scissors, the roar of the blow dryer. The sound system is playing Hallelujah, a song I’ve been hearing lately everywhere: …love is not a victory march, it’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah… This song always makes me both sad and happy at the same time; it’s a prayer of longing and not-quite-forgiveness. It’s a voice that wants to shout in jubilation to the heavens—you can it hear it straining to find its pitch—but finds itself hobbled by the failings of an earth-bound body.

It’s a song I’ve been singing my whole life.

Without speaking, I say yes. I nod, and she claps her hands, hurries off to get the foils and dyes. My blurred self and I wait quietly for her return. I know she’ll gently lift each hank of hair, carefully paint each strand until it shines.

*     *     *

Infidelity

Follow your heart! the poets exhort. I shrug my shoulders: What else would I follow? These are the lyrics I’ve been singing my whole life: songs of love and longing, passion and devotion. If I am anything, I am loyal. My eyes never wander. My feet are invariably warm.

But in college, when I begin to listen to radical folk singers like Ani DiFranco, I’m surprised, then riveted by lines like these: We’re in a room without a door, and I am sure without a doubt, they’re gonna wanna know how we got in here, and they’re gonna wanna know how we plan to get out. The song is called “Shameless,” and I play it hour after hour, the repeat button set on my small dorm stereo.

What I can’t get over is how candid the speaker is about covet[ing] another man’s wife. This is the first time I have ever heard a woman express such unabashed desire for another. I flush every time DiFranco’s voice dips low, slices through study time with a guttural moan: Then I get to see how close I can get to it without giving in; then I get to rub up against it until I break the skin. If my roommate walks in, I plunge for the pause button. I consider investing in a pair of headphones.

I once thought I’d have a daughter, a baby I could sing to sleep. I once thought I’d have a husband who would hold this baby lightly in the crook of his arm.

Little do I know that in just a few years I will find myself promised to a man. I will say Yes, OK, to marrying him, No, I’d rather not to the suggestion of a ring. He laughs at me. “You’re never about the bling, are you?” But he knows he can trust me, even with my bare left hand. He knows I’m not one for shirking my commitments. I always call, even if I’m only running a few minutes behind.

So I will not be able to name this. I will not be able to explain this. When I finally pick up the phone, days too late, I will wince at his fury, though I will know it is what I deserve. Shameless, he says, a snake in the grass. Later, in a letter: Men don’t choose a woman like you because you’re the hottest. They choose a woman like you because you’re the safest.

Why I didn’t call him first, why I didn’t sever one cord before I tied another—I couldn’t say. I was raised with Captain Von Trapp telling Baronness Shraeder on the Austrian terrace, You can’t marry someone when you’re in love with someone else. This he does before he kisses Fraulein Maria in the gazebo by the water, before they sing together about having done something good.

My heart, strange Geiger counter, is sending signals only my body can read. Perhaps the gazebo is the room without a door. Surely it is the glass house from which I must never throw stones. I am alone with the woman I love by a lake in darkness. It is spring, and our bodies are acting at last in their own best interests. My place. Her place. It hardly matters where we go next. I can’t even slow this down, let alone stop this. The night is a stringed instrument. The future an encore. We cannot top this, even if we tried.

*     *     *

Fidelity

The root word of fidelity means faith. As in devotion or belief. An infidel is one who has lost her belief. And, as with any faith, doubt comes into play. Doubt, the philosopher Paul Tillich stressed, isn’t the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. Or, to put it more lyrically, from Sylvia Plath: I talk to God but the sky is empty.

Fidelity also means accuracy, exactitude. As in fidelity to the facts. Or it means the quality of sound: high fidelity, as in a record or a film—each note clear and true. So many meanings for one word that, on the face of it, seems so simple and steadfast.

When I think of fidelity I think of my dog. Though her name is not “Fido” (a name that must, I hope, have the same origin), she keeps me always in her sights. She arranges herself in ways that seem meant to guard me from whatever, or whoever, might take me unaware (at the moment, for example, she has curled up behind my chair, blocking the doorway). She often has her eyes closed, but her ears twitch and she can be on her feet in a flash. She’s a small dog—only twenty pounds, with a foxlike face and a white plume for a tail—but her bark is that of a Great Dane’s.

