(Here some half memory—no, some smaller fraction—both wavers and insists at once. Did this happen? I’m a little boy, taking a bath with my mother, sitting between her legs in water opaque with soap. It’s hot, and everything feels too close. Something about her body—heaviness of the breasts, that dark hair wet between her thighs, something uneasy, as if it’s not safe to be there. Did what happen? The little piece of film sputters, replays: that’s all there is. The memory movie makes me feel a little sick. How is it to be understood? The mother frightened the boy with her touch, which he now cannot remember? The boy became frightened of the physicality of the mother’s body, because he understood that he loved his mother but did not love women’s bodies, and suddenly felt lost in this contradiction? Or frightened because his mother was a body, a thickening body, and his little form would slip away between her legs, into the future, while hers fell backward, into time, away from him?)

The secret allure of our game, for me, is that it is not entirely pleasant; a little frisson created by the mixture of interest and of repulsion makes it fascinate. One day we must feel extra safe from intrusion, since we emerge from the closet in my room. I am naked and have a nine-year-old’s version of an erection, and I strut around like a proud little prince, to Lorraine’s delight. She lies on the bed and instructs me to place the eraser end of a pencil in her vagina, which I do: odd little folds and crevices, moist and unfamiliar. I am instructed to sniff the pencil, and taste it, which I do, and we collapse in laughter. Later I have the distinct sense that my mother knows what’s up—not the shocking action with the pencil, specifically, but the nature of our recurrent game. But as with my hiding out from PE, nothing’s said. Perhaps my investigation of the opposite sex comes as a sort of relief?