jody rae

A Trace of Your Existence

Major Ireland Spokes just turned ten and was one of the oldest kids in our fourth grade class and, in my opinion, he was the most handsome. With his deep brown eyes, heavy eyebrows, and a dark brown mullet that fell just above his shoulders, softened by irregular, infrequent haircuts, and with his heavy metal T-shirts even on cold days, I was taken with him that year.

I wasn’t the only girl to have suddenly awakened to Major’s presence. I don’t have any memories of him before second grade and, even then, it is only on the playground during recess––a flash of shaggy hair blurred by speed as he kicked a soccer ball, his arms swinging across the monkey bars. But it wasn’t until the fourth grade that I really saw him, sitting still but fidgeting with contraband items inside his desk. I don’t remember him ever wearing a winter coat, but he did occasionally don a leather jacket. I never questioned where a ten year old managed to procure a leather jacket in his approximate size. It seemed he was born with it.

It was the year our classmates began, inexplicably, to couple up. Suddenly, girls and boys were “going out,” which didn’t mean they went anywhere together at all, ever. It just meant that, on school grounds, they were to be considered “together.” Dating, as it were, only on school property and chaperoned by countless schoolmates and teachers. As far as I know, nothing untoward was going on. It was a new trend, and none of us really knew the landscape all that well. We just knew that if two people had a crush on each other, they had the opportunity to make their feelings known and to claim each other.

I was at a friend’s slumber party the night Major decided to make his mutual feelings for me known. He called Jen’s house, asked for me, and as I gripped the receiver in her bedroom while surrounded by half a dozen chittering girls squeezing their fists into their mouths, I heard him say, “I’m calling because I want to ask you to be my girlfriend.” I asked him to repeat himself because the silent squeals from my friends were not so silent. “I said I want you to be my girlfriend.” Of course I said yes. I said yes as though he proposed marriage. I had to lock it down before he changed his mind.

For the rest of the night, I was elated and anxious from all the attention. I wouldn’t say I was smug or stuck up about it, but I was certainly oblivious to my best friend Laura’s obvious disappointment and hurt. She had a crush on Major, too. Well, so many of us did. He could have chosen anyone and perhaps that also made me feel special. Someone liked me, but not just anyone. Major Ireland Spokes liked me. That night I wiggled into my New Kids on the Block sleeping bag and shivered. The evening was so entirely thrilling, it blinded me to just about everything else.

The following Monday at school, I walked into Mrs. White’s classroom to a round of suggestive oohs and ahhs from boys and girls who heard the news over the weekend. Major smiled at me as I took my seat, and I felt my confidence swell exponentially, an outsized aura of blushing glee and harp music.

As if to solidify our status as the It Couple, Mrs. White soon rearranged our desks into groups of five, seating me directly across from Major, our desks practically kissing-on-the-mouth, with Laura right next to me. I don’t recall the other two kids in our pod, because all that mattered was that my two favorite people were with me all day long as we tried to grasp long division and Idaho’s Native American history amidst white settlement. I didn’t learn much from our core curriculum that year, but it would be erroneous to say I didn’t learn anything at all.

One Friday afternoon, after the bell rang, Major walked up to me as I was leaving the classroom and asked, “Would you like to hang out with me this weekend? We could just come back to the school playground tomorrow evening, if you’re free.” As if I had any other plans—but if I did, those were canceled immediately.

My parents, like all adults who were made aware of our relationship, were cautious and perturbed. I was nine. With a boyfriend? And now we had a date, just the two of us. My parents had never even met him, and they pumped my sister for information. But she thought Major was cool and even had a short-lived crush on him the prior year, so she didn’t give them any cause for concern.

The next evening after dinner, Major met me on Simplot’s Hill and walked me down to the school playground where we hung around, literally, on the chin-up bars until he presented me with what looked like a blank cassette tape in its case.

“I thought you might like this new album, so I recorded it for you. Have you ever heard of Mariah Carey?” He wrote each song title in the liner notes, and he drew a small red heart in the blank space. It was the nicest thing a friend had ever done for me. I had not heard of Mariah Carey yet, but I knew I already loved her music before I ever hit play on my small stereo.

