When Your Family Wants You To Be “All Boy”

In the woods, far away from our parents, my cousin and I stood at the edge of a cliff. Fifteen feet below, the Big Black River looked more like a slim brown creek. Mosquitoes swarmed, dime-sized and persistent, needling into my pale face and arms and legs. Noticing my erratic air-slaps, my cousin smiled. He told me the reason they were attracted to me and not to him. “New blood,” he explained. “Fresh meat.” It was true: I had never been this deep in the country before, and I was learning that not only would I have to get used to the outdoors, but that the outdoors—the trees, the river, the wildlife—would have to get used to me as well.

I was eleven, and my cousin was fifteen, and this was a weekend afternoon in the late 1990s. Our parents were preoccupied with preparing the land—a couple of acres my mom and dad had purchased from my grandparents for one dollar—before the arrival of my parents’ new house: a top-of-the-line doublewide, complete with blue-gray vinyl siding, a shingled roof, and its very own central heating and air conditioning unit. Our fathers would spend most of the daylight hours on rented bulldozers, knocking down trees and leveling the hill of red clay where the doublewide would sit. Our mothers—sisters who were separated by a decade, but very close—would supervise. And so my cousin and I were left to ourselves, to explore the trails that snaked behind our family’s houses on my father’s Yamaha four-wheeler. Before leaving, our fathers barked at us to “stay gone” until dusk, while our mothers warned us to stay out of the river. My cousin drove the four-wheeler because he was the oldest, and I sat perched behind him—my ass half on the cushioned seat with him and half on the vibrating gun rack. “You boys!” my mom called behind us as we left. “I better not find out you’ve been in that dirty water!”

Even so, here we were, at the river. No one had said we couldn’t sit by the water, my cousin had rationalized to me as soon as we were well out of earshot, or lay about on the cool sandbar in the deep shade of the riverbank. But he wasn’t nearly as persuasive as the heat had been: We had ridden the four-wheeler along the dusty trails in the woods for the first few hours of the morning, and the sun had licked our skin raw. A film of sweat had formed between us. Our stink so potent I had to breathe through my mouth. He parked the four-wheeler near a copse of trees laden with kudzu, and we walked the rest of the way to the river. Weary and weak, I would have gladly followed my cousin anywhere to escape the sun-bleached sky, even if it meant pushing up to the very edge of what my mom had forbidden.

Scanning the side of the cliff, my eyes eventually honed in on a large pine sprouting from the earth like a crooked tooth. One of the boughs split from the main trunk and curved out over the water. From a branch there dangled a long, braided rope.

“I thought we were just going to sit by the river,” I said, because I didn’t know how to swim, not even a little bit, and I didn’t know if my cousin knew, or what this might mean for me if he did know. My mom once told me how she had been taught to swim when she was a little girl. One of her brothers, I forget which one, took her fishing at the pond behind their parents’ house. Without warning, he threw her in the water—evidently, this had been the real reason for the trip all along. “Sink or swim,” my mother said. She sputtered and flailed and almost did sink until she realized it was shallow enough in the pond for her to stand. Instead of learning to swim that day, the experience taught her to fear the water, and she had passed this fear down to me. In the past year, there had been several drownings in the Big Black River (not where my cousin and I were, but in places where the river was deeper and wilder). “They were sucked down by the undertow,” my mom said, speaking of these deaths with a kind of awe. “You can’t see it,” she added. “Only feel it when it gets you, when it pulls you down, down, and by then, it’s already too late.”

I eased back from the cliff.

“What are we doing?” I wanted to know, the whine in my voice made me sound much younger than I was, like a toddler.

“Sit tight and watch,” my cousin said.

He shed his shirt and shucked off his shoes and socks. His body was a body so unlike mine: the bronzed skin, the sinewy muscles, the tufts of black hair ringing his nipples and navel. Hidden by a baggy shirt and shorts, I felt as if it were my own body being exposed, not his. Puberty had reshaped mine into something I no longer felt at home in. Overnight, it seemed, my blond hair had darkened and turned stringy. Acne riddled my skin in crazed patterns. The last six months—a time of great turmoil and stress as we got ready to move to the country from a town thirty miles away—I had gained twenty pounds, my belly puffing over my pants like the raw dough my grandmother used to make biscuits. I could not name a single part of myself that I didn’t loathe.

Using a stick, my cousin pulled the rope to his chest. Grabbing ahold of it, he swung out over the river like some kind of acrobat. Even then, I didn’t believe, I couldn’t believe—such was the kind of boy I was at eleven—that he’d defy our parents and let go, but he did let go. Of course he did. Falling, he tucked in his knees. The moment he made impact with the water, my mouth flew open and out came a little scream. Involuntary, but also high-pitched and keening. Like the squawk of a bird. When he surfaced, his mouth was wide and gasping: He was laughing.

