A week before my last day of high school in mid June of 1974, I had my first date with Kin. When I say "date," it wasn't something we planned because that was when I first told Kin I had a thing for her and we kissed. We kissed in a wooded area, behind the rec center, a converted white church built in the late 1800s, near the center of town, where we often agreed to meet.
Up to that time we'd just been friends. But not openly. She wasn't my type. So much so I was embarrassed by my attraction. I kept my interest a secret and avoided being seen with her at school. I'd even lied to my mother who was one to snoop in my business.
"Martha's mother says you're hanging around that Chinese girl," my mother said while putting fish sticks in the oven, What's her name, Kim?"
"It's Kin. She was adopted. You know in China you can only have one child."
"Well what about Martha, she's a pretty girl, and a cheerleader. She's got a scholarship to Amherst. She's a beautiful writer."
Martha. Martha was the cheerleader captain. She once took my hand after lingering in the parking lot after the bus ride home from an away game. "I think we're a good match," she whispered. I was cool and mumbled, "No, no." There was a kind of manufactured enthusiasm she relied on that I hated. We were never more than acquaintances. My mother sensed my lack of interest.
"I hear this Kin is unattractive. Martha's mother says you can do so much better."
"Martha's mother doesn't know what she's talking about, Mom." I responded matter of factly.
"Don't sell yourself short Peter, you have a lot to offer."
Kin was not my type, at least by the rather rigid standards of beauty and high school chic maintained by the friends and classmates who I hung out with who were mostly jocks or cheerleaders or an occasional crossover I came in contact with say in my biology or typing class. I thought I had the interpersonal courage to ignore these categorizations but the truth was, I didn't. I prized a kind of haughty sense of independence from my jock teammates. For example when a fight broke out with the other team during our last football game I didn't rush out onto the field to join the scrum but stayed on the sideline disgusted with the hotheadedness. I was the star. I could afford to be a quiet prima donna. I was an all state basketball player headed to the University of Pennsylvania on a scholarship.
Almost every soul in my high school class would have agreed that Kin wasn't my type. That I could do better. They would have said, like my father said, as he liked to rank people, that she was way below me, but from the very first day I met her there wasn't a day that went by that I didn't want to see her again.
I first met her in early February, one morning when she appeared at my locker and stood looking at me.
"What's up with you?" she said.
"Who are you?" I said.
"I'm Kin," she said shouldering the locker next to mine, up on the toe of one of her black high top converse All Stars which she kicked the floor with several times.
"I'm Peter."
"I know. Everyone knows who you are. You missed two free throws Friday night and lost the game."
"Right."
"You get nervous, do you?"
"No."
"Hah, you do. Don't lie to me. All those people watching and just you with the ball having to shoot it through that hoop."
"You wanna be my coach?"
She looked me in the eye, tight lipped, about to laugh. "You might need some special coaching," she said closing my locker door for me.
"How's that?"
"I've got class now. I'll have to get back to you,"she said, turning away. "Nice to met you, Peter."
"Right." I said, a-little enchanted, watching her glide away.
Kin had moved to town at the end of our junior year. She had jet black hair, a bullet-shaped face, that was ruddy due to an acne problem. She had slit eyes, a buxom, heavy build, pointy melon sized breasts, wide hips and a flat bottom. She was not a beautiful woman.
But Kin had an infectious smile, an unhesitating open, upright posture, a sincere affection and what seemed an honest confidence based on nothing I ever knew. She was a physical person, touchy. She was apt to pick up a vase, run her fingers over the textures, pet a friendly cat, run her hands through a girlfriends hair and offer me spontaneous hand massages in which she would suddenly read something in my palm. I might have expected she was an athlete, a tennis player or a long jumper who grunted deeply upon take off, but she wasn't.
She spoke with her hands, when we were together. She was always moving towards me, face-to-face, as if she had a secret to whisper, pressing in uncomfortably, but in a way that made me smirk, or laugh and that, in which I found a warm playfulness that felt both innocent and wily.
She'd make a point or ask a question, putting her fingertips on my chest and push me away.
"Now that's not the right answer, Mister,"she'd say and give me a little shove of rejection to which I couldn't help but step towards her.
She was inquisitive. "Why don't you wear more black, it makes you mysterious? Are you going to ask me to the senior prom? (I didn't) Why don't you walk me to my car after practice tonight, I have a surprise for you in the back seat? Why do they call them free throws?"
I was drawn to her. Soon after that first meeting I looked forward to our encounters, knowing she was just around the corner caused my blood to race, a smile to come over my whole body, and to feel a little off balance. Yet sometimes she wasn't there just when I expected her to be around, and she left me bereft and I have to say, yearning to see her.
But I had a problem. Though I wanted to see her, I didn't want to be seen with her.
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The night of our first kiss we met behind the rec center just as it was getting dark. We disappeared on one of trails that wound through the woods to the lake and sat quietly, hidden, but not too far from a small dock that was lit with a single hanging bulb.
