Ben
Any chronicle of the men in my life begins, necessarily, with Ben.
Our mothers have told the story so many times that it feels like memory, and maybe somewhere in my brain there are fragments of the day we met: something about sunlight streaming through the windows of the preschool classroom comes to mind whenever I hear or retell it. In any case, it was clear that we loved one another from the start. He immediately told his mother about the bow in my enormously unruly hair - so blond it was almost white - and about my owlish pink glasses, which he found beautiful. I did not tell anyone about the length of his eyelashes, or about the way I admired his cowboy boots, but I know that I must have spent some time thinking about them because they are some of my earliest memories.
Our relationship was never a romantic one, not even at the beginning in our four-year-old hearts; we both had other people upon whom we bestowed our juvenile and incomplete attentions. But for many years, he was the central person in my life, and in retrospect I believe that I was his. Gradually, our families began to draw together in the same way that we had, and by the time his youngest sibling Madelyn was born, our parents formed a united front and for ease they called the members of the younger generation by numbers: one through six, in order of birth. Ben and I had turned eight that year, and nothing seemed more natural to us than the fact that we should be "One" and "Two." We each had two mothers, two fathers, three other brothers and a sister, and countless cousins. My grandmother would ask me upon arrival where my "other half" was; and once when we were thirteen and I had lost my voice, she overheard the lowered register of my voice and quite naturally assumed that she'd heard Ben in the house, despite the fact that it was eight o'clock in the morning on Thanksgiving day. We laughed about how similar we sounded later that day - because of course we ended up together. Thanksgiving is, after all, a day for family.
Childhood and early adolescence is composed almost entirely of anecdotes about Ben, with Ben, away from Ben, but his presence or his absence is fundamental to each of them. We spent countless hours of the summer vacations training dragonflies in a tent for the pleasure of watching our babysitters' horrified faces when we'd appear with dragonflies perched serenely on our fingers, ears, and noses. We broke windows and dishes and bones. We took care of the kids when our parents went out together. We folded hundreds of origami cranes out of Rolo wrappers on long car trips, complained about our sunburns, asked his mother to make her gingerbread cookies, asked my mother to give us a ride to camp, went with my father to look for deer in the Audubon on February afternoons after school. We did our homework and slept in the same bed and generally lived our lives together.
We made compromises, of course. I watched his gymnastics meets and listened to his horse-riding talk with enthusiasm but feigned interest; he tried to read the books that I loved and to learn an instrument. But it always left us both unsettled when we found evidence that we weren't as identical as we felt we were, and as time went on, our differences deepened.
Middle school was tough for us. Ben wanted to explore alcohol, marijuana, girlfriends and boyfriends and staying out late; and when it became clear that I was not a suitable partner for these investigations, he found a variety of people who, together, began to collectively fill my role. And I was angry; wrongly angry because I considered it my business what Ben did to his brain and his body, and rightly angry because I felt replaced. When Ben finally became comfortable enough with his homosexuality to make his orientation public knowledge, we'd slipped away enough that I was one of the last people he told; and when I cried because he didn't love me, nobody understood that it was not the loss of a romance that I was mourning.
I spoke openly to him about how we were losing our friendship - once, and only once, in a letter. He became angrier than I'd ever known him to be, and even our friends noticed our unusual quietness and the bags under our eyes, and asked us if somebody in one of our families had died. Our eventual reconciliation felt inevitable but also unsatisfying. "Now we won't have to fight again for another eleven years," he said, smiling at my tears. But he admitted no wrongs and I lost the hope that I'd secretly cherished of returning to those dragonfly-filled afternoons.
In the years that followed, he went away to boarding school, and then I went away to college. We lost touch. It felt a little like dying, spending those years not knowing what to say when his mother would hug me and whisper in my ear, "Why don't you come over anymore, Samantha? We miss you. You can always come visit me, you know."
Somehow, in recent years, we've reached a new peace; he calls me when he's in town, we'll eat breakfast and catch up and find our common ground. I discovered, with a bit of a shock, that he's told his new boyfriend all about me; that he wishes Max could come and meet his "two best friends from home," which apparently includes me. I call him on his birthday, and a few other times a year, just to say hello. He doesn't pick up, and I'm always careful to tell him in my messages that he doesn't have to call me back - he won't in any case, but this way we both understand the rules of engagement. And when I see him it feels more like meeting an estranged brother than it feels like encountering my other half.
Still, Ben has shaped me in a way that very other few people have. He's still with me, too - not in his current six foot tall ballet-dancing chain-smoking form, but as the redheaded long-eyelashed companion of my childhood. And every time I chew half a stick of gum at a time, every time I absentmindedly fold a paper crane or smell saltwater early in the morning, I think of him. And I remember him as my beginning.
