“I’m like that one,” Elena said, pointing at the pubic hair of the second one. Little hairs I could see skin through.
I was surprised by her earnestness. I thought we were making fun of it, a zillion miles from these stages—so her tone caught me off guard. I went from being an insider because I found the book to an outsider because I didn’t have breasts or hair yet.
“Me too,” I lied. Reading this book gave me the same thrill, the same fear and gathering warmth in my abdomen, as looking at the naked woman in Playboy magazine.
“But I’m more like this one in my chest.” She pointed to the third picture, where the breasts were small yet might cast shadows. I’d assumed the parts in each phase evolved in synchronicity; was it possible to mix and match?
“I’m like the first one for those,” I said.
She turned the page to a close-up of several configurations of pubic hair. “Pubic hair,” the book said, “comes in different shapes for different women.” One shape curved up in a half circle toward the stomach, one was straight across, forming a triangle, and one had a sharp V in the middle, a reverse widow’s peak. “Some women have pubic hair in the shape of a heart,” it said, with an arrow to the V-shaped one. I had no idea such a thing was possible. I fervently hoped that mine would be shaped like a heart.
I didn’t notice Debbie until she was so close her skirt blocked light. This book was proof she was right about me.
She leaned down from her waist, not smiling. I thought she would deliver the damning speech about my character, or move me, again, into isolation. Instead, she held out another book about sex and changing bodies, with pictures of naked people. When we were close to having finished that one, she walked over and handed us yet another, smiling. Her smile was kind, but her eyes glinted, as if this might be a trick. She continued to feed us books; there were at least six of these books in the library, although I had never seen them before. We pored over them the next few days, sanctioned by her, as if this subject was plain and right and necessary, like history or math.
The school didn’t give grades. Teachers wrote evaluations in long handwritten notes for the parent-teacher conferences. Since I’d started at the new school, all my focus had been concentrated in the social realm, so my evaluations were poor.
I dreaded these parent-teacher conferences, the solidarity between my mother and the teacher, two women disapproving of my ideal look, my lack of studiousness. My mother wore nice clothes to these meetings, and she was solicitous and formal, as if we were formal and deferential with each other at home too, when in fact she was becoming increasingly frustrated with me.
My teacher Lee told my mother I should get a hobby. “If she develops a passion outside school, she’ll start doing better in school.”
“Anything that interests you,” Lee said, looking at me. “Something you think might be fun you can apply yourself to. Nothing to do with school.”
Was this supposed to be a punishment? It sounded like a gift! A month before, my mother had taken me to a dance recital at a studio called Zohar on California Avenue behind Printers Inc. bookstore, where women in leotards jumped to music inside colored lights in a white tent. Arms out, fingers splayed, shimmying fast back and forth like birds shaking in puddles.
“I’d like to dance,” I said. “Jazz.”
“Okay,” Lee said. “We have a plan.”
I started to dance twice per week, but my mother and I still fought about my clothes and my lack of studiousness. Every element I needed for my style was the exact element she forbade me to wear, and so I found myself perpetually lying and sneaking, terrified she’d come to the school one day without warning or a teacher would call and she’d find out.
And then it happened. Usually I took the bus home and wiped off makeup and changed before my stop, but one day my mother spontaneously came to pick me up and found me wearing makeup, dangly earrings, and a short skirt pulled over ripped stockings. We walked in silence back to the car.
“They’re just earrings,” I said in the car. “Why do you care so much?” These earrings were the very linchpins of my appeal. They hinted at sex.
“They’re not appropriate,” she said. “Take them off.”
“But other kids wear them,” I said, aware both that this statement was true, they were nothing, and also that they were something, that she was partially right, although I wasn’t sure exactly why.
“I don’t give a damn what other kids wear.” She reached toward me as if she would rip them out of my lobes. I dodged.
“You’re grounded for a month,” she said. I’d already been grounded for two months for sneaking a miniskirt and black nylons to school in my bag. “You’re also grounded from using the phone, young lady,” she said, her jaw clenched. “You sneak, and you lie.”
It was true. I snuck clothing. I snuck into her shower when she was out and shaved my legs for the way it made my calves reflect a line of light, and then I lied about using her razor.
“And no allowance this month.”
My allowance was five dollars per week, but I’d been in trouble for long enough for the clothing, my poor evaluations at school, and not doing my homework when I said I would that I had not received it for at least three months. Any money I had was from Kate Willenborg’s father, who would give us each a twenty-dollar bill and drop us off at the mall. I believed money should be used, transformed into objects as quickly as possible before it disappeared.
Back at the house, she screamed. I worried the neighbors would hear us. Some strange power was moving through her veins and her extremities, the voltage almost too high for the instrument it ran through. She waggled an index finger right up close to my face and her cheeks got pink.
“You’re wasting your life,” she said. “If you don’t study now, you won’t find what you love to do, and then you won’t get to work with intelligent people later.”
“But I’m only in fifth grade,” I said.
“You don’t understand,” she said, starting to cry. “The work you do now will lead to the work you do later. It will inform who are the people you spend your life with, how interesting they are. Your colleagues.”