She will bark at mailmen and anyone who delivers a package to my door. She will bark at the jingle of another dog’s collar in the street. She will bark at things invisible to my eye and ear, anything that might be a threat. She will bark to alert me, too, of friends arriving, wagging her tail so vigorously it’s a blur. Her pant becomes a smile, says: look who’s here!

She’s been my dog for almost ten years now, though I dreamed of her long before plucking her from the listings on Petfinder. She came to me as a puppy—all legs and nose and eyes—and I often felt at a loss, consulting my Puppies for Dummies book constantly, memorizing the steps for potty training, leash training, socialization, hygiene. She poked her head out of the cat carrier I’d used to pick her up, tongue lolling, eyes rolling from side to side. I could hardly speak, sure that anything I did might cause irrevocable harm. I touch her flank while we sleep, feeling her slow steady breath. I kiss her snout when we wake, nuzzle her under the chin. We make a full circle.

I once thought I’d have a daughter, a baby I could sing to sleep. I once thought I’d have a husband who would hold this baby lightly in the crook of his arm. I once thought my home would be filled with voices at all hours, a family working together at the mundane tasks—dishes, homework, puzzles—that make up a life. I believed these were facts, and anything else a poor imitation, inaccurate.

But, as it turns out, it’s just me and my dog. We are faithful to one another, and to this house that does not seem to mind its sparse occupancy. My dog roams the backyard, ears alert for any intruder; she comes inside and watches my every move. I stretch into downward dog, crocodile, cat and cow under her scrutiny. I sing to her the songs I’m learning, and she listens, sighing, stretching to make herself long as pulled taffy. Our sky is not empty, oh no. The night is a duet; it teems with a thousand stars.

Brenda Miller is the author of five essay collections, most recently An Earlier Life (Ovenbird Books, 2016). She also co-authored Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining and Publishing Creative Nonfiction and The Pen and The Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World. Her work has received six Pushcart Prizes. She is a Professor of English at Western Washington University, and associate faculty at the Rainier Writing Workshop. Her website is www.brendamillerwriter.com.

Julie Marie Wade is the author of ten collections of poetry and prose, most recently Same-Sexy Marriage: A Novella in Poems (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2018). She is also the co-author, with Denise Duhamel, of The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (Noctuary Press, 2019). Wade is an Associate Professor of English at Florida International University in Miami and reviews regularly for Lambda Literary Review and The Rumpus.

(All frags reported herein are genuine, heard in Oak Bluffs, a town on an island off the coast of Massachusetts, USA, captured here for this publication only)

Nothing like a good long walk, exercise and meditation in one. Two birds with one stone, though I hate that image. Who throws stones at birds? Cavemen and nasty ten year olds. When I have errands, I cluster them and walk into town the long way to the post office, the market, hardware store and packy. A long walk, on curvy one-way streets, past big old Victorians, little Gothic cottages. People on porches. Wind chimes. Gardens neat and not. Ocean here and there. Serene.

Then around a sudden sharp corner into raucous. Cars and bikes, outdoor bars, racks of tee shirts and pink rubber beach shoes. Families of six clogging the sidewalks, ice cream, fried clams, chowder. All of it perfect frag collecting territory.

Frag is short for fragment, of course. A small chunk of overheard conversation, an incomplete sentence or two caught as you intersect someone else’s orbit on a stroll. A few words broken off in passing, truncated by a boat whistle, interrupted by seagulls, wind or waves.

“…would that be normal for me……?”

“…my boyfriend’s favorite price point…”

“…price of a bacon doughnut…”

They fall out windows of passing cars, drop off bikes. Ellipses on one end or the other or both.

“…how about fishing college?…”

“…abandoned house or not….”

“… make it a national agenda…”

Elusive and intriguing. Like a dragonfly at the edge of your vision, a whiff of charred steak next street over. Sparking a chuckle, a wise nod, total bewilderment.