For the rest of the evening, we traversed the school grounds and ventured into the school arboretum, normally off-limits during school hours because of the creek, and we explored the woods and overgrown private property. When Major sat on a log where there was plenty of room for me, too, I stayed standing and reached up to hang from a low birch branch, keeping my distance for fear I might spark combustion and set the forest on fire.

“Is everything okay,” Major asked, “You seem nervous or something.”

“What? No! Of course not,” I said, not recognizing the flutter in my stomach and joints as nothing but nerves. I was overwhelmed to be there with him, in this charming and romantic setting, and I didn’t know how I was supposed to act. The boundaries were not clear and I had never been alone with him before. I felt woefully inadequate. The confidence I normally felt around him at school vanished as soon as he gave me a thoughtful gift. He thought about me when we weren’t at school––maybe as much as I thought about him! If I sat down next to him, I couldn’t trust myself not to kiss him. Maybe even on the mouth.

“Hey look, it’s some wild spearmint,” he said, tearing a few leaves from a short, bright green stalk. “Here, have some.” He held a few leaves toward me while sticking the others in his mouth.

“That’s okay,” I said, fearing he might see my hands trembling if I reached for it.

“Suit yourself. It’s fun to chew on.”

I snapped a few leaves off and stuffed them in my mouth. I would need fresh breath if we kissed later.

As the evening grew darker and colder, we crawled out of the woods and hopped across the creek. We said goodbye on the playground without kissing. We lived in opposite directions, so I walked home in a daze, looking at each house on my street, wondering which one Major and I would move into when we got married.

At home, I put on the Mariah Carey tape, changed into my “dance clothes”—black bike shorts and a gold lamé top—and propped my mirror against my closet doors to perform routines to her love ballads. My mom came into my room during a costume change, as I weighed the option of a blue scarf with silver tinsel over a black and white polka dot ensemble.

“I hope Major didn’t try to get you to do anything you didn’t want to do!” she yelled. Mom was always yelling about something, like she had a broken volume setting. I dropped the scarf.

“What? What do you mean? We just walked around the playground. Why do you think I wouldn’t want to walk around with him?”

“I mean he better not have tried to kiss you!”

I needed to be savvy here. I couldn’t outright argue that kissing Major was something I very much DID want to do and was something I thought about a lot, but if I admitted it to her, she would never let me go for a walk with him again.

“Of course he didn’t. We are in the fourth grade. We don’t even think about stuff like that! I mean, I don’t know what things were like when you were in the fourth grade, but we are too young for that.” We never discussed it again.

Over time, I tried to dress for my own private dance recitals the way I imagined Mariah Carey would dress onstage. I had only seen a few photos of her by then, so I imagined she wore a lot of black leotards. I listened to that tape every day, and I cherished it.

One morning at school, I reached into my desk for a pink eraser and I found a wallet-sized school photo of Major, wearing his signature black Batman T-shirt that I thought he looked so hot in. His shaggy mullet and sideswept bangs were haloed by the dark blue backdrop. His dark brown eyes, eyes of an old soul, seemed resigned to live in this mortal human vessel for some time longer before ascending to another realm. On the back of the photo, Major wrote a note addressed to me, With LOVE, signed MIS. His initials were slanted as though practiced, for the albums and posters he would perhaps sign one day.

Plus, the word LOVE was underlined twice in red ink. I glanced up at him, but his head was down as he worked on our writing assignment that hour. I blushed deeply and made sure to tuck his photo away safely so I could flaunt it with my friends and obsess over his choice of words and underlining. I decided to always keep his photo in my wallet, so it would always be with me. I couldn’t concentrate for the rest of the day.

After a couple of months and as spring was in full bloom, my relationship with Major felt rock steady and no less exciting. But one afternoon, I thought I overheard him and another boy in our classroom talking about me or about us or about something that hurt my feelings. It was loud in the classroom during an activity, so I didn’t hear everything, but it was enough to disappoint me in some vague way. I pulled Laura aside and told her what I thought I’d heard, and she seemed genuinely compassionate even though she still harbored a secret crush on Major.

