Boys by nature require these silences; they must not be startled by too many words, spoken too quickly. What they actually say is not that important. The important parts exist in the silences between the words. I know what we’re both looking for, which is escape. They want to escape from adults and other boys, I want to escape from adults and other girls. We’re looking for desert islands, momentary, unreal, but there.
My father paces the living room, jingling his keys and small change in his pockets. He’s impatient, he can’t help hearing these monosyllables, these murmurs, these silences. He walks into the hall and makes snipping motions with his fingers, meaning I’m to cut it short. “I have to go now,” I say. The boy makes a sound like air coming out of an inner tube. I understand it.
I know things about boys. I know what goes on in their heads, about girls and women, things they can’t admit to other boys, or to anyone. They’re fearful about their own bodies, shy about what they say, afraid of being laughed at. I know what kind of talk goes on among them as they horse around in the locker room, sneak cigarettes behind the field house.
I don’t think any of these words apply to me. They apply to other girls, girls who walk along the high school halls in ignorance of them, swinging their hair, swaying their little hips as if they think they’re seductive, talking too loudly and carelessly to one another, fooling nobody; or else acting pastel, blank, daisy-fresh. And all the time these clouds of silent words surround them,
This is what I know about boys in general. None of it has to do with individual boys by themselves, the boys I go out with. These boys are usually older than I am, although they aren’t the kind with greasy ducktails and a lot of leather, they’re nicer than that. When I go out with them I’m supposed to be home on time. If I’m not, my father has long conversations with me in which he explains that being home on time is like being on time for a train. If I were to be late for a train, I would miss the train, wouldn’t I?
“But this house isn’t a train,” I say. “It’s not going anywhere.” My father is exasperated; he jingles his keys in his pocket. “That’s not the point,” he says.
What my mother says is, “We worry.” “What about?” I say. There’s nothing to worry about, as far as I can see.
My parents are a liability in this as in other matters. They won’t buy a television, like everyone else, because my father says it turns you into a cretin and emits harmful radiation and subliminal messages as well. When the boys come to pick me up, my father emerges from the cellar wearing his old gray felt hat and carrying a hammer or a saw, and grips their hands in his bear paw handshake. He assesses them with his shrewd, twinkly, ironic little eyes and calls them “sir,” as if they’re his graduate students. My mother goes into her nice lady act and says almost nothing. Or else she tells me I look sweet, right in front of the boys.
In the spring they appear around the corner of the house in their baggy gardening pants, smudged with mud, to see me off. They drag the boys out to the backyard, where there is now a large pile of cement blocks accumulated by my father for some future contingency. They want the boys to see their display of irises, as if these boys are old ladies; and the boys have to say something about the irises, although irises are the last thing on their minds. Or else my father attempts to engage them in improving conversation about current topics, or asks them if they’ve read this book or that one, pulling books from the bookshelves while the boys shift on their feet. “Your father’s a card,” the boys say uneasily, later. My parents are like younger, urchinlike brothers and sisters whose faces are dirty and who blurt out humiliating things that can neither be anticipated nor controlled. I sign and make the best of it. I feel I’m older than they are, much older. I feel ancient.