The boy and girl slide through the water. I watch, furtively, and think: Her mother. Somewhere her mother watches them make their smooth way through the water. He pulls her close to him, a large hand claiming her smooth belly. She strokes his cheek. I actually lean forward off my lounge, almost speaking, wanting only to beckon her to the poolside for a moment and whisper, “Be nice to your mother.” But I say nothing at all, and pretend to read.
I see the accelerating future approach. I’ve done this already, after all, with two boys—grieved for the silly three-year-olds, the gap-toothed six-year-olds, the willowy nine-year-olds. They’ve died and will never return, and I grieve. She ruffles my hair when we watch television and my back actually arches, like a cat, pushing into her hand, asking for more. She brings goodness to me and makes me fear evil; she gives and takes away the world. There are so many mysteries ahead.
I remember the world fading into the universe made by Two, and I remember how it shatters when that ends—and then, how it begins again, brand new. So much to do, so many mistakes to make for the first time. And what is there to regret? This is how the world goes, this is how it must be. I don’t grieve for her—I grieve for me, sitting by some poolside in a few years, pretending to read so my sunglasses hide my hungry, tearful eyes as she glides by, oblivious.
I haven’t seen my childless friend in many years, but I’ve replayed that conversation again and again in my mind. I hadn’t thought I needed to say to her that it’s terrifying to be God. I thought such a thing goes without saying. The risks are so enormous—the losses so sharp. For years, I’ve wanted to tell her how powerless that power feels. How it is to be a voyeur, subject to the most pleading of desires. I wish my friend were here, and I could say: I dare you to try this. I double dare you.
Salon, September 16, 1997
I wrote a column for Salon for a few years, called Second Opinion. (It was part of the regrettably named section Mothers Who Think.) I consider this essay as one of a pair with the next story, “Crossing to Safety.” They are two ways to think about the way we lose childhood—the enormous gift of being young and healthy and unafraid for a time, the inexpressible small deaths of growing up, and the stupefying losses of simply watching this happen.
Crossing to Safety
EVERY SUMMER FOR SEVEN YEARS, I CAMPED WITH OTHER Girl Scouts beside a lake, in the shadow of a mountain in southern Oregon. A cavernous lodge stood above the shore, and we had endless acres of tall pines and dusty trails to ourselves. In all those years I never found the camp’s boundaries.
We were divided roughly by age into several groups and assigned to airy cabins, each with its own campfire ring, its own name, its own quality. I remember the days as being almost without variation and filled from morning to night with songs of all kinds, funny and sentimental and silly and sad. Each day meant waking to “Reveille” played on an invisible trumpet, to bright, cool air and pine perfume, to the clattering of battered plastic bowls heaped with oatmeal and the dull thunk of arrows hitting hay bales. And each day ended with a chorus of high girls’ voices signing taps in the sudden dark. When the last note (“safely rest—God is night”) faded, niiiiiigghh, like a melancholy kiss, we would stay silently by the fire a few moments, each of us with hot, dry eyes toward the flame, backs cool in the rising forest night.
I’ve never gone back, unwilling to break the spell those summers cast upon me, an enchantment with the whole and its many parts under which I still dwell. Each thing still has power over me: pine scent, canoes, wildflowers, the popping of firewood under a starry sky, and girls. Those summers are part of why I still live in the Northwest, part of every camping trip and hike, part of every swim in its cold rivers and mountain lakes.
A few years ago, I volunteered to work at a camp my son attended. It was all much tamer than mine had been: a pool instead of a lake, a small town complete with Dairy Queen nearby, wide grassy spaces instead of corridors of trees. It was a pretty place, with big poplars and a few snakes and house martins and bats swooping at dusk. I made pipe-cleaner animal figures and painted faces on river rocks on hot afternoons and doled out Band-Aids. But I was uncomfortable inside my thick skin—conservative, withdrawn. Adult.
