In most of my childhood memories I’m in the backseat of a car. This would have been my family’s Buick, with nicked paint and an apple core always rotting in a cup holder. In all these memories of driving I can only picture a single type of weather: a glowing industrial sky, bright and overcast, the air sensuously cold.
Outside, the sole vegetation is yellow grass in the median and barren, vine-encumbered trees on the margins. Through the emaciated trees are scattered houses with plastic clapboard siding, colored gray, beige, or light blue, and next to the houses, yards of dark-green grass and glossy hedges, sometimes with a child’s playset knocked over on its side. There are no people visible.
Looking at the houses and the trees and the metallic sky I would feel the sort of erotic suspense one feels in a dream. I imagined all the girls, or sometimes the boys, who were my age and living in those houses with plastic clapboard siding. In my mind they were of middling looks, since I spent these years searching for someone neither ugly nor too pretty because I thought this would mean they were more likely to let me touch them. Plastic siding aroused me, both sexually and through the euphoria of alienation – a passive omniscience, as though I had become a djinn possessing the land, a genius of gray expanse. I fantasized about the comfortable rooms within those structures, their little pockets of electric heat and clean wall-to-wall carpeting, and the way someone who owned such a place could quietly look out their window at other houses just like their own.
Our first house had plastic clapboard siding. It was an attached house of faded yellow, where I lived until eight or nine. All the nearby houses looked similar; they were either attached or stood very close to one another, with a little yard in front. I don’t remember the interior of that first house except for a few square feet in the living room. This was the corner between the couch and the wall, a space barely large enough for me to tuck myself in an upright fetal coil. From the first eight years of my life I barely remember the room where I slept, or the table where I ate meals, but I remember this corner between the couch and the wall and how it smelled like old apple cores and warm dust.
*
In clapboard siding, the narrower top end of a board is lapped beneath the thicker bottom of the board above. The English borrowed the method from shipbuilding, where it is called shiplap. Boats like the ancient Nydam Boat, which was recovered from a Danish bog in the nineteenth century, had their hulls constructed in this style, as did the Viking ships that plundered coasts and sailed to Greenland and Nova Scotia. The English invaded America in shiplapped boats and set about building houses, but knew only how to build boats. They moved shiplap to land and it became clapboard. This is why American houses look like you could drop them in the ocean and they wouldn’t take on water. Eventually, manufacturers learned to replicate clapboard with sheets of vinyl, which besides being cheaper than wood is also hydrophobic.
As a child I learned that everything is made of plastic, and that what isn’t made of plastic is occluded by a layer of it.
One of my early memories involves peeling the top layer off a wooden table in a classroom. With a penny and my fingernails I managed to pry up a few inches of what turned out to be a mat several millimeters thick, glued on top of a sticky dark slab that formed the base of the table. From above, the mat appeared to be wooden planks, but looking closer at the pattern of the grain I noticed a repetition several feet forward from where I was sitting, and again in another place over to the side, and I inferred that the manufacturer had printed pictures of wooden boards onto a plastic sheet, then glued the sheet to the top of a rectangle of metal or rubber or firmer plastic, which was the dark and sticky mass I had uncovered.
*
At the end of seventh grade I experienced my first kiss, with two girls from Waterbury, Connecticut, on a class trip to a water park. My friends met the girls, who were from a different school, and dared them to kiss me in a stairway at the back of a pool. They did this, one after the other, with tongue, laughing to show it wasn’t in earnest, and I laughed as well to convince them that kissing me wasn’t serious enough to be something they might later regret. One girl was white and the other black, two skinny children wearing gray sweatpants and dark red camisoles over elastic swimsuits.
I remember the white girl telling me to be gentler with my tongue. When I complied she leaned out of the kiss and thought for a moment, then said, with great solemnity, “Yes, like that.”
After kissing the girls I paraded them around the park like a hunter showing off a deer hoof preserved in epoxy. I told various people that we had kissed. The girls went along with it, although I don’t remember noticing how they appeared to feel or why they accompanied me on my victory tour. Perhaps they were in on some joke at my expense. Before we left for our buses I managed to get their usernames for AOL Instant Messenger.
The rest of that day has no certainty in my mind. I went to the food court and ate several dry, powdery donuts; hopped around an obstacle course and sprained my toe against a child’s knee; saw a girl in a swimsuit walk by and drop her towel, and felt certain that all the beautiful things, the beautiful bodies, were not meant for me, my bare feet burning on an asphalt path that lustered in the sun. I don’t remember whether any of these events happened before or after my first kiss. I’m not absolutely sure they happened on this trip at all.
That year I thought a lot about the city of Waterbury, Connecticut. For months I tried to contact the girls I had kissed. They ignored me for the most part, or sent a few terse messages. Eventually one of them blocked me.
Waterbury is on the way to Hartford, where my aunt lived, and my family drove past it several times a year. Well into adulthood I ached whenever I read its delicious name. A city of attached houses with plastic clapboard siding spread over a hill, visible from the highway. An ugly red hospital, a looming brick church. I have never gotten off at the exit. Waterbury only exists when seen from the highway; if you set foot there it turns to shifting sand.
I spent hours imagining myself wandering through Waterbury streets on chilly bright days and encountering a city of skinny, sad children wearing gray sweatpants, the waistband folded over itself a few times below the worn polyester hem of a monochromatic camisole, a half-inch stratum of stomach gleaming through the gap.
I remember asking my parents what they knew about Waterbury and their telling me it was blue-collar, that there was industry but it dried up.
There’s something alluring about a populous city that is culturally insignificant. The messiah could visit such a place and we would never know; the messiah probably has already come to such a place.
