Oola

She told me this on a train in Normandy as we zippered between provinces. From Arizona we eventually jetted to France, to attend my third cousin’s wedding. The father of the groom paid for both of our flights, despite thinking our names were Lola and Steve. We’d gotten used to the weirdness of things and accepted this extravagance, bidding the scorpions and toothache-inducing sunsets adieu. “Such a handsome couple,” he drunkenly cried when he met us. “Good on you, Steve-O!” From the wedding, we made our way to Austria, where the ski lodge awaited its whipping.

On the train, we passed fields of rapeseed so yellow our eyes stung. At the time, neither of us knew the name for this plant, which made it all the more magical; Oola leaned against the window and mouthed mustard gas, mustard gas, as the yellow expanses, like lit-up barges, floated by. None of the Frenchies on board seemed to care, or they couldn’t be bothered to look up from their papers. The man sitting across from us was roused from his novella but once, when Oola sat upright and arched her back, stretching her arms from window to compartment door. His gaze was quick, impassive, landing on her décolletage as lightly as a fly. Traveling with Oola, I’d begun to tally the up–downs and backward glances she received from strangers in a day, which soon proved more complicated than I’d first thought, demanding a specific system of categorization that often numbered in the triple digits before dinner. While I obsessed over whether the ticket taker had eyed or ogled her, Oola remained unimpressed, her gaze fixed on the distant hills, which, contrary to rumor, had no eyes with which to return the stare. When she caught me actually tallying my results on the back of a receipt and I tried to explain, she groaned, “This would only seem remarkable to a man.” When I tried to justify my interest as vaguely anthropological, she waved her hand in my face: “Oh, please, Leif! Do what you want, but don’t expect me to play too.” Her words wounded me. I remember we stayed in that night, just us, a quiet meal of cold noodles and an overcompensatingly large TV.

But after, perhaps now that she had brought to light the strangeness of my interest, I no longer tried to curb it. I became all the more committed. I devised a ranking system, from innocuous appraisal to elderly lingering to pure sex stare. I wore sunglasses to hide the fact that I looked not at Oola, whose flesh, by then, I knew, but at the men who were so bold as to guess. That we were constantly traveling only exacerbated my problem: Crowds seemed to fold around Oola, though of course I knew this couldn’t be true, and I often felt like a factory overseer, checking workers off a list as they shuffled past her, the heavenly time clock, punching in to our world with the force of their eyes. This Frenchman, neatly dressed in black, was no exception; for the entire ride I had been waiting, without realizing, for the moment his resolve would waver and he’d have to sneak a peek.

“I managed to fit eighty percent of Disco’s head in my mouth,” Oola went on, unfazed by his attention. Of course she was. Like any pretty girl, she’d learned how to conserve energy. She saved her spit for the men with zero boundaries; I’d seen her scream at a touchy-feely senior citizen that dementia was too kind a fate for the likes of him. “Old Disco didn’t protest. I could’ve gotten it all the way in, but my mother came out to the yard. She screamed and pulled him out of my arms. After that, I earned the nickname T-Rex. Disco still adored me.”

The Frenchman had returned to his book, and Oola had begun to bore herself. Her eyes drifted to the window. It was just the three of us in the compartment; in this rare cell, with only the sound of the train’s internal mechanics to fill the room, no one was looking at her. The countryside tumbled by and I did my best to take it in, but I was no better than my objects of study. I was the doctor double-dipping his IVs, and after a studied minute staring out the window, I glanced at Oola’s inclined neck, which, after so much yellow, was blotted with blue. I remembered this phenomenon from childhood: staring at my green plaid bedspread with watering eyes, willing myself not to blink, then looking up quickly at the blank wall of my bedroom, which would be, to my delight, superimposed with red squares. Older now, I found it easy to not blink. There was too much to miss out on.

Thus, the rest of the train ride passed in peace: the Frenchman reading, Oola drifting in and out of sleep, and me knowing just when to look up and witness bits of her (a wrist, her widow’s peak) turn blue.

SHE COULD HAVE STOPPED ME at any time. All she had to do was cry no fair! to call it off, hold up! to halt the game indefinitely.

Sports? I can hear her sneering. Know your audience, Leif.

All you had to do, Oola, I would patiently explain, was say enough.

Enough’s enough, eh? That’s one of those words that sounds weirder the more you say it.

