own shoulders slump and I can feel my lower lip start to quiver. I blink and focus on a point on the wall. I can read the needlepoint now: ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’ it tells me. ‘No,’ I say.
‘Good, it’s always so much easier with a little cooperation.’ From the back pocket of her sweat pants, Pony Girl unfurls a pair of rubber gloves. Not the surgical kind, skintight and unobtrusive. These are kitchen gloves. Thick and bright yellow, the kind you use when you pick up Brillo pads and scrape the grill after a barbecue or when you want to clean the oven.
Mom used to wear gloves like that, I recall, when we were little. She warned us not to listen to that flimflam about dishwashing liquids that were good for you – no matter what the commercials said, the grease, the suds, the serrated edges of steak knives and the tines of all those grimy forks, those things were bad bad bad for your skin. You had to wear gloves to protect your hands, to keep them young and unlined and so as not to break your nails, especially after you just paid five dollars for a manicure. Mom would kick up a fuss if she couldn’t find her kitchen gloves, which she couldn’t sometimes if we’d swiped them from their place, under the sink with the Drano and the vacuum bags. We liked to play dress-up with them. You’d pretend they were evening gloves, the elbow-length satiny kind like Audrey Hepburn would wear in those old films you liked to watch.
Mom had gloves like Hepburn’s, too, which she wore sometimes when she dolled up in long dresses with short sleeves and went out with Dad, buttoned up tight in one of those tuxedos with the ruffled shirts, for the annual dental association ball. But she kept the real evening gloves stowed in a shoe box at the top of her closet behind some crumbling family photo albums and we couldn’t reach them. So we made do with the kitchen gloves – not that she ever thanked us for the substitution.
Pony Girl pulls on her kitchen gloves, bringing me back to attention as she wrestles the cuffs right up to her elbows, the rubber cracking against her funny bone, just like you did when you were pretending to be Audrey Hepburn. No giggling now, though.
‘Get undressed,’ she demands.
I raise my eyes to Mark and Leroy. That hint of a smile is still break-dancing around Leroy’s mouth and it seems to have spread like a yawn to Mark as well. I’d like to rub those smarmy grins off their faces with an eraser the size of a double-decker bus. I’ve never undressed in front of a boy in my life. Except for you, of course, but that’s not the same. Not even Dad has seen me naked since I was maybe six.
Pony Girl follows my gaze and now she’s grinning too. ‘Feeling shy, are we?’ She crosses to the door and kicks it shut, the two fools jumping back just in time to avoid sore noses. ‘Right, but remember, they’re just on the other side so try anything funny and they’ll be in here like that.’ She tries to snap her fingers but can’t with the gloves on so she claps her hands together instead, creating a dull plop of a sound.
I crouch down to unbuckle my Mary Janes. I want to step out of them gingerly, but my feet have been sweating and, without any hose, my soles have stuck. I pry each shoe off with the toes of my spare foot. Pony Girl’s impatient and nags me to ‘hurry up already’ as she drums her rubberised fingers together. My tartan skirt falls off as soon as I unbutton it at the back. I have to roll your turtleneck up over my head, turning it inside out as I haul it loose. My hair, drawn through the too-tight neck, springs free from the shirt all staticky, like I poked my finger in a socket.
It takes me less than a minute until I’m standing in nothing but my bra and panties, my hands clasped at my belly.
‘Underwear too.’
I hesitate and Pony Girl rolls her eyes. ‘Underwear too!’ she shouts. ‘For fuck’s sake, don’t you people understand English. Howya think a strip-search works?’
I bite my lip and wriggle my arms up behind my back in search of the catch to my bra, but my fingers are shaking and I can’t disentangle the hooks from the eyes. I slip my arms out of the straps and twist the clip round to the front. Even seeing it, though, it takes me four attempts to undo both hooks. I slide my panties down next, hustling them past my knees and ankles, and deposit them on to the dusty carpet with the rest of my Sunday not-so best.
‘Spread ‘em – arms and legs.’ It’s just like on some TV police show, Cagney and Lacey maybe, the one with the lady cops. Except it’s longer now, more drawn out, more humiliating – and without clothes, of course.
She starts in my hair, raking roughly through it with her clumsy, kitchen-glove paws, then she pokes in my ears and I’m wondering how how how could I hide any contraband there and what do they mean by contraband anyway, what does it look like and why do they think I would have any? Then the gloves brush against my cheek.
I remember Mom used to get awful mad when she’d go to do the dishes and those kitchen gloves of hers weren’t there.
I close my eyes and feel the honeycombed grip of the right palm – or is it the left? – abrading my face. Gripped not for scrubbing faces but for holding on to plates, holding on even when they’re wet and slippery.
‘Open your mouth.’
And I open my mouth and in slips a sheathed forefinger, probing my gums and my incisors and molars, pushing down my tongue, poking into my tonsils – or not the tonsils, but that dangly doohicky at the back, the cartoony bit they always show flapping about in Popeye when Olive Oyl opens her trap big enough to swallow the screen and lets rip with an almighty screecher.
Our mother also hated it when somehow we’d accidentally puncture one of those gloves, though I always reckoned it was more likely to be the fork tines than our little hands that were to blame.
Pony Girl’s kitchen-glove thumb is clamped over my nose and I’m inhaling the rubber that smells like balloons and tastes like them, too, this glove in my mouth, tasting like after we’ve been blowing up birthday balloons all afternoon, like we did for our tenth birthday party when all the kids from school came. And I wonder if this is what a condom smells like and tastes like, and I swear I don’t know for myself but I imagine it must be because it’s called a rubber too. The finger is out of my mouth and I have somehow managed to avoid throwing up again.
Whatever the cause, if there was a hole in those rubber kitchen gloves, the ones packed away beneath the sink, the corrosive soap and grime could seep right into your bones and it was as bad as not wearing any gloves at all, according to our mother.
Pony Girl’s finger is trailing my own spit down my cheek and around my neck and down. And I’m wondering what exactly it is that I’ve just had in my mouth, just exactly how many strip-searches these gloves have been a party to and just how exactly do they clean them afterwards? And maybe I am going to be sick on second thoughts.
Our mother always wore kitchen gloves. Up until our family got a dishwasher, anyway, which it was our job to load and unload.
Pony Girl’s rubberised finger is wet and slipping down my sternum, ringing round my neck and scooping under my armpits where usually I’m ticklish. And I’m thinking if maybe I laugh now she’ll stop, if maybe I pretend we’re playing a game to see who’s the most ticklish, it’ll startle her and she won’t be able to go on. But she does go on.
Then we got a cleaner too, as well as the dishwasher. The cleaner, she was named Marjorie. She came in twice a week, so Mom didn’t even have to wear the kitchen gloves for handling the mop or scouring the countertops or anything.
Pony Girl’s finger is snailing down my arm and checking under my fingernails for contraband – what contraband, how small is contraband, how microscopic
