Helen Raica-Klotz

Playing With Boys

The letter came in a pale blue envelope. I ripped it open and read the small type. I had been accepted into Michigan’s gifted and talented summer program for high school students, to be held for two weeks at Wayne State University’s campus. I immediately stuffed the letter in the back of my underwear drawer. My mother found it five days later. She slid it across the kitchen table one evening, announcing she had called that morning and accepted the full tuition scholarship on my behalf. I would be leaving in a few months. I didn’t want to go. I had already made my own plans to return to Interlochen Fine Arts Camp this summer to study music and be with Norm, the boy with the long brown hair, wide smile, and chipped front tooth.  This is the boy I would meet in the cramped rehearsal room behind Groening dining hall to exchange deep wet kisses, pressing up against his lanky frame with a sense of urgency and purpose, as the echoes of the other students dutifully playing scales and sonatas swirled around us. We would both emerge sweaty and breathing deeply, his hair sticking to his neck in damp tendrils, my lips red and deliciously raw. 

Later, after camp was over, he would write me letters on purple notebook paper, his small, elegant handwriting covering the page. Later still, I would travel to his house for holiday break via a fourteen-hour Greyhound bus ride. The bus ticket was a Christmas gift from my aunt, always a sucker for a good love story. His home was a large sprawling ranch in Bloomfield Hills, which featured a finished basement with real carpeting, a guest bedroom with an attached bath, and second family room with its own fireplace. He lived in an alternate world: two cars in the garage, a father who dressed in suits for work, a table that held candles that were actually lit for dinner. In preparation of my arrival, his family had placed a small Christmas tree in the bedroom in the basement and explained that while they were Jewish, they wanted me to feel at home. Norm gave me a bouquet of real roses and an extra small pink polo shirt, complete with three white buttons and a small green horse that rode on my upper left breast. In the guest bedroom that evening, I stripped off my flannel shirt. I put on the polo. I looked in the mirror. I flipped up the collar and smoothed the fabric over the rise in my breasts, the flat surface of my stomach. This shirt was a talisman. I was now someone else, a beautiful, powerful young woman who belonged in this upper-middle class neighborhood outside of Detroit, not the girl from the Upper Peninsula whose house was covered in tar paper and windows taped over with Visqueen, a Michigan basement filled with cords of wood for heat during the winter months, and a rusted Pinto station wagon in the one-car garage. 

I was supposed to meet Norm back at Interlochen this July. He had whispered during our last phone call he had bought some condoms. I had flushed with excitement. This was supposed to be a good summer.

But there I was that July, standing in a long line of teenagers at the university’s student center with my battered vinyl suitcase at my side, waiting to register for my dorm room and get the mimeographed agenda for the next two weeks of “activities and opportunities.” I was already bored, wondering how to make change from the twenty dollars my mother had given me so I can use the pay phone to call Norm tonight.

Then the boys arrived.  Huey first, his stomach pushing out the top of his T-shirt and his converse sneakers turned in slightly at the toes, mumbling a shy hello. George was next, solid and squarely built, leaning forward to lift my suitcase easily with one hand, his button-down shirt tucked neatly into his khakis. And Cameron, with his long thin hands lifting and moving in front of his body as he told a joke, his green eyes flashing with laughter under a tumult of blond curls. They circled me, these beautiful, strange creatures. It is then I felt it, the power of my own attraction:  my breasts and hips, my carefully curled hair and black eyeliner, my shy smile and steady gaze—it was working.  These three boys were here, waiting for me to choose one of them. I was Goldilocks, drunk with the power of choice.

Huey was the first to try. He gave me a pull tab from a Coke can fashioned like a ring and crouched down in front of me. “Will you take this ring,” he said. When I looked, I saw the desperation in his eyes. I laughed, took the ring, and turned away, pretending it was all a joke. He played along.  He spent the next few days tagging along behind me, pulling out my chair and getting me an extra soda at dinner.  I let him do this, but I kept him at a distance.  I studied Cameron more closely, the most beautiful of them all. I decided he was the one I wanted.

But a week later, alone in a hallway, out past curfew, our kisses were awkward and shallow. We bumped noses, then tentatively tried again. Finally, we rested our foreheads together, fingers interlaced. We stood like this for a long time. “Friends?” I asked. “Sure,” he agreed.

So I ended up at the Detroit Symphony Orchestra concert with George. I told him I didn’t really like going to the symphony. I am used to playing in an orchestra, inside the sound. In this space, you are surrounded by the melody. The notes whirl off the page and fill your entire body: you become the music. In the audience, the experience is a pale imitation – Here, I feel trapped on the outside, with no door to get in.

