The Sparkling-Eyed Boy Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Thanks

  Introduction

  Part I

  Up North

  A Primer on Rootlessness

  The Way It Goes When We Close Our Eyes

  The Art of Letter Writing or, “Hey! It’s been a long time!”

  Guttering

  Witness, Summer 1996

  Part II

  Choking on It, Summer 1998

  The City Mouse and the Country Mouse

  A Fictional Journey in the Deep Midwest

  Dearest Boy, (Take 1)

  Part III

  Ornamental Nature

  Funeral

  My Sister

  Sociology, That Soft Science in Us All

  You, Only Worse, Summer 1993

  The Moment After the Moment It Would Have Mattered

  When Have We Not Been Weak, Summer 1999

  An Aside About Sex

  Ethics of Nonfiction

  Part IV

  Dearest Boy, (Take 2)

  Epistolary Evidence, Summer 1999

  Blank

  Two Stories of Frustration, Summer 2000

  The Bodies of Preteen Boys

  Inside-Out Days

  Part II, Reprised

  The Perfect Day

  A Week at the Edge of the Woods

  The Bath

  Part V

  Dearest Boy, (Take 3)

  Property Lines

  Souvenirs, Summer 2001

  Walking Diary, Summer 2001

  Bread Loaf and the Bakeless Prizes

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2004 by Amy Benson

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  ISBN-13: 978-0-618-43321-6

  ISBN-10: 0-618-43321-X

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available

  Portions of this book have appeared in Connecticut Review, River Styx, Literal Latte, Quarterly West, Climate Control, Fourth Genre, Sonora Review, River Teeth, New Orleans Review, and Skidrow Penthouse.

  eISBN 978-0-547-34646-5

  v2.0518

  For my mother, for her generous and tenacious spirit;

  for Nancy, for her fierce brain and dear heart;

  and for Douglas, with whom, now, all stories begin and end.

  Author’s Note

  This book takes as its ground a place monumentally important to me as a child and a person who became for me a symbol of that place—of the best, and most difficult, things about it. Though we were close as teenagers, I have seen him only briefly a few times since then and do not know who he is as an adult. Any conjecture about his present self is simply my attempt to try on different continuities between past and present, familiarity and an exile of sorts; just as the fictional chapters in this book are attempts to imagine the great distance now between us diminishing. Neither of these things is possible, however. The past does not collapse into the present, and the distance remains. Just as it should.

  Thanks

  I would like to thank the people who have supported me in many and varied ways while I wrote this book. Thanks to Douglas; thanks to my family—Richard, Patsy, Janet, and Eden, and the Repettos; thanks to my friends who critiqued and encouraged—Catie, Lisa, Susan, Nancy, and Dennis; thanks to Kerry Klett; thanks to my former students and colleagues at Northwest Missouri State University; thanks to the teachers who have changed me: Robin Behn, Donald Callen, Elizabeth Meese, Darius Ogloza, Thomas Rabbitt, and Richard Rand; thanks to the people who very tangibly have made this possible—Ted Conover, Michael Collier, the Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize, Bill Clegg, and the team at Houghton Mifflin, most importantly Deanne Urmy, Melissa Grella, Corrina Lesser, and Alison Kerr Miller; and, finally, thanks to the people I knew in the Upper Peninsula for sharing their home.

  Introduction

  To the famous list of three events that anthropologists say characterize human life around the globe—birth, marriage, and death—I wonder if it isn’t time to add a fourth: first love.

  Who among us has not had a sparkling-eyed boy or girl—that person we met when young and couldn’t keep our minds off, the one we hungrily wanted to look at again and again and again? And have never forgotten?

  Most crushes are probably ephemeral, and the power they exert can make them seem silly, a childish example of emotion trumping reason. “Amour fou, ”say the French; or “puppy love” (a phrase I have always hated for its dismissiveness, for who loves more passionately than the young?). Others, however, are clearly deep and last a long time. And profundity lurks in something that focuses all our attention and touches us to the core.

  Those who have held a crush know that it can be hard to make other people understand. But here in your hands is something new. Amy Benson’s book makes infatuation fascinating to us. I have never read anything like it; in the intensity of its feeling and the sheer music of its language, it leapt at me from the stack of submissions for this year’s Bakeless Prize in Creative Nonfiction.

  Benson has written a singular, mostly one-sided love story. Like most good fiction, it is a product much more of the writer’s mind than of the give and take between actual lovers. But the sparkling-eyed boy, a real person, never seems to me misrepresented or exploited; Benson is too smart to broadly objectify him. If we do not know his mind, that does not mean he is belittled by her adoration.

  In fact, as Benson notes ruefully, in the beginning it was he who had the crush on her. Only later do the roles reverse, and we see how, over time, this prolonged, distanced relationship has had agony and loneliness, crossed signals and mixed messages and bad timing, just like a more conventional one.

