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the year and so I also watch movies on my thirteen-inch set with the tiny white dots running in diagonals from bottom left to top right. I work if I have to and so I know, from experience, that I can handle a fully-loaded wheelbarrow, which weighs, I'm proud to say, 300 pounds. But I prefer sitting to jogging and lying on my stomach is even better. If I could, I'd stay up until three in the morning and wake up at noon. Shopping malls are great. They make me feel like an American even if I don't buy anything and they sparkle and hum like clean commerce. My people are sports people and so I know how to shoot a jumper and I know how to cast a fly rod and load a muzzleloader. My dad showed me how to throw two kinds of fastballs. I'll sit through a game on TV for the moment, after the buzzer sounds or after the last fly ball's caught, when the winners crash into each other in a fit of some of the purest joy around, hats and chunks of dirt tracing ecstatic arcs through the air. My mom has no innate love for sports but she's acquired one because she had to and anyway she's taught me to keep my darks separate from my whites and that loving another person is the best there is. I try to follow my mom's advice but I can't, not all the time. Because I want the world to conform to my needs. I'd like to eat rich, spiced food and read books on balconies. I'd like to fly somewhere sitting next to someone I love, drink cold beer, take black-and-white pictures, spending all the countless nights with loud, obnoxious, fascinating people and later writing about it, hung over, bad in the stomach but good in the head. I won't lie and tell you I wouldn't be the star of these stories. I would and I'd probably make myself look better than I am. Because I'm not hiding anything here, I can say there are some things I'm not sure about. I have two brothers but no sisters and so girls are tough, complex, smarter than us but volatile. I'm still learning. For example, girls are all about subtext, what's not being said. That's a tough one to learn, but I'm trying to get fluent in that language even though I've tried Spanish twice and it never stuck. This subtext is why I say they're smarter, because they live their lives as if everything means something, the pauses in speech and the tilt of eyebrows carrying deep, rich meaning that I've spent years ignoring. Sometimes, when I'm feeling especially exasperated, in the dark and awake on the far side of the bed, it seems as if they're tapped into some secret world of colors and melody and then in the morning I wake up and realize it's all true, that their world exists. They speak more languages better. And they care about things like picture frames and thank-you-notes. And soup. And I don't know how to have arguments with them and I don't know whether they should be called "girls" or "women" or, in certain situations, "ladies," but a women's studies major told me once that "female" is almost never correct and she had a serious look on her face when she told me this. I 18
FUGUE#30