That night Kin had been quiet. She put her hand on my thigh and said, "I think you want more than you let me know."
I paused and kicked the dirt. We sat on the trunk of a downed tree.
"I think you're right. I don't think I've ever been in love before, but I think I'm in love with you."
I heard her sigh and then felt her bending low beneath me so she could catch my eyes because I was looking at the ground.
"You do?"she whispered in a childish voice.
I put my fingers to the back of her neck, which was damp with perspiration, and fell to my knees to face her, pulled her face to mine and kissed her. The crickets celebrated, an owl hooted, moonlight lit the night. And after our kiss I asked her, "Do you feel the same?"
"I do," she said leaning into me hugging me tightly. We were quiet and sat back down on the log.
She looked at her sneakers, carefully aligning them so that the the heel of one intersected the instep of the other.
"But how can I love a guy who doesn't want to be seen with me?"
I cringed. I'd thought or hoped she wouldn't notice my manipulation. What a creep I'd been.
Yet, I didn't sense Kin was hiding a hurt I'd inflicted.
"I know. I'm sorry. I've been an ass," I said.
"You worry. I told you you worry," she said. "You stand at the free throw line and worry about what everyone's gonna think if you make it or miss it. All that worry on you."
"Aw, it's just a game Kin. You win some you lose some." I said aligning my left foot with hers.
"No. It's more. You're trying to be big, impressive, and seen as if that's the way to be loved. But it's a fake."
I kissed her again. Honestly I didn't know what she meant. I promised I'd be more open and I knew that'd be easier because summer was here. High school was over.
Still, we went to the movies in a neighboring town and I lied to my mother about where I was going and who I was seeing.
Our affection grew. I'll admit, I wasn't sexually experienced. I mean there was one girl I fell for, Narci, the only girl in the chess club, who had green eyes, dyed black hair and pale skin. We'd spent an hour French kissing in the back seat of my 1963 Buick after the Christmas ball. We went out on two dates and again got stuck in the back of my car kissing, but a month later she moved to Cincinnati. I'd never had a girlfriend. My life was about basketball and my studies, I liked science and nature and pleasing my mother and father, though I wouldn't have put it that way back then, at age eighteen.
The nonsexual physical commingling Kin and I shared had caught me. When we parted her absence felt palpable, as if a piece of clothing had been removed, the difference between being sheltered and exposed. There's security in touch and Kin awakened me to that sensuality. As the summer wore on I always had my arm around her. She sat in the middle, right next to me, in my car's front seat as I drove. We hugged often, we kissed whenever we were in a private space. Once unceremoniously, during a movie, in the back of the theater, she "missed" the popcorn on my knee and put her hand on my cock, and gripped it through my baggy jeans. I shifted uncomfortably.
"What are you doing?" I whispered red faced.
Like everything between us, she led the way. She rubbed my penis up and down through my pants until my erection hurt. Then, she stopped.
"Did you like that?" She whispered and laughed loudly interrupting a delicate scene in The Way We Were.
Just a few days after graduation, we agreed to take a morning hike. We met behind the Carvel, on Route 112, on the south side of town, below the broken canopy of Panorama Hill that had collapsed from slope failure years ago. The hill was a pretty collection of statuesque bedrock, in well-defined fractures. I'd studied the geography of the area in Earth Science class my sophomore year.
We took the Arcada Trail. Kin carried a backpack containing a gray wool blanket, water canteen, and fruit. We followed the trail which sloped down through a field of tall dewy grass that wet our pant legs, proceeded up and over a small clearing of mostly sunlit boulders, then disappeared into a tight cluster of sugar maples, yellow birch and white ash.
We walked a mile, through the cool shade of the trees, took two lefts, hiked a half mile up Barren Ash Hill, then fifty yards through hillside scrub onto a small, semi concealed platform of rock that I'd discovered just a few years before when I'd go for hikes to get away from my family. I loved being outdoors. The clearing faced east, away from the town, faced the hills of Oswego Valley that stretched out to the glistening horizon in shades of foggy gray.
The whole time we walked we were silent, a determined silence, we were hiking toward a protective solitude where we could let go, meaning ravish, ourselves with kisses and caresses, reaching a kind of apex that had been flickering and sparkling more hotly each day and now was about to be consummated as if the last several months had been a long climb toward the achievement of human union of which we were completely unconscious.
She laid out the blanket on a patch of grass. We could look through a clearing at the valley. Behind us the town, our homes, the grade school and high school I'd attended, her parents home the rec center and movie theaters and the mall that had just gone up a few years before where my mother was shopping for new clothes for me to wear at college. This would be our last summer in our hometown.
"Come here,'she said.
She knelt in front of me and undid my pants, pulled them down to my ankles.
"Kin."
"Stay quiet, Peter. Let me. I've been waiting to do this for a year."
