by Arden, Jann
I was a late bloomer in many ways, well, in every way. I hadn’t really had many romantic encounters. Yes, I had kissed Mark and had let Leonard dry hump me in his mother’s basement, but that was pretty much it. Oh yeah, and in the fourth grade a little boy named Greg said he’d give me a big piece of bubble gum if I kissed him on the lips. It was only a one-one thousand, so it was totally manageable. I kept my mouth shut as tightly as a pickle jar.
Every year it seemed like we lost a couple of girls to “the sinful deed you should never do.” It was always the girls you’d never dream would be engaging in sex of any kind, certainly not the kind of sex that involved a real honest-to-God penis. I’d hear whispered rumours by the lockers at lunchtime about this girl and that boy and the next thing I knew the knocked-up girl in question would be whisked off to some school for pregnant teens in Edmonton. That very same girl, pregnant no more, would reappear in the classroom the next spring, and not a single word about the illegitimate baby would be breathed by anybody. Not even the bullies dared go there. Eventually the whole sordid affair was swept under the boards of the football bleachers, never to be spoken of again. Well, at least not in front of the sinners themselves …
I always wondered why the boys who impregnated these young girls got off so easy. They stayed in school and graduated with their classes and were more or less held up as heroes by their male friends, with a lot of wink, wink, nudge, nudge going on. I am not saying that the boys didn’t suffer some pain and anxiety, but they didn’t have to be pregnant. The boys seemingly glided through all the embarrassment and the shame while the girls ate and slept in it.
The girls always looked so changed, so defeated, when they came back to school. I don’t know how anyone could not be changed after giving birth to a real, live person. It must have been horribly hard giving the babies up. These girls were probably going to be spending the rest of their lives wondering how their babies were and who they were and where they were.
I knew one girl who gave up her baby her very first year of university. Just when she was starting her life, she got pregnant and had a very sudden change of plans. She was only seventeen or eighteen. She was in my grade but she’d skipped a year because she was so darn smart. I saw her a few times after her baby had been adopted and she was different somehow. The whole baby thing made her cynical and mean. I guess if she was going to feel miserable, she was going to make damn sure everybody else was miserable too. I felt sorry for her. She was too young to be broken.
I had a hard time giving an old pair of jeans away, so I couldn’t imagine giving away a person. I think it was very brave of those girls to do what they did. They gave their babies a real chance to have wonderful lives. We had adopted Patrick when he was ten days old, so I knew full well what a gift it was to have a new soul come into your family. I knew that some young girl had given him up in order for him to be with us. We were all very grateful to his biological mother for putting him on the planet. Apparently she was only sixteen years old when she gave birth to him. It was hard for me to get my head around that. Pat was such an amazing addition to our family. We were all thrilled when he arrived with his little, blue blanket and his tiny hairbrush. He had the cutest face and the biggest ears. He was completely adorable, and we loved him the minute he came through the door.
I read an unbelievably crazy statistic once that said that four out of four girls have had sexual contact they did not want. I read it about six times to make sure I was reading it correctly. It’s a tongue-in-cheek comment, but I can sort of guess where the author was coming from. It’s more of a comment about our society than a statistic. It means that every girl has a bit of shame following her to bed at night. I knew I did.
When I was about ten years old one of my relatives at a family event got me alone in a basement and lay on top of me. He was older than I was so he certainly knew better, but he did it anyway. “Don’t tell anybody, ’k?” he quietly insisted. “We didn’t do anything, right?” Who’s we? I didn’t do anything but you, on the other hand …
He somehow lured me downstairs and got me onto the crappy couch with the springs sticking out of it, and eventually managed to get his fat, sweaty body on top of me. He writhed around, making these low moaning noises, his sweat dripping onto my face. I had no idea what he was doing but somehow I also did. Does that make any sense? I knew it was bad. I knew it was dirty, and I knew beyond anything else that it made me feel terrible.
