Page 39 of What Boys Learn
“I’m so sorry.”
Of course. Benj and I weren’t the only ones with problems.
“Listen. We can find the right person for you, I promise. Someone with the right specialty.” In the background, a screen door opened and banged shut. I could imagine all the things Curtis Campbell had to deal with. A dog, a father, clients, research, a book. Somewhere far away: a daughter, an ex.
“That’s okay, I can google—”
“No, the wrong person is worse than no person at all. How about Raveena Adelman? Didn’t you take classes from her?”
She was another one of my college professors, a specialist in child development, her office only three doors down from Curtis’s own. I’d taken Benjamin to see her once and it didn’t go well.
“I tried her about five years ago. One session only. It wasn’t a good fit.”
“Not a good fit. That happens.” He seemed to be ruminating. “Eighty percent of psychologists are women now. Men are disappearing from the field—as practitioners and as subjects. Boys’ issues don’t get much attention these days.”
I’d managed to hit a nerve. “No, they don’t.”
“I sometimes think the world is afraid of teenage boys. What kind of message are we sending them?”
I let him mull that one as I stood at the counter, running a finger along the cheap laminate edge, staring at the letter from Ewan, with its strange, cajoling tone. I’d worried a few times about the day Benjamin turned eighteen, if he would ever decide to visit Ewan’s prison. I hadn’t worried aboutthis: that they’d find a way to communicate even earlier, behind my back.
“Let me think about it,” Curtis finally said. “I’ll call you tomorrow?”
Around two in the afternoon, I was thinking about Summit’s graduation ceremony and all the students I wouldn’t be able to congratulate when I spotted one of Benjamin’s journals on the side table, next to the couch. On the front cover, he’d written only his name. On the inside cover in angry capital letters, he’d written: “I go out and fuck and I come back to her and I don’t care about her and I only love my girl. That’s not cheating, that’s exercise.”
I recognized the name of the person written on the next line. I couldn’t tell if Benjamin really thought the quote was clever or if he knew I’d riffle through his notebook and wanted to punish me for it.
After a late shower, I took a cup of coffee into the bathroom to sip while I detangled my ropy, wet hair. I kept thinking about that asinine quote. I knew what Benjamin was telling me.You didn’t like an actual author? I can move down the evolutionary ladder. Bring back some real Neanderthal shit. Which, frankly, wasn’t fair to the Neanderthals.
Maybe every family has its own tensions as each member jockeys for position, especially if money, love, or respect seem scarce. Maybe our identities are forged by teasing, provoking, resisting—saying,You can’t change me, in the case of a teenager.I refuse to play second fiddle, in the case of a stepmother. Maybe it’s natural, in other words. I worried too much, and I knew why I did—because I’d had a front-row seat to the development of a troubled boy into a troubled man. And at the same time, that perspective warped me. Confirmation bias, it’s called—the tendency to search for what you already believe, or fear. Ewan deserved the blame for that. But he didn’t deserve the blame for everything.
Every time I hit a snag in my hair, I remembered Martha just after she’d gotten engaged to my dad, when she was still pretending to care about me, yanking a comb through my hair without patience, then catching herself in time, remembering that this was a performance. I disliked the gentler combing as much as the rough kind.
After the wedding, photos of my mother were cleared from the living room. Then Martha started talking about how Ewan had to go, on account of his volatility. If he was sent somewhere—military school, or any place that would take him—I’d be the only target in the house. A growing target, painted in even brighter colors by the unstoppable forces of adolescence.
When I needed my first bra, I was too afraid to ask Martha to buy me one, so I kept wearing my inadequate undershirts until the school nurse sent home an embarrassing note to my father. Martha intercepted it. Then she called me into the bathroom. She told me to take off my button-down shirt. Then my cotton undershirt, which I folded nervously and set on the carpet-covered toilet lid.
“Those too,” she said, pointing to my underwear, which I stepped out of, slowly.
She pointed to my nearly hairless crotch. “You let anything or anyone down there?”
I was horrified. Speechless. Anyone?Anything?
I already dreaded getting a first period; I hoped she wasn’t going to try to show me how a tampon fit or worse, where a penis went. When her hand hovered inches from my body, I pushed my knees together, confused.
When her glance moved upward, I felt a moment of relief until she leaned in close to my torso, so that I was looking down onto her head of tight brown curls. Her face was an inch away from the small, barely developed mounds on my chest.
“That’s all you’ve got?” she said, leaning close. “Those are worth sending a letter home?Those?”
I thrust out an arm to grab for my undershirt. She countered with her forearm, blocking me. Then she seized one nipple and twisted hard. I yelped in pain. She clapped a hand over my mouth.
“You don’t even know enough to realize I’m not the one you should be afraid of.” She leaned back and laughed her husky smoker’s laugh. “Oh, yeah. Trouble’s coming.”
I squirmed away and ran from the room. Hours later, I could still feel the painful tingle in that right nipple. I felt it again, a few years later, the first time a boy snuck his hand up my shirt, even though I wanted him to. I felt it even now, standing in front of the nearly cleared mirror, amazed to think that two degrading minutes could still take up so much space in my brain, no matter how much I’d tried to cram in there since. Pavlov’s dogs, Skinner’s box, Piaget’s stages, Bandura’s observational learning of violent behavior, it was all there, efficiently tucked into the gray folds, but beneath it all, a physical pain still pulsed, and below that, an even deeper humiliation.
I set down the wide-toothed comb and studied my expression in the steamy mirror. Frowning. Tired. Nearly overwhelmed—but thatnearlywas the key word, and underlying it was a self-pity I couldn’t afford.
Martha was long behind me. I didn’t have to feel this way anymore. I was the parent, now; I’d survived the sleep deprivation of Benjamin’s babyhood, problems at day care and grade school, the sullen tween years. I refused to infect my son in the same way Martha and Ewan had both infected me—making me believe that adolescence was, by its very nature, a time when everything went to hell.