It’s lying there open, like a flayed fish. Its innards are exposed. So we stop on our bikes.

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It appears to be a magazine. 

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We’re now deep into that particular summer. It’s around the corner on Farragut Street where we make the discovery. We’re riding bikes with a couple of other neighborhood kids. Something is lying in the middle of the street. 

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Farragut Street is quiet and civilized. There’s not much through-traffic, so it’s a good place to learn to ride a bike, which is what the three of us do there, brother, sister, and I. One by one, over the years, we have all learned to balance. It’s a miracle when the wobbling straightens out. You think it won’t happen but it does. 

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It’s not Time magazine. It’s not Guideposts, which is a Christian magazine some relative sends to us and which we never read; we keep it on the back of the toilet. It’s not a Sears circular. It’s not Ranger Rick or Life. 

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What we can finally see is a photographic spread of female flesh. There is a face and a head of dark hair but mostly it’s two pages of a naked female body. An expanse of skin, with large perfectly round nipples. 

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The magazine is slightly mangled—it may have been run over by a car—but everything is still shockingly easy to see. Flip a few pages and there is more of the same lady, the same flesh, curving and sort of fuzzy, as though her edges are disappearing into the space around her. She does not look real but the pictures are real, the magazine is real. Our communal glimpse of it is embarrassing and awful and electrifying.

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How can we just leave it there? We can’t just leave it there. 

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It’s a delicate operation to get it from the street into the basement of our house. One of us hides it under a shirt while riding our bike, and upon getting home has to walk from the driveway to the slanted cellar doors and down the cement steps to the cellar. Mom is upstairs in the kitchen probably snapping the ends off of string beans and has no idea what we’re doing. We all stand around in the cellar trying to figure out where to hide it. It’s a mess down there. We discuss it for a long time and then the magazine finally gets shoved under some old artwork in the bottom of a cupboard next to the chemistry lab I have set up towards the back, a place where I do experiments on rocks. 

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It rests in the cupboard for three days. 

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Somewhere in the middle of the second day I visit the magazine. But secretly. I crouch down by the cabinet and rustle around underneath the old artwork and find that it’s still there, which amazes me. I had thought maybe brother and a friend of his might have come back and taken it for themselves, because after all they are boys and boys love that kind of magazine. It’s their domain, really, even though the subject of the photos is female, like me. I’m an invader, a spy. 

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The thrill of seeing it again is nearly too much. Like looking at some sort of rare and filthy relic left behind by marauders who passed through too quickly. 

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It’s almost sickeningly seductive. So this is what sex is. A woman displaying herself for a man in the most teasing way. Is this all that sex is? Even at this young age I think there might be more. 

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Later I find out there is more. But that takes a long time. 

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Boys don’t know how strange this is for us, seeing the way they see us before we even know how to see ourselves. What a mess it makes of things.

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I close the rumpled pages. The magazine needs to be put back under the pile of artwork, but I need to find the exact spot where it was before. Was it under my stupid drawings of tilted trees or under sister’s much more original French-fry people. It’s quite possible someone will come visit the magazine and notice that it’s in a different spot. I put it under my tilted trees and hope that I’m right. 

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The rocks on top of the old cabinet next to where I’m crouching—my chemistry lab—need to be checked anyway. If someone discovered me now, I could just say I had to see how my experiments were going. 

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There are three kinds of rocks: igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic. In a wide-ranging study, I have collected various examples of all three kinds of rocks and then dripped different kinds of liquid on them to see how they’re affected. Orange juice dripped on an igneous rock, for example. Or leftover milk from the bottom of a bowl of Count Chocula drizzled onto a sedimentary one. Or a drop of Compound W on a metamorphic one. I keep a piece of paper with notes about all the reactions in a folder on the cabinet. “Kind of orange-yellow splotch” I note about one of them. Or “Nothing really happened” on another. Or “Definitely weird stinky smell when you smell it” on another. 

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There is no rhyme or reason to what I have done in the experiments. It’s just the idea that if you do something to something, something might change. And it might surprise you. Or you might just be disappointed. 

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You’re just trying to get a reaction. 