The campers under my care seemed mulish and bored, and instead of singing they listened to the radio, and it seemed to me they thought smaller, more local thoughts than I had. Boys and girls were mixed together there, in a hot, explosive herd, and the girls were especially careful, unwilling to swim races or chase balls or cast a fishing line. At their age, I would take a canoe alone into the swamp at one end of the lake to sit in silence and wait for beavers and consider things. They sat together, fettered into a constant group by fear and liability insurance, heads tucked together like birds on a roost.
I missed the lake. It was mostly the lake where we did things—where we floated, swam, rowed, paddled, raced, and dived—in that round, deep, black pool a true mile wide.
I swam across the lake once. It is one of the measures of courage by which I have weighed the rest of my life.
There was a lake swim every summer. Each girl could try, if she could prove herself first in a test of endurance by swimming fifty laps, swimming for an hour or more without stopping. Those who dared came down to the dock on a chosen evening, when the light had begun to yellow and the mountain across the water was turning black with shadow. Counselors—those large, strong, tall women who ambled through the woods like an admired alien race—sat on the dock, their big legs dangling in the clean water. We swam without rest, forward and backward, pacing ourselves into the darkness.
A few days later, the half-dozen of us who had passed the test were awakened before dawn. I pulled on my swimsuit and clothes—whispering, hurrying, shivering, thrilled—and walked through the forest to the shore with the others, no sound but our own padding feet. Six girls, six counselors, six rowboats set out with the swish of oars into the empty, flat lake in the dark, and crossed.
It was a long way, that mile, so far from the safety of the camp that we could barely see its shore, and all the cabins on the other side were hidden in the hovering trees. On a tiny spit of sand under the mountain, I took off my jeans and sweatshirt and shoes and put them in the rowboat, where the counselor sat, bobbing, watching me. The group dissolved, no one spoke above a whisper, there were no longer six girls, but only one, only me, alone. I hit the icy water and swam.
I swam for a long time, the counselor pacing me in silence, through black water and black air, in the shadow of the black mountain, and watched the dawn.
Small splash of beaver’s tail far away, the sound carrying forever into the day, the cattail silhouette of the swamp small in the distance, tendrils of mist rising to surround us in fine veils as the colors of the world appeared. Blue water, blue air, blue mountain; golden light, green trees, the red roof of the lodge ahead, a tiny patch. I swam. I pierced the glassy surface of the water like an arrow pierces the air, and watched my pale hands disappear into the blackness below.
I swam and finally came to ground near the lodge, applauded by a smiling crowd, a hero’s welcome home.
On the last day of my son’s camp, a hot, parched, shimmering day, I watched the boys and girls drift sleepily off to bed while tiny bats darted across the sulfurous porch light of the lodge. When all was quiet, when it seemed all the children were asleep, someone turned the lights on around the pool, and suddenly the whole staff was there on the deck—all the crotchety adults, worn out from the past weeks. We broke the pool rules, we ran on the deck, threw balls at each other, we floated, paddled, raced and dived under the tall, black trees. I shed my thick skin. Near midnight, someone slipped into the shed and turned off all the overhead lights and all that was left were the bulbs underwater, casting a shivering aqua cloud onto the side of trees. I floated on my back beneath a milky spray of stars in the August night. And then I rolled underwater, turning the world upside-down, and watched my pale legs pierce the glassy surface of the water and disappear into the
blackness below.
Salon, August 7, 1998
Recording
I’M NOT REALLY EAVESDROPPING ON THE CONVERSATION in the backseat. I can’t help it.
“I think the mistake I made with David,” says Kristen, her eyes hidden underneath a baseball cap, “was to let him have internet relationships while we were dating. As long as he didn’t become emotionally involved.”
Cody, her ostensible boyfriend, soft of face and with a blond ponytail as long as Kristen’s own, nods sagely. I watch them in the mirror, my eyes darting back and forth between the highway and their reflected faces.
“I’ve made lots of mistakes in relationships,” Cody says. “That’s why I’ve had so many.”
“You haven’t had so many,” says Alison, Kristen’s best friend, squeezed next to her in the backseat.
“Yes he has,” argues Kristen. “We’ve both dated lots of other people and we’ve dated each other three times. This is the third time we’ve been together.”
