Every Visible Thing, page 5
On the corkboard are two naked figures—one male, one female. To the right of each figure are detailed genital and internal diagrams. The woman’s poster has more diagrams than the man’s.
Mr. Gabriel goes through the diagrams abruptly, pelting them with terms: scrotum, vas deferens, epididymis, seminiferous tubule, Cow–per’s gland, urethra, ovary, fimbria, fallopian tube, cervix, clitoris, hymen, perineum. Ethan Fine, the class brain, sketches furiously and records definitions until Mr. Gabriel tells him they won’t be tested on it. He lectures in detail about what happens to the penis and testicles from arousal to ejaculation, and takes them through the cycle of menstruation. He informs them that if a boy can ejaculate he can get a girl pregnant, and that girls ovulate before their first period. He announces that the discomfort that results from not ejaculating (blue balls, someone whispers) is not physically harmful and it is no reason to pressure a girl into having sex. He warns them that comments about a girl’s developing body, or jokes about late bloomers, will end in a visit to the principal’s office. He lists venereal diseases and their symptoms until a few of the boys turn green at the repetition of the word discharge.
This is not what Owen expected, and he can tell by the stunned expressions of his classmates—a few of them look on the edge of tears—that it is not what they expected, either. From his browsing of a book at home—Changing Bodies, Changing Lives, which once belonged to his sister but was left behind when she moved into her own room—Owen assumed that they would all sit in a circle and discuss their feelings about adolescence. That’s what the boys and girls in the book did. Mr. Gabriel is giving them too much information. As Owen’s body has yet to change—he still has the soft, hairless testicles of a boy and a voice mistaken on the phone for his mother’s—he is not interested in the anatomy lesson. He doesn’t really need to know how semen is produced when he hasn’t produced any semen. It is like learning what is going to happen when he dies of old age. What Owen wants to know he is clearly not going to be able to ask. Not even via the anonymous question box, which Mr. Gabriel says he will set up by the watercooler. That is for sex questions, and sex is not what Owen’s worried about. Not exactly.
Mr. Gabriel is now talking about AIDS. They have all heard of Ryan White, and are told that they attend a public school that would not discriminate against a dying boy. The class thaws a bit and starts asking questions. AIDS is in their parents’ newspapers, in magazines, on television, and it is more controversial, more interesting, than the anatomy of the reproductive system.
“Is it true you can get it from kissing?” one boy from Ms. Lieberman’s class asks, and Mr. Gabriel says it is transmitted through blood and semen.
“What if you have a cut in your mouth?” the boy says. Mr. Gabriel admits that he is not sure, but that there are no documented cases of contracting AIDS from kissing.
“Can a boy get it from a girl?” they want to know, and Mr. Gabriel tells them yes, though it’s less common.
“My dad says only fags and Haitians get it,” Brian Dowd pipes up, and Mr. Gabriel, his teeth clenched, tells Brian his father is wrong. He says that though the largest group of victims seems to be homosexual men, it is a virus that has no prejudices.
He goes on to talk about homosexuality, and how it is normal for children to have sexual feelings for both boys and girls and to experiment. “Don’t worry if you are attracted to other boys,” he says, and a number of boys make retching noises until he glares them quiet. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re gay.” There is a silence of disbelief.
“If you’re confused, though, it’s important to find someone you can talk to,” he says. He doesn’t seem to be volunteering.
“Are you gay?” Danny says suddenly, and the room gasps at his boldness. Mr. Gabriel looks confused, then angry, then mortified.
“That’s none of your business,” he says. He turns around and begins to erase the blackboard which he has filled with a list of terms none of them will remember tomorrow. “But I’m not,” he adds.
He launches into pregnancy, warning them that they’ll be watching a video on childbirth next Friday. His knuckles are as white as the chalk he’s holding, and he’s talking too fast. The boys have stopped fidgeting, exchanging looks, and whispering smegma to one another. Even Danny, who looked so defiant when asking, is subdued, hunched forward, his face burning under the cover of his bangs. He knows he has gone too far.