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Reactions are not always easy to come by. Let’s say there’s a family where certain things are not supposed to be talked about, so if people behave in a certain way, or treat other people in a certain way, the expectation is that even if you notice, you won’t react. 

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                                                                         ***

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In the evenings while we’re all sitting at the dinner table, Walter Cronkite reads the number of Americans who got killed in Vietnam that day. Mom makes a clicking sound with her mouth that means “That’s so sad.”

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Dad fought the Japanese in World War II and can tell if they’ve used the wrong sound for a fighter jet in war movies. He is alone in his incredulous acknowledgment of such careless stupidity; most people would never know. He takes the three of us kids to see Tora! Tora! Tora!, about the Pearl Harbor attack, at a neighborhood movie theater on a summer afternoon. He is obsessed with World War II aircraft and will be for the rest of his life, and I will never manage to figure out if it’s nostalgia for a time in his life of great purpose or the paradoxically soothing revisiting of confusion and fear. He likes to talk about the war. He has some funny stories. He keeps it light. He never appears to be emotional about it, but one time he does say, in a baffled sort of way, “I just couldn’t believe my job was to get up every day and kill the Japanese.” 

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Every day my job is to get up and hope that no one in the family is sad. But eventually it will become clear that hoping was never enough. 

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And at some point, many years later, the culture will decide it’s really not so bad to say you need some help, you need some therapy, you need to talk things out and try to get to the bottom of it, to the stuff that got pushed really far underneath the surface. But generally speaking, the Greatest Generation, which is Mom and Dad’s generation, misses that moment. 

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As a young man Dad is just a sensitive guy who wants to be a writer or a musician. But he does like to fly, so there is that.

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During World War II Dad gets shot down by the Japanese in the South Pacific. He survives an entire night floating in the sea and is eventually rescued. It’s big news back in his hometown and someone writes an article about it for the local paper. The article states that the first thing Dad said upon being rescued is “Hey, boys, can I have a cigarette?” It sounds like a line from a movie. The writer just made that part up. 

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People make things up. Or they leave out important details. They talk about some things and not about others. They pick and choose according to how much they can tolerate. 
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                                                                         ***

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On the third day we decide we have to get the magazine out of the house. There’s a plan. 

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One of us hides it under a shirt again, and we walk it up and around the corner to Farragut Street, where we found it. Instead of leaving it right in the middle of the street, we pick a spot in the dirt underneath a hedge along the sidewalk. It’s on someone’s property but there doesn’t seem to be anyone around. We  crouch down and dig with our hands and bury the magazine in the dirt, working fast and nervously. The woman who owns the house sees us then, and comes outside and yells over at us. “You kids get out of there.” She couldn’t possibly know what we’re doing, but she doesn’t want us mucking around on her property. We’re ashamed, although it’s not clear, at least not clear to me, if the shame is about the magazine or about the burying of it. 

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We run home and we never talk about it again. On the way home, we pass the house on our block where the husband and wife will both die of AIDS. It’s a sad thing that won’t happen for many years. We also pass the house right next door to ours where our neighbor will be murdered, another sad thing that won’t happen for many years. It’s tempting to think, later on, that these things were waiting to happen. But it’s a strange phrase that loses meaning when you really think about it. The things weren’t really things. They were more like a million moments and events in some kind of order we never fully paid attention to. Who was waiting? Us? Time? The idea falls apart pretty quickly.

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In the afternoon our best friend next door invites sister and me to come play Barbies. We add Ken to the mix to open up dating possibilities. Meanwhile, brother and a friend make a battlefield for their GI Joes in our backyard, in the corner part of the yard where they can make a mess. The girls have chosen romance and the boys have chosen war. 

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After dinner, I go down to the cellar and check on the rocks. One of them has changed a little. The one I dripped hydrogen peroxide on has some bubbling on it, which has caused some loosening of the surface. It’s a subtle difference but it’s there. 

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Things really do change over time. People change, even the ones you think are stuck forever. You have to look closely. They might be staying in one place, but everything around them is shifting, so the setting is different, the light is moving, the moon is cycling, the wind comes up and a storm comes through and no one is quite the same. 
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