He had all his clothes on but that didn’t make it any easier to stomach. He went back and forth on top of me, rubbing over my body for what seemed like three weeks, and then he came to an exhausted sudden halt, huffing and puffing away like his big, fat body had been running after an ice cream truck. His breath was hot against my neck, and I struggled to avoid it blowing into my face. He lay there, still, not really knowing how to let me up. Maybe he thought I was going to do something like run and tell somebody? I felt like a rabbit in the jaws of a wolf.
I am sure I was only about eighty pounds when I was ten. He must have been at least twice my size. I certainly couldn’t move out from underneath him. I was pinned there like a rag doll. I should have screamed, but I didn’t. I should’ve hit him or kicked him, but I didn’t. I didn’t do anything at all. I cried a lot afterwards and locked myself into the bathroom down there in the basement, hoping he’d be gone when I finally had the courage to come out. Like so many girls, I thought I had done something wrong. I thought that I had done something to make him do that to me.
My ten-year-old self couldn’t process any of it. I tried not to think about him and “it,” but as I got older I’d occasionally see him at a family get-together and I’d do my best to act normal, whatever that was. I felt like everybody around me could see my memory floating through the air like a black balloon. It still creeps into my head on a sunny Sunday afternoon.
I want other girls to know, yeah, it happened to me too. You’re not alone. I wasn’t raped, but I was violated. The brutality against so many women on this planet defies goodness on every level. Sexual assaults have lasting, lifelong effects on the human soul.
I should have told my mom sooner than I did, but eventually it all came out. She was very understanding and empathetic. I realized, years later, that my cousin was going to be the one who had to live with the shame, not me. That was a good realization. I don’t let the memory hurt me anymore.
Becoming a person can be difficult, to say the least. You are inundated with so many experiences and so much information. There are trillions of tiny bits and pieces of universal information that sift through your head at any given moment, like how does my brain make my fingers move, what kind of sandwich should I make, should I pull off this hangnail really quickly or clip most of it off to avoid the pain I know it’s going to cause if I just yank it off? I found myself lying in bed, wondering how I was going to make sense of it all. If getting my period was the only thing I had to worry about I would have been laughing, but, oh no, there were myriad things far worse than a menstrual cycle.
For two or three years I felt completely overwhelmed by everything. My hormones were running around my body like hungry truckers at a buffet. Hairs popped up in places I never even knew I had. I was plucking them out as fast as my tweezers could tweeze. I finally had to give up on the hair removal because I was starting to look like a rotisserie chicken. And the mental and emotional part of growing up wasn’t any easier than the physical part. When I dragged religion into the whole equation, I started feeling like I was certifiably nuts.
I wondered more and more about who in heaven’s name God was.
Was God:
A) A really big person?
B) A UFO?
C) A lost astronaut from another galaxy?
D) A friend of my Mormon grandmother’s?
E) None of the above?
I had a Buddhist friend who told me that I was God. That God was in me. No wonder I was feeling like I was putting on weight.
I prayed every night tha
t I would wake up with all my spiritual queries answered. I was prepared for whatever answer God wanted to give me. I just wanted to know one way or the other what the hell was going on. I prayed constantly and read the Bible religiously (how else can you read a Bible?). I enjoyed parts of it, where there was an actual story, but for the most part I was completely and utterly lost. The “begats” made my brain hurt. Did we really need to know who begat whom and for that many pages? To tell you the truth I skipped through most of the begats and ahead to the parts where everybody was killing each other. (Nothing has changed, it seems, we’re still doing that today …)
The Bible had a lot of rules that I knew full well I was not going to be able to abide by. Two thousand years ago, my menstrual cycle would have really caused me some problems. For instance, I would have had to either live in a tent with some other broads for the entire week or leave town altogether. If Biblical men were the ones having the periods, it would have been a time to drink and feast and have full body massages. Eating pork would have also posed a big problem for me back then since that’s what my mother had bubbling away in her Crock-Pot at least once a week. I would have been stoned on the spot. They revise a dictionary every year, for crying out loud! High time to revise the Good Book, I would think.