The next Friday, there is a television in the classroom when they return from lunch. They watch sperm swim their way through tubes and valleys to meet up with a massive egg. They see a jellied baby grow, curled up tight as though it has no intention of ever testing its sprouting limbs. Then a starkly lit shot of a woman giving birth. The woman is moaning in a way that sounds more like sex in movies than something painful, causing the boys to shift positions to hide their spontaneous erections. There is an outburst of disgusted “eeews” at the close-up of a mucous-covered baby head between fat, sweaty thighs. The birth doesn’t seem miraculous to Owen, as the voice-over on the film suggests. It’s not even as gross as he thought it would be, although he is a bit startled by all the hair, both baby and pubic. The rest of the class is disgusted, and Mr. Gabriel gives up trying to control their noise. Owen feels sorry for the baby, who slips out amphibious and cold, who will be made to watch this video over and over the way Owen once suffered through the silent, sped-up films of his toddler years projected onto his grandmother’s wall. The whole family always hushed when the grainy, insubstantial image of Hugh passed over the molding.
After the movie, Mr. Gabriel answers questions from the box. Owen tries to guess who asked what by the way they either beam with pride or stiffen up and try to look uninterested. Most of the questions are about girls. Do they think about sex as much as boys do? Does it mean a girl has her period if a dog smells her crotch? Is it true that the bump which makes them excited is really a tiny penis?
Mr. Gabriel seems annoyed at the majority of questions, some of which he won’t even read out loud.
The final question of the day is: How do you convince a girl to have sex with you?
“Tie her down?” Brian Dowd whispers, and a few boys snort in appreciation. Luckily, Mr. Gabriel doesn’t hear and merely gestures for them all to be quiet.
“You shouldn’t pressure anyone to fool around or have sex,” he says. “It’s a decision that girls and boys need to make when they’re ready. Sex comes with a lot of responsibility. It requires maturity and compassion, and bullying or cajoling someone into it is wrong. If someone tells you no, it means no, and you should back off. If you force someone to have sex with you, it’s rape, and you can go to jail for that.”
Rape has been treated with similar gravity by Owen’s book. Though the chapters about sex offered vivid detail, Owen barely skimmed them; he retains his idea of sex as uninspiring from what he has witnessed in movies and on TV. Sex appears to involve mostly the frenetic removal of clothing, then a brief mashing together of torsos followed by exhaustion; it doesn’t seem to require any more thought or maturity than taking a bath. Except for the baby part, and everyone knows that girls can have abortions.
Owen worries briefly that Mr. Gabriel has noticed that none of the questions are in his handwriting. He’ll have to make up a question for next week. Perhaps he can find one in the female section of Lena’s book. He hasn’t cracked this yet. He is even less interested in girls’ bodies than he is in his own. The questions Owen would like to ask are not things he can phrase, and even if he could, he suspects Mr. Gabriel would not have the answers.
After school, when they’re getting their coats and boots on, Owen hears Danny tell Mike Bisbee, who had blushed and looked at his lap during the last question, that there are guaranteed ways to get in a girl’s pants. And that he’ll tell him five for ten bucks.
Owen and Danny start going straight from school to Amanda Peters’s house—a sixth-grader who sells glimpses of her crotch for a dollar, but lets Danny see for free because she’s in love with him. While Danny and Amanda disappear to her bedroom, Owen is left with Amanda’s sister, Chrissy, who is in the fourth grade but already wears a training bra and braces. Owen doesn’t mind Chrissy, who seems to expect little from him. They make Ellio’s pizza in the toaster oven, play Super Mario Brothers, and listen to Prince on her parents’ cassette deck. One afternoon, Chrissy starts hitting Owen with couch pillows until he grabs one of his own and hits back. Though he can’t say how, he’s sure she maneuvers the pillow fight so she ends up pinned underneath him. Owen scrambles off; the friction of his jeans combined with an hour’s worth of wondering what Danny and Amanda are doing, plus the lyrics of Prince’s “Erotic City,” leave him with a hard-on that he must hide beneath his rugby shirt.
“Owen, do you like me?” Chrissy says, and Owen shrugs, wishing he could disappear.
“How come you never kiss me?” she asks, and Owen imagines it briefly, a sudden, violent motion that has more anger in it than curiosity, as if he could press all his frustration at that closed bedroom door against her mouth.
“I’m only ten,” Owen mumbles, and Chrissy, with a flip of her blond braids, storms off to her bedroom, slamming the door.
