“Yeah.”
This was something I still could not fathom—the exposure. For as long as I could remember, my father was very careful about knocking on my bedroom door before he entered so that I would not be walked in upon as I was dressing. How did one nude oneself before another person—before the world?
“And also,” Polly said, crinkling up her face, “she was beat up pretty bad.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. There were bruises and cuts all over her. Plus—”
Polly went silent for a moment. She pulled up some blades of grass and opened her fist to let them fall, but they were wet and stuck to her fingers.
“Plus,” she went on, “she was bleeding. You know?”
I said nothing. I was paralyzed—as though I were standing on a precipice, stricken with vertigo, unable even to pull myself back from the edge. This was large, multitudinous. My mind was a color, and the color was red. The needling water on my back felt like it was falling on a version of me that was a long, long way away.
“They put her in the bathtub,” Polly said. “I stayed with her when they went downstairs. The water, it turned pink. She says she doesn’t remember anything, but I can tell she does. I think she remembers all of it.”
For a time, we were both silent. She picked the wet blades of grass off her hand, and I watched her. It was time to move the sprinkler, but I had to know more, and I couldn’t break the spell the conversation had put me under.
Finally I mustered the courage to ask a question:
“Did she get pregnant?”
“No,” Polly said. “She told me they put her on the pill before she went breach. She said all the parents do it.”
I thought about my father. It was difficult for me to imagine him giving me that kind of pill. How would he do it? He could make a joke out of it, bringing it to me on a burgundy pillow, as though I were a princess—and we could pretend it meant nothing. We could pretend my secret and shameful body had nothing to do with it. Or maybe it wouldn’t be necessary. I was determined to skip breaching altogether.
“And she said something else,” Polly went on.
“What else?”
“See, I was sitting on the toilet next to the tub, and she closed her eyes for a long time, and I thought she was asleep. I was just looking at the pink water and all the dirt that was in it. There were little leaves, and I picked them off the surface. She was so dirty. She came back so dirty.”
“What else did she say?”
“So I thought she was asleep, and there was this little twig in her hair and I wanted to take it out for her. So I went to take it out, but when I tried she grabbed my wrist all of a sudden and gave me a look.”
“What kind of look?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t like it.”
“Was it angry?”
“No. Not exactly. More just…I don’t know. Like a jungle look, you know? But it was only for a second, and then she let go of my wrist and smiled at me. That’s when she said it. She said it’s all right. She said it’s nothing to be afraid of. She said it hurts, but it’s the good kind of hurt.”
“The good kind of hurt?”
“That’s what she said.”
I didn’t want Polly to see that I was confounded by this notion, because she herself seemed to have accepted it as an obvious and universal truth, the potential goodness of hurt. It was important to Polly that she be in the know about all things adult, and she lived by the rule that performance eventually leads to authenticity. So it was difficult to tell what she actually understood and what she was only pretending to understand.
For my part, I squirmed uncomfortably in my ill-fitting swimsuit. These things seemed entirely detached from the books I read, from the math and science I was so adept in the mastery of. I sometimes wondered (as I sometimes still do) if I had gotten off track somehow, if maybe I wasn’t as natural as those around me, if perhaps my life were unjoined from the common lives of others.
The way my teachers looked at me, I suspected they could tell I didn’t belong. Especially Mr. Hunter, the drama teacher for the high school kids, whose curious and fearsome gaze I was sure followed me wherever I went.
The sprinkler splashed us with its rainy metronome, and there we lay in the growing shadow of my big house, the two of us, blasted through with the abject discomfiture of our tiny places in the world.
We were fourteen by the following summer, and Polly had developed even further, her hips having shaped themselves into curves—which I thought must have been in some way responsible for the new saunter in her walk. There was still no shape to me at all. I wore colorful dresses and put ribbons in my hair as evidence that I was, in fact, a girl. I stood naked before my bedroom mirror and, with the intention of luring out my stubborn and elusive womanhood, recited Edna St. Vincent Millay poetry I had learned by heart. I smeared honey on my chest, believing it might help me grow breasts. Honeybees are industrious—they can build anything. But the poetry seemed not to possess any magic, and my father found the sticky honey-bear bottle on my nightstand one morning and explained that it was bad for my teeth to snack on it in the middle of the night.