Homies

Some splinters still cling to the shoulders of my old Mount Rainier National Park tee shirt. With my arms down and my posture lazy, its bottom hem barely reaches my waistband, barely conceals the new belly I still haven’t made peace with. Why did I wear this shirt out last night? I know why, but I don’t want to think about it. Luckily, I don’t have to. I pull the shirt’s collar up past my mouth and let it stretch over the bridge of my nose. I’ve just come into my childhood home through the backdoor, the kitchen door, but instead of a kitchen, I’ve found a nebula of obliterated china. Clay dust swirls with its own gravity, and below the cloud of colorful specks and flecks the floor is littered with ornately painted jagged edges. The ecru walls have bald spots now, wormholes in the old, familiar boundaries of the room. It sounds like an owl is screeching somewhere, but I know that’s not the case. We don’t have a bird, we never did. I’m not ready to investigate, I’m not ready, yet.

I woke up alone, outside. 

I need water and Advil. I open the fridge– it’s picture perfect, its contents color-coded– I grab the pitcher. I move to open the cabinet that holds our glasses and my sneakers crunch over the remains of what I’m looking for. Many of the mugs which now litter the ground were gifts. Some had pictures of our family happily printed onto them, one in particular, my favorite, showed us screaming joyously on Splash Mountain. There’s its handle, isolated by the cellar stairs. I still check the cabinet, just to be sure. It is empty, there’s not a vessel in sight, of course. I grab a stainless ladle off its peg and dip it into the pitcher, drinking my water as if it were a cold soup as if I were a thief and it was still night. I don’t want to crane my neck to drink from the sink. It’s such a sad posture, never enacted out of grace or pleasure, and besides, I might not be able to straighten back up if I stoop to that level, there’s a terrible kink in my neck which I think is rooted somewhere in my ankle. 

My parents are moving out of the house I grew up in. My mom is moving to Montana, my dad to San Diego. He’s there right now actually, for a long weekend, closing on his new place, and then going on a four-man fishing trip. My mom still doesn’t exactly know what she’s going to do in Bozeman, or who will help her move, or how she’ll make new friends at almost seventy. My older brother came home last week to help her handle what he could. He told me she seemed fine. I believed him. I thought I was fine too, until last night. I was sorting objects into boxes in the garage when I came across a dusty garrison of plastic men. The only toys my brothers and I ever got from our dad were soldiers. Birthdays, holidays– it was always the same. Sometimes we got baggies of bazooka-toting frozen warriors, sometimes specialized G.I. Joes with replaceable hands and gear. It was hard to play war all together because there were three of us. Nobody likes a two-front war, they’re too hard to manage, especially for little boys. My older brother, Danny, would just take the pieces he wanted, and my younger brother, Eddy, had a blood-curdling war cry, so I was usually the odd one out. I didn’t really mind, I liked to recreate the maneuvers of great generals, pretend I was Hannibal, and that my dad’s armchair was The Alps. I was obsessed with the Punic Wars, then the Napoleonic, and then, in seventh grade, I got my growth spurt and my dad started dropping me at the park to make friends and play ball. 

It was good advice. At the park, I made friends with a few popular boys my age. They started bringing me into recess games at school, and eventually, I became a popular boy myself. I largely abandoned my carpeted theaters with their furniture-cum-geological features, but even while I was in high school, guerilla GI Joes remained stationed around the house in case of emergencies. Sometimes I craved their respect, sometimes I wanted to exercise control, sometimes I had the urge to imagine horrible things—so for a time I kept a few covert operatives in my bathroom, where in the privacy of the hissing shower head and the mirror-smudging steam I would play with my toy soldiers again, out of sight and, in the end, always clean. 

I was impressed by the secret squad of Rip Van Winkles I found in the garage. I didn’t remember them looking like that: Their physiques were so lithe, so aesthetic, none of them seemed ready to carry a fifty-pound pack through the desert. They seemed unaware, unprepared, and ignorant of the violence for which they were intended. And, when they did do violence, it really hurt. They made me think I was soft and out of proportion, I’d poke and pinch and scrutinize my rubbing thighs and bulbous hips until I was convinced I was defective, worthless. It had been a long time since I’d thought like that, felt like that, but picking up the Navy Deep Sea Diver Joe last night sent me spiraling. He used to be my favorite, the one I brought on playdates. He got to kiss his pick of Lauren Phillips’ Bratz, and I often thought he might even be kissing her when I turned my back. 

I haven’t exactly been sexually active of late, I told my doctor “No, not in the last nine months” at my most recent physical, which was a lie, it’s been much longer than that. In a desperate attempt to feel comely at home, I texted every girl I went to high school with who I thought might still be around. I got a pretty quick response from Haley Pederson, who suggested we meet at a park just outside of town.

I chose the biggest shirt I still had from high school, the biggest shirt I thought she might remember having seen me wear back when I was popular. I pulled on the sleeves and hem hoping to stretch them out a bit, hoping to make the shirt fit me even if I no longer fit it. The pale flesh that gushed from under the bottom hemming looked more than a little ridiculous, so I found a hoodie and zipped it halfway up to hide my protruding paunch. We met at Squaxin Park around nine-thirty. It used to be called Priest Point, we tried to make small talk out of that, but couldn’t. Tequila materialized, we got drunk, I got excited, I thought I recognized the conditions for a collision, but any attraction was imagined, and as my boldness burned out I zipped my hoodie all the way up. It was good though, to see her, she was good, happy, working at our old middle school. She liked teaching, she was subbing for someone on maternity leave, a Mrs. Jenkins. She said she didn’t think about her time as a student as much as she’d expected to. Mostly, she was just concerned for her kids, not her kids, her twelve-year-olds, not hers, but still, did I know what she meant? I told her I understood. They had crises, she said, these tweens, real ones too.“It’s like a fucking battlefield every day for them, and I guess I’m something like a doctor, or a medic, or whatever they call a healer during the war, a Nightingale-type.”