This is what I wanted to say, anyway. I didn’t say anything. I just sat in silence, shifting in my chair in the back row of the balcony. I looked at the crowd, the beautifully dressed men and women who spoke in soft whispers to one another.  The men wore dark suits, their hair trimmed neatly, their shoes black and sleek. The women wore soft dresses, carefully coiffed hair, jewelry that sparked in the low light.  I was dressed in my pink polo shirt and Zena jeans. It smelled like money here, and I smelled like Love’s Baby Soft and sweat. I didn’t belong. Then the curtain rose, and the musicians came forward, moving in unison, instruments gleaming in the spotlights. The conductor danced on stage, twirled around. We applauded dutifully. After I finished clapping, I realized I didn’t know what to do with my hands. The music began, a Beethoven sonata. One lone cello sounded his notes from the far away stage.

George leaned over and put his mouth to my ear. “Listen,” he whispered. His breath was warm and steady. He took my left hand and placed it, palm up, in between us on the armrest. Then he suspended his hand over my hand, fingertips touching mine. The back of his hand was pale, with a dusting of freckles. His fingernails were bluntly cut into clean straight lines. “Close your eyes,” he whispered. I obeyed.

I heard the music. The violins and percussion had joined in, so the sound was louder now, but still so very far away. They were at sea, and I was on the shore. Gently, George pressed my middle finger down with his. “This,” he murmured, “this is the center. Do you hear it?” His finger depressed mine more deeply. And I heard it. It was the first real chord. Then, as the music moved up the scale, he released the pressure ever so slightly on my middle finger, now pushing down my index finger. “And here we rise,” he whispered, his breath warm on my ear, my neck. I felt the sound start to hum inside my chest. The music entered inside, pushed forward, spilled up and into me. When it rose again, he pushed my pinkie down. “Do you feel it?” I did. I felt the sweep of the music, the warm touch of his fingertips mine as he guided me inside the sonata, the music resonating through my entire body. This was the music, and something more than the music. When it was over, the audience applauded, but we stayed frozen. I realized I had forgotten to breathe. I took a quick, shuddering inhale. I kept my eyes closed.

I felt him turn my hand over, placing his fingertips underneath mine. “Your turn.”  And I played his hands: first one finger, then the next, anticipating the rise and fall of the music. His fingers were pliable, so very receptive, almost bending before I put on any pressure. This touch, this sound, was everything.

The movement ended.

I opened my eyes. The lights had come up; it was intermission. There was no music. I moved my hand away. I got up. “I have to use the bathroom,” I said, I hope I said. I moved past George, down the aisle, into the lobby, and stood in line. When I got into the stall, I pressed my forehead, my face, my whole body against the metal door. I was trembling, and I could not stop. I took slow, shuddering breaths. I stood there for a long time. Then I opened the door, walked back into the lobby, and left through the double doors to Woodward Avenue. I walked all back to campus—the little white girl in the bright pink polo shirt, walking blindly past the burned-out buildings and homeless men lining the sidewalk, the whirr of the four-lane road distant in my ears. When I got to my dorm room, I took off the pink polo shirt, threw it in the corner of the room, and I curled up on the bed into a tight ball. I still felt the thrum of the music beating inside me.

The next day, I apologized to George for leaving. I told him I was sick, not feeling well. He pretended to believe me. We would not look each other in the eyes when we said these words. I would not look at him for the rest of the week.

Now, the three of us are sitting together for the last time before we head home. We are on the top of the Cass parking garage, the city of Detroit sprawling beneath us. It is night. The Fisher rises to the north, the Renaissance Center to the south, and the moving lights of traffic pulse in between. Cameron sits next to me for a moment, then leaps up to look over the edge, pushing his sneakers through the metal fence. Huey sits motionless on my other side, leaning slightly into me, his soft weight like a golden retriever. George sits apart. I look at his profile, but it is too dark for me to see clearly. Tomorrow, I will go to Norm’s house before heading home. We will kiss and grope one another in the dark of his parents’ basement, but when he pulls out the condom wrapped in brown aluminum with the serrated edges on the package, I will change my mind. He will be as gracious as a 16-year-old boy can be. He will be hurt when I break up with him a month later, on the phone.

But right now, I am here, these three boys and me. The one I didn’t want, the one I did want, and the one who might have been just right. I close my eyes and push my middle finger down into the crumbing cement, feeling the sharp gravel give way slightly underneath my fingernail. It hurts, but I keep pressing harder, hoping to hear something.

Helen Raica-Klotz teaches writing in the English Department at Saginaw Valley University and in regional correctional facilities, homeless shelters, and local libraries–any place where she can find people who have something to say. She has written two non-fiction books, Empower Me and Journal Me. Her poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction has appeared in various places, including Riverrun, Walloon Writers Review, Bear River Review, and The Dunes Review, and Cardinal Sins.