The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets - By Kathleen Alcott Page 0,22
that moment as a blinking cursor, as if our buoyancy gave us the freedom, the permission we needed to press the boundaries we did that evening.
My father had taken us out only under the condition that we study for our spelling test that evening. We sat on the floor beneath the open window of the brothers’ bedroom, still in our bathing suits, taking turns drilling one another, but my mind kept returning to Jackson sneaking up underwater and nibbling my toes.
“S’hot,” he kept complaining. Tired of his whining and likewise heated, I removed my bathing suit, simultaneously proud and embarrassed. “Now you,” I insisted. We balked at the silliness of our naked bodies and began the scientific exploration, sitting cross-legged on the carpet, parallels of gender and the entire universe as we understood it. What he had was much different from mine: I held it in my hand and let it drop, held it in my hand and let it drop. In retaliation he began to poke at me. Quick, tentative jabs, the tiny pink knob that would be with me forever listening, waiting. If this was wrong, it was only because, like our classmates taunted, secrets don’t make friends, and this was certainly a secret.
Julia was in the kitchen, washing dishes, and James, we thought, asleep in front of the television. It was Jackson who saw him in the crack of the doorway, who grabbed his arm and dragged him in.
“Why are you naked?” James asked.
“Because it’s hot,” Jackson tested, and it seemed for a minute that James would believe it, before he drank in the particular pink of our cheeks and guilt in our eyes and catch in our breaths. Before he got to the “o” of Mom, Jackson’s hand was over his mouth and he’d wrestled his little brother to the floor, made him promise not to tell. James was crying, and it occurred to me later it was not for the threat or the physical force, but because he had just witnessed something private, that he wasn’t a part of: he felt, for maybe the first time in his life, alone. Like tourists tracing their fingers over the maps of the underground trains, wondering at how vehicles of the same origin so quickly split into branching.
We did not continue our experiments, nor did we mention them. But in the bath, beneath the bubbles, I touched myself and tried in vain not to feel my fingers, tried to understand why it was so different when someone else did it. I rubbed my crotch back and forth on the monkey bars at the park down the street, and though the metal was foreign, it was not the same as someone else’s flesh.
(When I brought it up years later, Jackson denied its truth, looked at me the way people might look at an academic who has written a lengthy book on a subject so pigeonholed, so inaccessible, that the time and research involved seem at once pathetic and awe-inspiring in how unfathomable the reality. A memory so fierce as mine leaves one lonely.)
When my father caught me masturbating under the dinner table, he was gentle: he explained that it was perfectly normal but meant for private settings. When I grew up, it would be something very special to share with someone else. Nonetheless, my face grew red and I cried from shame. Later in my bedroom, I rubbed myself hard and wished determinedly for the time when someone else would be present for this warmth, this friction. And I knew, even then, whom that someone would be.
The secret, shameful feeling about sex that I’ve grown to have, which it’s now clear Jackson long suffered, grows as I go farther back in eidetic memory, deeper in roots. It’s been a part of my life longer than it seems it should have, which did not occur to me as good or bad until the latter lit up in bright lights—the type that shine through symbolical windows and keep one from sleeping.
Our childhood was a love affair like any other. Were I to choose my details wisely, I could submit them in present tense to a romantic advice column. We went through ups and downs, lapses in communication, periods of feverish adoration, epochs of lasting alienation. During the week he was gone one summer, I hung my quite long hair over the edge of the stone wall on our porch as if in protest, awaiting his return. Surely the act was in