In adolescence, the girls I found attractive came from blue-collar families on our town’s margins. They wore pajama pants or gray sweatpants below monochromatic camisoles and layered heavy makeup over pale, tired eyes, and they spoke less often than the wealthier girls. I probably thought they were easier to get into bed.
In one recurring dream that followed me well into college, I wandered around my hometown, in an East Coast suburb, and found a girl at a bus stop wearing pajama pants and a monochromatic camisole. She was smoking either a joint or a menthol cigarette or a Camel Crush or a blunt, depending on the night. Snowflakes began to fall and were revealed by a steel streetlight crooked above us, adumbrating the patch of street in a layer of sterile white. The girl smelled like cheap vanilla perfume; we kissed; she went home to the apartment building up the block. Later in the dream I would look for her in her building and find nothing but a labyrinth of hallways that smelled like old apple cores and warm dust.
*
After the attached house with plastic clapboard siding, my parents moved us to a brick structure about a half-mile away. We were not in the wealthy part of town but the move was in that direction. There were no longer any attached houses nearby, but some had plastic clapboard siding.
On the second floor of this house were three bedrooms and a small guest room, and a fold-out staircase that gave access to a malodorous attic rimed in dirty yellow insulation. On the first floor were a dining room, a living room, and a kitchen connected to a mangy backyard. The first and second stories had wood floors that creaked, publicizing every movement to the rest of the house. In the distance, the susurration of an intracounty highway enclosed my world like the gurgle of a womb.
At this age, all that mattered to me was privacy. This was before I had a laptop: there was nothing to do in my bedroom. The basement became a sort of refuge after my dad fixed it up. He brought in blocky used furniture donated by a cousin, and installed wall-to-wall carpeting and a CD player. There was a boxy television with basic cable.
When we first moved in, the basement flooded anytime it rained, and even after a contractor installed a noisy sump pump the place smelled of sulfur. The scourge of the space was scutigera coleoptrata, the common house centipede, with its boar-bristle legs and tiger stripes. These creatures climbed out of the grates that covered the heating pipes, moving with feline speed across the drywall. In the corner, a giant black Dell was the only way to watch pornography.
It was in the summer leading up to my freshman year of high school that I met Kayla. She was to be the most important person to me for some time, and the most spiritually significant, although we only spoke for a year. I met her on Myspace, where I learned we would enter high school together, and each graduated from a different middle school. Fittingly for her significance to my life, she existed for months as a still image, an icon, before I met her in person. Her profile picture showed a pale face with dark makeup and a stretchy camisole. For several months she existed as ethereal text on Instant Messenger, broadcast from an adult world I yearned for. We were turning fourteen, born one week apart.
Eventually I got her cellphone number and invited her to a concert of various high-school bands.
I brought my friends to the concert. When we ran into Kayla she was heavier than I expected, and my friends took me aside to laugh at me for crushing on someone who was fat, so I avoided her for most of the concert, feeling self-conscious. I think it took me several months to understand that Kayla was conventionally beautiful, and that she was neither fat nor skinny. But even when I felt ashamed for liking her, I also saw her as somehow supernaturally chosen for me. She rejected me from the moment we met.
At the end of the year, Kayla was struggling in classes and asked me why the teachers seemed to like me more than her. I told her she should show less cleavage so people would take her seriously, and we never spoke again.
*
Connecticut is a state I’ve never lived in yet am always compelled to visit. My wife’s parents’ house is in Connecticut, near a marina where they dock a small sailboat. Their house is clapboard, not plastic but cedar painted a dusky Winslow Homer blue. The structure invokes a yeoman past with its little manicured garden, the cord of wood displayed on the front porch. Outside the wind carries brine and the smell of smoke; inside it’s so clean that it’s a wonder people live here, eat and drink here, walk around and blow their nose. Scattered on shelves are books on Shackleton and Joshua Slocum, the chronicles of Erik the Red, arranged around awards her father received while working at a hedge fund. Despite its newness, the house is as delicate as a fisherman’s shack. In a strong wind the roof shakes, the walls click. The foundations sneak a few inches toward Long Island Sound.
*
When I was very young, before it got too expensive for us, my family would take a trip to Block Island once a year. First we drove to a city in Rhode Island where we could catch the ferry. The place was a miasma of salty rot, greasily fecund. That intensity of ocean can only exist in memory, the gulls as loud as a passing train. I recall sitting with my family at a bar and eating clam chowder out of paper cups. The feeling of eating clams in such a place, a sort of communion. Afterwards we boarded our Buick and drove into the belly of the ferry, then got out of the car to stand and watch the land shrink and disappear.
Gray sea, gray hull, clouds. Passengers hushed beneath the spray. Every surface of the ship was layered in resinous paint. Eventually the little island appeared, the muddy cliffs in the north, buildings in the south.
We spent five days searching for hermit crabs with our toes. We would build gated communities and condominiums for them out of sand, the sorts of places one sees on the side of a highway. We named and catalogued crabs. Some years my brother swore he found hermit crabs he had captured years before.
One morning, during one of the last summers we vacationed there, we woke up and the ocean was gone. The beach beyond our hotel now stretched to the horizon. There had been a strange moon the night before. We went out to the place where the ocean had been, now a littoral moonscape of craggy rocks and naked flushes of seaweed. The tide had receded a hundred yards, and beyond that for as far as I could go the ocean only went up to my waist. Big fish hovered around rocks, some lay dead in the sand.
We found a lobster, red and raw, crouching behind a rock. My brother picked it up by its tail and brought it to the sandcastles where we kept our hermit crabs. Eventually my parents saw the lobster and conferred with other adults who said it was too small to eat and we had to put it back. We had never mentioned eating it, but back it went.
