Donna James

I remember that first time: the empty auditorium, her voice, the dark all around us, her mouth reaching into mine. She was Freddy’s foxy older sister, and I didn’t know why she wanted to kiss me. She had already finished high school and probably shouldn’t have been walking the halls, but she always called me her friend. So one Monday after gym, I found myself beside myself in front of her house—with my trench coat and lunch bag— probably not looking much like Shaft. Inside, the air held warm milk and we talked a bit about her baby and her Aunt who paid the rent painting cars. Maybe she liked me because we were both black and mostly alone in the suburbs, but I hadn’t thought about that. It was her voice that got me—banked fire, the color of dusk—her voice, and my name was smoke in her mouth. I think about it more than I should now, that January noon—an hour before algebra—how most days I’d be thinking football or replaying the seventy-some kisses I’d gotten over those lean years, but that day Donna and me were on the couch munching potato chips. Rrruffles have rrridges, she kidded coming from checking the baby who’d slipped into a nap. I was kind of disappointed that we hadn’t done anything, but I needed time to get back to school, so I started to stand. She said wait, look at this mess, and with her left hand, she brushed the crumbs from my lap the way you’d whisk away lint— then, swept over my pants again— to be thorough, I guessed, but slower and then some more, as if her hand were getting drowsy. You know how sometimes you see something but just can’t believe it—like a squirrel bobbling a biscuit on your kitchen counter or a cricket creeping the red feathers of your mother’s Sunday hat? Her hand there, on my lap, could easily have been a five-fingered flying saucer from the fifth dimension. For awhile, I just watched and wondered if she knew where her hand had landed but it was me who didn’t know: me with my six dozen kisses and the great Eden of my virginity. How do we not talk about it every day: the ways we were changed by the gift in someone’s touch—your body, suddenly a bright instrument played by an otherwise silent divinity. When I heard my zipper, I couldn’t have said where my arms were or what a clock was for: I had no idea I could be such a stranger and still be myself. How could I have known what a girl might do to a boy with her mouth if she felt like doing what her mouth could do? It was a kind of miracle: the dreamedimpossible—my soul finally called to my flesh. I didn’t know what I didn’t know and then I knew.