Or just say no.

Ahh, I see. A wry smile. Now we’re talking about a different game.

It’s true that the thought of Oola murmuring no still has a licentious ring to it. I picture her at age fourteen, lip-glossed to hell and back, practicing saying it in the steamed-up bathroom mirror. Hold your horses, mister. No means no. It would take us a while to get to the point when she actually meant it, when all forms of touch merited an apology, when Oola wore long sleeves.

At the outset of the experiment, though, we packed and repacked our belongings with glee. We were on the road. We flaunted our passports, extravagantly mobile in a fast-condensing world. We didn’t even have to decide where to travel to next; an email from my mother so often directed our fate. From Austria we went to Romania, from Romania to Croatia, from Croatia to Dubai, from Dubai to Montreal, from Montreal to Vermont, from Vermont to the Orbitsons’ beach house in Florida, from there to the patiently mildewing cabin in the deep seat of Big Sur. We liked bouncing around, bound to nothing but each other; our digestive schedules quickly synced. We were American children and thus no strangers to false gods. Xanax, college, travel, core strength, hardcore sex … being together was one more monolith to cling to.

As a freshman in college I took a seminar called (De)facing the Face of God. It was faddish then to talk about nostalgia, though I wonder if this is the case for every class of eighteen-year-olds. I made it through four years at one of those preposterous liberal arts colleges where students design their own majors amid marble and maples and fuck frequently to ward off S.A.D. Fresh from the codes and clubs of a Connecticut prep school, I got a bit carried away. I started out strong with Critical Kiwi Studies and dreamed of a life as a poet-cum-shepherd in the wilds of New Zealand; sophomore spring I saw the light and switched to the ever-more-employable Philosophy of Porn. But when my academic adviser asked me to specify my interest—kiddie? kink?—I got cold feet. I settled, at last, on Contemporary Thought and Literature, because I thought it sounded vague enough to accommodate my then obsession with the understudied leitmotif of dessert in modern fiction. Some of my notes still exist from this period:

ice cream (choc) as default signifier of femme shame. originates w/ Sex & City?

mary gaitskill vs. lorrie moore: masters of sad pastry

devil f. cake=neocapitalist undertones?

PUDDING!!!!

As critical thinkers in the loosely grouped humanities department, we were expected, in this seminar, to be militants against nostalgia and its pearly ilk. Like cakes (!) in a bake sale, our memories were unwrapped and arranged on a seminar table, Loss of Virginity and the Moment That I Felt Alive and the Scent of X’s Perfume. Then, like naughty boys, we stomped on them. We squished Mother’s Cooking beneath our faux-leather shoes. “Don’t hold on to these false gods,” the professor coaxed. “Purge!” For some reason, no girls had signed up for this class. We hunkered down and listened to Chad’s tale of the Moment He Knew He Would Die. We analyzed Luke’s fetish for high school locker rooms, “which is weirder than it sounds because, well, I didn’t even play a sport.”

We watched IKEA commercials, spaghetti westerns, footage from Rolling Stones tours. “Lies!” our prof screamed. Mick Jagger’s face fucked the window behind him. “Lovely lies!” The college quad was swallowed by Mick’s lips, or, I should say, the concept of that hallowed pucker. We spent two weeks debunking the Crush, alternately named the Great Romance, Head Cheerleader, and/or the One. “I didn’t know it then,” Dale moaned, “but looking back, I think she was it.” I was floored by our collective lack of originality. Meanwhile, the teacher thumped Dale on the back. “Expunge,” he soothed, “expunge. It’s not Beth you love, it’s the figment of Beth. Clear out your attic. She’s for sale.”

Though we knew her to be fictional, we were all in love with Beth, sweet Beth, with her kneesocks and her scruples regarding pubic hair. Never mind the fact that she was forever fourteen or holding us back with impossible longing. Beneath the analysis, we thought only of her pubic bone, which Dale described as slippery. I pictured a moonstone, which had sat on a shelf in my childhood room (damn nostalgia!). It was a small seminar room and the steamed-up windows had always to be open, even in the height of December.

After class, I lay awake and thought of home, of all the things I’d loved and thus used up. Punk, Tay, Cape Cod in July—the professor’s voice haunted me. Send off those ships! I brushed the memory of cracked crab from my furthermost teeth and silently grieved for my golden retriever. Hadn’t her love been real? When I was young, Bubba had been the only one able to withstand the torque force of my hugs. “Ouch!” my mom—and, later, girls like Beth—would say when we held hands. “You’re cutting off my circulation. Quit it!”