“…no extra seat in the bathroom…”

“…time to notify our people…”

“…found it in dystopian history…”

I don’t actually collect frags. Hear and release. Trying to hang on to them closes your ears, changes the experience so I rarely write them down. Once in a while a phrase pops up in a notebook margin when I’m looking for something else. The other day I came across

“…a legend so reductive…” from July 2012 on the fishing pier. No wonder I wrote that one down. I also admit I sometimes call my sister to report a great frag and we’ll imagine a story, speculate on a context, analyze the speaker. An old family game. “… all shaped by iniquity,” the most recent.

I used to be a collector. Cardigans, white rocks, Ferris Wheels. According to the dictionary, a collector is:

1. a person who collects things, professionally or as a hobby, as in art collector, stamp collector, coin collector
2. a person who collects something in their job, as in garbage collector.

I fell somewhere in the middle. The dictionary then told me to “see hoarder.”

I appreciate the urge to collect. The families who rent our house in the summer leave shells and dead crabs lined up on the porch railing, having forbidden the children, I imagine, to take them home in their little backpacks. Collecting is fun at first. To love something, search for it, make space for it. Arrange and re-arrange the objects of your obsession until there’s no place to put any of it. Friends and family, happy to give the perfect gift, give you more. Clutter ensues.

Frags take up no space and they’re everywhere. Hear and release. My route today was around the corner and through the park,

“…an insignificant branch of the family…”

“……ants dropping from the sky….”

across the park to the water side,

When you first begin to hear frags on a walk it’s tempting to categorize, mentally order and file them–domestic, metaphysical, illuminating. Let that go. It’s just serendipity to get two fishing frags in the same afternoon, we’re surrounded by water after all.

“…first time in my life I’m tired of taking pictures…”

north toward the harbor,

“ …you go over there girl and you drive that Mercedes….”

along endless ocean and endless horizon,

“…not an actual bed with an actual mattress…, “

past the ferry dock, a flood of arrivals,

“…where’s the sea serpent at?”

“I heard that on a Garfield episode…”

along the boardwalk and down to the tie-ups.

“…wouldn’t let me go fishing so I ran away from home…”

When you first begin to hear frags on a walk it’s tempting to categorize, mentally order and file them—domestic, metaphysical, illuminating. Let that go. It’s just serendipity to get two fishing frags in the same afternoon, we’re surrounded by water after all. No organizing is one of my rules. You can make your own. No lurking is another. The more you hear of a conversation, the more it makes sense, therefore not a frag. Too much attention and focus, too much grasping turns it ordinary. Ears open, never searching. No changing direction either, no following just to listen, that’s eavesdropping. That’s creepy.

Past the bars along the harbor,

“…amazing to get it done without standing…”

“…so stupid they don’t know how ignorant they are.”

where a tour group waits for the boat to Nantucket.

“….the kids just blew up…”

“…sombre et orageux…”

Up the side street, sounds but no words. A young woman on her porch strums a ukulele. A boy on a skateboard whizzes past, arms outstretched, followed by, I realize, not an origami bird but a small, humming drone, three feet above and right behind him.

Through the musical din of the carousel,

“…more than once is boring…”

up to the crowded post office.

“ …peculiar scouting mission…”

“I choose to be not alone ever since…”

I head home with the water bill in my pocket, past the brew pub and the house with the sail boat trim, across the park to the water again and turn right.

“My nose is not that big and my butt’s not that small…”

“…one Lexus dealer in a hundred miles has that color…”

Along the sandy beach,

“…vodka smells nothing like kombucha…”

“…they don’t want you to know where you’re going…”

then home through curvy one-way streets with people on porches where I hear my last frag of the day.

“ … pickled in his own mess..”

Frag season is winding down. Porches empty, tour groups gone. Dead leaves in the gardens. Frags forgotten. When orbits intersect off-season you usually know the other person and stop. Conversations are real and complete and meaningful, springing from a bedrock of shared time and space. Still counts as a walk but you can meditate at home in front of the fire.