“I don’t care about them,” I said. I pictured people in an airless room who thought they were enjoying themselves, but who were not. I believed my mother was lying to me, wanting me to become just like her. This made no sense—she didn’t have colleagues—but her insistence that I abandon my own sensibility and adopt hers made me assume the story would end with me as her. Were I to abandon joy for study and long-term gratifications, I was sure I would be rewarded with a situation as tepid and flavorless as the studying itself. It didn’t occur to me until years later that she had been referring to her own loss, having a child so young when she might have continued at school, at work. Working alone now, when she might have liked to work with a team of people. That she had been fighting so hard for me to apply myself to my studies to help me have a good life, the closest she could come to describing the eminence she felt she had lost for herself.
“You will care, you little shit,” she said, kicking my bedroom door hard, and leaving a hole in the white paint that looked like a mouth dropped open in surprise.
A few days later I found my mother leaning over her bathroom sink again, yanking her braces off with needle-nose pliers.
“What are you doing?”
“The orthodontist said one more year,” she said, “but I don’t think so.” The sound of something crackling.
“Mom, go to the orthodontist. Let him do it.”
“I can’t wait. I can’t live like this anymore.” I’d noticed she’d been complaining about them more than usual lately: they were painful, food got caught, she was sick of changing the bands. She wanted them off for good. The adjustment had moved faster given how often she’d changed the bands; her teeth were straight enough, she said.
“Please, don’t,” I said. I stood next to her in the small bathroom. The wires stuck out like silver whiskers.
“I’m not stopping,” she said. “Get out. Go do something else.”
Some nights Toby called. He was a popular sixth grader with white-blond hair, a long neck, and ears that stuck out like delicate shells. His voice was a low, rich scratch with the higher notes still inside. At school, I flirted with him, glancing and looking away, giggling with friends.
“Do you want to go steady?” he asked one day.
“Sure,” I said. Sure was the word I’d decided to say if he asked—it was positive, but held something back.
We planned to French-kiss. Kate and Craig would escort us to the Stumps at lunchtime. The Stumps was an area down at the bottom of school property, a level clearing named after a collection of logs sawed into pieces near a bend in a fire road along a dry creek bed. Lunch was only forty minutes—with travel time factored in, we wouldn’t have long.
We followed a path below the middle school, over a small bridge in the shade of the trees that reminded me of Bridge to Terabithia, a book that had made me feel the great importance and weight of life and love. There were cool ribbons of wind inside the warm, dry air. The leaves cracked under my feet; the trees above covered the paths in cool shadows, with dots of light like white paint flicked all over the forest.
“So kiss a little longer, longer with Big Red,” Kate sang.
The path became steep and less determinate after the bridge, and I almost slipped on my butt, but scrambled up, grabbing at branches, being careful not to snag my earrings.
When we arrived, Toby said, “I guess you guys should go away now.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks for bringing us!”
At school, I lied and said I’d kissed before, ashamed to be later than my father had been at kissing, and thinking it would make me more attractive if it got around that I’d done it before. I felt woozy. I stood on a low stump to be level with his face.
“Well—I guess,” he said.
He smelled of soap and detergent. A thrill moved through my back, heat moving up. I wasn’t sure how long to keep going, how frenetically to maneuver my tongue. It was warm and good and electric, the temperature lower in his mouth by a degree or two, and less salt. Was I moving my tongue in the right way? How much was my tongue to be entertained, versus entertainment for his tongue?
My heart fluttered; his tongue seemed to be searching, avid, pointed at the tip and forcing his way through the cavity. An excess of saliva made my chin wet, and in the midst of it I worried about what I would do when it was over, to dry off. He ran his tongue over the back of my top front teeth, a hollow ring in my jaw.
My neck got sore and so I took a risk, detached and tilted my head to the other side, flipping my hair along with it. At the reattachment, we knocked teeth. We both laughed, nervously, then continued. Later, I would teach myself to twist my tongue both ways to reveal the soft underside.
It was unclear when to stop, but we’d have to get back to class, and now we’d done the kiss on both sides.
“We’d better go back,” I said. I jumped off the stump, looser in my limbs. His lips were red around the edges. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
I did, too, when he looked away.
The following summer, after more kisses in movie theaters, at the Baylands, the beach, and in the back of his mother’s station wagon, and letters exchanged back and forth, Toby called to end it with me. I talked on the now paint-spattered cordless phone my mother had purchased when we moved into the Rinconada house, the phone that was, like the microwave, a sign of moving up in the world.
“I think we should break up,” he said.
I felt a stab of guilt I couldn’t place. “I’m sorry for what I did wrong,” I said, choking up.
“What? It’s okay,” he said.
I put the phone down and fished through my mother’s small red leather pouch that held her jewelry, where I’d once found my baby teeth. Beside it on the tile shelf were a necklace and two bangle bracelets I coveted but was not allowed to wear. I put them on. It was Sunday morning, and my mother was doing errands and would be gone for a few hours. Holding my arm so the bracelets wouldn’t fall off my wrist, I went to her closet and rummaged through her clothing and took from her dirty clothes pile a peach silk shirt with buttons down the front, short sleeves, and a collar. I wasn’t allowed to wear it. I slipped it over my head so I didn’t have to unbutton the buttons. Already I felt different—stronger.