Later that day, Major called me aside as everyone prepared to go home for the day. He stood close and said, “Hey, I asked Laura earlier why your face seemed kind of red, and she told me you thought you overheard me say something hurtful. I just want you to know I really care about you, and I wouldn’t ever want to hurt your feelings, and I’m sorry. Here, I want to give you this.” He took my hand and dropped a small, polished tiger’s eye stone in my palm and squeezed it closed. “I know it’s not a lot, but I hope you’ll feel better and it can be a token of my feelings for you.”

I wanted to fucking marry this person.

There was just no other option. I was in love. Completely head over heels. He was the most grown-up person I had ever met, and that included almost every adult. I made sure Laura knew he and I were still going strong, and I thanked her for giving him a heads up that my feelings were hurt. And I carried that tiger’s eye stone in my hand all the way home, careful never to drop it.

As the school year ended, I was sad that I wouldn’t get to see Major every day, but that sadness didn’t last for long. On the first day of summer vacation, Major called me “just to talk” and we wound up talking every day after that. To the background of theme songs from game shows and courtroom dramas my sister liked to watch, I would stand in the kitchen and wander as far as the spiral cord would allow, twisting it around one finger, then another, as Major and I discussed pop culture and music and our summer days of watching a lot of television and reading books. He liked the Redwall series and I had just finished reading every volume of The Baby-Sitters Club, but I was ready for more challenging material that my mom, a librarian, was eager to supply in large quantities every other day.

We didn’t talk much about our families at all. I didn’t know his parents’ names, or what they did for a living, which drove my mother crazy. The first thing she always wanted to know if I even mentioned a classmate was what their parents do. I knew Major’s parents were divorced, like mine, and also shared custody. I knew he had a sister a few years older than us, who was kind and sweet and who left him alone.

One day my dad came over to take me and my sister out to a hardware store so he could gather items to fix up Mom’s house, and he asked me who I was talking to. I made a Dad! Please! face and turned the corner into the living room for some privacy. “Who’s she talking to?” Dad asked my sister. Suddenly seeing some way to talk shit, my sister said, “It’s Major. You know, her boyfriend?” She sneered like so many sinister siblings in ’80s movies. “They talk on the phone every day.”

My dad knew about Major, but I think he wrongfully assumed this little phase would subside as soon as school let out. He vastly underestimated our status as potential soulmates, however, because our hearts were knitted, and we were bored latchkey kids with no backyard pools or extravagant vacations. All Major and I had were books, TV, radio, and each other.

We read so many books, in fact, that he and I were among a group of only four students who earned the summer Pizza Hut reading contest. The reward was a pizza party at Pizza Hut with Mrs. White, and it was the only day we got to see each other all summer. He spent his summers at his mom’s house across town, so meeting up in person was not really an option. I remember getting a haircut, just a blunt bob after tearing a comb through my long blonde hair all my life. When Mrs. White and the other kids saw me, they fawned over it. “I really like your hair,” Major said. “Really.”

It felt like I was living someone else’s life—someone who had it easy and was the likely protagonist in a frivolous, plotless novel lacking any real conflict.

And then Major called me one last time.

“Hey, I just wanted to call to let you know that I really do still care about you, but school is starting up in a couple weeks and I’m switching to White Oak. My mom just moved into a new house, so I’m going to school there instead. And since we won’t be seeing each other in person anymore, I think we should break up. It’s really just because we won’t be living near each other anymore. You know, I’ve picked up the phone to call you and hung up at least ten times the past few days. It hasn’t been easy to come to this.”

Obviously I was shocked and heartbroken, but I understood to some degree. Of course I wanted to see him in person rather than continue talking on the phone forever, but I also missed his calls each morning as the summer drew to a close. My mom came in and sat on my bed for a little while to talk about my feelings, since I was so completely devastated. I counted our relationship’s lifespan on my fingers, landing just shy of the six month mark. We were practically life partners. As a distraction, I begged her to let me get my hair cut short like Chynna Phillips from Wilson Phillips, the fair pixie cut that looked so stunning on her but would look like a mistake on me.

Immediately, as my blonde locks fell to the SuperCuts floor at Boise Towne Square, I realized that, like Jo March in Little Women, my hair was my one beauty. I cried on the way home. At least Major would never see me like this.