My cheeks burned. This wasn’t the first time I had been laughed at, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last, but after my cousin’s cold, careless, beautiful laughter echoed up from the river, I heard my mother’s voice in my skull. “Don’t be so silly,” she would say, whenever I told her about the taunts at school, the jeers, the bad names, how boys in my class would sneak up behind me, cup their hands around my flabby chest, and squeeze so hard it took my breath away. She always said she would talk to my teacher, but after I begged her not to, she, in a low and loving voice, said, “Then maybe don’t be so silly, sweetheart, and they will leave you alone. Maybe if you fought back. Maybe if you laughed it off.” Silly became our code word for anytime my behavior was suspect: When I snapped my fingers like the sassy girls at church did, when I wrapped a t-shirt around my head and lip-synced every word of Amy Grant’s “Baby, Baby,” when I worried over my weight, when I showed too much emotion and not enough grit. “Don’t be so silly,” she implored, and I wanted to apologize, but didn’t, because I knew, without knowing how I knew, that apologizing for it was, too, a silly, silly thing to do. Now I understand how she only wanted to protect me, in her own way, by teaching me how to hide my true nature from those who would want to destroy it, but at the time, I interpreted my “silliness” as disappointment, as more proof that I was not the kind of boy my parents had signed up to raise.

My cousin waded out of the water and stood on the sandbar, his feet and legs caked in mud. He looked up, directly into my eyes, and pointed a finger at the still-swaying rope.

“Now,” he said. “Your turn.”

I understood my relationship to my cousin was changing. By the end of summer, we would be next-door neighbors. Because I was an only child, and because my dad and I weren’t very close, I suspect my cousin must have seen it as his responsibility to teach me all the ways in which I would be expected to behave now that I was a country boy. My first lesson would happen down by the river.

I didn’t jump. Instead, in what I saw as a compromise, I shuffled down the cliff, scraping my knees and arms against exposed roots and rocks along the way. My cousin was shaking his head when I reached him. I was bleeding.

“Been easier had you just come down my way,” he said.

“I can’t swim,” I said.

He cocked his head to the side, the way a dog does when you whistle at it. “Can’t, or won’t?” Slick with river water, he smelled like the inside of a tackle box. Almost as tall as he was, and much broader, and yet I felt so small next to him. Small and useless. This feeling would return months later, in the fall, when I didn’t try out for peewee football. When he found out, my cousin traipsed the twenty steps from his parents’ house to the doublewide to make sure I recognized the mistake I was making. He was bewildered by my cowardice. He couldn’t understand it. Such a waste, he kept saying, for me to be so big and not put that bigness to use. I wanted to tell him that, if I could, I would give him my body to use however he saw fit. It meant nothing to me. If only bodies were like gloves you could peel off and lose. I almost said as much, but then I didn’t want to sound silly.

My cousin scaled the cliff more gracefully than I had come down it. Once again, he snatched the rope and swung out over the river and cannonballed in. I sat down on the sandbar and crossed my legs. It was cooler down here, but I couldn’t enjoy it. My scrapes oozed blood, attracting more bugs. I didn’t swat them away. I became very still, hoping they would lose interest. They didn’t.

My cousin lingered in the water, bobbing under the surface, dog-paddling to the other side, then floating back, his body a raft, as he gazed heavenward. I looked on, seething. I recalled the undertow my mother had spoken about. I pictured his serenity suddenly broken as he was snagged in the thrall of a rogue current. Oh, I prayed for the devil to make it so. I wanted him sucked under, gone. And, once it was over, I’d lie to my family about how I tried to rescue him. They would understand. They would tell me not to blame myself. He should have known better, they would say. He should have listened.

But my cousin did not drown, no. We spent the rest of the day at the river without incident. He swam, I watched. For lunch, we ate jerky and peanut butter and banana sandwiches our mothers had stowed away in the toolbox on the back of the four-wheeler. He swung himself into the water several more times, only tiring when the sun sank beneath the trees and it was time to go home.

My cousin drove the Grizzly fast enough to dry himself off. By the time we made it to the main road, he no longer looked wet, just sweaty. Back at the now level plot of land, my cousin steered us through the abandoned bulldozers and stopped in the middle of a large rectangle of dirt. We got off the four-wheeler, and I sketched a square with my sneakers in the corner of the rectangle. “This is supposed to be my room,” I said, and my cousin nodded.

“It’s a big trailer,” he said.

