The Dark Side of Innocence

by Terri Cheney

  The Black Beast had been all atingle that morning. He kept urging me to dress more quickly—eat my breakfast faster—hurry, hurry to the church. It was hard to rein him in. My father noticed me wolfing down my pancakes and asked me what was the rush.

  “No rush. Just hungry.” Oh damn, a lie. I’d have to remember to confess that too.

  I said my opening lines so fast that Father Tim had to ask me to say them again. “Once more, with feeling,” he said. Talking slowly was extremely hard for the Beast when he was in this kind of mood. The pressure of unspoken thoughts and words kept building up against my tongue until I stammered. “B-bless me, Father, f-for I have sinned . . .” Finally, I spat out the canned remarks, and he asked the question I was both longing and dreading to hear: “And what are your sins?”

  I was ready. “I have been impure in word and deed,” I said, parroting the language I’d read so often in my catechism.

  “Go on.”

  “Once, I lied to my father. And once, I licked a penis.”

  “For the lie, say ten Hail Marys,” he said. “Now, what was that last part again?”

  Deserved or not, priests have acquired a bad reputation for seducing children. In this case, it was the child trying to seduce the priest. Not that I wanted anything sexual from him. I only wanted to make sure that when he left, I would remain a vivid memory. I heard my voice, as if from far away. It was husky from yesterday’s cheerleading practice, and I sounded far older and smokier than my ten years as I repeated, “Once, I licked a penis.”

  Father Tim leaned in closer to the screen. “Whose penis did you lick?”

  I wasn’t at all prepared for that, and my stammer came right back. “I-I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you that. I swore I wouldn’t.”

  “But God knows everything, my child.”

  “Then why do I have to tell you?”

  He sat back, clearly stumped.

  “Why did you do this thing?” he asked.

  “He made me.”

  “You mean, he physically forced you to do it?”

  “Well, no, but he gave me no other choice. And Father?”

  “Yes?”

  “Part of me found it quite interesting. Not the good part of me, you understand, but the part that does the nasty things, that gets me into trouble . . .” I was entering dangerous territory here, and the Black Beast abruptly stopped speaking.

  “Go on.”

  “Well, it didn’t feel at all like I’d expected. I’d thought it would be like licking an ice cream cone. But it was warm, just like a living thing. And it wasn’t sweet, it was salty.”

  Silence from the other side of the screen, which seemed to last forever.

  “Father?” I asked, and my voice was back to normal again. I sounded just like what I was: a terrified ten-year-old girl. I wanted to ask him, “Am I damned?” but it came out “Are you mad at me?”

  “No, Terri, I’m not mad at you.”

  I gasped. The priest is never supposed to use your name during confession. The shared pretense is that he doesn’t even know who you are. You’re just another repentant sinner seeking out God’s grace. Father Tim had broken the sacred rules. The Black Beast was thrilled to the marrow.

  “But I’m concerned,” he continued. “I think you’re a very special girl, and you’re about to enter a brand new world. Trust me. College can be very . . .” He paused, as if searching for the right word. “. . . stimulating. Full of new ideas and new temptations. I’m worried for your soul.”

  “Thank you, Father,” I said humbly, but the Black Beast was so excited that I had to bite down hard on my lower lip to keep from saying, “You really think I’m special?”

  “If this business with the licking ever happens again, I want you to come straight to me and tell me all about it. In person,” he added. “Not in confession. Here it has to remain confidential. Now promise.”

  “I promise,” I said, knowing full well that once the Black Beast’s curiosity had been aroused, my promises meant nothing. I would see Dan O’Leary again. He would play the Hawaii Five-O theme for me, and I would lick his penis. Father Tim lived in a make-believe world, all flickering candles and incense. I lived in the real, transactional world, where beasts were bigger than all the best intentions. I sighed.

  “I’m really sorry,” I said.

  “I know. Now say your Act of Contrition. Slowly, like you mean it.”

  “Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of Heaven and the pains of Hell; but most of all, because I love Thee, my God, who art all good and deserving of all my love . . .”

