To Know You

“I was a shy kid,” I said to a goateed thirty-year-old named Dave last week. He’d asked me out on a date. We were eating soy crisps.

“I was a goofball,” I said later. “A real ham.” I added this when we were in the car, after a trolley had cut Dave off and he yelled “Toogle!” instead of “Shit!” or “Damn!” I told him “toogle” sounded like a word I would have invented when I was eleven.

After the date was over, I wondered what kind of self-portrait I’d left Dave with: half oil, half melted crayon? And where did I get off making such declarations about myself anyway? Self-knowledge has always reminded me of writing; the closer I am to a piece of work, the harder it is to view it objectively.

For his part, on our date Dave related several solid childhood anecdotes. He and his brothers liked to make up funny names for imaginary characters, like Felix Corn Felix, Bart Farkas, and Peggy Borkis. Then he told me about his fourth-grade science teacher who made up facts about the universe. The science teacher explained, for example, that the quarter he’d just blown across the table only moved because his breath had displaced the gravity.

I thought about the fact that I’d had a sex life at age six. Nothing abusive, abnormal, or horrible, just me and my six-year-old female best friend Nanda fully clothed, lying on top of each other on her mother’s waterbed in Eagle Rock, playing “boy-girl.”

“You want to play boy-girl?” one of us would ask the other.

“Yeah, you want to play boy-girl?”

I didn’t tell Dave this story.

But I did wonder if I should’ve told him that up until the age of twelve I thought I was dumb. Kindergarten through fifth grade, I attended the Arroyo Seco Alternative Magnet School, where every day was a field trip in the park playing Red Rover beneath the sycamores and having “choices” and “feeling circles.” When I switched to the more conventional Ivanhoe Elementary in sixth grade, I was convinced that long division was and would forever be beyond my hippie dippie comprehension.

Dave told me that his mother was a conservative Baptist and that his father was a liberal Buddhist.

“And they’re still married?” I’d asked.

He didn’t smile. Just tipped his hand back and forth, so-so. I wondered where that left him.

“I feel like Ohio in an election year,” he said.

“A battleground state,” I said.

He nodded and pointed to his heart.

Dave told me that when his sister became an adolescent, she couldn’t wait to become a woman. She used to make bras out of paper and wear them around the house before she’d even developed. At ten, just for the novelty of it, she started wearing maxi pads and begging her mother for tampons. I told Dave that I’d been the opposite. I was afraid of getting boobs, of having a period. I used to wear T-shirts over my bathing suit, ashamed of my new body.

“I was a tomboy,” I said. But when I showed Dave a picture of my childhood room, he described it as very feminine, pointing to the blue walls, the white satin swan tapestry with which I’d been obsessed.

What type of kid had I actually been? I wondered. And what could I tell Dave that would paint the right picture?

First Heart

When I was four and attending nursery school, I was deeply impressed by Ian Finley. He was five, brown haired, and rangy, and he always had a juice stain around his mouth. He took his shirt off a lot and liked to run races.

“From the slide to the swings!” he’d shout, and I’d tighten my fists and run as hard as I could, but he always won. When I asked him how he could run so fast, he said, “I eat a lot of steak.”

Once his parents set up an...