boys of winter

all through the brisk new jersey winter, we wrote to each other by hand.  his letters came from connecticut where it was even colder. the landlady would slide them under the door of the attic and i would pick them up and lie on my bed for a long time before opening one. you know, just smiling at it.

i was reading the complete works of dostoevsky, living in the attic, practicing the cello for five or six hours a day. once or twice a semester i would give a concert in the university auditorium. i never dared to look at the audience because i was always shaking and pale from vomiting.  i would just stare at the floor. but no matter how nervous i got, that pregnant, squirming to-the-death need to deliver would win and i'd go begrudgingly onstage to have another sonata baby in public.

for the sound of my russian soul weeping through burled cherry wood, the people put their hearts into their hands and applauded with muscle. the sound of clapping would burrow deep into my gut and maybe then i'd look up and see a smile or two. maybe i'd think, i wasn't delivering deformed monsters after all.

the blond chamber director took me aside and stared into my eyes. i had her love, she wanted me to know. and i would fall asleep in my mittens and hat in the freezing attic, feeling the sweet and sour sting of being noticed.

i was 19 at the time and i weighed 98 pounds. i remember, because my mother had come to visit and she commented on how attractive i was in my black velvet pants, hardly anything left of me but bones.

the boy's letter went on for twenty pages. inside the letter was always a little gift, like a sparkly band-aid or a cartoon kitten. he was a painter and so one day to be closer to him, i wanted to make a sculpture. i went out into the snow and gathered the damp limbs of trees. then i took a pocket knife and spent the afternoon whittling the wood into these slender, fluted shafts tied together with twine. I don't know if it was art, but to me it was magical to make something beautiful out of a pile of twigs.

Later that evening i walked in the dark along the railroad tracks to the deli to call the boy from a payphone. He said hello and that he would take the commuter train from new haven all the way to new jersey so we could spend halloween together.

when i got back, the landlady had thrown the sculpture in the trash. it lay in a glad bag landfill of eggshells and orange rinds, looking very much like garbage after all.

a few weeks later, the day came and the bus deposited the boy on the corner in a flannel coat. his stringy blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail.  he came in and sat on the bed, trying to warm up.

to make it onto the bed, sitting and warming up, it had taken the boy four years of letters and phone calls. it's still hard to understand why anyone would take that kind of time just to travel to new jersey.

we decided to go trick or treating even though he was 22. there was nothing to do in town, but the real reason was something i told him in the letters. he wanted to help me do this hard thing called have fun. this maneuvor of labor, laughing. i hope you will never understand what i mean by that.

i went downstairs and got the tin foil from the cupboard and i covered him from head to toe. he covered me in cellophane and garbage ties. we went around knocking on all the doors with pumpkins in front of them, two too-old mummies in love.

it was around 11p and it was time for him to go home. we sat down on the curb to wait for his bus. earlier at the diner, i saw pieces of his face almost next to mine, parts of his nose and teeth very close to me. i think his woolly hat was on my head. and he fed me something where my mouth was on his finger. every hair that brushed my face was linked to words on a page of a letter, and in his head was every single thing i'd ever said in the dark. other people, like my mom, they only saw a young girl's ass looking tight in velvet pants. but even that, the boy knew about. he knew about it all.

somewhere down the frost crusted street the two yellow eyes of the bus blinked. it was still far away and there was still time. the boy took a deep breath and put his arm around my shoulder. it kind of hung there like a bagette. but after a few seconds of feeling like a breadstick, the arm got heavier and firmer and started to feel like a human embrace. and the arm stayed there for the rest of my life, just resting on my shoulder, loving me and all the words in my head and all the music fighting for its life