  I spoke as slowly as I could, putting my whole heart into my words. But I was speaking all the while to Father Tim, not to God. Desire, as would always be the case with me, had the final say.

  My father found a student who could drive me to the college and pick me up. As the time grew close for me to start, I became increasingly nervous. So the Sunday before my first class, my whole family trooped to the campus for a tour, to familiarize me with my new environment.

  Pomona College was like a jewel in a garden, many of the buildings magnificently weathered and covered with ivy, the landscaping lush. This was no mere community college, I realized. It was the real deal. I felt overwhelmed by the tour. How would I find the bathrooms? What if I got lost? How could I locate a pay phone, in case of some dire emergency?

  I’d assumed that the family would all go out to dinner together afterward, to celebrate my new adventure. But my father headed straight for home, and once we got there, my mother made a beeline for her bedroom. Danielle, the latest in a long string of babysitters, was waiting for us at the front door.

  “What do you think?” she asked Zach and me. “Plain or pepperoni?”

  “Kung pao shrimp!” Zach shouted.

  I shot my father a look. He shrugged and glanced away. “Your mother wants to go out to dinner.”

  “Fine, then let’s go out.”

  “Just the two of us, sweetie.”

  I felt a pang, like I’d been smacked by a dodgeball. “Why?”

  Another shrug.

  “If I get her to change her mind, can I go?” I asked.

  He bent down and whispered, “Tell her you’re really nervous about tomorrow.”

  I skittered down the hall and knocked on my mother’s door.

  “Go away,” she said. “I’m dressing.”

  “I know,” I said. “I want to watch.”

  To my surprise, she let me in. “You can untangle those,” she said, pointing to the long string of pearls my father had given her for their anniversary. “But be careful about it, and don’t touch anything else.”

  I was dismayed when I saw the spread on the bed: the beaded clutch, the sheer black stockings, the blue silk dress with the portrait neckline that was my father’s favorite. And worst of all, the mink stole. I felt helpless against that mink stole. My mother was unassailable in it: beautiful, elegant, confident. But most of all, she was a woman, and I was still a girl.

  I bent over her pearls and said, “You know, Mom, I’m really, really nervous about tomorrow.”

  She didn’t look up from fastening her garters. “You’ll be fine; you always are.”

  “It would really help me if I could go out with you and Daddy tonight, just to talk things over.”

  “You can talk things over with Zach.”

  I snorted. “All Zach wants to talk about are go-carts and Star Trek. Come on, pretty please? It’s my first day at college, and I want to do it right.”

  She finally looked at me. “Tonight is for your father and me. You are not, I repeat, not coming along.”

  I couldn’t remember the last time my parents had gone out together as a couple. Sometime last year, maybe. I’d almost foiled that time too by running a fever. But at the last minute, my mother had caught me holding the thermometer up to the lamp.

  “But Mom,” I whined. She stopped me before I could say
another word. Grabbing my arm, she turned me to face her.

  “I said no. Tonight is my night, and you’re staying home.”

  The Black Beast didn’t like to be touched, and he especially didn’t like that word no. A flush of anger surged through my blood.

  “You don’t love me!” I shouted. “You never did!”

  “Not when you’re being a spoiled brat.”

  I had to get out of that room, away from those pearls, which were just begging to be ripped apart and flung into every corner. But even at the outer limits of my control, I knew that I couldn’t let my father see me like this. As far as he was concerned, I was a sweet and even-tempered child, intense and serious for my age, but obedient nonetheless. I didn’t want him to meet the Black Beast face to face.

  I ran down the hallway to my room and started wildly rearranging things. Sometimes that distracted the Beast: overturning the furniture, ripping down all my books, then putting them back alphabetically. That night, however, it didn’t help. The Black Beast seethed. The pressure inside my head felt like it would explode. I had to do something, quick—so I grabbed my old cheerleading baton and did a couple of spins in front of my mirrored closet door.

  “We’re leaving now!” my father yelled from the kitchen. I heard the front door close.