I didn’t like the fact that according to my dad’s very Mormon mother—my grandmother Richards—God knew what I was thinking and could see everything I did, including when I was having my period. It was hard going to the bathroom after that without wanting to completely cover myself with a towel, and sometimes I did cover myself with a towel and I am not kidding.
I wondered how God could see every single person on the planet and know what they were doing, never mind what they were thinking. It seemed impossible that God could keep track of us all. My head felt like it was going to cave in on itself. My mom told me I was too young to be worrying so much about God, and that it was actually God’s job to be worrying about me. She was probably right. My mother always knew what to say to make me feel better.
My grandmother Richards told me that all people were sinners, and that I was a sinner too and that I needed to repent and work harder in school. She told me that I needed to remain steadfast, whatever that meant. I always thought she smelled a little bit like a Kleenex box, if that’s possible. Maybe because she had so many Kleenexes stuffed into one of her bra cups. (She’d had a breast removed due to a cancer scare in the fifties.) Whenever she wiped my face, I knew exactly where she got the tissue from. It was a bit creepy, but handy just the same. I think she kept a deck of cards in there, too, and a Yahtzee game. My grandma loved to play Yahtzee. Growing up, I must have played two million games of Yahtzee with her. I would be in her good graces, and God’s, if I let her win. I threw the games on purpose almost every time.
I think my grandmother Richards would have been a lot nicer and happier had her husband, my dad’s dad, not passed away so young. She was left with a young family to raise, and it must have been hard being alone. She didn’t have a lot of friends, according to my mother. She had church friends and that was it. She wasn’t the type of person to invite the neighbours over for coffee because A) she didn’t like the neighbours and B) she didn’t drink coffee. My grandmother had Jesus and she made sure we knew that practically every time she spoke. I wanted God to be anything but what she believed him to be. Her version of him seemed really scary.
Her God was mad at everybody, handing out punishment and fear, stomping his feet on the ground when he didn’t get his way. Her God had more rules for getting into heaven than I knew what to do with. I wasn’t going to be able to abide by them all. She told me that families were forever and that she hoped I was going to be able to come with her into eternal life. Not at the rate I was going, I thought. If drinking coffee or beer or wine was going to keep me locked out of Eden, well, I guess I was a lost cause. (Maybe decaf would have been okay, but I’m not sure. I’ll have to go back and check Mormonism for Dummies.)
Grandma Richards and I didn’t quite see eye to eye about God, that’s for certain. I guess she would be travelling to wherever it was in the ether of the afterlife without me. I didn’t have any plans on dying, anyway, so I could wipe that off of my worry plate for the time being. I was planning on living a long, long time.
chapter eleven
THE LAST SUMMER
I managed to graduate from high school, but just barely. I never studied for a single test, I never listened to instructions and I didn’t care about anything even remotely academic. Other than that I was a great student.
I was short only three measly credits going into my last semester of high school, but I had to somehow make them up in order to pass. I was sent to my school guidance counsellor to figure out what I could do. He informed me that my choice was to take an extra class or take an extra class—so, well, I took the extra class. It involved me staying after school to work with and learn from a local farmer. I was the only student who was going to be taking that extra class, which had something to do with fertilizer. I didn’t think that that sounded all that bad, but I ended up standing on the back of a manure spreader pulling a lever that shot cow poo a hundred feet into the air. Nobody told me that fertilizer was poo. I thought fertilizer was fertilizer. For that simple act, which perhaps took me three or four hours at a time, I earned the three lousy credits that enabled me to graduate with my class. The lowest possible number of credits needed to graduate from an Alberta high school is one hundred. I graduated with 101. I had never been so proud. My parents were beyond relieved, as you can imagine.
I wasn’t even on the ballot but my classmates elected me grad chairman. I was in charge of organizing our party, hiring the band, finding a venue, selling the tickets, planning the meal: the whole nine yards. I had never done anything of the sort but I was excited. Thank God the rest of the grad committee were smart and talented and organized because I was useless. I couldn’t organize my own sock drawer.