  The book is also a searing self-examination, the literary diary of a woman who follows herself and the boy from the weirdly pure impulse that first love represents to a child or adolescent to the more complicated thing it implies for a woman headed toward thirty. Her thoughts of the sparkling-eyed boy distract her from other relationships but bind her to a youth she cherishes. She recognizes how unrealistic her feelings are, knows that she is probably idealizing the now-grown “boy,” but is not prepared to admit that this is necessarily bad. He is, she writes, “the perfect elsewhere on which I might dwell.” Upset at not seeing him one night, she is told by a wise friend, “You’re pining for something; you’re not really pining for him. ”I believe Amy Benson’s daring self-exposure in matters of the heart will resonate with many readers.

  This volume is also just a sheer pleasure to read. As they hear her story, I think readers will be enmeshed, as I was, by Benson’s remarkable dexterity with language, by the careful crafting and inspiration that result in verbal surprises on practically every page. There is music here, and poetry, and they combine with Benson’s recursive examinations of self to move the art of memoir in a fascinating and promising new direction.

  Maybe one other reason I loved this book is that I had a crush on a pretty tomboy from kindergarten to about sixth grade; she was, after my mom, the first love of my life. She was the only one who could keep up with me—even beat me—at playground sprints and spelling tests. We shared captainship of the safety patrol. She was brave and strong, once whipping a neighborhood braggart in a fight, a feat I wildly admired. We were terribly shy; I don’t think we ever even held hands or did much more than walk home together after school.
But for years after we fell out of touch I would think of her, wonder what she was doing, and occasionally torture myself by contemplating what our lives might have been like if we had declared our love and stayed with that first, pure thing.

  Then, quite a long time after, I was spared further second-guessing of the choices I had made when I heard from a mutual acquaintance that my first love had lived with the same person now for years and years—and that this life partner was a woman. It would never have worked anyway. With a stroke came closure; but how many of us are so lucky?

  Ted Conover

  NEW YORK CITY

  Part I

  In Medias Res

  Up North

  They called us trolls because we lived for nine months of the year below (that is, south of) the bridge. The Mackinac Bridge connects the Upper Peninsula of Michigan with the Lower Peninsula. For the five miles of the bridge, all you see is water and sky, blurring out at the edges. People died erecting its towers and suspending its cables over water three hundred feet deep—they say the body of at least one man is trapped in a concrete tower. In high winds, tiny un-American cars like mine have been blown off the bridge, down to the storm-blackened Straits of Mackinac. I imagine the impact every time—flying free from the car, the beautiful water like an anvil driving the bones in my toes all the way up into my soft neck.

  Some people who live far from the Great Lakes don’t know that Michigan comes in two pieces disconnected by water. The Lower Peninsula looks like a mitten, a comfort to trolls far away from home, who can always, when asked by strangers where they’re from, raise their right hands—palm forward and lined like a road map, thumb out to the side—and point to their hometown. But the mitt of Michigan is not charming to the billy goats above the bridge. Yoopers, as they often call themselves (a phonetic version of UPers), are surrounded on every side by the largest quantity of fresh water on the globe; they’re flooded with evergreens and wild animals and independence. Even though they’re attached by land to Wisconsin, Michigan’s downstate capital, Lansing, rules them. Detroit, in turn, through its sheer size and auto industry clout, rules Lansing, and yoopers hate Detroit in every way. That’s where we’re from, 350 miles to the south.

  The yooper boys I knew told my sister and me they felt sorry for us, all the secret ways the city must be ruining us: to live where things are assembled, and the noise, the grease and sweat that must work its way into our skin. And the stench of the Three Sisters smokestacks, and the Rouge River, the Detroit River, none of which they’d seen—but they could imagine the scent of things burning that never should have been things in the first place. And the blacks. The blacks, with their hot crack pipes and babies and guns that were not at all like their own guns. To accept concrete and traffic and crime and the constant hazy glow that unravels the significance of stars; to live by deforming, more and more every day, what we had been given, down to the compacted dirt under our feet—how could we stand it?

  They said all of these things in ugly or touching or frightened or silent ways. And I for one believed in places that didn’t looked humbled by humans, where more things grew than were produced, where I could thrill myself for whole moments at a time that I was the last person on earth. I believed those boys were right and I was, by some misfortune, a troll.

  Most of us downstaters get as far north as Mackinac Island: we take a hydroplane ferry across the Straits of Mackinac, eat fudge, swoon around the Grand Hotel, pretending we have erased crass modernity but secretly complaining that the island doesn’t allow cars.

  Those who actually cross the bridge find that the U.P. is at least ten times as big as Rhode Island and has only one area code for its sparse population. The seven-month winters and towns of thirty or forty people drive off the weak and the ambitious. The U.P. might as well be Alaska—ours only because we’re greedy. And, as Alaska was for its gold, the U.P. was prospected for timber and shipping routes almost two centuries ago by the shy, the sturdy, the malignant, and the insane. But this is just the history of America, distilled.