  I spun myself around again. This time I couldn’t stand what I saw: a little girl, ugly and scrawny, unworthy of love. I kept on spinning. All I could hear was my mother saying “No” to me. Louder, with each spin:

  “No.”

  “No!”

  “NO!”

  “Kill it,” the Black Beast whispered.

  I swung the baton back as far as my arms could reach, then smashed it into the full-length mirror. My face shattered into a gazillion pieces, glass shards flying around the room. I stepped back, a little stunned but satisfied. The room was silent. I’d murdered my mother’s voice.

  The next morning, we were in such a tizzy getting me off to college that I somehow managed to get away with my rather lame explanation about the broken mirror. I said that I was practicing my twirls, and the baton flew out of my hands. My mother sized me up but said nothing. Their big evening out had apparently been a success: my father actually pecked her on the cheek as she was leaving for work. Then he dropped me off at the Pomona College gate, at the northern boundary of the campus. The gate was inscribed, “Let only the eager, thoughtful, and reverent enter here.”

  It scared the hell out of me.

  It was 1970, the height of hippiedom and the free love/flower child movement. I stood at the massive, ivy-covered gate in my Catholic schoolgirl uniform: blue-and-gray plaid pleated skirt, crisp Peter Pan-collared shirt, kneesocks, and shiny black spit-polished shoes. Everywhere I looked was anarchy: students smoking, kissing, arguing. One couple was lying on the grass, their groins locked together like magnets. To me, people seemed not so much dressed as strategically undressed, consciously disheveled. Hair was long and prominent—tousled, unkempt—on the boys as well as the girls.

  I reached back and touched my own long and cautious braid that my mother had fixed for me that morning. I tugged at the rubber band holding it in place and shook my head until my face was enveloped in a reddish-blonde cloud. “Cool,” said a passing woman in tattered bell-bottom jeans. That was all the encouragement I needed. With some bravado restored, I went to find Professor Tremaine.

  I remembered enough from yesterday’s tour to make my way to his office. It was on the top floor of a small brick building across from a big, thriving oak. My legs itched at the sight of that tree: it was prime for climbing, the branches sturdy and not too far apart, the bark just rough enough to get a purchase. I eyed it like a professional, which is what I was rapidly becoming. Over the past few months, I’d climbed every tree in my own backyard at least a dozen times, and there wasn’t a sign pole in the whole neighborhood that I hadn’t made my Everest.

  Climbing had quickly become second only to poetry in my pantheon, an amazing fact considering that I hadn’t a tomboy bone in my body. My mother dressed me like a delicate thing—all white cotton eyelet and lace filigree—and expected me to return home just as pristine. She wouldn’t even allow me to go barefoot in summer, for fear I’d pick up a dreaded “something” from lawns less well-manicured than our own.

  It made for a difficult coexistence with the neighborhood toughs. One afternoon a few months back, Doug Dyson had called me a chickenshit and given me an Indian burn because I refused to climb the sign pole at the end of our street. I was wearing a dress; my mother would kill me; plus I didn’t know how to do it. These seemed like three very good reasons to me for refusing, but I didn’t dare share them with Doug. I just shook my head and glared at him mutely, like the village idiot.

  That night, though, after the street lights came on and all the kids had gone home, I snuck out of the house and climbed that damned pole. Not right away, of course. I felt heavy and clumsy and couldn’t figure out where to put my hands and feet. Gradually, I discovered that if I pressed my hips really hard against the metal, it anchored me and freed up the rest of my body to move. Ever so slowly, inch by inch, I dragged myself up. Three-quarters of the way there, I noticed a flurry of sensations in my pelvic region, but I ignored them. Ever since I’d begun playing the Hawaii Five-O game with Dan O’Leary, I’d become aware of strange and sudden stirrings “down there,” a place that had always been dormant.

  But by the time I reached the top of the pole, I couldn’t ignore what was going on between my legs. I was pounding and pulsing and throbbing, caught up in a mighty current. It was as if I were being thrust to the edge of a great waterfall: waiting, resisting, until finally . . . release. Then falling, falling, falling forever.