I grabbed the phone again and went to sit on her bed. I would call him to communicate my confidence, my new independent spirit, set him at ease.
“Hello?”
“Hi, it’s me again. I just wanted to call and say not to worry. I’m fine.” As I said it, the stupidity of the idea became obvious: he wasn’t worried. “I just wanted you to know I’m okay, you know. After I got off the phone so fast, and everything.”
“Thanks.” There was a long pause.
I hung up, shaking. At least it had been quick. I grabbed my mother’s hairbrush and walked across the house to my room, wearing her bracelets, her shirt, and my pajama pants.
I brushed my hair as I walked, flipped it up and down a couple of times so that it would fluff and feather. I put on jeans from the dirty clothes pile in my room, grabbed my journal from the shelf, and lowered the scraping venetian blinds over the window that looked out on the street.
I opened my closet door so the mirror that attached on the inside faced the room—but I resisted looking. I sat in front of the mirror on the floor and began to write. I could see a fuzzy silhouette of myself in my peripheral vision, and I wrote in a slanted, adult style, as if this first painful breakup experience had already made me older and more mature. I sat on my knees and bent forward, my hair falling to one side, as if for a camera or another person watching—all of this mattered as a record of who I was.
I adjusted my arm to get the bangles to clack. I looked down and noticed my shirt, how the peach went with the cream bangle, how the cream went with the wood. Adults mentioned forgetting parts of childhood and memories of others, and it was not clear to me which moments would create memories and which would fade away; the moments did not indicate which type they were.
I wrote that I’d broken up with Toby—well, he’d broken up with me, I wrote—and I was sad about it. But, even so, I wrote, I was doing just fine. I described what I was wearing in detail, in case my older self would want to know and picture my younger self at this moment. I implied that the shirt and the bangles were mine, not my mother’s.
I flipped my hair and looked up. In the mirror my hair did not hang or cascade but fluffed, thin and foolish. The items I described did not look the way I imagined them: the shirt fell wrong from the creases formed in the dirty clothes pile; the short sleeves hit my arms below the elbows; I didn’t have breasts to fill out the front, which hung down hollow. The color was dingy, almost like skin. The bracelets were not glamorous, just big and foolish.
Runaway
I started up in the darkness, my heart pounding. Dread sat like a weight on my chest, the taste of tin in my mouth. A roar in the distance had displaced the air, a heaviness still tremored in the earth below my futon. This was the end, a nuclear bomb on its way to NASA.
I knew what to do. I’d planned for this moment, the short interval after I knew the bomb was coming but before it hit: I would run through the dark center of the house and wake my mother, tell her the bomb was on its way and we had only a few minutes. We would hold each other and cry before we dissolved into the awful radiation and light.
I was up on my feet when I understood the sound was only a freight train. The heavy trains came through at night, longer than the passenger trains. I’d never woken up to the sound of them before.
Before this, when I was eleven, I’d started getting migraines. I knew one was coming when I looked down at my hand and part of it was invisible, or when I looked into the mirror and half my face was gone, replaced by a gray cloud with a shimmering stitch. Within twenty minutes, the first
silvery, electric saw would slip down from my forehead, move through my eye and into the center of my brain.
The migraines and the fear of an impending nuclear holocaust became intertwined. A woman on NPR explained that once bombs were launched, it would not be possible to un-launch them. Our missiles were pointed at Russia; theirs were pointed at us. The Russians would have bombs trained on NASA, I thought, because it was strategically important. NASA was only a few miles from us.
That fall I became certain there would be a nuclear attack at Christmas. I also felt it was up to me to stop it, to get the adults to believe me, even though I was only eleven. One day, another migraine starting, my mother called Ron, who still worked at NASA. I hadn’t seen him for a few years. I was lying on my bed with the blinds drawn, dreading the start of the pain. My nerve endings spread out to touch every worry on the planet—each individual suffering, actual or potential.
“How you doing, kid?” Ron asked, walking into my room, where I was lying in bed, the curtains drawn.
“I’m worried about a bomb,” I said. “They’d want to hit NASA, right?”
“Maybe,” he said. “But if it happened—and I’m not saying it would, because it won’t—you wouldn’t feel anything. Not a thing. It would be like, poof. Over.”
“But in Hiroshima—”
“The bombs are a thousand times more powerful now,” he said.
“You mean, faster?” I asked. “Or covering more space?”
“Both,” he said.
“But what about just before it hits? Those minutes after we know it’s on the way but before it explodes?”
“You’d be vaporized before you had any idea. You’d be dead”—he snapped his fingers—”like that.”
“Thanks for coming by,” I said weakly. I didn’t believe anything he said. There would be at least a second when I knew it was coming, when the world still existed and I was still material. I could catch that moment if I was vigilant.
A few days later my father came over, biting triangles off an oversize Toblerone bar. He didn’t usually eat chocolate. A gift, he said, from a woman he’d just started dating.
Small Fry Page 16