“Pre-manufactured house.” I quoted my mom, who was always quick to remind my dad and me of the preferred terminology. My parents had bought the largest model on the lot, they had bragged to everyone about it. We’d taken pride in the fact that our new home was so massive it would have to be delivered in two pieces, each piece strapped behind its own diesel-powered eighteen-wheeler. I saw now in my cousin’s half smirk how foolish we’d been.

“I hate you,” I said. “You’re a bastard, and I hate you, and I hate this.”

He climbed back onto the four-wheeler. “Get on,” he said. “It’s getting late.”

Our parents had migrated down the road to our grandparents’ house. My cousin parked the Grizzly beside the butane tank, and when he killed the engine, I heard them. A crowd had gathered under the carport. In addition to our parents, there were several aunts and uncles, some cousins, and, of course, our grandparents.

When she saw us, my mom hollered, “We thought y’all had done run away.” She and her sister sat on a metal glider swing. Above them, by the screen door, an electric blue mosquito lamp popped and sizzled. Beside one of my uncles, an ice cream maker churned. Everyone was yelling so they could hear each other over the racket. A general feeling of celebration was in the air.

My cousin knelt beside the ice cream maker and fingered out a cube of ice from the bucket and brought it to his lips. I didn’t know where to sit, so I stood at the edge of the carport and peered in at my family. For a while, they left me alone, but then a female cousin was calling the truck stop, ordering everyone cheeseburgers, and didn’t I want one? My mom told me to tell her what I wanted on mine.

“I don’t want anything,” I said. “I’m going on a diet.”

“Oh, he’s just being silly,” my mom said. “He’ll take it plain with just mayo and ketchup, thank you.”

One of her brothers—an uncle I knew to drink and was possibly drunk even now—asked my cousin a slurred question.

“Did y’all go fishing today?”

My cousin, still sucking on ice, shook his head.

“Huh?” my uncle said. “What, boy?”

The men on my mother’s side of family were serious outdoorsmen, former star athletes, veterans of foreign wars. They were frightening in their manhood—or, maybe, they only frightened me, I can’t say. The carport buzzed with more talk, mostly from the men, except for my father and my cousin’s father, who had spent a long day out in the sun and stared blankly at the floor, dazed, wet bath cloths wrapped around their necks.

“No,” I said to my drunk uncle, who was still waiting for an answer from my cousin. “But he went swimming.”

“Do what now?” My uncle did not understand the implication of what I had just said.

Everyone fell silent. I moved inside the carport. “Swimming,” I said again, this time louder, and averted my gaze to the carport’s cracked concrete floor—I couldn’t look at my cousin. For some reason, I was more afraid of him now than I ever was before or after this moment.

I don’t know when I decided to tattle on him, or what I wanted to happen now that I had. Or maybe that’s not completely true. I think I suspected what would happen. My cousin’s father—while normally a quiet man—was known for doling out brutal whippings when angered, when driven to it. My cousin had endured several legendary ones that I had witnessed firsthand. And I wanted to see another. I craved the violence.

My cousin’s father remained where he was, seated beside my father, not listening, still stupefied by a hard day’s work.

But my cousin’s mother had heard me. “Surely not,” she said.

Before she could say any more, the drunk uncle wrapped his meaty arm around my cousin’s shoulders and jerked him into a headlock. He balled his hand into a fist and gave my cousin a noogie, digging his knuckles into my cousin’s scalp. Laughing, my uncle said, “Don’t get on to him now!” The two of them swayed back and forth in an unsteady dance. My cousin dropped what was left of the ice and used both hands to slap at the drunk uncle’s arms. “He’s just doing,” the drunk uncle was saying, “what I did when I was his age.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” said another male cousin.

“That dirt water will make him tough,” said a different uncle.

My mom touched her sister’s arm. “He’s just all boy,” she said, shaking her head as if the matter were out of their hands. She was shaking her head and smiling, I noticed, as if it were right and true, shaking her head as if it were the way things always were. I blinked at her. I kept blinking because my eyes were burning from the tears. The feeling in the carport changed. Evening had shifted into night, and no one had cut on a light, so everyone’s face was cloaked in shadow. Something was dragging me down, down.

“The undertow!” I screamed at mom. “What about the undertow?”

“The what?” the drunk uncle asked. “What’d he say about his toes?”

Laughter erupted from all corners of the carport. Silly, I thought. They are all so fucking silly.

A light flicked on in the carport, and my mom noticed my wrecked knees, all crusty with dried blood. Her arm shot out from her side and grabbed my arm and held it up to her face. She examined the mosquito bites peppering my skin, the swollen flesh, the scabs, then let go of me and looked at my face, disbelieving.

“Son,” she said. “Just what happened to you?”

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