PHILADELPHIA, PA-

And take upon ’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies.

-Shakespeare, King Lear

You really don’t know what’s lurking under the lid when you start to ask someone about obsessions.

It might look neat and orderly from the outside.

Obsession begets its own melodramatic light, becomes a self-contained beacon leading us in twisted, inspired directions.

Not that that’s a bad thing, mind you.

You’ll never get me to talk smack about an obsession.

I like obsessions.

I’ll take the lid off and poke around.

Even if I have to wear gloves.

I also like pretending I can see molecules from flammable fuels.

I like cuts that heal slowly with missing scabs from being clumsy in crowded rooms with sharp edges.

Because I am clumsy like that.

Susan Henderson of Lit Park.com wrote about obsession last week and goaded readers of her blog to confess theirs.

Some people faced up to being caught in the light of a familiar beacon: the ex who got away, the one who branded them, the crush who never reciprocated.

When I meet folks who don’t possess this file in their brains and don’t know at a gut level what I’m talking about, I don’t get what to do with them.

You’ve never been lit on fire? I want to ask, and then I don’t, because they wouldn’t know what I’m saying anyhow.

Maybe they’re clueless.

Maybe they’re not God’s spies.

Maybe they’re smart.

If I try to explain obsession to them, I look like one more crazy lady on a rampage.

I’ve met other aspiring spies like me, those folks who DO know what I’m saying about obsession, its inevitability, absurdity, and redemption.

Their eyes catch the light differently.

Then they usually tell me their story.

Confessions and obsessions: they work hand in hand to reveal odd places in the soul.

I’m not here to tell their stories.

For all I know, those stories might be fictions, bits of tape and glue to keep a mundane life afloat.

I’m here to confess my stories, and to reveal an odd place . . .

The place where THE redhead still resides in my memories.

He got all my candy, he did.

The first ones get all of it, unabashedly handed over, fistfuls and then more.

Generosity and puppy-tailed enthusiasm are so easy the first time.

I gave it all away to him.

I was six.

I’ve gotten a lot smarter about candy.

Where were we? Surely I wasn’t here to talk about candy.

Ah. Redheads.

There’s a long line of redheads comprising my obsessive history.

My friends make Charlie Brown jokes about me for a reason.

THE redhead, whom we’ll call Red from hereon, was the nephew of neighbors who smoked a fair amount of weed on weekdays and always let their kids play in the rain and smack each other over toys until their arms and legs sported welts.

I remember Red wore, of all things, blood-red runners’ shorts and white muscle shirts with logos.

He drove a Camaro with a shit paint job that should have been red, I think, but looked increasingly orange with each waxing, which was frequent.

Good grief.

Red came to visit during the summers that were soupy humid around here.

Everything seemed to stick to me that summer, especially him.

What I mostly remember of him is the skin on his legs, neck, and arms, in that order.

Revealed, pale skin.

Redhead skin.

I was hooked.

I was six.

I knew enough of skin that I made my dad give the guy my candy.

I shoved all of it haphazardly into a beat-up cardboard box that once housed broken New Jersey seashells with edges like sandy razors and, before that, saltwater taffies that rotted my teeth on contact and glued my tongue in place.

It was a lot of candy for a six year old to give away, all that I had collected in my drawer for weeks.

I would often horde candy away in a drawer, saving it up for a treat and relishing the idea that the drawer was both full and mine.

The potential of enjoyment was better than the real thing.

I like being tempted by possibilities.

Back when I was six and fascinated, the end of August neared.

My dad told me that Red would leave, and that soon the leaves would turn different colors, including red.

I squeaked, “When?”

“In a week.”

Dad knew.

I didn’t know how to hide well then, to pretend that nothing mattered, that people didn’t penetrate and change me.

Back then, I decided not to eat the candy because I didn’t know how else to steal Red’s heart.

Or at least to get him looking across the street at me when I would climb a pathetic, lopsided, ant-infested dogwood tree in the front yard.

Because I asked him, my dad walked across the street with a worn box of candy in his hand as the summer closed.

In my head, I play this reel as a silent movie seen through rips in an old screen door.

I stayed tucked away and watched, a spy.

I saw gestures, smiles, and laughter from Red as he accepted, shook my dad’s hand, and threw the box on the front seat of his Camaro.

Time passed, and I climbed trees less and less.

Things were changing quickly.

When I was 9, other mothers asked my mother about my waist and bust line.

This happened a lot at the pool.

I said nothing.

