First Time I Stole

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“They’re horny. Teen girls aren’t allowed to be horny so they just scream,” I said into the windshield.

In the car, on the way to the grocery store, my boyfriend asked me what the phenomenon of teen girls screaming at concerts was all about. This was in apropos of nothing, but it was admittedly a good question. First it was Beatlemania, with bee-hived, A-lined wailing. Then a similar but markedly different incarnation took the stage: boy bands. The same because it was a band of 3-6 boys, but different because there would be no musical instruments and more room for gyration. Then we loved the single boy: Bieber Fever. Now who knows what we like because I’m 32, but you watch videos of any of these concerts and there it is. But the answer to his query was so simple to me, it practically tumbled out of my mouth.

        He replied with a “huh,” and before I could expound my truly delicious commentary on sexual politics, my words were sucked out as he rolled down his window to let out a fly.

                                                                                                ***

        My first concert was NSYNC in 6th grade. I remember screaming a lot at that show, partly because everyone else was doing it, and partly because it felt like the only authentic, reasonable reaction to what I was seeing. On stage were five hot guys telling my very hopeful heterosexual fortune: that I am a girl and that inside me lies a force that has the power to burn me from the inside out. Just Add Boy. They flew down from the ceiling on wires and they promised us potential.

I didn’t have the words or the confidence to verbalize to my best friend screaming next to me what I was feeling; she didn’t either. I didn’t have the courage to say it to my mother who was also standing next to me, simply clapping. So, I screamed. I know my mother, a woman who was a girl once, saw my jaw agape and the stage flames reflected in my eyes and knew. I know she remembered what it was like to be possessed, even if she never admitted it.

        That was my only concert as a kid and as a militantly quiet child, I never again got an excuse to yell out of horniness in public, although I wanted to. My mother, sensitive in so many ways, and perhaps with no room for noise competing with the clanging of her own anxious thoughts, often shushed me and my friends from the bottom of the stairs at least once at every sleepover, appearing as the screams left our throats. I know the “shushing” of a mother seems like it would be vague, but I guarantee I could pick my own mother’s out of a lineup. I can hear the sound waves as they fight to break through her clenched teeth. She was probably holding a dish rag. She was probably so tired. She probably wanted to scream, too.

***

        Instead of constantly screeching out of horniness, I would often spend a Saturday by the radio in my room, waiting for “My Heart Will Go On” to play so I could record it onto a cassette tape, hoping to God that it would be the extended version with the audio clips from Titanic. Then I could be narrated laying across my bed and rolling myself up in my sheets and weeping, my little nine-year-old arm draping off the side, never letting go and then always, always having to let go. I welled with longing listening to Celine and that recorder deliver directly to me: Love can touch us one time/ And last for a lifetime/ And never let go 'til we're gone. My nail-bitten white-tipped pointer finger depressing the record button, inconsolably lusting over my heartbreak. A silent hysteria.

        I had recently seen the movie in the theater with my mom and best friend. On the van ride home, my friend and I unbuckled ourselves at red lights and reenacted the door floating scene, me again, dipping a hand into the romantic, frigid waters of the floorboard. Her, perishing. My mom caught us in the rearview, her eyes crinkled with a smile.

        I know now that I would have much rather reenacted the steamy palmed car scene, but I was only nine so the devastation of losing a lover was more accessible to me than actually having a lover. Too young to have a sexual partner, but old enough to feel the deep, billowing sadness of something lost, and therefore something missed, and therefore desire for it to be again, and therefore, let’s just call it desire, then. I writhed around inside this tween devastation/desire yin yang for years. Some other triggers:

·   Pearl Jam’s Last Kiss

·   Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet

·   Brick, by Ben Folds Five, which introduced me to the concept of the harrowing, romantic teen abortion

·   Pearl Harbor, duh.

·   My Best Friend’s Wedding, which I still can’t explain.

·   That Aerosmith song from Armageddon

        As I aged, this desire only intensified. I had worn lipstick for the first time, shaved my legs, and I had pridefully, officially declared myself Steph, not Stef. I also made good grades, was a peer mediator, was in Gifted and Talented, and followed the dress code to a fingertip-length T. And all the while, inside my closet door, smiling speechlessly into the darkness, was a poster of Jonathan Taylor Thomas absolutely desecrated by red lipstick kisses.

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I think there are few things my mom wants more in this world than to be close to me, her youngest child, her only daughter. To know me, my specific possessions, my deepest desires and fears. But because she is my mother and understands the space that must exist there, and because she wants to keep her own specific possessions and desires and fears from me (a powerful vestige from her secret-worshiping Southern Baptist upbringing), we delicately dance a muted waltz, an arm’s length often between us, guilty smirks on both our faces. She, “guilty” of having her secrets but mostly of wanting to know mine. Me, guilty of having my secrets and wanting to keep them from her. Both of us wanting to have a type of closeness with each other, but both of us being judgmental, knowing too much about the other, really knowing the other, would make us too close, too at risk of colliding. A collision might mean annihilation.

My dad was a therapist and she was a retired social worker, a stay-at-home mom and general sweetheart, so I was allowed to feel things, of course. “I” statements and “How do you feel about that?” were spoken daily in our home. I could feel and I could tell them how I felt; they just preferred it to be measured, packaged, quiet.

***

        I remember the click of Kmart’s upright poster displays pinging each other as I flipped through them. His rusty button-up shirt. His mouth closed, the corners curved up making their own tiny fractalled smiles on his cheeks. He was tan. Interested. JTT. I found my mom’s cart an aisle over and dropped the small, rolled up, shrink wrapped version in the bottom, letting it roll to the no-man’s land under the place where people sometimes sit their babies.

        I knew she would probably buy it for me, but I didn’t want her to. Knowing I wanted this poster would tell her too much about me: I liked boys. Blondes. I wanted to be looked at by blonde boys, even if it was just a picture of one. I couldn’t bear it. I just wanted to have it, to possess it without conversation or transaction, for it to just be mine. And by a most beautiful geometry of angles, trust, and ignorance, the poster made it through the checkout line, to the car, into my backpack, and into my closet.

        My mom saw it one day when she was cleaning out my closet.

        “Where’d you get that?”

        I replied totally truthfully, but with a red face, “Kmart.”

        “Huh,” she replied.

        She didn’t mention the kisses.

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