pleasure, which one offered the most “realistic” experience, which one brought me “closer” to my lover.
VI.
Sometimes I wonder, if I had been conceived three years later
—would I have been born?
Sometimes I wonder, if my parents had had the choice
—what would they have chosen?
VII.
She loved to tease. She knew how to wind me up. During our senior year, she turned that crank almost every day. The first time, I was sitting at the lab table in biology—dissecting or mixing test tubes. She came up behind me, slid her hand down the front of my shirt, put her face on my neck, and inhaled deep. She said, “I fucking love Polo. It gets me so hot.” She walked back to her table and left me to fumble around, hard and distracted. After the bell rang, she walked up to me, slipped her hand in the front pocket of my jeans, and left a note. This was the first of many notes—two or three a week for five months. Notes where she told me in great, vivid detail what she wanted to do with me—to me. While I didn’t know if they were for real or some elaborate gag, I loved to read them, then reread them.
Maybe one fell from my pocket when doing laundry or maybe it fell from my backpack, I’m not sure. But my dad found one of her notes and stopped in my room one night and had the talk. I was sitting on my bed, listening to my Walkman and reading. He looked in pain, like some-thing bad happened. “I’m going to work,” he said.
“Okay?” He’d never told me he was leaving before. He just grabbed his lunch and left, 11:15 every night. “Is everything okay?” I asked.
“I think this is yours. I found it on the floor.” He handed me one of her notes. It was folded, but not her way of folding. This one had been opened and was now folded in half, then half again.
“I can explain,” I said. He held his hand up.
“Look, son,” he said. “I am not really good with these things. I . . . just don’t . . . look, don’t make my mistake. If you aren’t careful, it can happen to you—you can knock up some girl—have to get a job to raise a kid—end up in some factory—end up an old man before you’re thirty. That thing in your shorts—keep it there. Go to college and get your degree. Then have your fun.”
“Okay,” I said.
“And if you’re going to ignore me, at least use these.” He tossed a small box on my bed.
I wanted to explain that we weren’t doing anything. Explain that she wrote this stuff for fun, to wind me up. Tell him that I just read the notes. Admit that I can’t even write anything back to her—much less do the things she wrote about in these letters. But then, he threw that box of condoms and it seemed like for a moment, there was something different in his eyes—something that said, so what if you suck at baseball, and football, and hockey, at least you are good with the ladies.