In One Person

to your future. At your age, I lived in a library! Now novels and plays are my life.”
    This was all so overwhelming. It was staggering to imagine that there were novels about crushes—even, perhaps especially, crushes on the wrong people. Furthermore, our town’s amateur theatrical society would be performing Ibsen’s
Hedda Gabler
with a brand-new leading man, and with a tower of
sexual strength
(and
untamable
freedom) in the leading female role. And not only did my wounded mother have a “
beau
,” as Aunt Muriel and Nana Victoria referred to Richard Abbott, but my uncomfortable crush on Richard had been supplanted. I was now in love with a librarian who was old enough to be my mother. My seemingly unnatural attraction to Richard Abbott notwithstanding, I felt a new and unknown lust for Miss Frost—not to mention that I suddenly had all this serious reading to do.
    No wonder that, when Richard and I came in the house from our excursion to the library, my grandmother felt my forehead—I must have looked flushed, as if I had a fever. “Too much excitement for a school night, Billy,” Nana Victoria said.
    “Nonsense,” Grandpa Harry said. “Show me the books you have, Bill.”
    “Miss Frost chose them for me,” I told him, handing him the novels.
    “
Miss
Frost!” my grandmother again declared, her contempt rising.
    “Vicky, Vicky,” Grandpa Harry cautioned her, like little back-to-back slaps.
    “Mommy, please don’t,” my mother said.
    “They’re great novels,” my grandfather announced. “In fact, they’re classics. I daresay Miss Frost knows what novels a young boy should read.”
    “I
daresay
!” Nana repeated haughtily.
    There then followed some difficult-to-understand nastiness from my grandmother, concerning Miss Frost’s actual age. “I don’t mean her
professed
age!” Nana Victoria cried. I offered that I thought Miss Frost was my mom’s age, or a little younger, but Grandpa Harry and my mother looked at each other. Next came what I was familiar with, from the theater—a pause.
    “No, Miss Frost is closer to Muriel’s age,” my grandpa said.
    “That
woman
is older than Muriel!” my grandmother snapped.
    “Actually, they’re about the same age,” my mother very quietly said.
    At the time, all this meant to me was that Miss Frost was younger-looking than Muriel. In truth, I gave the matter little thought. Nana Victoria evidently didn’t like Miss Frost, and Muriel had issues with Miss Frost’s breasts or her bras—or both.
    It would be later—I don’t remember when, exactly, but it was several months later, after I was regularly in the habit of getting novels from Miss Frost in our town’s public library—when I overheard my mean aunt Muriel talking about Miss Frost (to my mother) in that same tone of voice my grandmother had used. “And I suppose that
she
has not progressed from the ridiculous training bra?” (To which my mom merely shook her head.)
    I would ask Richard Abbott about it, albeit indirectly. “What are
training
bras, Richard?” I asked him, seemingly out of the blue.
    “Something you’re reading about, Bill?” Richard asked.
    “No, I just wondered,” I told him.
    “Well, Bill, training bras aren’t something I know a great deal about,” Richard began, “but I believe they are designed to be a young girl’s first bra.”
    “Why
training
?” I asked.
    “Well, Bill,” Richard continued, “I guess the
training
part of the bra works like this. A girl whose breasts are newly forming wears a training bra so that her breasts begin to get the idea of what a bra is all about.”
    “Oh,” I said. I was completely baffled; I couldn’t imagine why Miss Frost’s breasts needed to be
trained
at all, and the concept that breasts have
ideas
was also new and troubling to me. Yet my infatuation with Miss Frost had certainly shown me that my penis had ideas that seemed entirely separate from my own thoughts. And if penises could have ideas, it was not such a stretch (for a thirteen-year-old) to imagine that breasts could also think for themselves.
    In the literature Miss Frost was presenting me with, at an ever increasing rate, I’d not yet encountered a novel from a penis’s point of view, or one where the
ideas
that a woman’s breasts have are somehow disturbing to the woman herself—or to her family and friends. Yet such novels seemed possible, if only in the way that my ever having sex with Miss Frost also seemed (albeit