The Way Girls Feel About Boys

Inappropriate

Something I’m not even joking about:

One time on a job in Detroit, in order to get to the mall, I had to take exit 69 for Big Beaver Road.

Apple Tree

up up up 
in the apple tree
he climbs real high
and calls down to me

‘break off a branch 
and peel back the leaves,
sit in the shade 
and think of me’

he loves me
he loves me not

Mad About You

He’s sitting next to me on the couch. He’s got his Santa Claus Santa Claus suspenders on. This means he’s got suspenders which have Santa Claus on them, but they also happen to be the suspenders he’ll wear when playing Santa Claus. Though I doubt this will happen, because, while he is jolly (mostly a sarcastic jolly, though) he’s not fat. And never will be.

Thomas’ new roommate is sitting on a couch across the way. Earlier tonight she was mad because he made a comment about the way she looked and she didn’t appreciate it. (Yes. The guy in the Santa Claus suspenders attached to madras shorts made a snide comment about how someone else looked…) But then she tried to explain her anger and started making excuses for it, almost apologizing.  ‘No. It’s not like I have a self esteem issue, I just don’t appreciate it when people tell me what to do.” Then she went on to explain how mom’s do this to daughters a lot. Differed guilt. I completely understood what she was talking about.

But he didn’t understand. He kept clawing at the issue until it had no option but to bleed. In her attempt to explain her frustration, she became even more frustrated. It resulted in her getting up off the couch and going into the kitchen for a while.

They study this. I think they call it linguistics. There’s a word for it. Syntax, maybe.

They made up ten minutes later. She gave him a hug and said she couldn’t stay mad at him for long, not with those suspenders on.

Terminology

I struggle to find terms for us. I am either a girl or a woman. You are either a boy or a man. But we are both and neither. We are somewhere in between. So we will remain undefined and unclassified until we mature, or regress, I guess

What I Want

Four a.m. End of the party. There’s already one person passed out on the couch. I’ve already got a friend coming home with me to pass out on mine.

But there’s this boy left over. He’s the remainder of this long division night.

“Please let me come home with you,” he begs.

“You’re either going to sleep on the floor here or on the floor at my apartment, so…”

“Please,” he pleads again.

“Whatever.” But then, rethinking things, I stick my finger in his face and say in a very stern tone “but you’re not getting into my bed, ok?”

“Yeah. Totally,” he agrees.

And the three of us fumble down the street, creating wave frequencies on the sidewalk with our drunken staggers.

Arriving home, he immediately tries to sit on the sofa, but my friend immediately kicks him off, and stretches out, claiming her territory. While I wash my face, he stiffly places himself in an angular, upright chair and drapes a measeley afghan over his legs, making every attempt to look as pathetic as possible.

I emerge from the bathroom and he looks at me with whimpering eyes outlined in dark bags. “Can I please sleep in your bed?”

I huff.

“Please? I promise I won’t try anything.”

“Whatever.” And for the second time tonight, I give in.

But strange things happen when, if my bed were a cauldron, you begin to mix whiskey, four a.m., not being able to sleep anyway, a boy who has a very decent beard, decent conversation, conversation about sex, a hot summer, a boy who was so hot he needed to take his shirt off, a boy who has a very decent chest of manly hair, and me, who hasn’t had a boy in my bed for a while.

“Let me kiss you,” he says rather than asks.

“Seriously? What did I tell you earlier?!”

He brushes aside the pillow I’d cleverly placed between our bodies. He pulls me in so that where we were once the outline of the bed, we’re now the content.

“Why are you denying yourself something you want?” he asks.

And this is where the record screeches to a halt. This is when all the feminists in the room throw up their hands and shake their heads. This is the part of the story where you decide he’s an asshole. This is the part of the story where you determine what kind of character I am- either strong and assertive or naïve and guillable.

So what. Maybe I am naïve and guillable. But he was right.

Ghost

“He was really hot, from what I remember,” she says.

I conjure up his image in my mind. Blonde hair. Scruffy beard. Calculator watch. “Yeah. He was really good looking. And he was a sculptor.” I picture him in his studio, squishing the clay between his rough palms. Running his wet fingers down a canal of damp earth. He’s got terracotta-crusted hands. He’s got sweat on his upperlip. “God. You can’t do any better than a sculptor,” I say.

“Oh god. Yeah. So sexy. All I can picture is that scene from Ghost,” she says.

I laugh for a minute at this. Then I laugh harder. “Yeah. Exactly like Ghost”

Fast-Dancing

Her and I, we sit at the bar. It’s past midnight already. Previous to now we were at an art show, and low and behold, after weeks of complaining of the complete lack of cute boys around town one appeared like a vision to my friend, far superior a piece of work than those that hung on the walls.

But here we sit in a booth at the bar, the bar she invited him to, alone, with our heads in our hands, watching the couple across the way with a bit of disdain as he slides his hand up her knee while she bites the straw in her cocktail. We sit, watching the couple on the dance floor. He has her by the waist and they sway back and forth, out of time to the bluegrass band, out of time in general. We sit here, noticing the two in the booth next to us, dressed to the nines, him in his zoot-suit and fedora, her in a rockabilly dress, so in tune with one another they’re beginning to look alike. We sit here, her and I, locked in a friendship we could both potentially call our most serious relationship in years.

