WOLF-BOY
A Creation Story
I am never officially introduced to Gracie, just immediately locked in her orbit, fascinated by the new, radiant, bald‐ headed cashier at my Uncle Randy’s photography studio called Shoot! at the tip of Cape Cod. It’s my first day of work the summer of ‘79, and the world seems both infinitely huge and impossibly small all at once.
Spotting her feels like a creation story—my silly, amateur world falls away, and my engines roar to life when she steps into the light that makes the old whaling village and artist colony so attractive to photographers. Before Gracie, before Provincetown, before this wild, bittersweet season, there’s only Whiffle ball, brine, and a nagging, primal fear of hairy palms.
“Randy told me to keep an eye out for a handsome young man,” Gracie says, and my buddy steps forward to shake her hand. Everything about Liam Preston seems taut, from his shoulders and chest to the prominent veins on his hands and arms, mini serpents, really, which I find both terrifying and vaguely thrilling.
“I’m Liam,” he says. “This other guy is Randy’s kid nephew, Danny. Rumor has it he’s got a huge crush on me.”
“What?” I say, blushing before Gracie smiles, shaking Liam’s hand, and slides her bizarre sunglasses down her face and winks my way. The glasses are black, bug-eyed, and make Gracie look like some cool space alien, as if the spectacles themselves have a life all their own.
“I find Randy’s kid nephew sexy, Liam,” she says. “And I adore Danny’s doe eyes, and the funky, cool hollows of his collarbone.”
I’m sold on her in a millisecond for that. Plus, I’m told she’s an adopted child of Portuguese American descent, and most of my friends and family are Irish Catholics, so to me she’s a rare diamond—a dazzling thing to behold, and her body has the most wonderful, bronzed tan.
“Sweet Ivy-League lady” is what Liam calls her, and part of that is his sarcasm, and the other part is pure, naked envy. Her bare head is round and smooth. When Gracie turns around, two dimples at the base of her skull remind me of resting cat eyes. Her neck is graceful and long and holds a hint of serpentine possibilities.
Most everyone’s eyes follow her around the room. Even in Provincetown, a village where it takes quite a lot to stand out, Gracie shimmers. She has a sweet nose, although a little crooked, and the left nostril has a big safety pin through it.
It’s the shapely body, however, that nabs everyone, makes people study her. Her limbs appear coiled, as if she’s prepared at any second to bounce up high, way above the jetliners, and zip back to the ground, squatting lower than a dime.
She smells different, too, like she rolls around on a bed of lilacs after going for a four-hundred-yard sprint, naked. I can still smell sweat, hail, whiskey, Coppertone, and fire. To a boy of sixteen, it’s like the compressed bonfires of an entire Cape Cod summer—if a hundred of them were tossed and seasoned with all its collective lust, snow cones, crescent moons, half-finished poems, transcendent music, roman candles, and star gazing—if you sauté that with a case of unusually ripe narcissism and turn it to a liquid, what you’d get when that creation splashes down on a young woman is the one and only Gracie Rose.