The summer I turned 9 I saw my first naked boy, gained 12 lbs., and bathed in a river with a dead cow downstream. The river is still there, though presumably the cow has decomposed, this same river is supposedly too polluted to bath in anymore. The naked boy was no one I liked or found particularly attractive, but it was the first time I saw a male body that wasn’t mine. The 12 lbs., give or take a million, never seemed to come off throughout my adolescence and into adulthood, like the tide’s unending and unstoppable ebb and flow.

No one seemed to care about the cow. I don’t even think people noticed the cow, to be honest. Sometimes I think I made it up as some surreal recollection of a psychologically recluse child. Don’t get me wrong, I was always very physically and emotionally present. I think that’s what made me popular all my life, but my mind was often elsewhere in the increasing realization that I wasn’t like them, and they shouldn’t ever find that out. The other kids jumped off the ledge of a riverbed, where a tiny waterfall formed, but I was too small or too scared, so I crouched in the muddy water at a distance from everyone looking askance at the decomposing corpse.

I’m not sure if everyone has had this experience, but it’s common to have children of the same gender bathe together when there are many children to save time and money. As an only child in the states, this was never a common occurrence for me. I ran from any situation that might arise to that effect. But this time it couldn’t be avoided. I was in a foreign country as familiar to me as any place can be when you’re that age shepherded by adults everywhere. I was staying at a relative’s house for half the summer in a residential subdivision of a small town in el Cibao, the northern valley of the Dominican Republic. After we left the river, we all needed to bathe quickly before dinner. So, separately, the girls bathe together, and the boys bathed together. I hated it. I hated being naked with another person, but I couldn’t object. I didn’t know how and on what grounds, so I didn’t. He was older than me by a couple years, which meant he had developed further than I had at the time. I couldn’t help but stare out of the corner of my eye. But don’t linger. I wondered if that’d be me. If what I had then and how I looked would become him. I had never seen my father naked, and I never had a chance to ask him how his body developed. All I had were clinical textbooks in Spanish my mom dutifully bought for my edification around the age of 11. 

My mother screamed in protest when I returned home several pounds heavier with no explanation beyond, I don’t know. She called her relatives who housed me that summer demanding to know how it was that I came back so fat. They simply stated that I kept eating and asking for more food, and as a growing boy under their care they wouldn’t let me go hungry. Which is how the tale of me eating six plantains as a 9 year old was retold for years. The very same who overfed me seemed equally as shocked by my capacity to eat as much. My mother protested that I shouldn’t have been overfed. Had their children been allowed to eat that much, she insisted.

My mother, now a resident of the same town with the same river, bemoans the river's pollution brought on by her countrymen throwing their waste there. The river is a regular trigger for her soliloquies regarding the trash people throw everywhere and how her country is the dumpster of the Americas because people have no care for the environment. She’s become a little humored though a much-ignored local champion of the environment and waste management. She collects trash along the dirt road that snakes through her agricultural hamlet, cursing under her breath. Recalling her childhood memories, she insists that the government do something about the state of the river. Modernity and rapid unregulated development seemed to be to blame, but my mother swears it’s apathy. The way she’d describe apathy is both innate and contagious, a malediction of people at large. In any case, no one bathes in the river anymore.

The summer I turned 9 was the last time I spent an entire summer, unaccompanied by my mother in the DR. Despite multiple trips, I haven’t seen that river or the naked boy since, and as one would imagine, I remain fat. I still think of that decaying cow in the same waters we bathed in and wonder why no one noticed and why no one cared.