By Mary Clark
When I started texting my coach, I’d had a crush on him for two years. By the time things started with us, he was coaching a younger team. He started lending me things. I would find him after practice to return his copy of Brave New World or his first generation iPod, texting him later, “I like Animal Collective the best.”
I went to his house one warm morning for a date. We stuck our feet in the pool and joked about the legality of kissing each other. We asked, “Is this legal… is this?” as we leaned in closer to each other, or brushed our feet together in the water. We went inside to watch Ponyo and eat scrambled eggs from a bowl.
He often said formal things like “thanks for coming over” and “anime is my favorite genre.” At one point, as we sat close to each other on the couch, I farted and immediately turned to stone. I sat as still as I could, like a kid imagining I could make him believe nothing happened. No one said anything, but later he laughed too hard when a fish in the movie farted and a bubble floated to the surface of the water.
His roommate came home briefly and no one knew what to make of anything, so no one said anything beyond “nice to meet you.” I also gave a low nervous wave with the hand that wasn’t holding his under a pillow in my lap. Obviously, I wasn’t the loser in this situation, but how could I have known?
Later, I broke up with him, because one night a younger boy said to me, “I know I’m not unbiased in this situation, but I think that guy’s pretty much a creep.” I was convinced. Sam was more interesting and had already read Brave New World and was 17, not 27.
The coach and I had a date at the drive-ins that night, and when I showed up, he had two grocery bags worth of a picnic and a huge smile on his face. He brought cups for sparkling lemonade. I almost lost my mind. At that age, when I had to tell someone something horrible, I cried first so there was no getting out of it. He never took his hand off the parking brake while I told him I was done by saying, “You know that guy I went to homecoming with, remember him?”
He cried so hard and for so long I almost missed my curfew. He texted me that he loved me, that he had cried all night. A few weeks later he mailed a DVD of Ponyo to my parents’ house. I saw his tiny neat handwriting on the package in the mailbox. Thank god it was me who found it. Later, after I told my mom my secret, she told me that she wouldn’t tell my dad because he would have fought him. I thought that was ridiculous, but now, when I think about his tiny all- caps handwriting, I kind of want to fight him too.
When the roommate left the house that day of our first date, our knees touched each other’s on the couch. We had already kissed the weekend before at a First Friday downtown. I met him outside of a Spaghetti Warehouse, ostensibly to say hello. I said, “I just came from practice” and he said, “It smells like it.” Then we moved our heads around until we were kissing. It felt like kissing a brick wall. The kiss of a guy trying not to get arrested.
I changed his name in my phone to Amanda, as in, “A man, duh.” I loved that he was a man.
I went to his house after taking the SATs. He cut up an apple for a snack that we ate in his bed, before I gave him head for the first time. I hobbled naked to the bathroom for toilet paper. It was actually his parents’ house. I slipped on my green boots and drove away in the rain feeling proud of myself.
When I think about the way he looks I remember what a folk singer said about her ex-boyfriend. She said he looked like everyone she’d ever known. Walking around, I see a constant stream of similarly medium-sized sandy men with big arms and small noses.
On that first hang, at his own second-story brick apartment, we made out in his room where he had one framed Wes Anderson poster and man-themed bedding. I slept in all of my clothes on my side with a stomach ache.
My back had been tight for a few weeks, no doubt an athletic injury, and after being spooned all night by a man, I woke up feeling like I had been bent in half backwards. My mom was picking me up for church at 10. I told her I was getting breakfast with a friend, I’d meet her on the corner. I got into the car and could barely sit down. It felt like my body was strapped to a board, and I could barely bend my knees. My mom said I must have slept funny. I cried and asked if I could go home, but my mom said people were expecting me in the nursery where I worked.
When I got there, I could barely pick up the smallest baby, a recently adopted Russian orphan who was afraid of everyone except me. I tried to put her down, but she dug the plastic heels of her tiny Mary Jane’s into my back, pinching my skin and my nerves. I finally sat her down, and went to the bathroom to stand still and to cry.
Through my tears, I thought with relief, “Maybe now I can quit soccer.”
Mary Clark is a poet and fiction writer from Tulsa, Oklahoma currently living in Los Angeles. She graduated from UCLA in 2015 with a B.A. in Comparative Literature. Mary currently works as a nanny, and volunteers with the Prison Education Project.
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