The next day, when Owen refuses to go to Amanda’s, Danny replies “Whatever,” and they go to McDonald’s instead. Owen takes sharp, vicious joy in the knowledge of how quickly and thoughtlessly Danny gives her up.
In Human Development they talk about divorce. More than half the kids in Owen’s class have two sets of parents, but this doesn’t seem like a tragedy to Owen. Though girls often cry about it, they seem to do it on cue to get out of gym class, and the boys barely mind at all. Two boys in their class, Chris and Noah, have recently become stepbrothers after knowing each other since kindergarten. Chris’s mother and Noah’s father, who met at a soccer game, had an affair and ended up divorcing their spouses and marrying each other. Now the boys share a room during the week and go off to live with their other parents on the weekends. Though they are famous for their merciless fistfights, they like living together, and were spoiled with gifts during their parents’ guilty transition. Owen secretly wishes his own parents would get a divorce. When he is picked up at Danny’s, Owen pretends not to hear the car horn, so his father will be forced to come inside and talk to Danny’s mom. Mrs. Gray fusses over him, and though Owen’s father avoids looking at her cleavage, Owen still holds out hope.
It seems like at least once a week, some kid goes to the social worker’s office to discuss his parents’ announcement of divorce or remarriage or both. Owen’s house, where no one fights or threatens or uses children to get back at each other, is abnormal in comparison.
On a rare morning in which his sister stops in the kitchen, leaning against the counter to eat a banana, Owen looks at her from behind his cereal box. His mother left before they woke up, his father’s low, melancholy whistling can be heard from the shower. He has the only whistle Owen has ever heard that sounds miserable rather than cheery.
“Do you think Mom and Dad are going to get a divorce?” Owen says. Lena digs a brown spot out of her banana, making a face as she drops it in the sink.
“Not a chance,” she says, and though she doesn’t look up, it seems like a rare moment of understanding between them. As if she, too, would like their nonfamily to become more like the fractured families of their friends.
He almost asks why not, but decides not to push it. He suspects that Lena would tell him that their parents are still married, not because of her and Owen, but because of Hugh.
What would they say if he ever came back?
Owen is the only one of them who knows that Hugh is dead. He came to this conclusion easily, between the ages of six, when his family was still Catholic, and eight, when he almost died himself.
The year after Hugh disappeared, Owen began the first grade and, along with it, CCD, which met every Monday afternoon at the Catholic school across town. Lena walked him there, leaving him at the door of his classroom. Inside were old-fashioned open-topped desks and a picture of Jesus with a see-through chest, his heart choked in thorns, like some science class dissection project gone awry, over the blackboard. The walls were thumbtacked with vocabulary words written in a teacher’s perfect cursive, with notions weightier than the cardboard they were cut out of: GRACE, PENANCE, FAITH, HOPE, DEATH, RESURRECTION.
Owen’s teacher was not a nun, but a pretty woman named Ms. Winter who smiled all the time and spoke to them in a high voice that made even the subjects of original sin and hell seem about as grave as sugared cereal. Owen was in love with her by the end of the first class, ready to believe anything she told him. In his painstakingly perfect handwriting, he copied down the Ten Commandments and filled out the weekly quiz testing his interpretation of them. His workbook, a purple paperback with pictures of happy Catholic children, dressed-down priests, and fields of wildflowers, laid out the year ahead of him, lots of blank space on which to record easy answers to weighty questions.
One afternoon, Lena was home with strep throat, so Owen’s father had to pick him up after class. His father was late, so Ms. Winter sat with Owen on the wide marble steps of the school’s foyer. The subject of class that day had been angels, something Owen should have known too much about, except that his father no longer discussed his former obsession. Owen knew that his father had once studied to be a priest, and later, after meeting his mother, became a divinity scholar. The book he’d been writing had been about angels. Owen could remember paintings that once covered his father’s office, men with sorrowful expressions and massive wings sprouting almost painfully from muscular torsos. Everything was taken down to make room for the search for Hugh.
Ms. Winter’s lesson that day had been about guardian angels, who, she said, were with you from birth, sitting on your right shoulder, whispering encouragement for good in your ear. Though he had long ago decided to believe everything Ms. Winter said, he found this one difficult. He couldn’t imagine angels sticking by some of the bullies he knew; surely they’d give up after being ignored for years. And what about truly evil people? Did Hitler have the withered, resigned shell of an angel barely breathing on his shoulder? He didn’t ask these questions out loud, deciding that the belief of his beautiful teacher was more important than his own hungry suspicions.
