If You Knew Then What I Know Now (review)

A young boy sits in the back of a station wagon, holding hands in the dark with his beloved. Just five years old, the two profess their love for one another, and the boy takes the next apparently logical step. “Will you marry me?” he asks. It’s a charming moment, innocent, sweet. Yet “First,” the opening piece in Ryan Van Meter’s collection of linked essays, concerns the love between two boys and the harsh lesson learned by the narrator when his mother overhears the proposal.

“You shouldn’t have said that,” she says. “Boys don’t marry other boys. Only boys and girls get married to each other.”

And so first love leads to the first awareness that love—life!—is not the simple thing a child imagines it to be. This is, of course, true for everyone, but as Van Meter shows us in If You Knew Then What I Know Now, it is particularly true for a child who is gay, and for the man that child becomes. That he does so with flashes of sly, insightful humor and equally insightful moments of anger balanced by a deep empathy for all concerned makes this collection deeply honest and fully felt. The writing is, quite simply, beautiful—precise, clear, refined—creating closely observed moments that are full of surprising intensity.

In “Discovery,” during a visit to his grandparents’ farm, Van Meter finds an ornate party dress in the closet of his father’s boyhood bedroom and puts it on. His grandmother, encountering this vision of her eight-year-old grandson, pauses only momentarily before asking him to set the table for dinner. The particular pleasure of this everyday task is, of course, made glamorous by the wearing of the dress. Yet a kind of danger looms as the boy’s grandfather and brother return from the fields; despite her own apparent acceptance of this (first?) cross-dressing, the grandmother yields to an urge to protect the child.

“We look at each other, a woman in her dress, a boy in his, one of us on each end of a perfectly set table for four. Here is a secret we both helped make, and in this moment we feel it dropping fully formed down into each of our bodies, whole and heavy, where it will sit forever.”

Of course, not all of the moments are marked by such grace. Many of the essays deal with the expectations of what it means to be a boy, particularly the “right kind” of boy—one who loves sports, one who plays outside, one who behaves in specific ways. Van Meter explores the pressures of gender-related expectations from parents, peers, and self. In a world where being “different” equals being “wrong,” these pressures are immense; these essays show us the small everyday moments in which they are revealed and how they are internalized. Witness here, for instance, the way Van Meter moves between past and present, third person and first, the boy he was then and the man he is now:

“Don’t be a pansy,” his father says during a session of backyard baseball practice. “You look like you’re afraid of the ball.”

“I am afraid of the ball.”

The two of them have made a deal—one more season of baseball in exchange for a color TV for the boy’s bedroom. “Practice” and “Lake Effect,” about a gathering of men and their sons, both explore the tensions between his father’s desperate desires for his son and that son’s growing awareness of himself, of how others already seem to know something about him he does not yet understand, of how that knowledge creates a barrier between his father and him.

The title essay is addressed to Ryan the sixth-grader, warning him about the long-lasting residual effects of a cruel prank played by two schoolmates. “If you could avoid working on this project with those two boys, you could avoid...