The Possum Queen

My first girlfriend had a possum in her attic.

I never woke to the sound of it scurrying across her ceiling, but to her fist pounding the wall where a head-board might be. The fist was saying, I’m embarrassed. But the possum was undeterred; it ran laps, it invited over friends. They scuttled across the attic: flirting, playing tag.

My first girlfriend slept on her belly or her back. Never with a pillow. In the mornings, she liked to crisscross our legs and put our faces close together while we woke up. I liked to press my palm against her hairline and wrap my other arm around her soft back. She liked to pull on a strand of my hair like the rope of a bell.

Those mornings, the possum above us, were in the winter; the trees out her window were splintered and barren.

________

When I was a teenager, I attended a Methodist church. During a summer mission trip we were instructed to take a small slip of paper, write down our greatest sin, and nail it to a wooden cross. My most obvious sin was the one I’d kept secret since childhood; I scrawled two words, and I picked up the little hammer, and I pounded it in.

Nearly four years later, I was sixteen when a friend passed a note across the cafeteria table. Earlier she’d borrowed a hair tie by slipping it off my wrist. She’d written electricity? in loopy blue ink, with circles like globes over the i’s. I remember because of the sound in my chest when I read it. A long crack like heat lightning.

________

I met my first girlfriend in a thick grove of thin trees, bark peeling like paper. We drank wine. She was direct and formal. Two friends, a geographer and an organizer three years into a love affair, sat across from us. My first girlfriend asked about the first time they had sex: Was it the night you met? Who propositioned who? Really? You sixty-nined?

When the attention turned toward her, she was much more guarded. She spoke about her work as a reporter like she was making a case for a promotion. She arched her eyebrow like an arrow toward the divot in her part, and I was tempted to brush the soft baby hairs from sticking to her forehead. It was late June: the nest of summer, and hot. Although I didn’t know it yet, my first girlfriend didn’t own a hairbrush. Her hair, blond and streaked with grey, was loosed downwind like a wheat field in the fall and her eyes were mossy, her shoulders tan. Her summer uniform was jean shorts, a skinny brown belt, and Tasmanian boots.

By July, I grew bold. I followed her home from a bar. Her yellow hair crumpled like straw under the streetlight. She backed me up against the railing of her porch stairs and her lips parted mine. After that kiss, after the sloppy unfastening and after the untested patterns that followed—Do you like it this way?— we practiced every night for a week.

That summer, my first girlfriend didn’t want a relationship. But I felt my whole world collecting static. Like how my palm pressed the gap between her shirt and waistband. How she liked to sleep chest to chest, knees touching. How she drummed the bleachers at baseball games. How it felt when we sat at dinner with the organizer and the geographer and she clinked her knuckles like secret keys down my spine. How that feeling made it difficult to open my mouth and speak. How sometimes, during sex, our foreheads pressed together like flowers between laminate.

Every affair becomes a segment: a line of interstices bound by the first point and the last. A week after our first kiss, we walked through a field of goldenrod and ticks and deer blinds. I found damp scumlike algae on a rock. She recoiled when I reached out and touched it with my finger. You wouldn’t expect to find...