One night that summer my mother decided it was time to tell me about There was a line drawing on the cover Obviously, she and my father did not have a language for what they did School wasn’t in session. By then, I was out of the house. We sat at the edge of the river discussing parents in general More and more that summer we understood We sat in the reeds at the edge of the river And after a while we’d all get up together and walk back through the dark But the ones in the river\u2014 When I got home, my mother was asleep, my father was still at the table, At the River One night that summer my mother decided it was time to tell me about what she referred to as\u00a0pleasure, though you could see she felt some sort of unease about this ceremony, which she tried to cover up by first taking my hand, as though somebody in the family had just died\u2014 she went on holding my hand as she made her speech, which was more like a speech about mechanical engineering… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1kHSD-1iU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5016"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5017,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5016\/revisions\/5017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nwhat she referred to as\u00a0pleasure<\/em>, though you could see she felt
\nsome sort of unease about this ceremony, which she tried to cover up
\nby first taking my hand, as though somebody in the family had just died\u2014
\nshe went on holding my hand as she made her speech,
\nwhich was more like a speech about mechanical engineering
\nthan a conversation about pleasure. In her other hand,
\nshe had a book from which, apparently, she’d taken the main facts.
\nShe did the same thing with the others, my two brothers and sister,
\nand the book was always the same book, dark blue,
\nthough we each got our own copy.<\/p>\n
\nshowing a man and woman holding hands
\nbut standing fairly far apart, like people on two sides of a dirt road.<\/p>\n
\nwhich, from what I could judge, wasn’t pleasure.
\nAt the same time, whatever holds human beings together
\ncould hardly resemble those cool black-and-white diagrams, which suggested,
\namong other things, that you could only achieve pleasure
\nwith a person of the opposite sex,
\nso you didn’t get two sockets, say, and no plug.<\/p>\n
\nI went back to my room and shut the door
\nand my mother went into the kitchen
\nwhere my father was pouring glasses of wine for himself and his invisible guest
\nwho\u2014surprise\u2014doesn’t appear.
\nNo, it’s just my father and his friend the Holy Ghost
\npartying the night away until the bottle runs out,
\nafter which my father continues sitting at the table
\nwith an open book in front of him.
\nTactfully, so as not to embarrass the Spirit,
\nmy father handled all the glasses,
\nfirst his own, then the other, back and forth like every other night.<\/p>\n
\nIt was summer; my friends used to meet at the river.
\nThe whole thing seemed a grave embarrassment
\nalthough the truth was that, except for the boys, maybe we didn’t understand mechanics.
\nThe boys had the key right in front of them, in their hands if they wanted,
\nand many of them said they’d already used it,
\nthough once one boy said this, the others said it too,
\nand of course people had older brothers and sisters.<\/p>\n
\nand sex in particular. And a lot of information got shared,
\nand of course the subject was unfailingly interesting.
\nI showed people my book,\u00a0Ideal Marriage<\/em>\u2014we all had a good laugh over it.
\nOne night a boy brought a bottle of wine and we passed it around for a while.<\/p>\n
\nthat something was going to happen to us
\nthat would change us.
\nAnd the group, all of us who used to meet this way,
\nthe group would shatter, like a shell that falls away
\nso the bird can emerge.
\nOnly of course it would be two birds emerging, pairs of birds.<\/p>\n
\nthrowing small stones. When the stones hit,
\nyou could see the stars multiply for a second, little explosions of light
\nflashing and going out. There was a boy I was beginning to like,
\nnot to speak to but to watch.
\nI liked to sit behind him to study the back of his neck.<\/p>\n
\nto the village. Above the field, the sky was clear,
\nstars everywhere, like in the river, though these were the real stars,
\neven the dead ones were real.<\/p>\n
\nthey were like having some idea that explodes suddenly into a thousand ideas,
\nnot real, maybe, but somehow more lifelike.<\/p>\n
\nreading his book. And I said, Did your friend go away?
\nAnd he looked at me intently for a while,
\nthen he said, Your mother and I used to drink a glass of wine together
\nafter dinner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"