Wendy Palmer is an ex-social worker who lives on an island. Her work has appeared in Rosebud, New Millennium Writings, Nimrod, Confluence, and Martha’s Vineyard Magazine. She is shopping a novel about Ferris Wheels and working on a novel about Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 19th century radical feminist, described at the time as hysterical and overly absorbed by the woman question.

Photo Credit: Susan Helgeson

As Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee, I’m hugging a mammogram machine. “Okay, we’ll take four pictures on the right, and two on the left,” says the bubbly tech with the blond bangs. “Oops! I mean, four on the left, two on the right. Sorry! Haven’t had my coffee yet.” It’s odd to hear a medical professional apologize to you as she maneuvers a beige device the size of a small car.

“Then, an ultrasound,” she informs me. “Standard procedure, whenever you have a spot.” I instinctively pat the lump where I’d placed the small metal sticker she’d given me to better highlight the area of concern on the x-ray.

*     *     *

I’ve had this spot checked twice before. First, seven or eight years ago, when a duct in my left breast started leaking a substance that looked terrifyingly like milk. Then again, about two years ago, when I was lactating for real, and that duct had hardened into a painful lump that wouldn’t go away. The previous tests indicated no cause for alarm. It’s gone down, but it’s always there, as much a part of me as the scar on my knee from falling off my bike in fourth grade. Or was it fifth—or sixth? The memory of picking gravel from my bloody skin is no less vivid because I can’t pinpoint the year.

This time, the spot on my breast feels different, and leaks again for no apparent reason. It’s worrisome enough to stop unpacking from our recent move for a diagnostic mammogram, on the advice of my new ob/gyn. Thankfully, I find a place that can fit me in before the annual rush in October, though I forget to schedule around the news cycle.

I call my new insurance company, but I can’t determine whether this facility is in network, or that I’m covered at all. After forty-five minutes on the phone, I’m so angry that I politely decline the request to complete a brief one-question survey about the experience.

*     *     *

I slip my right shoulder out of the robe first. The tech guides my breast into the machine that seems to have been designed for someone a foot taller and molds my skin like clay with her cold hands, for which she again apologizes. She follows the diagrams and numbers printed on the clear plastic plate that are comprehensible only to her. The machine whirrs, and the plate tightens, pressing and pressing and pressing my flesh, not just my breast, but parts of my shoulder, my ribs, my armpit, until it cannot possibly go any further, then one smidge more. “Take a deep breath in, and… hold it,” the tech says as she captures the image. Briefly, I’m free. She asks me to hug the machine another way, and another, for scans at different angles: 37 degrees, 90, two 180’s.

Part of being a woman: having your story fact-checked against a man’s. Either way, you lose.

Then, mercifully, it’s over. In the waiting room—design concept: spa on a budget—I chat with my mom, braless in public for the first time since my last mammogram. The rough threads of the starched robe scratch against my nipples. I sip a diet cranberry juice box, the least worst of the all-diet beverage options available. We gab like we’re getting manicures or something, like we’re anywhere but a waiting room. I pull out my phone and check every app except for Twitter, whose quick dopamine hits seem lately to have been spiked with something more toxic than usual.

*     *     *

The documents released before the hearings catapulted me back to my small, private high school. Nestled on a tree-lined campus in a rural area of a red state, it occupied its own quirky orbit, far removed from the elite schools of the country’s power centers. Instead of a football team, we had laid-back Episcopalian chapel services in which we sang “Drop-Kick Me, Jesus” and the “Cheers” theme song. Still, the demographics were similar. In the student parking lot, I’d navigate my old station wagon with its ripped seats and broken air conditioner around hand-me-down Beemers and brand-new Range Rovers. Every year, a handful of graduates moved up to the Ivy League. The doctors’ and lawyers’ children who were my classmates are now the next generation of doctors and lawyers.