As he sat with Ms. Winter, the silence began to grow uncomfortable, so he asked her, more out of a desire to appear intelligent and devout than any real interest in the subject, if people became guardian angels after they died. Ms. Winter sighed.
“You must miss your brother,” she said.
Owen was flustered. His question had not meant to refer to Hugh. He rarely thought about his brother anymore, it was the space left behind that concerned him.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Have you tried praying to him?” Ms. Winter said.
“My brother’s gone,” Owen explained. He never used the word missing. This word, still plastered all over his father’s office, had too much weight for Owen to pronounce it comfortably.
“I believe that those who have gone watch over us from heaven, Owen,” Ms. Winter said. “Your brother has not really left you.”
Owen didn’t try to correct her, mostly because that was the moment that Ms. Winter put her arm around him, and he didn’t want to say anything that might have caused her to recoil. Just after Hugh’s disappearance, his mother had sometimes clutched him with frightening force, but lately, entombed in her dark bedroom, she rarely touched him. His father, rather than draping an arm around him, was more likely to grip the back of Owen’s neck, as if pulling him back from some abyss. More than anything, Owen was desperate for a hug.
Flushed and brave with such intimacy, Owen made the mistake of telling his father what Ms. Winter said on the ride home. By the time they pulled into the driveway, his father was muttering incoherently. He called the rectory, screamed at the secretary and then at one of the priests. Owen was not sure which one because his father addressed him as Jack, which in itself, Owen thought, must qualify as some sort of sin. After a few minutes, Owen’s mother emerged from her bedroom, hair lank, the imprint of pillowcase creases on one cheek.
“What is it?” she said hysterically. “Oh, God, what is it?” Owen’s father ignored her.
“My son is not dead,” he yelled, more than once, and the final time, his voice broke and there was a frightening stretch of muffled, gasping sobs. Finally, when he had control again, Owen’s father spoke three words, clear and cold and alien, into the beige receiver, before hanging it up with such force, the base let out a pale, false ring.
“Fuck you all,” was what he said.
Owen and Lena were taken out of CCD. The Furey family stopped going to church on Sundays, no longer mailed in the preaddressed envelopes for the Cardinal’s Annual Appeal. Phone calls from concerned parishioners and priests went unanswered. Lena skipped her Confirmation, which seemed to delight her. There were arguments with their devout grandparents. Henry Furey’s parents had helped build their town’s church, his mother was the rectory secretary, his father in charge of collection. They went to mass every morning at eight A.M. Owen’s grandmother said that if Owen’s father had kept his commitment to becoming a priest, none of this ever would have happened. They stopped going there for holidays. Owen still received a birthday card from his grandmother every year, but now it came with a check instead of a present.
Owen never made the First Confession and Communion Ms. Winter had been preparing him for. Initially he missed her, but he got over it. He was relieved not to be Catholic anymore. When he brought Noah Wasserman home from school one day, Noah laughed at his sister’s First Communion photo, asking if she’d gotten married at the age of seven. It all seemed weird to Owen—the kitschy church, the saints, angels, and prophets, the sacrifice of a single skinny man to save everyone else—once he was away from it.
Two years later, when Owen’s mother entered medical school at the start of summer vacation, Owen woke one Saturday morning to a quiet house. His sister and father were sleeping late, his mother gone to a morning class. Owen, encouraged by the warm sun and clear lungs, decided to ride his bike for an hour before his baseball game. Looking in his drawer for his Brookline Little League T-shirt, he remembered his mother had collected it for the wash the night before. He couldn’t find the laundry basket in its usual spot by the linen closet, and, scowling at his mother’s neglect, decided that it must still be downstairs. Wearing only his baseball pants and cleats, he descended the dimly lit stairwell to the basement, passing by the door to his father’s office, all the way down a cement-floored hallway to the laundry room. The overhead light was broken, the cave-like room lit only by an ancient standing lamp with a bare light bulb, which had been left on. Even with the lamp, the room was harshly shadowed, dank and frightening, and the mold made him wheeze.
