“It seemed impossible not to remember something like that. The first time a girl put her lips on yours. What kind of chump forgot being a five-year-old mack? I would’ve coasted on that for years if I’d known. But I did know. I was there. What put it out of my mind? I looked at Melanie’s profile, the coast of her nose and mouth and chin. She was one of us. A Sag Harbor Baby.”
Most of us remember our first kiss. An innocent peck on the playground in pre-K or a hormone-pumped make out session in middle school -- they all count. So how could Benji, a self conscious teenage boy eager to have the ultimate summer experience, completely forget his precocious rite of passage? Melanie, as she called herself, was a long-lost descendant of first generation Sag Harbor beachgoers whose family had done the unthinkable and sold their Cuffee Drive property a decade before. Upon her homecoming, Melanie immediately proves herself as a well-versed local -- not to be confused with a townie -- and becomes involved with NP, so when she confesses to Benji that she had been his secret admirer all those years ago, he is completely caught off guard. It is interesting to note that during this pivotal scene, instead of focusing on the adrenaline, Benji keeps talking about the house, his “long lost love”. This seems to contribute to the fact that his first kiss is completely wiped from his memory as well as the resulting scene at the end of the chapter where Melanie acts as if their second kiss hadn’t happened either. The common denominator seems to be the destination, Sag Harbor, where memories are made and sometimes kept, the essence of them ultimately overshadowing the details. When Benji reflects on his summer, it’s not really Melanie he remembers, but the coming of age experience she shared with him that he would carry to his back-to-school setting, much like how Jason’s first kiss seemed to be a precursor for his adolescence. Before we are quick to scold him for his forgetfulness, imagine if Benji had remembered his childhood fling. Would he have used that experience and built on that reputation? More importantly, would he have been the same narrator?
That's an interesting point I never really though of. I think in Ben's case it may have altered how he feels about himself a little. The first scene of the novel we see Ben talking about how if he knew it was the last time he held hands with a girl for a while, he may have kept a souvenir. It seems like Ben holds on to things, and that may have been one he held on to.
ReplyDeleteI totally considered this title for my post too! I think even if he remembered the "fling", he would be the same narrator and have the same reputation, because as I recall, Melanie's feelings for him were pretty unrequited. I don't think he would be the kind of person to tell everyone about it. Besides, he was only in kindergarten. Benji isn't much of a braggart. I don't think he values other people (or himself) for sexual encounters as much as personality. Therefore, I don't think he would try to better his reputation by talking about a childhood romance.
ReplyDeleteThis whole chapter ("Tonight We Improvise") is about memory, and I wish we'd been able to discuss it more extensively in class. In a novel that is explicitly an act of memory, a reconstruction of a life that now seems far distant (that "other boy"), Whitehead dramatically calls the basic reliability of memory into question throughout this chapter--in the end, we don't know whether Melanie's first-kiss story is true or not. Benji can't even be sure she was ever even out on Sag back then, although she seems to know enough local references to persuade him. Throughout this chapter, we're aware of the power of the mind to create strong emotional resonance for things that may or may not be actual memories. Benji either "forgot" his first kiss, or it never happened--either way, he can't be sure.
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