Seeing that page scanned from private-school yearbooks reminded me we’d had those, too. Dot-dots, we’d called them. Each of the fifty-two seniors in my graduating class got a half-page to say whatever we wanted—to fill up space, I suppose. My dot-dots included a quotation from an obscure Beck interview and a handful of inside jokes with my girlfriends that mostly originated while tipsy on hard lemonade at sleepovers.

At least, I think that’s what’s there. I haven’t read mine, or anyone else’s, in seventeen years. I’m sure they’re in a box, somewhere, in our new house, where all of our belongings are together for the first time in months. But I don’t look for them. I’m afraid of what I’d find in certain entries, like the boy who gave me my first kiss at a party before disclosing he’d been dared to. Or the boys who teased me incessantly about my height, using my shoulders as armrests; the boys who knew the best places to park so we could steam up the windows for a while before my curfew; the boys with legendary alcohol tolerances who ended up in rehab; the boys who, when asked to give a persuasive speech on any topic, argued they should be allowed to, as eighteen-year-old seniors, take eighth-grade girls to prom.

*     *     *

Before I can help myself to a second diet cranberry juice, my results are ready. Despite my unusual symptoms, there is, thankfully, nothing wrong. The radiologist tells me, “Like many women, you have an abundance of breast tissue that is very responsive to change.”

They’re not fat cells, though I have plenty of those, too. But fat doesn’t care when you’re stressed, say, or when you’ve just moved with your family across the country, or when you spent too many weeks in a short-term rental with a painted toilet seat your son started calling the psychedelic potty, or when you reward yourself for unpacking all your dishes by compulsively reloading an app with the latest iterations of collective trauma. Everyone is talking about the woman who’s preparing to testify on a national stage against a man who seems with each new anecdote like someone who, if you’d gone to school together, would have made fun of you, or worse. This kind of tissue soaks up hormones—stress and otherwise—like a sponge.

The radiologist performs a cursory ultrasound. She apologizes for the cold jelly, then confirms that what I’ve experienced is normal. “All part of being a woman,” she says, as she snaps off her gloves. I feel like I’ve wasted her time.

*     *     *

Part of being a woman: being one, or zero, degrees away from someone who’s experienced sexual trauma. These are the only two numbers available.

Part of being a woman: feeling the impossibility of writing about such topics without detailing your own traumas—as though without such validation, no one would believe you.

Part of being a woman: feeling like your rage has swelled out of proportion to what you’ve experienced personally.

Part of being a woman: feeling like you should probably apologize to someone for something, but you’re not sure what.

*     *     *

In the hospital atrium, my mom and I hug, then dodge plump drops as we sprint to our separate cars. On my local NPR station, the hearing’s still underway, but on a break. The commentators fill the downtime by replaying earlier highlights. When I hear the clip, “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” I start to cry. The tears sting as I compare my pain to hers. What I endured was nothing. My morning experience was a momentary, private discomfort that ended in good news. Her morning is a waking nightmare. She’s received death threats. She can speak her truth in a such a way that no one will believe her, or they’ll believe her and yet not care. What good, if any, can come of her bravery?

Rain falls on my windshield in sheets.

Later, the man testifies as I drive to preschool pick-up. At a red light, I smack the steering wheel with my palm and scream as he plays coy about those old yearbook passages. He portrays himself as a good boy, an all-American jock who loves God, his country, and beer. As though a man whose colleagues insist he’s super nice cannot possibly have a dark side.

Continuing to listen, no matter how historic the proceedings, feels like picking at a scab. I turn the radio off and retreat into my Spotify playlist of high-school angst, one of this week’s only comforts.

Listening to Tori Amos’ “Precious Things” for the first time in years feels like trying on an old, well-loved sweater and discovering it still fits.

He said you’re really an ugly girl
But I like the way you play
And I died
But I thanked him

During college, I stopped listening to Tori. Her total lack of irony made her deeply uncool. She needed to get a grip, have a sense of humor about it all. Sometime senior year, a cute boy told me he was forming a metal band. “We’re calling ourselves Torn Anus,” he said. “You know, like Tori Amos, but…not.”

