Dear B,

            I realize now you may not remember me. It took me years to figure that out because I’ve never forgotten you. There was one thing I knew since then, despite being only nine years old. I understood the part you played in my life, and what it would mean to me in the end.

            Some months before we met, before we moved into that drab yellow complex, I found a book in my father’s old study. I’d been reading his books ever since I was tall enough to reach his shelves. I had to stand on top of the table, but then I had access to his immense collection of novels; however, the book I pulled out that day said Erotica on the cover. I didn’t know what the title meant, but in those days I figured out most things through context, so I dove in. It wasn’t a mystery, like many books in his library. It was a collection of stories. Stories about men and women, men and men, women and women, women and boys, men and girls, people and animals, and more.

            I had no basis for judging which of these acts—so explicitly and evenly described—were deviant, and which weren’t. As it turns out, I might never have a basis. The story of the socialite who gets licked to orgasm by a dog and the old woman who fucks the teenage boy by the abandoned train station and the husband who tenderly shaves his wife all embedded in my mind with the same degree of propriety. In any case, it was my father’s book, which immediately lent it moral authority.

            My memory of your dark basement apartment is clearer than many of my other childhood memories. All the kids in the complex loved it. Looking back now, I imagine you must have loved it, too; seeing us flood the living room after your weekly judo lessons, lounging all over the furniture. I still remember how bright the fish were in your aquarium. Since my parents hated pets, it would be the first time I ever fed a creature other than myself, and I always secretly sprinkled in extra fish food when you weren’t looking. I wasn’t allowed pop at home either, so I always raided your fridge for it.

            It was Elly who first went into your bedroom. We were sitting on your shag-covered couch together, sipping Coke, chatting as if we were grownups at a party. When she got up and pushed open the bedroom door, only I was bold enough to follow. And when I saw the waterbed, I was glad I had. I’d never seen a waterbed before. Elly clambered onto it with a familiarity I recognize only now, decades of climbing into beds later.

            She lurched and fell, laughing hysterically. I couldn’t resist. I joined her. There was something about the uneven motion that made the place not like a bedroom at all, more like an amusement park, or a science museum. We bounced and rolled and dove, and I don’t know how long you had been standing in the doorway when you spoke. I hastily jumped off at your admonition, but Elly remained unrepentantly prostrate on the crumpled sheets. You only shook your head and went back to the living room.

            Elly was my first kiss. I didn’t know there was such a thing as sexual orientation when I was nine. Neither the Erotica book nor my life thus far had drawn that many lines. She had sparse coarse pubic hair. I didn’t know whether it was supposed to be like that, because I hadn’t grown any yet. It seemed strange, so I kept my fumblings to her ass, which was so smooth and round. We didn’t touch each other’s breasts at all, probably because they were flat and didn’t feel like much. 

            Every afternoon after school, Elly and I played house in an empty apartment we had found unlocked. My little sister and Elly’s little brother were “our kids,” but Elly and I usually got tired of parenting pretty quickly. We’d lock ourselves in the bedroom that had only a bed and a dresser, jump on the bed until we were tired, then flop down breathing heavily, and feel each other up like crazy, giggling when “the kids” got bored and banged on the door, asking us what we were doing.

            I was the one who found your closet, not Elly. The one I couldn’t stay away from. The one I went to even on days we didn’t have judo. When I think about sex now, there are times when I recall that tiny room, the single naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling, and instead of clothes, the shelves lined with sex magazines. I can picture the redhead with such large breasts that her willing tongue could reach them, the black woman with the afro tied to laundry lines being whipped, laughing, and other women with their legs so wide you could see straight into them, into that deep wet pinkness.

            I knew it was wrong to be there, standing under the wavering shadows, but I couldn’t help myself. I don’t know that I even liked the pictures so much. When I think back on them now, they seem dated, simplistic, fetishist. Especially since I find few visual cues equal to textual ones, or to my imagination. Either then, or now.

            But the fact is, I liked knowing what was inside each magazine. It was a complete mystery each time, every page turn a guilty revelation. Which was why I didn’t blame you when you came into the room. I had come on my own, after all; to satisfy this relentless thing I would come to know much later as my libido.

            And you never hurt me. In fact, it didn’t feel like much at all, you squeezing and pinching my nipples through my clothes as I flipped through the magazines. I could even ignore it, take it as payment for my curiosity. If you had pushed harder, things might have been different. If you hadn’t acquiesced each time I pushed your hands away from my jeans, each time I stopped you from taking off my shirt, I might not have come back. Or perhaps only visited when others were there. But no one can really predict these things. What I have wanted and won, relished or regretted, I couldn’t have imagined then, and sometimes can’t believe it now. I only know not to be so surprised at my variable inconsistencies.

            After everyone found out that Elly had accused you of forcing her to have sex with you, all the parents said she was a bad girl and we shouldn’t play with her. Some parents even said it was because she was black, which didn’t made sense to me because you were black, too. I know now there are different rules for women and those rules almost never serve us well.

            Of course no one thought you might have started it. Not you, the gregarious beloved landlord who gave judo lessons and soda pop to all the kids in the complex. It must have been Elly’s mistake. Elly with her ready mouth and taunting words and preternaturally wanton ways. And so she became a stranger in my eyes, despite all our afternoons in sunlight, in the empty apartment, touching each other in silence.

            My family left that concrete complex soon after. The last time I saw Elly, I was walking up the stairs to our apartment with my parents. She was standing on the landing, hip against the rail. Hey, she said, when I got close. I don’t think I glanced up high enough to see her face. I know I said nothing back to her. Elly, who was far more interesting than you. I walked past her and on into the rest of my life. It would be one of the last times I listened to my parents over my heart. It wouldn’t be the last time I would be disloyal to someone.

            That’s what I wanted to tell you: I wasn’t shocked or hurt when you came into that little room. Your large fingers don’t haunt me, your peppermint breath, that flickering light. Even now, decades later, when I have learned so many ways to blame others, and more recently myself. Perhaps it was that Erotica book that helped me understand why a middle-aged man might find a little girl sexier than he can stand. Or maybe, despite the irony, it was Elly, with her unapologetic ardor, who taught me to live my sexual life without fear or frontiers. Either way, I don’t believe you betrayed me those long ago evenings. Especially not when I’d done my share of betraying. I figure one bad turn for another.

 

Sincerely,

 

A

 

Abeer Hoque is still overfeeding the fish.  See more at olivewitch.com.