And then she gasps. I spin around in time to see him bursting through the front door, the skin of his gentle face and rugged nakedness of his arms transitioning from the harsh pale lamppost light of the outside world to the warm bath of red which creeps into and out of the orifices of this bar. He spots her immediately and pushes his way through the crowd in a direct line from point A to point B. I can tell time has stopped for her. She tries to act unfrozen, but she’s frigid. His hand reaches out for her, and then- not pressed together, though not altogether separate, they’re on the dance floor, having a much better time than the other couple who, now juxtaposed, look award and syrupy. Arms flailing about, he’s what she’d later call a ‘crazy dancer’.

Strange how three minutes can be folded into the span of three hours like a taffy machine on the boardwalk, producing a large gummy goo of what you will later recall as ‘the best night ever’.

Puddle

Here’s how I want it to be:

He comes back to town in a few weeks- just long enough to bring me to the breaking point of yearning but not so long that I forget the desire. Then, without speaking a word to one another, he grabs me by the waist and kisses me. Movie kiss. It’s a slow, long, passionate kiss and I’m so taken aback by it that at first my arms hang limp at my sides. Maybe I drop the pen that I was holding in my hand. No. Maybe I drop the glass of juice that I was holding in my hand and it spills, puddling red liquid at our feet. We assume this warm wetness is something we’ve created with our bodies; Something internal rising up from our toes. My back bends back slightly as I breathe him in. I bite his bottom lip. “I’ve been thinking about that for a long time,” he says. “Really?” I question. “Yeah. Oh yeah.”

Here’s how it will be:

I will never see him again.

Scent

Would you turn down an inconvenient job in a time of recession? Well, most people wouldn’t have the option to say no….

Not too long ago, I left for five weeks to work in Michigan. But this job came at a very inconvenient time- right when me and my friend and I were discovering that our late-night conversations, our ability to create art together, and the way we both felt after I spent the night with another boy, all meant we were perhaps more than just friends.

Would you be jealous if I said my job was to shop? Well, some girls would be…

So there I was in the Gap, and upon my exit, I recognize the cologne bottle on the display table.

Would you think me creepy if I said I knew it was his scent because I’d peeked into his medicine cabinet, sniffed bottles, examined prescriptions, and made assumptions about him based on the current condition of his toothbrush? Well, some people would…

I spritzed it on myself. And then proceeded to float around the mall the rest of the afternoon, like I was wrapped in the sun’s corona. At night, I laid the shirt next to me, settled into the unfamiliar sheets on the unfamiliar bed, feeling warm and at home.

Would you feel empathy for me if I said I had to go into the Gap several times over the duration of my trip? Well, some people would…

Every time I excited the store, I sprayed myself with longer, more drawn out spritzes of the Eau De My Man. But slowly, after a while, the scent started to become a bit overwhelming. It eventually started turn my stomach. The more I sprayed, the less time I could spend in the clothes. I would have to return to my temporary apartment and strip off the shirt his scent was so deeply embedded in. Eventually, he made me sick.

Would I be lying if I claimed this wasn’t a metaphor? Well, probably…

To the Boy I Have Yet to Know

To the boy I have yet to know:

I’m most excited about the mornings. The mornings we wake up to the sun, and no matter what a lovely night we’ve had previous, the anticipation of another day makes our chests nearly rupture. And you pull me into you so we adjust, my head buried in your beard, my hand stroking the curls on your body, our legs entwined, and we fall back asleep.

Ps: (I promise to do my best to always smell like coconut.)

Signed,

Yours already

Sleeping Arrangements

The lights are off. I lay in my bed and she lays on my couch, only ten feet from one another. The skylights cast rectangular cutouts of moonlight in a ladder-pattern down the length of the studio.

“Oh my gosh. He was so cute. No. He wasn’t even cute. He was, like sexy.”

“Yeah. He was definitely what you’d call sexy.”

“He was, like, rugged sexy.”

“Yeah. He was like rugged sexy but also gentle sexy.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah. For sure.”

The two of us fall asleep on different pieces of furniture, with our separate bodies and our separate minds, our opposite shades of hair, our toenails painted two different colors, our contrary interests and opinions on movies, books, lifestyles, and often even boys, and my hopes which equal her fears, and her hopes which translate into my fears, but somehow we fall asleep, thinking the same thoughts, hugging our pillows in the same manner, wishing for the same dreams that night…

Jealousy

There was a boy I used to be involved with. (And when I speak of jealousy, please keep in mind it’s not the kind of jealousy which is tinted red and green but instead the kind of jealousy which is sepia toned; the color of memories stored in worn out photographs and old slides that don’t belong to you but to your aunt or your friends parents and have been stored, untouched, in a closet for twenty years…) This boy found another girl to love. Sometimes he speaks of their sex. Sometimes he speaks of the way in which, when they’re in bed together, he looks into her eyes and feels both physically and mentally a part of her. He speaks of collision and combination and combustion. And that makes me feel jealous.

…And Counting

There are eight boys on my list. Some girls have fifteen. Some have more. Some guys have many many more. And some guys only have one. But these names are only the tiles, and what this list leaves out is the grout.