Gypsy Moth
Twenty-three years ago my nemesis was a rail-thin woman named Mrs. Kyler. She lived in a New England sort of country ranch house, all whitewashed slats and decaying rose bushes surrounded by a sturdy picket fence. She lived there fifty of her ninety-one years she said, and she rented one small bedroom, the one nearest the tomato beds, to my first serious boyfriend.
I called her Kitten Kyler. Not to her face, of course, but in the quiet afternoon moments in my boyfriend's room where we'd lay on the double bed and listen to the Alan Parsons Project and talk about running away, running across the country or to the next town, maybe Paris, maybe Mexico. I called her Kitten Kyler because it sounded good, I liked those words together, liked how it sounded velvet rich and pink and hungry for men. But Kitten Kyler was solid lower middle class and brown like a raisin and the only man in her life was Mr. Chen, a gentle Chinese man she paid to cook delicate soups with shrimps and watercress and laundered her clothes on weekends.
My boyfriend studied nursing at the local college and I met him under an oak tree after my saxophone lesson on campus, just a high school chick, instrument case at my feet, pregnant gypsy moth resting on my arm.
"Who's your friend?" A short man with muscled arms carrying a book and a binder under his arm looked at the moth. Her bloated abdomen left a trail of tiny yellow scales in a line along my forearm.
"Oh, it's just a gypsy moth I found on the ground. I thought I'd pick her up and put her in the tree. I just got out of my lesson." I added the last bit because I didn't know what else to say, because he peered at me through water gray speedball eyes, and my insides shook when he brushed against my arm to capture the moth in his hand.
"My name's Manny. What's yours?" He held the moth up to his eyes, up to the sun. She barely moved, ready to give birth, abdomen distended, heaving, shaking, small earthquake in his hands. "You know, we should kill it."
"Birdie. And no, don't kill it. She's trusting us." Gypsy moth caterpillars ravaged the trees in my New England town, ate the tree I loved at my gramma's house, but this lonely moth left a shimmer trail on my arm, brought me a man like magic, gave me something to share with this strange short muscle creature toting a book on human anatomy. "Don't kill it! We can save her, let her go someplace special to give birth."
"You must hate your parents for naming you that." Manny spoke his mind, then and there in our first encounter, through every moment of our short time together. He said things I would never say to any friend, things I wouldn't even say to myself. He told me he swung the high bar for the college gymnastics team, and I told him I didn't believe him and he handed me Our Moth and ran across the lawn and flipped into the air, once, twice, three times, landing in a split, leaping back into the air, a gyroscope man, a crazy direct intense kaleidoscope man, and I wrote my phone number on a slip of paper and handed it to him and grabbed my saxophone and ran when I saw my dad's car pull into the lot. I carried Our Moth home and let her go in the tall oak still unravaged in the front yard.
Manny called me, and we made a secret date to meet after my next lesson. I told my parents a story about needing extra music help and bought myself two hours with a gymnast man five years older. We met and ate a bag of potato chips on the lawn and kissed, pressing our bodies into the ground, into each other, under the magic saxophone gypsy moth tree. One date turned into two, into three, into the day I snuck into his house while Kitten Kyler snored old lady dreams and let Manny touch my breasts for the first time. He slid one hand under my sweatshirt and unhooked my bra, tracing a gypsy moth line to my right breast, the one with the perfect small dark circle mole I called a beauty mark.
"Do you like that?" Manny liked to ask me this question when he touched me, but I was too shy to say Yes. I giggled and squirmed and pulled him closer to kiss me, feel my tongue against his, such surprising saltiness, run my tongue along his teeth so small and solid like him. I couldn't use the words he used, couldn't call things cock and pussy and tits. I couldn't call them anything at all, could only giggle and squirm and pull and be hands skin and mouth in the moment, be a high school saxophone player with a gymnast bed buddy in the moment.
We kissed and touched, just heads, hands, necks, bare chests, spent hours on our sides, melting quietly while Kitten Kyler snored. One day when she woke I walked out of Manny's room and pretended I was his tutoring student studying human anatomy, because I could say that with truth, skin to skin truth. She eyed me with steel bearing eyes.
"Girls didn't go into bedrooms for schooling when I was your age. I don't want you in this house again." She stomped the floor with a carved ivory handled cane for emphasis, and Manny apologized, drove me to a block from home in his beat up Volare, kissed me good afternoon.
Manny snuck me into his room after that day, through the open sliding window by the tomato beds. We talked about gymnastics, my music lessons, how many babies our gypsy moth birthed, his nursing classes. Such a secret affair, so secret I didn't know if Manny had another girl from the college, didn't know his last name, didn't know if his ancestors were Russian or Latvian or Czech, didn't even know his favorite foods. The secret selflessness of it seems precious to me now, the way I ripped off my sweaters, my bra, not caring if my hair flew into a bird's nest, not caring about zits or baby fat, not noticing imperfections, not thinking I was beautiful, just feeling so fucking damn alive.
Manny took my hand and guided between his legs, and I felt him, felt it wonderfully strange like the rib missing from Eve, all hard and warm and full with blood. He showed me how to move my hand, how to pull his whispers into contorted expression wet flash groans. And one spring fever afternoon we did it, did IT, mixed our fluids like those diagrams in his human anatomy book, and oh dear god it was good, butterscotch good. We lay in that double bed, tangled naked gymnastics saxophone people, and let time pass, let the Alan Parsons Project tape click off, let Kitten Kyler snore, until we heard the tap tap tap of her cane across the hall.
"Girl! Girl! I know you're in there! Girl! I am coming in the room!" Kitten Kyler yelled in a raspy old lady voice. The tap tap tap grew closer, and I panicked, grabbed my clothes and vaulted out the window as if Manny gave me the power of a gymnast with the sweet anatomy chemicals he left behind, and I landed on a tomato plant with a thud squish thud.
Two weeks later Manny stopped calling and I didn't have a car to make my way to his house. And late in the spring my family front yard oak tree began to wither from gypsy moth infestation.
8:20:44 PM 
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