Compared to other people, I always wanted more, more than expected, more than OK. Even as a little boy, I pushed too hard; I broke screen doors. While the other kids sniffled and dozed in the glitzy ruins of a fourth-birthday party, plunging their hands in their pants and unearthing entire pieces of cake with world-weary expressions, I trolled the perimeters, popping every balloon. It was in a fit of passion that I decapitated my teddy bear. Bubba had looked on solemnly.

“Born heartbroken,” the elementary school nurse had sighed. “Official diagnosis.” She was a buxom ex-hippie who taught Pilates to our mothers on Sunday and used us to practice her unpatented alternative therapies, healing our energies when we came in with scraped knees and having us chant boo-boo, boo-boo, until the pain suddenly subsided or we got bored. She cracked our little knuckles and gave us rosemary lozenges. “Empathic stomachaches,” she pronounced. “Poor little looker.” For a while, I loved her. I came up with endless reasons to be sent to her office; at least once a week, I pretended to have lice so that she’d sit behind me and comb my hair with a plastic drink stirrer. All this ended when the school, fearful that my itching was a liability, accused my mother of negligent parenting. She scrubbed my head with molasses-colored shampoo and made me swear not to go to the nurse anymore. “If it itches,” she told me, “keep it to yourself. Teacher doesn’t need to know. Just tell Mommy. No more nurse. Itchy equals ice cream. OK?”

I wagged my lying scalp: OK. She handed over the promised push pop. I ate it alone in my room, knees drawn to my chest. I wept, another pastime. There’d be no more conversations about chakras in a clean beige room for me, the nurse palpating my lymph nodes and using words I couldn’t know. I’d been exiled from her sterile harem of gadgets and chai, just as I’d already been exiled from the library (another sterile harem, with more bodily an odor as I shadowed the spinsters who shelved books for a living) for reading too much and needing fresh air. Forced outside, I stood on the blacktop and gulped down this air, which I found overrated, and still couldn’t seem to fill my lungs up. Even this, I wanted too much of. I’d received yet more proof that I was a vacuum, that that was what it meant to be a little boy: You drained people, like the banana-colored babies I’d seen sucking at the neighbor’s tit as if she were a playground water fountain.

“The babies are hungry,” my mom had said happily. Her adjective choice only horrified me more, and thus began my two-week anorexic spell that Mom will bring up to this day, shushing the table at Thanksgiving to tell it.

“Such a waif,” she will laugh, no brick wall herself. In the dining room candlelight, her hollow cheeks resemble cellar doors. Expensive jewelry traffic-jams her wrists. “Such a sensitive thing. You think he’s thin now? You should’ve seen him back then. I caught him sneaking his dinner out the door, pot roast in his pockets. Just what do you think you’re doing, mister? And he looked up and said, Feeding the moles. The moles need food too, Mom. It would’ve been sweet if I wasn’t afraid he’d pass out. Honestly, he could’ve worn one of my bangles as a garter belt.”

“Mom—”

“I’m not saying you did. But you could’ve, if you wanted. I’m not telling the bra story, don’t worry.” She winks over her brimming glass. “I’ll save that gem for Christmas.”

The bra story: yet another example of me wanting more than was possible, more of the silky-smooth substance I associated with women, more robust of an answer to the question I eventually became fixated on—Who are you?—something more believable than her blithe I’m your mommy! which sounded as cryptic to my third-grader’s ears as I’m your first dose of the Other or I’m the sack of flesh from whence you came.

Perhaps my obsession with being a drain, my conviction that there was some funnel inside me that could never be quenched, not by good deeds or ice cream or, later, by ketamine, was due in small part to having so frail a mother. I would never dare to suggest that her struggles with weight, with depression, with the little pink pills she called Good Guys, had anything truly to do with me or that she is to blame for how I ended up: Just like Nurse told me, wiping my tears with patchouli-stained fingers, some babies are born breech, others brokenhearted. But it can’t have helped my doughy heart, still in the process of rising and taking on shape (braided? Bundt?), to watch my mother wax and wane, her chic black slacks tailored in vain. Before I had even the faintest notion of fleshiness as a personal preference (d’ya like em knobby or plush? the older boys cackled), I hugged her leg and wanted more, if only to know that she would still be there the next morning, shaking her head to the story read aloud on the radio and scrambling my eggs without ever touching the yolk.

