to scream or pee or flinch or cry or sneeze or plead – and then it is delving deep into my pubic hair, down and down and beyond.
Our mother still has lovely soft hands.
My eyes are closed.
And Mommy, I swear I’m a virgin.
I have a memory that floats around in the early-time ether. We’re two, maybe three. I only retrieved the memory because of something my best friend Cindy Gregory told me in the seventh grade. Cindy had this kooky old aunt named Anastasia who was an astrologer, who told us that everyone was supposed to know the time of day they were born. If you didn’t know the exact time, Anastasia said, then you couldn’t ever have an accurate astrology reading because you couldn’t ever know your precise alignment with the stars. Something like that.
It always bugged me that Mom couldn’t remember the time, but we were never big into astrology so on that count, I guess, it wasn’t a disaster. But Aunt Anastasia did cause me to recall this other time. We couldn’t have been old enough to talk properly, but I remember us talking to each other, like cartoon thoughts bubbling up out of our skulls except only you and me could see them. We could read, too. We were bright young sparks, even if nobody else knew it.
We little Einsteins were with Mommy – because we called her Mommy then – nearing the checkout at the A&P. They have all these candy bars, rolls of mints, bubble gum and cheapo pocket pamphlets displayed around the checkout to distract you, because the cashiers at this A&P are high-school dropouts and the waits are always long.
I’m feeling a whine coming on, I want a Chunky bar. You’re bored, too, but easily entertained by the cheapo pamphlets, cardboard that melts in your mouth. You start fingering one that’s got a picture of a fierce but friendly looking lion on it. A lion like Aslan out of The Chronicles of Narnia – only we wouldn’t have known that then because, though we could read, Dad didn’t buy us the C.S. Lewis box set until we were nine.
‘A – U – G – U – S – T,’ you tell me. ‘August, that’s us.’
‘Yes, very good, Joshua, that’s Daddy,’ Mommy pipes in, getting it wrong as usual. ‘What a good boy to remember Daddy’s birthday.’
When you shove the corner of Daddy’s birthday into your mouth to see what flavour it is, Mommy slaps it out of your hand.
‘Tastes baaaad.’ She tidies it in its rack and leafs through the other cheapo pamphlets, until she finds another, much more boring-looking one that’s got a picture of a lady lounging on it. ‘Hey, twenty-fifth of August. That’s you.’
I curl up my lip.
Mommy doesn’t hear. ‘Virgo, the Virgin. That’s you.’
‘What’s a virgin?’ you ask, disappointed as I am that we can’t be something as cool as a lion. Why does Daddy get to be a lion and we’ve got to be some lazy old bag on a chaise longue?
‘Don’t like the sound of it.’
‘Sounds stupid.’ You tear the pamphlet from Mommy’s grip and proceed to drool on it in protest.
There’s another woman behind us in the line. She titters and coos away. ‘They’re so cute. Are they twins?’
The stump-brown Kmart cords are more like three sizes too big. They bunch round my ankles and the only thing that’s holding them up is Pony Girl. She’s removed her damnable kitchen gloves – never again to be associated with Audrey Hepburn and playing dress-up with you on Indian summer afternoons so sunny and lazy we could see the dust move through the air – and has hooked her fingers through my rear belt loops which she’s hitched up high enough almost to touch my shoulder blades. The loose cord material swishes and grumbles between my thighs as she steers me away from the scene of my humiliation. She instructed me to leave all my real clothes, bar my bra and day-old panties, in the room.
She made me hand over my Swatch and even my retainer. Nothing with wire or metal, including no jewellery, no belts, no barrettes. Hair ties were OK, she said, her own ponytail bobbing in evidence, but I didn’t have one of those, so my hair stays electrified. I couldn’t care less about the barrette or the retainer – good riddance – but the loss of the watch is a blow. Ordinarily, I’d claw at anyone who tried to take it off me, but I’m no longer in a state to protest.
I’m silent and glum as Pony Girl leads me out of there, past Mark and Leroy who fall in behind us, down a dim, low-ceilinged corridor, past other small empty rooms like the last one and other rooms with closed, signposted doors, and into a large meeting hall. This is the main warehousey part of the building and the height of the room soars accordingly, with tubes of fluorescent light buzzing from the iron rafters up there in the distance. I recognise this room at once. This is where we came for the ‘Open Meetings’ when you were in the programme. Every Friday night, as if none of us had better things to do on a Friday night, Mom, Dad and I would file into this room with the rest of the parents and siblings and we’d have our one chance to see you, sitting at the front of the room with the rows – boys on one side, girls on the other – of other…inmates, patients, clients? Phasers, that was the term they used.
You’d sit at the front, usually in the back row on the boys’ side but sometimes in the first or second or third, I always counted, and you’d stare out at us, the collective families. Every week I’d try to catch your eye. Though we were a much larger mass, I was sure you could sense when I arrived, was certain you knew exactly where I was. But if you did, you never showed it outwardly, never caught my eye, smiled at me, waved, blew me up cartoon bubbles to read your thoughts or made one of our secret hand signals, the three-fingered rub of the nose perhaps, the fanning across the chin or even the Fonzie thumbs up.
Today’s phasers are congregated again here, but to one side with a grey concertina partition half unsprung across the middle of the room. They’re not in neat parallel corn rows like you were either, though they are still separated from the opposite sex. Their chairs form a sort of ellipse in the middle of the room, boys all arcing on the right, girls mirroring them on the left. The female arc is somewhat shorter than the boys’ one, which makes the careful arrangement appear strangely asymmetrical. I scan the boys’ section. Left, right, left. Some faces look familiar, but I can’t be sure. I know none of them attend JFK High.
Encircling those seated, a smaller number of boys and girls stand straight and Mark-and-Leroy-sentry-like, legs wide, hands tucked into the smalls of their backs. And here again, towering above all heads, seated and standing, in the centre of the group, is Hilary, a young man with slicked-back blond hair and model looks pacing at her side.
As we enter, the phasers are all chanting: ‘…make a list of all persons we have harmed and make direct amends to them wherever possible.’ The model guy nods vigorously then karate chops his right hand into the palm of his left and shouts, ‘And Seven!’
Hilary spots me before the group can respond. As she blows her whistle, a couple of the female phasers, startled by the sudden noise, scrunch up their faces and raise their hands as if to cover their ears. But they seem to reconsider mid-action and let their hands settle back into their laps.
‘Newcomer