Our mothers have told the story so many times that it feels like memory, and maybe somewhere in my brain there are fragments of the day we met: something about sunlight streaming through the windows of the preschool classroom comes to mind whenever I hear or retell it. In any case, it was clear that we loved one another from the start. He immediately told his mother about the bow in my enormously unruly hair - so blond it was almost white - and about my owlish pink glasses, which he found beautiful. I did not tell anyone about the length of his eyelashes, or about the way I admired his cowboy boots, but I know that I must have spent some time thinking about them because they are some of my earliest memories.
Our relationship was never a romantic one, not even at the beginning in our four-year-old hearts; we both had other people upon whom we bestowed our juvenile and incomplete attentions. But for many years, he was the central person in my life, and in retrospect I believe that I was his. Gradually, our families began to draw together in the same way that we had, and by the time his youngest sibling Madelyn was born, our parents formed a united front and for ease they called the members of the younger generation by numbers: one through six, in order of birth. Ben and I had turned eight that year, and nothing seemed more natural to us than the fact that we should be "One" and "Two." We each had two mothers, two fathers, three other brothers and a sister, and countless cousins. My grandmother would ask me upon arrival where my "other half" was; and once when we were thirteen and I had lost my voice, she overheard the lowered register of my voice and quite naturally assumed that she'd heard Ben in the house, despite the fact that it was eight o'clock in the morning on Thanksgiving day. We laughed about how similar we sounded later that day - because of course we ended up together. Thanksgiving is, after all, a day for family.
Childhood and early adolescence is composed almost entirely of anecdotes about Ben, with Ben, away from Ben, but his presence or his absence is fundamental to each of them. We spent countless hours of the summer vacations training dragonflies in a tent for the pleasure of watching our babysitters' horrified faces when we'd appear with dragonflies perched serenely on our fingers, ears, and noses. We broke windows and dishes and bones. We took care of the kids when our parents went out together. We folded hundreds of origami cranes out of Rolo wrappers on long car trips, complained about our sunburns, asked his mother to make her gingerbread cookies, asked my mother to give us a ride to camp, went with my father to look for deer in the Audubon on February afternoons after school. We did our homework and slept in the same bed and generally lived our lives together.
We made compromises, of course. I watched his gymnastics meets and listened to his horse-riding talk with enthusiasm but feigned interest; he tried to read the books that I loved and to learn an instrument. But it always left us both unsettled when we found evidence that we weren't as identical as we felt we were, and as time went on, our differences deepened.
Middle school was tough for us. Ben wanted to explore alcohol, marijuana, girlfriends and boyfriends and staying out late; and when it became clear that I was not a suitable partner for these investigations, he found a variety of people who, together, began to collectively fill my role. And I was angry; wrongly angry because I considered it my business what Ben did to his brain and his body, and rightly angry because I felt replaced. When Ben finally became comfortable enough with his homosexuality to make his orientation public knowledge, we'd slipped away enough that I was one of the last people he told; and when I cried because he didn't love me, nobody understood that it was not the loss of a romance that I was mourning.
I spoke openly to him about how we were losing our friendship - once, and only once, in a letter. He became angrier than I'd ever known him to be, and even our friends noticed our unusual quietness and the bags under our eyes, and asked us if somebody in one of our families had died. Our eventual reconciliation felt inevitable but also unsatisfying. "Now we won't have to fight again for another eleven years," he said, smiling at my tears. But he admitted no wrongs and I lost the hope that I'd secretly cherished of returning to those dragonfly-filled afternoons.
In the years that followed, he went away to boarding school, and then I went away to college. We lost touch. It felt a little like dying, spending those years not knowing what to say when his mother would hug me and whisper in my ear, "Why don't you come over anymore, Samantha? We miss you. You can always come visit me, you know."
Somehow, in recent years, we've reached a new peace; he calls me when he's in town, we'll eat breakfast and catch up and find our common ground. I discovered, with a bit of a shock, that he's told his new boyfriend all about me; that he wishes Max could come and meet his "two best friends from home," which apparently includes me. I call him on his birthday, and a few other times a year, just to say hello. He doesn't pick up, and I'm always careful to tell him in my messages that he doesn't have to call me back - he won't in any case, but this way we both understand the rules of engagement. And when I see him it feels more like meeting an estranged brother than it feels like encountering my other half.
Still, Ben has shaped me in a way that very other few people have. He's still with me, too - not in his current six foot tall ballet-dancing chain-smoking form, but as the redheaded long-eyelashed companion of my childhood. And every time I chew half a stick of gum at a time, every time I absentmindedly fold a paper crane or smell saltwater early in the morning, I think of him. And I remember him as my beginning.