On the afternoon in question, her underwear fit me surprisingly well, the panties puckering only slightly in the back and the bra like two yarmulkes glued to my chest. I was a nine-year-old bombshell. What I remember with the most pain is not the embarrassment of my parents discovering me (doing jumping jacks in front of the mirror) and laughing until they cried, my father practically killing the cat in his haste to get the camera, but rather the fine lace trim of my mother’s underwear and the print: pomegranates on one, Swiss dots on another, a bow the size of my pinky nail on the pair that I, after much deliberation, wriggled into. Just like a girl’s, in style and size. At the time, I was astonished. I hadn’t been privy to this sense of humor, reflected in a pair of panties with two kitty paw prints on the back, or ever considered that amid my hand-wringing and eye-rubbing, my mother, despite her modest black garb, might be wanting something too.

This is no Oedipal sob story. Now I only feel sad for my mother, an unbearable tenderness when I picture her getting ready for bed, steadying herself on the bedpost. She is still a private person. I’m not supposed to be in the bedroom with her, even via my eunuch’s imagination, and yet I long to offer her a hand. Thinking of her handwashing the peach lace bra she barely needed, laying out each intimate, it strikes me that by having the numbers on her scale go down (99, 97 …) she was also trying to go backward. Or maybe I’ve got it all wrong: Maybe she didn’t want to get any lower or younger or less than she was but just to hold tight to the scraps that she had, pause her life on an approximation of perfect, like someone playing poker while their toddler waited in the too-hot car some hundred feet away. If she kept playing, she could get more, could hit jackpot, but she could also lose big time or lose a little more every round, so why trouble the waters? That is a difference between us, I think. I would play until dawn, until my desire supinated me. If she were the one in the parking lot, waiting in Nevadan silence, I’d play until the car reached boiling and she nodded off with her head on the dashboard.

Staring at my dorm room ceiling, I thought about my mother, my childhood, and I thought about Beth, the girl made a celebrity because she’d been so plain, doomed to lisp a class of boys to sleep each autumn night. So lava-hot were our desires, her puberty had been Pompeii’d: We combed the ash from her erogenous zones with hushed, professorial care. Lying awake at 3:30 a.m., I was both a budding writer and an archaeologist. Well, really, I was neither; I was just a kid, undressed, with my bare legs splayed and ideals, like knickknacks, lined up on the little ledge that overlooked my bed. Was it on these sleepless nights that I first realized how at risk I was of being exactly like everyone else? I thought of the other boys in my class, deep-feeling, big-talking, rosacea’d with passion: Did we share the same bookshelf, same background, same visions of love, and thus the same trauma of suddenly finding ourselves, for the very first time, disadvantaged, in the face of flavored ChapStick, of unbearably soft breasts? Our imaginations were tragically tidy, like a cartoon drawing of said breasts (circle and dot). If Beth didn’t trim, we’d do it ourselves, quoting Barthes, saying baby. As I tossed and turned, one thing became clear to me: I had to find a hot new way to love, or risk obliteration.

I listened to my roommate breathe. I felt a nonsexual tingle when he turned over and sighed—a long, hard fwuhhh. They soothed me immensely, these human sounds. When he coughed, I could’ve kissed him. During the day I tried to fit the mold of the acerbic student, marked by tatty sweaters and a monolithic brow; but for all the books I waded through, my academic distaste for society was diluted the instant I stepped out of the library and realized it was dusk, that slow disaster, when one more day wicks down and all the world can’t help but sigh and let their shoulders slump. I shared this daily tragedy with the joggers and the elderly as we moseyed through the lilaced air, dinner on our minds. The sight of someone’s shoulders slumping, at this haunted hour or on the bus or one nook over in the library, meant more to me than sex (I swear), because it was the body at its purest: not the blank-brained thrall of sex or selflessness of books, but the quiet click of resignation as one slips into herself. This is why, much later, in our various house-sits, I loved to watch Oola in the shower. Even with the curtain drawn, I found myself enthralled by the long blur of her body as she went about its tasks, moving her hands in varying circles as she rinsed, washed, and repeated.

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