Peru. Gordon Lish

of times when the outdoors was absolute poison, time after time when it did not pay for you to go outside, times when you were probably taking your life into your hands if you were stupid enough for you to go do it, times when to get fresh air was definitely out of the question for you, when in all honesty and sincerity it was the better part of valor for boys to stay indoors and keep a careful vigil—especially if you yourself were actually a delicate boy, which is what the nanny said what Andy Lieblich was.

      This is what I wanted.

      I wanted to be a boy who was delicate like Andy Lieblich was—I wanted to be a boy who was every bit as delicate as that boy was. That’s the kind of boy I wanted to be. The kind of boy I wanted to be would be a boy who could not keep any fried foods down or miss his nap or not get his bath in a bathtub or ever have to get a sandwich off the kitchen counter and not be served his meat pattie when it was high time for lunch or for him to have to have his milk without the chill off.

      But even if it was nice out, even if the weather was absolutely totally perfect out, then you still could not just go ahead and say that that just automatically meant that you could come over and play in the sandbox with Andy Lieblich, even if he himself, even if the nanny said that Andy Lieblich was actually going to be coming out any minute to play in it. What I mean is that there was always no end of things which might have to make the nanny make up her mind that she was just not going to be able to give you her complete and total permission at this particular juncture yet—namely, if it looked to her, for instance, like you were coming down with something, or like you had the first signs of some other thing, or that even if you did not look to her like you were actually getting anything, then it maybe looked to her like this was going to be a day when you could not be trusted, like this was going to be one of those days when no matter how much you might want to promise the nanny to the contrary, you just could not help yourself, you just could not help but not play nicely, not even if your life depended on it—or maybe she just said that it was a matter of horizons, that a boy like Andy Lieblich had to keep stretching his horizons and for him play the field whenever it was humanly possible.

      There were lots of times when I was not the one who got to come over. There were lots of times when the nanny had to say to me that she herself was not God, that she alone could not just wave a wand, that there were some things which were beyond the powers of anyone to control them, that she did not have the strength to move heaven and earth even if this is what I and everyone else thought she did.

      But if there were other boys, if Andy Lieblich actually had over other boys, I myself never saw them—Steven Adinoff being the sole exception, Steven Adinoff being the first and last exception, Steven Adinoff being the single solitary exception—but after him there were probably lots of them.

      Never more than two at a time in the sandbox, never more than two boys in the sandbox at a time, this was one of the nanny’s strictest regulations—whereas my idea was this—that I was the boy who lived next door to Andy Lieblich, which was supposed to give me the first chance to be the boy who was the second one. But what the nanny said was that things like this were the very reason why it had to come out just exactly the opposite—that the first shall be last and also vice versa.

      I always knew what the nanny was saying.

      I always knew what everybody was saying.

      I never didn’t understand anybody saying anything.

      Even the colored man when he said things, even though the colored man almost never said actually anything.

      He said chamois, for one thing.

      And then there were the things which he said I should eat, the things he said which I should go home and tell my mother to get busy and start cooking for me for me to eat—he had all of these different things, he had all of these different things—they were greens, they were leafy greens, a total of eight of these different kinds of leafy greens, I think, and I’ll bet I could tell you the name of every last one of them, even though the colored man only told me once when in fact he finally got around to actually telling.

      I always wanted to kiss the colored man. I always felt like I was going to have to kiss the colored man. I always felt like I wasn’t going to be able to help myself or stop myself or do anything to be able to keep myself from falling toward his lips and kissing the colored man.

      But I didn’t. I never did it. I saw how pink his palms got, I saw how when he got them wet how pink his palms got, and I never did do it, even though there were times when his back was not always facing me.

      But he was mostly working on the Buick if he was at the Lieblichs’, so his back was in general always facing me because, as such, he had to face the Buick, unless it was one of the times when he went into the garage for changing shirts and for getting things or for putting things back.

      In all truth, it is true he did not speak—it’s true that the colored man mainly did not speak—but if you watched him the way I watched him, if you really kept your eye on him the way I did, then you never ended up feeling that the colored man didn’t let you in on what kinds of things he thought. But this was probably all in my head. I was probably just making all of this up in my head—thinking, for instance, that you could look at him doing things and then get ideas about him from that—from the way he flattened out the chamois cloth, for instance, or just folded up a rag. Even the way he shook out the Old Dutch Cleanser onto the scrub brush the maid always left for him for brushing up the white-walls, even the way the colored man did a thing like that, just tapping the side of the can with just one finger instead of actually turning it over and shaking it upside-down, even a thing as little as this looked to me like it was something which only the colored man did—and that if he did it for me, if he did it in front of me, then the thought I had from that was that the colored man specifically wanted it to mean something to me, that it was like a statement which the colored man had actually gone ahead and decided to make for my own personal benefit—just things like getting the lid of the Simonize can back on again by just pressing it down with his thumb, or things like the way he let the water from the hose run out over the back of the hand he used for washing the car with the sponge, just the way he made the water come out and gush out over the back of his hand, just things like that made me feel that the colored man was behaving that way, was doing things like that only because he could tell that I liked him to, only because he could tell that the boy who was standing just in back of him and who was watching him, who was watching his every single little move, could not have been paying any closer attention to every single little bit of it—and make no mistake of it, I couldn’t have, I couldn’t have!—the way the water streamed over the veins which were in the back of his hand, the way the water ran out over it and then broke itself up into different streams that just as quickly streamed away and were all gone away—but then there was a fresh gush of water and then it started and ended all over again, his veins, his hand.

      Even if he didn’t actually say it, I think we can say he theoretically said it—the statement of what I stood to gain, of what kind of a future I would stand to have as a man, from getting my mother to feed me the eight greens which the colored man said to me he ate.

      I loved watching the colored man—but it wasn’t anything like the love, it didn’t come anywhere close to the love which I had for the times when I was actually with Andy Lieblich in his sandbox. This was the single best feeling in the world—this was the single best thing in the whole wide world—there wasn’t a sadness that I myself could ever have thought of which just being in the sandbox with Andy Lieblich could not have totally but totally got rid of, especially if I stopped to think to myself, especially if right in the middle of doing something, of getting sand and filling up a pail with sand to make a building, for instance, or of packing it down to get it to really have the best chance of sticking together when it finally came back out of the pail, for instance, when I finally turned the pail over and tapped it and got it to come back out, the sand, especially if I said to myself that the colored man was taking all of this in, even if it actually happened to be a day when the colored man wasn’t even there at the Lieblichs’ in the first place, or even if it was a day when he was—either way, could he see around the house from the front of the Lieblichs’ property to the back of the Lieblichs’ property and see me doing things? Of course not, of course