We are driving up to the mountain to go snowshoeing, into a winter world seventy miles from the city and valley, where it rarely snows. Three cars, three adult drivers, twelve students on a mid-week field trip, and it was my idea. This is Project Week, with days full of field trips, and I am enamored of snowshoeing and wanted to get the kids outside. Though they are all from my daughter’s small school, I have never met these particular students before. They are polite—courteous in a way that seems only reasonable when dealing with a strange adult—but it is obvious from the first few minutes that they are also completely uninterested in me. My earnest attempts at conversation are gently deflected, almost ignored, and quickly I lapse into silence and let them speak. Which they do, without cease.
Kristen regales Cody with tales about David. “I can’t stand this girl Stephie who David says is his best friend. She stayed at his house one weekend.”
“Were they together?” asked Alison. This is the code word, simple and potent. You are together, or you are apart.
“Nooooo,” says Kristen, thoughtfully. “But she’s too old for him.”
A while later, Alison is complaining about her own boyfriend, who hasn’t come on the trip and, it seems, has little time for her.
“Alison, you know you have to get him to a therapist,” Kristen says forcefully. “He has to learn how to talk to you.”
They are thirteen years old.
IF THIS WERE television, Cody would be the Cute Guy (subset, Goofy Cute Guy). Kristen—slender and blonde, in a faceless, cookie-cutter way—would be the Cute Girl. Alison is the Cute Girl’s Fat Girlfriend, saved from purgatory by this single thread. And next to me in the front seat is Ryan, the tragic character—the Fat Boy No One Likes. He alternately plays with a Game Boy in brief bouts of concentration, and eats. Now and then he laughs at the conversation he is carefully following, trying to turn his bulky body around in the seat and take part. He is treated with much the same courteous lack of interest with which they treat me.
I find myself thinking of my passengers this way, in capital letters outlining roles, within a few minutes. Their conversation is a script, full of catch words and cheap ideas, the irony entirely unconscious. Where did they learn to talk this way? They seem saturated with image, imitating not only behavior but response as well—living through the imagined conversations of imagined selves. This is how people talk on television, in the movies, this is what the magazines say. Is it that simple—that blunt? Do they inhabit these iconic roles because they have grown so familiar with the formula—or do I see them as icons because I am?
Kristen is still talking about David. “If I wasn’t dating you, I’d still be dating him,” she says to Cody. “But he wanted to know how old you had to be to get married and I said, ‘Yeah, right.’”
“That’s why I broke up with Billy,” agrees Alison. “He said he wanted to be together forever.”
Ryan is eating peanuts with a steady hand. Quietly, so that only I can hear, he says, “I’ve never had a girlfriend, so I wouldn’t know.”
Cody swears and then looks up suddenly and catches my eyes in the mirror and asks innocently, “Is that word allowed?”
“I don’t care,” I say, looking back at him.
“How about kissing?” he asks.
“A little kissing is okay,” I say. But they don’t kiss. Perhaps it is still more idea than fact.
A single untutored word blends in with a hundred rehearsed ones; mediation is the norm. This is the normality of adolescence: a wild anarchy of selves. Young people try on points of view and habits of speech like clothes, leaving the discards in a pile behind them. Sometimes there seems to be little but imitation and disguise at this age; at times, the self of each adolescent is little more than a successive mimicry. Chameleons.
I wasn’t so different. I dressed the way people I admired dressed, talked like them, parroted their ideas. Young people always have—the culture of youth is obsession with the culture. And still I think it’s different now. These teens live in a world of mirrors, in nothing but mirrors, endlessly reflecting themselves.
Even as they try to live the lives played out before them, the lives they do live are recorded constantly; they live recorded lives. They are always on stage. Every event I attend is a sea of camcorders. Dances, soccer games, dates, picnics, slumber parties—all are photographed and videotaped, spliced and edited, and then copied and mailed off for distant viewing. Every classroom has computers; every break involves a screen. They can add special effects now, and music, subtitles, narration; their lives are shot across a world wide web in living pixel color. Nothing is more real than what we see made up.