  I held on to the sign pole for dear life, not sure when these incredible sensations in my body would end, and even less sure I ever wanted them to. I had a nagging sense that whatever this was, it felt too good to be good for me. It was on a par with rubbing up naked against my mother’s mink stole, or running barefoot in summer: too wickedly delicious to be allowed.

  When my heart finally slowed to its normal rhythm, I slid down the pole—only to be assaulted by a dizzying rush of anxiety once my feet touched the pavement. I’d always known that my mind was capable of astonishing intensity. Now I knew that my body was too. I didn’t know how to feel about this discovery: exhilarated, proud, or terrified? Was I a freak or a prodigy? I saw no middle ground. I clung to the pole, trying to will myself into tranquility, which never works no matter how hard you try.

  I didn’t know back then that heightened sexuality is a common feature of childhood bipolar disorder. As it was, I was left feeling lost and bewildered, certain of only one thing: whatever had just happened to me, I absolutely had to keep it a secret. Yet another secret. I wondered if by the time I became an adult, there would be any room left in my storehouse of secrets, or would I someday be crushed under the sheer weight of them?

  So I told no one about my experience, but you can bet I took to climbing trees and poles with a vengeance after that. “The Feeling,” as I called it, didn’t happen every time, but the intermittent reinforcement made me crave it all the more. As I stood before the campus oak, I felt a familiar flash of desire. That’s what I needed: a quick hit of the Feeling. Then I’d have confidence enough for anything.

  I looked at my watch. I had a few minutes left before my appointment with Professor Tremaine. But my uniform was neatly pressed, and my shoes were freshly shined, and—“Oh, shut up and do it,” the Black Beast snarled. I glanced around. No one seemed to be watching me, so I shrugged off my backpack and shimmied up the tree. It was, as I’d suspected, an easy climb, the trunk firm and rigid between my thighs. I scurried up until I was safely nestled among the thickly woven branches. Then I slowed down—way, way down—and rocked my hips from side to side and round and round until I found the perfect rhythm. I closed my eyes and thought of Father Tim and the elusive catch on that clerical collar. I wondered if his sk
in underneath would be pale and soft, or taut and tanned as the rest of him . . .

  It didn’t take much, just the thought of pressing my lips to his bare neck, before the Feeling flooded me—wave after wave of it, lifting me high above the tree, weightless as a wisp of cloud. But then the Black Beast made some kind of animal sounds, which quickly brought me down to earth and back into my body. In my wild rush to get up the tree and find the Feeling, I hadn’t noticed that there was an open window not far away, almost within reach. I couldn’t see inside from my angle, but I broke out in a sweat nonetheless, afraid that I’d been seen or heard doing whatever it was I did to the tree.

  “See what you made me do?” I snapped, but the Black Beast felt smug and satisfied.

  “Now you’re ready for poetry,” he said.

  I was, but I was ten minutes late. I slid down the tree, grabbed my backpack, and bounded up the narrow stairs, taking two steps at a time. Professor Tremaine’s was the very first office at the top. He was on the phone and waved me to a seat. I looked around me, breathless.

  It was chaos; books and papers stacked everywhere, which deeply disturbed the neat freak inside me. But the most prominent sight of all was the painting hanging above his desk: an enormous cracked egg, out of which spilled dozens, maybe hundreds, of little green peas.

  Why peas? Was it some kind of veiled sexual reference that I didn’t get? Ever since meeting Dan O’Leary’s penis, I’d felt like the whole world was one big erotic in-joke, and I was missing the punch line. I heard and saw sex in everything—and the last thing I wanted was to seem unhip or naïve or, worse yet, innocent. I was, after all, in college now, even if I still went to fourth grade on the side.

  Nervously, I took a dozen or so books from the nearest untidy pile and rearranged them neatly on the desk. Unfortunately, one of the books was Walden, which naturally made me shudder.

  “Are you cold?” asked a voice. I looked up and saw Professor Tremaine leaning back in his chair, studying me. “I could close the window.”