My sister’s new boyfriend, Jerry, has a motorcycle: a potent little package of chrome and black enamel that gives off some scent of heady thrill, intoxicating, like a stolen cigarette or the scent of bourbon. He’s sleek as his machine, all of seventeen, muscular from working in his daddy’s concrete business, his thick black hair oiled and combed back attentively, just the right lank flourish of curl in the front, loosely shadowing his forehead, pushed back sometimes with a veiny arm: Love me tender. Once Sally takes me to the pool with him; she’s lying in the sun slick with Coppertone. (I am embarrassed by the Coppertone girl, the one whose white buttocks are exposed by the dog tugging at her bathing suit; where is her dignity?) Sally’s going blonder, pointy white sunglasses like my mother’s making her look unsettlingly adult, and I’m walking around the perimeter of the pool, when I come upon the damp windowless shed where the lifeguards and their buddies lift weights. Jerry’s on his back on the bench, pressing a barbell up, his friends in their black trunks circled around him, just enough light through the cracked barnlike door so I can make out the oiled curves of the boys’ chests and shoulders, their slim, dappled bellies in the dark hot room that seems to pulse with their combined presence, a room where I could never go, though I might stand struck still beside the door by something I couldn’t name.

Another hot day, Jerry takes me for a ride on the back of the motorbike. His shirt’s off, he’s wearing just blue jeans, and in order to stay on the bike as we tool around corners, scooping the neighborhood, I am to put my arms around his bare waist, the likes of which I have never before touched: supple and chiseled, both firm and just yielding enough, sun colored, inexplicably satisfying, sending off some deep flutter in me, down in the base of my stomach, in the base of my spine—something far more exciting than riding a motorcycle.

This body is so different from my father’s pale softness, from any other man I’ve seen (what other man have I seen?), the first male I’ve apprehended or touched who seems to me compelling, beautiful, his chest and belly themselves like some golden thing from Sumer, an artifact pulled from the burial mounds of Troy.