Free The Joyce Maynard Collection by Joyce Maynard Page B

a saying: even the richest man in America isn’t eating tastier pie than we are tonight. That will be so for us.
    I asked him then where his grandma was now.
    Passed on, he said. His voice as he said this suggested it might not be a good thing, asking more.

Chapter 8
    T HAT SUMMER, MY BODY HAD BEEN changing. The fact that I’d grown taller wasn’t the main thing. My voice was deeper now, though stuck in an undependable middle range where I never was sure, when I opened my mouth to speak, whether the words that came out would be in the old high register or my new lower one. My shoulders were as thin as ever, but my neck might have filled out a little, and hair had started to grow under my arms, and lower down too, in the place I had no words for.
    Here too I had changed. I had seen my father naked, and the sight had made me ashamed of my own body. Peewee, he called me, laughing. But Richard was younger than me, and I’d seen him in the shower too, and the sight had confirmed what I had already guessed. There was something wrong with me. I was a boy raised by a woman. I was a boy raised by a woman who believed this about men: Men were selfish. Men were unfaithful, and untrustworthy, and cruel. Sooner or later a man would break your heart. Where did that leave me, my mother’s only child, a boy?
    Sometime in the spring, it had happened for the first time: the stiffening in my groin, my private parts—this was my mother’s term—pressing against the fabric of my pants at odd moments in the day, in ways I had no power to control. Rachel McCann would go up to the chalkboard to work out a math problem, and her skirt would rise up over her thigh, or I’d catch a glimpse of the crotch of Sharon Sunderland’s underpants, when she was sitting on the bleachers above me at assembly, or I’d see someone’s bra strap, or just the fastener of some girl’s brassiere showing through the fabric of her shirt, from my seat in the desk behind hers, or my social studies teacher, Ms. Evenrud, would bend over my desk to look over how I’d formatted my bibliography, and there it was again, like a whole new body part that had come to life in my pants, where only a useless nubbin had existed before then.
    I could have been happy or proud, but this was merely a new source of embarrassment. What if people saw? Walking down the halls at school now, I lived in fear of pretty girls, girls with round bottoms, girls who smelled nice, girls with breasts. I had read an article one time about a method of catching bank robbers, where the dollar bills were treated with a chemical that got activated when the money was taken out of the bag, so some kind of pressurized canister released a blast of blue paint that wouldn’t wash off, on the faces of the robbers. This was how I felt about my erections—the undisguisable proof of my miserable half manhood.
    There was more. The worst was not even what happened in my body, but what went on now in my brain. I had dreams every night, about women. I was so unsure how sex worked, it was hard forming pictures of things people might do, things I might do, though I knew there was a place on a woman’s body where my newly sprouted organ could thrust itself in, like a drunk crashing a party. The idea of anyone ever wanting me there had not occurred to me, and because of that, every scene I invented was filled with shame and guilt.
    Some of the dreams came back over and over: images of girls at my school—but never, maddeningly, the cheerleading squad. The girls who populated my dreams, uninvited, were the other type of girls, the ones who looked as uncomfortable in their bodies as I did in mine—girls like Tamara Fisher, who had grown fat in fifth grade, around the time her mother died, and now, in addition to her stomach and her wide white thighs, carried in front of her a shelf of heavy breasts that looked as though they should go on some old woman, not a