  Some people press on past the bridge, though. A handful of downstaters, like my family, perch nervously in their subdivisions most of the year, waiting to snap alive in the U.P. for a few summer months. My suburban family heated our house with a wood stove, cut and split the wood, raised and canned the year’s vegetables, made our own clothes; in short, we did everything we could to live in a time when living required more effort. So when we packed the car up tight each June and drove north, it was understood we were going home. Of course, we noticed the satellite dishes, the Schlitz, the propped-up cars in the U.P.; and, frankly, we needed them in order to claim we liked the wilderness and its rough love better than the yoopers did. A favorite sentiment of my parents’ as we’d watch a pink sun drown itself in Lake Huron, our bathing suits still wet, sand in the seashell curves of our ears, quiet everywhere except for the rhythmic wash of the waves and our own breath, which were one: Remember this when we’re trapped in the middle of the crowded winter.

  Even though my sister and I wore hand-me-downs and homemade pants, we lived in Detroit and read National Geographic, we’d been to both coasts—we’d been to Europe, for god’s sake. We never spoke of these things with our locals, though. We knew that what could give us power in Detroit, like Europe or hair spray, was a liability in the U.P.

  We were “summers,” people who spend their summers in the same vacation spot every year. Summers are displaced peopie: we learn not to be at home at home. But my sister and I knew enough to need a home, and so we wanted their home. We wanted to be more local than our locals. And we thought we had a way in: we could trace our family to founders of the minuscule town. The boys could see our grandfather’s childhood home falling to bits at the base of the hill that sloped down to the bay. We were no mere “tourists.”

  Oh how my sister and I curled our lips against the tourists. They stayed in the handful of rental cabins just down the shore from us and pulled up with inboard boats behind too-shiny trucks. They came to fish and slap mosquitoes from their pale thighs. They stayed for a week or two, thought it was pretty, wrinkled their noses at the sulfury well water and said how the fishing wasn’t as good as last year. They used this place, but they didn’t need it, and it didn’t dictate to them what was both beautiful and true for the rest of their lives.

  All summer we swam with our locals, ate Zingers and sometimes venison steak with them, looked through their yearbooks with them, fell through the rotten boards of their tree houses with them, got summer jobs with them, drank in the woods with them, sometimes we kissed them, broke our hearts with them. And then, every September, we drove back south without them.

  Come the next June, we needed them to circle us, sniff our hair, knock us down, and accept us back with them, as one of their own.

  Let’s face it: my sister and I were fresh meat to the local boys. Their charms had become stale to the local girls by the time we’d discovered one another. They recited every story they knew by heart in accents that made us giggle—Oh yah? Tell me aboat it, eh? They smiled at the charming miniatures of themselves in our rapt eyes.

  When kids realize the end of their road is not the end of the world, they wonder if they could have fallen into a better place, a better spread of chromosomes. They are on the verge of a dissatisfied life, a grown-up life, the life of a summer.

  Sure, the boys thought they might eventually get laid, but what they really wanted, what we did give up easily, was the sense that they had fallen, by the love of no flimsy god, into the best place on earth. Their wondering was over and their dazzled lives could begin.

  He attached himself to me from the first; I don’t know why. He didn’t like makeup on girls and I wasn’t allowed to wear it. I didn’t know how to flirt. Maybe it was as simple as that. Whatever the reason, we stuck together, as friends, for years, while I abused his feelings, pining for another local who, in turn, abused my feelings. This is so typical. We were practicing for life: neglecting what you
have and who you are for what you can’t have, who you won’t ever be.

  But we never scorned where we were; we knew what beauty stitched itself into the shifting moods of the water and the serious pine trees crowding right down to the water’s edge, daring us to walk among them. He loved with loyalty. He would never leave this place and be from somewhere else, struggling to breathe through vestigial gills. And, as I got ready to go to college, he knew before I did I could never stay.

  He married someone else three years after I left and didn’t return. I can only think he needed someone he’d still be touching when he was sixty, skin to skin in the middle of the night.

  How do we make meaning out of what does not abide?

  He lived, lives still, in a town of maybe forty people and a general store/restaurant/bar, post office, and Catholic church. I can’t remember everything about him as well as I’d like, and I have no way of knowing what I’ve forgotten. A few pictures I have of him, though, tell me much of what I need to know. They were taken during the town’s centennial celebration in 1979 and published in a little book commemorating the festivities and the family history of the area. He was only nine or so (though I was there, in a homemade pioneer dress, we wouldn’t meet for another three years), but he got his black-and-white photo in the booklet twice. In one, a fourth grade class photo, he’s grinning and he has his arm around the boy next to him, about to pinch his cheek with a quick, sharp hand. In the other, my favorite, he is in a rocking contest, propped up in a large rocker. Cushions protect his bony frame, his knees meet in the middle, and his feet fly out to either side, like the hooves of a new colt. But I’m most interested in his face: he’s pushing it toward the camera, a smile so tight across his freckled skin that his eyes are nearly pinched closed. This is a being capable of feeling joy through his whole body to the tips of his teeth. This boy is not mean, nor is he afraid. The centennial booklet belongs to my grandmother, and she keeps asking for it, but I make excuses, put her off. I can’t give up that image of life.