“That’s hilarious,” I remember telling him. He was a nice guy and, later, a good boyfriend. We occasionally like each other’s Instagram photos. But I no longer find his wordplay hilarious.

*     *     *

Part of being a woman: having your story fact-checked against a man’s. Either way, you lose.

Part of being a woman: convincing yourself what happened was nothing at all.

Part of being a woman: considering yourself to be one of the lucky ones and looking back with fury anyway.

*     *     *

As I drive home with my kid in the backseat, the remainder of Little Earthquakes now playing at an imperceptible volume, I think of the two young men who stood at a lectern, picked at the crotches of their uniform khakis, and bragged about wanting to ask tweens to prom. Even then, I knew it was awful and walked out of class in protest.

Other events take years to reveal their shadiness, like the fact that the person who bought us all those hard lemonades at our sleepovers was usually my friend’s older brother, who was in his early twenties. Only as an adult do I wonder why a grown man would want to purchase alcohol for a bunch of teenage girls, though, as far as I can remember, nothing bad ever happened. But looking back makes me question everything.

I’d forgotten that the aspiring eighth-grade paramours were both part of a crew of dudes who’d use our free period to bench press in the gym’s weight room during freshman, or maybe sophomore, year. Then they’d come outside, where us girls were chatting, or finishing our geometry homework on a picnic bench, and find us.

Part of being a woman: convincing yourself what happened was nothing at all.

Not all of us—just the more petite girls, or the ones who, in some subtle way, seemed to be asking for it. Anything that made it easier for the boys to stick their hands under our armpits and lift us up in the air, without warning. They particularly liked to place our small bodies in one of the cylindrical black plastic trash cans that dotted our campus. We’d yelp and kick in protest, with no teachers in sight to rescue us, but we didn’t fight that hard. It was male attention.

I enjoyed my share of it, especially from one broad-shouldered boy already north of six feet tall. He could have been a linebacker if our school had fielded a team. I’d have preferred that he ask me out instead of hoisting me into garbage, but still, there was that feeling of weightlessness, of helplessness, the sense of my body as an object that someone stronger could pick up and put down at any time. Without question, I accepted that being female meant tolerating lowkey degradation.

It’s okay, I remember rationalizing. They always make sure the trash can is empty first. Later, it would become the punchline to a story I’d tell about something funny that used to happen to me in high school. I don’t think it’s funny anymore.

*     *     *

Part of being a woman: wondering whether these stories will suffice for you.

Part of being a woman: intuiting how wide I need to open the vein for you to care.

On a scale from one to five, where 1 = completely dissatisfied and 5 = completely satisfied, please rate your satisfaction with the information presented here. We’d like to know how to make this topic more appealing for you. If something more explicit would better suit your needs, please don’t hesitate to let us know.

*     *     *

Part of being a woman: cells at the ready to absorb what life slings your way.

Part of being a woman: carrying it around in your body, long after it’s over.

*     *     *

Predictably, Kavanaugh is confirmed. Life moves on, but it’s difficult to accept that I can’t walk around every day quietly seething, as I did in high school. My new therapist encourages me to work on putting those old books, metaphorically speaking, back on the shelf where they belong. “Or I could just keep them in moving boxes for months,” I offer. I thought that was a good solution.

These precious things
Let them bleed
Let them wash away

Like every other woman who grew up in America, I spent my formative years marinating in a culture that empowers and excuses the actions of a privileged class of young men. It’s okay to be angry if you experienced something like what Dr. Blasey Ford went through. It’s okay to be angry if you didn’t. We should all be angry about what recent events remind us about the worth of women in this country. We should channel our rage into action, and fight to transform our culture.

When it happens, I know where I’ll feel it. I’ve been told it’s very responsive to change.

Colleen Rothman is a writer based in New Orleans. Her essays have been featured in The Atlantic and Mutha Magazine, and her short fiction has appeared in Jellyfish Review, Okay Donkey, and Chicago Literati, among other journals. You can find her on Twitter @colleenrothman or colleenrothman.com

Photo Credit: Jacob Rothman