Back in my bedroom, where I made cassette recordings of my favorite songs on the radio, I went to work on a new dance playlist, hovering over the record button and ready to pounce as soon as the DJ quit talking over the intro music. I wanted a new repertoire by which to thrash out my aggressions and daydream about performing in front of adoring fans. I hit record on C&C Music Factory, Naughty By Nature, Boyz II Men, and Amy Grant. When the tape ran out, I popped my stereo open and caught my heart in my throat.

I had taped over the entire Side B of the Mariah Carey tape Major gave me. The howls and moans that emanated from me summoned my mom and my sister to my doorway, where they watched me writhe on the brown carpet, worn thin by my dance steps. When my sister realized why I was sobbing hopelessly, she shrugged and went back to watching “Who’s the Boss?” My mom crossed her arms and tapped her foot. “Enough, now. Don’t you think you’ve dragged this out long enough? You can’t stay lovesick forever. And you can get a new Mariah Carey tape.”

“But it won’t be the tape he gave me,” I groaned. And it’s not like I could ever tell him about this. I couldn’t just ask him to make me a new one. We weren’t together anymore, and I didn’t want him to know how careless I had been with one of my life’s most prized possessions.

I tried to pull it together in time for my first day of fifth grade. We had a new teacher, someone nobody had ever met before. Laura was in my class again, and we went back to school shopping together. I’d make the most of it, if I had to.

When I took my seat at my new desk, trying valiantly to ignore the shocked, disappointed looks on my friends’ faces upon seeing my new haircut, I fake smiled and acted cheerful until Major walked into the classroom.

He wasn’t supposed to be there. He was supposed to be starting fifth grade at White Oak, and we were never going to see each other again. Why had I spent the past two weeks grieving our lives together if he was just going to join my class after all? His gaze met mine, and he looked away. I never asked him what happened with the White Oak plan. It didn’t seem to matter all that much.

I spent the next few months rebounding. I “went out” with other boys, a short string of perfectly nice enough guys who could never measure up to Major and who sensed early on that I was not interested in them at all. Laura and I drifted apart. There were two new girls in our class who became instantly favored by everyone, Major included. I wasn’t invited to birthday parties as often, and I had trouble with schoolwork. Everything I was supposed to learn in the fourth grade leveled up in the fifth grade, and nobody was going to take the time to teach me long division now.

One night, I sat on my bedroom floor when my favorite radio station announced it was taking requests, so I called the DJ to request Mariah’s latest single, “Can’t Let Go.”

“And can you dedicate it to Major for me?” When I hung up, my mom knocked on my door and flung it open before I could answer.

“I heard you make that song request. ‘Can’t Let Go’? Gimme a break. It’s time to get over this.”

I laid flat on my back on the carpet and stared at the wooden planks in my vaulted ceiling. “Do you actually think I like feeling this way?” I asked.

“Yes. Yes, I think you like feeling this way. Stop being so self-indulgent!”

I flung one arm across my eyes. “Shut the door,” I said, waving her away.

Eventually, the new teacher, who wasn’t suited for elementary school education, seated everyone in random and separate pairs so that our desks were binary compounds, kissing-on-the-mouth. This new teacher, obviously ignorant of our prior history and completely inept at reading a room, paired me and Major together. I didn’t even try to hide my disappointment, not because I didn’t love Major anymore, but because I so very much did. And everyone except that dumb teacher knew it.

Occasionally we had to work on assignments together, which always flustered me because I was so far behind on learning that I became self-conscious about it and that made things worse. The tension I felt may have been entirely one-sided, but it was so agonizing to sit across from him all day that I fell even more behind at school. My parents hired a tutor who wasn’t very effective. My dad tried to teach me fractions and long division on weekends, both of us resentful about spending our time off this way, and finally my parents admitted defeat and consoled each other. “Well, at least she’s a top reader at her school.”

Years later, when I was seventeen, I found a small memento box on my closet floor that survived several moves, including our move from Idaho to California. Inside, I found the small tiger’s eye stone along with the Mariah Carey tape in its case and the school photo that Major gave me. Even then it sent a thrill through my chest. With LOVE, MIS. I laughed at his shaggy mullet and at how small he looks in the photo, too small to carry a name like Major Ireland Spokes. So small to hold such an outsized presence in my youth. I wondered what his life was like and would be like, and I sighed with the resignation that I’d never know.