Because there were only forty-two of us, our grad wouldn’t require as much planning as grads for Calgary High School, which usually had about fifteen hundred students. Going to a small school had its advantages. We could have had our grad at a KFC but we didn’t, thank God.
The hardest part of planning the entire thing would be finding someone to go with me. I hadn’t thought about that a lot; I was too busy worrying about God watching me when I was in the bathroom. The scramble to find a date started in March for most people and most of my friends were all set. I was one of the only girls who didn’t have a date.
There wasn’t really anybody that I liked all that much. Mark was out of the question, and the boy I sort of liked was already spoken for as well as most of the boys my age and older. I had known most of these boys since the fourth grade so they were all kind of like my brothers and not grad-date material. But I don’t think that was the point—the point was I needed to not be going alone. It would have been really easy to go with Theresa but I don’t think her boyfriend would have been too keen on that. I was going to have to do the unthinkable and ask someone a grade below me, oh the horror! I would almost certainly be ridiculed but it was a chance I’d have to take. Asking someone a year older would have been no problem whatsoever—I would have been considered incredibly cool—but asking someone a year younger meant I was a desperate loser.
I don’t know where I found the courage but I finally managed to go up to an eleventh grader named Stuart Richardson and ask him if he wanted to go to grad with me. He actually accepted, which I was totally unprepared for. In my mind I had already heard him say, “No, thank you, I have to bathe my ailing South African grandmother that night.” Stuart probably had no idea how important it was for me to have him accept. I am pretty sure that he didn’t want to hurt my feelings and that’s why he agreed to go with me. It was not a perfect scenario: my parents drove Stuart and me in their car and my mother made the dress I wore and there were still a few pins left in the hem, but the night turned out to be a great success. As grad c
hairman I could be proud. All I had to survive now was making it through my debut performance.
As I sat through the dinner, I worried about singing my song. It took up all the space in my brain. I hadn’t ever sung in front of anybody before, so I wasn’t sure if I would faint or not. I couldn’t imagine what it was going to feel like. In fact, I didn’t know if I could go through with it, period. My thousands of hours of secret singing in my parents’ basement had in no way prepared me to play in front of a live audience. I had spent a number of months trying to figure out how I was going to sing a song I had written for my classmates. No one in my family—never mind my school—knew that I played the guitar and wrote songs, so it was going to be a bit complicated. I didn’t want to be made fun of. I was known as the class clown, not the girl who sings a serious ballad about having to say goodbye to life as we knew it.
I had practised the song a thousand times in the basement and had tried to visualize my classmates sitting there at the grad ceremony in their underpants. (I had read somewhere that that’s how Karen Carpenter got over her stage fright.) I told myself I didn’t really care what the kids thought since I was going to be getting out of Dodge anyway, but I was worried about what my mom and dad would think. More than anything else, I did not want my parents to think I was crazy. I was sure they’d be shocked, considering they didn’t know I was the least bit musical. Trust me, I was shocked myself.
I finally walked up to the band leader and explained that I had written a song for my classmates and wanted to sing it to them. I am not sure he trusted me entirely, but he lent me his guitar and set me up behind a microphone. (I had forgotten I would need a guitar!) I don’t think I have ever been so afraid in my entire life. My lips went completely numb, and I felt like I was going to fold in on myself. One of my eyelids kept twitching—I would have glued it shut if I could have. My mouth was as dry as dirt, and I found it incredibly hard to swallow. I don’t remember singing at all, only the fear and the panic and anxiety. I stood there in the dress my mother had made me, with this huge electric guitar flung over my shoulder, and looked out at a sea of dropped jaws. My classmates were looking up at me on that stage in total disbelief and I watched their faces change from surprise to confusion. I felt like flying around the ballroom and like throwing up. I wondered if a person could throw up and fly around at the same time.