They start talking about celebrities, a favorite topic. When life is an artifact, a recorded event, recorded lives are the most real. “I’m related to that general guy, what’s it, Patton, like through my great-grandmother or something,” Alison says, and Cody says that he too is related to Somebody Famous and Kristen notes that she is also distantly related to Somebody Famous and adds that even Edmund, crazy Edmund who is the school scapegoat, is supposedly related to Britney Spears.
Ryan, who is eating potato chips now, says to himself in the front seat, “I’m not related to anybody.”
“Maybe you’ll be famous someday yourself,” I tell him, with a note of maternal encouragement that horrifies me as soon as I hear myself speak. “Then everyone in your family can claim to be related to you.”
And already I’m wondering why I think it should cheer him up to imagine that he’ll have to be famous before his family would be glad to be related to him. But he nods thoughtfully, chewing.
WE REACH THE ski shop. The kids in my car are the youngest, the “seven by eights,” in the lingo of this small school, which houses kindergarteners through high school seniors. The middle-schoolers, acutely conscious of each nuance of the high school students, are themselves ignored by their models.
We fill the shop in the massive, floor-to-ceiling way only teenagers can achieve. Everyone gets snow shoes and most get boots, and I count how many of them are wearing jeans after being carefully instructed not to wear jeans, and then we all line up in the parking lot for a quick how-to-put-snowshoes-on lesson and then pile back in the cars and keep heading up. Soon the road is lined with tall conifers sprinkled with snowy confection, and with each curve the deep tree-carpeted valleys appear further below, sprinkled white. Smoky fog swirls across the road, shot with sunlight.
“Wow,” the kids say, and seem genuinely surprised.
“It’s beautiful!” Kristen breathes, eyes wide open for the first time all day, and she pushes the baseball cap back on her head. None of them are regular skiers, none have been snowshoeing before. Ryan has lived here most of his life but he’s never been to the mountain at all. For a moment, the screen of the world fills their sight, a Panavision view as breathtaking as every SUV commercial they’ve ever seen, as pretty as any backdrop in their video games.
“Don’t go in the caves,” the man at the ski sho
p told everyone, referring to the early spring caverns opening in the deep drifts. I look up from the crate of snowshoes in the parking lot and count the feet sticking out of the caves and march over to be a grownup. Slowly they assemble, complaining good-naturedly, suddenly remembering everything they were supposed to bring but forgot at home—sunglasses, lunch, gloves. I pass out extras of this and that, to the Handsome Guy, his Petite Girlfriend, the Tall Girl, the Skinny Guy With Glasses, the New Girl—I can’t stop; I look around and each has a place, a perfect fit. Conversation surrounds me, a blend of rhetorical sophistication and the blunt concerns of teenagers—sex, power, yearning—a wave vibrating across a web of relationship. The politics of relationship they recite to each other sounds as familiar as nursery rhymes.
We march off, a ragged group spread across a plain of deep snow as smooth and unbroken as the blue sky. They form a body, organic and shifting in the Brownian motion of youth—busily swimming close and then far away, aggregating and dissolving, speeding up, spinning in place. They make a lot of noise, and spread farther and farther apart. Several boys compete to see who can mess up the most snow, who can run the fastest before he falls down, who can come most perilously close to the bank of the river before I yell at him. Two girls march stalwartly ahead, as though they can march forever. They stay side by side, steadily walking in a straight line toward a distant stand of trees across a featureless sheet of soft powder.
I’ve forgotten my camera and for a minute feel guilty—I, the adult, will fail to record this event. But suddenly out of the hundred-dollar backpacks come the cameras. Light flashes across the snow, but they aren’t taking pictures of the snow. They are taking pictures of each other, singly and in groups, and of themselves, the camera held shakily at arm’s length. All, that is, except Ryan. He walks wearily along in a group of one—now trailing behind, now slogging ahead, now slipping sideways—and he takes pictures of the empty snow, the unpeopled trees.
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