“You’re a boy” means, I’m policing you now, we’ve got your number, we see your deviant ways. You must be vigilant, impossibly vigilant, because you could slip anytime, you could make so many mistakes, you don’t even know what the mistakes are, since you don’t understand what it is you’re supposed to be.

You can’t hide from us now.

No—it means, Hide, hide as far as you can; what we already know we will put away from us, in a rigid little case, we will tuck it away in a hole, like bread buried in a jar in the garden. Echo of Khrushchev on a TV screen, pounding and shouting: “We will bury you.”

Or worse, We will teach you to bury yourself for us.

You’re a boy: watershed between childhood and something else. I have been ushered into the world where adults live; I have been warned, have been instructed to conceal my longing. And though I will understand, someday, that without longing there’d be nothing to carry us forward, that without longing we wouldn’t be anyone at all, I can’t see that now. I’m a child, or I was until she said, You’re a boy. I am stunned and silent, caught in a shame that seems to have no place to come to rest. I have been initiated—whether because my mother wanted to punish or to protect me—into an adult world of limit and sorrow.

PART TWO

7

Guest from Nowhere

Transfer. I sleepwalk through sixth grade, our year in Northern California, gray plain of the valley above Sacramento, acre on acre of almond trees, bare all the rainy gray winter. Somnambulist, I cannot be reached.

I’m a chubby smart bookish sissy with glasses and a Southern accent, newly arrived from unimaginable places. It’s obvious that even the teacher, an ex-military brute with a blond brush cut and missing fingers lost to a bomb in Korea, thinks I’m weird. I walk the outer edge of the playground at recess. I like to walk with my arms bumping against my hips in a repetitive rhythm, an enjoyable beat; I can lose myself in a little song of my own making and not think. The other kids—who’ve grown up in Maryville and have known each other forever—are glad to have some stranger do something strange to identify himself and solidify their bond. They notice, and howl, and I vow never to do this absent-minded thing again. But walking alone another day, unsure what else to do with myself, I forget, and they cry out with delight.