After puberty fully hit me like a dirty bomb, I was left with clumsy breasts and clumsy hips by age 14.

I also was saddled with a clumsy truth.

I was tempted by another kind of candy than I expected.

The reality of bisexuality, of queerness, hit with a force I didn’t expect in the form of a girl one year my senior, who was as haughty as her hair was red.

She was the Queen Alpha Bee to her coterie of Alpha Bee Bitches, the ones with the right parents who had the right houses in the right neighborhoods.

They seemed to know the right boys, what to say to them, and to feel comfortable in knowing that the boys and marriage were their future.

Perhaps even their salvation.

Like, omigod, for sure, ya know.

But to me, the world was as limitless as a morphing teenaged body, and I knew already that there were other possibilities open to me.

Just not with the Queen Bee herself.

I was doomed over the red-haired girl.

Sometimes the truth of identity rests in one strand, in one moment.

You know.

I knew my truth like I was handed a big, red sign.

Good grief.

Her nickname was Cherry, short for “Maraschino Cherry,” because of the red hair that she flipped everywhere.

She played it up, even wore silly red lip-gloss that smelled of cherry flavor.

I don’t have a mental picture now of her without at least one hand in her hair, her head tilted at one angle or another, letting us know what she had and we did not.

Over the years our high school semesters overlapped, I occasionally heard Maraschino Cherry! screamed by one of her get-along-with-the-pretty-people friends.

It echoed across the polished, heavily shellacked gym floors and off the disinfected aisles flanked by greenish gray lockers.

I wasn’t one of those girls.

I would hear it, feel revealed like someone caught me picking a wedgie, and note how much I hated the artificiality of maraschino cherries, the overdone sweetness, the hyper color.

Too much.

I don’t remember Cherry’s real name, partially because the years have erased it, and mostly because I don’t care now about the truth of her.

I care about the truth of me.

About the truth of candy and of the difference between sharing it and giving it all away because the latter feels, strangely, safer.

I care about the truth in being one of God’s spies chasing the forbidden in a very Catholic, all-girls school.

I never intended to give it all away to Cherry, but she was a first, so she got it all anyhow.

The first time I boarded the bus for the first day of high school, I saw her seated neither in the middle nor the back of the bus, but between the two.

Where the cool kids sat.

I chose my spot some seats in front of them, the sophomores, who lorded their new non-freshman status over us, the underlings.

As the bus’ gears shifted into motion, I looked toward the Queen Bee, whose very tone of voice manifest that she knew exactly what she was.

She was looking right at me, following up from my first glance at her when I stumbled to my seat seconds before.

Thunderstruck by her, her physicality and energy.

All of it horded in my eyes and directed toward her in one moment of mutual acknowledgment.

When the bus hit a pothole, everyone bounced, but conversations were not interrupted, except for my silent one.

She broke our gaze, said something in a whisper to a lesser member of her Queen Bee royalty, and turned to me, her voice as merciless as a hungry cat’s eyes.

“So you’re a freshman.”

More eyes on me from the coterie, alit, curious, impossibly girl-cruel and adolescent.

“Uh huh.”

Clumsy, I was, my candy spread all over my face.

She sighed, smiled, and flipped her hair in one move.

“Yeah. You are,” Cherry said, hair-flipping again.

More of her teeth showed. “I can tell.”

Then it was over, and then she was talking to someone else in a second.

Sometimes, you get found out.

Busted with candy.

Years ago, when I was somewhat less clumsy and 23 years old, I taught at a college Writing Center where one of the students was an 18 year-old who grew wide-eyed quiet when I directed her attention to something.

I pointed to a line in her essay and felt some mysterious aura about her that I ignored for months.

I leaned over her work, picked words, mentioned commas, and said, “Revision is . . .”

Actually, I don’t remember how I defined revision.

Maybe it was something about altering a story, seeing what we want to see, and making others see it, too.

Because we can, especially if we’re clumsy like that.

I do remember that on the last day of the semester, she stopped by, asking for one more round of edits.

Before leaving, she pulled from her backpack a box of Whitman’s chocolates and put it in front of me.

I ate five in her presence.

Nougat, caramel, peanut butter, solid dark, and marshmellow.

I wondered how I looked talking and chewing through candy, my tongue getting stuck in my mouth.

“Don’t you want some?” I asked, turning to her as we both headed to the parking lot, a school year closing behind us.

She was already looking at me.

“They’re all for you.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 7th, 2006 at 3:05 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.