FOR SOME TIME after that she was lost in a kind of distraction, focused on this most strange business of menstruation. The idea that she was becoming a woman in that way, but in another way could never be. She noticed others. The peculiarity of their different shapes. For the first time since she’d been weaned of nursing, she thought again about breasts. The doctor had said that hers would begin to change. There was a lumpish thickness beneath her nipples, hardly noticeable in the mirror but evident to the touch. It occurred to her that, compared to her mother, her sister was quite buxom. She remembered the Barnett boy placing his hands there, which she had thought odd, but Grace had moaned in a way that sounded like pleasure, and lain down and made him hurry up and do what he was going to do.
The next summer she looked for and found another of the infamous stinkhorn mushrooms. The cap on this one was black and did indeed stink. She broke it off at the base and looked until she found a mushroom that looked vaguely, very vaguely, like the drawings Dr. Thompson had shown her of the female parts. She looked around to make sure no one had followed her, then carefully pressed the stinkhorn into the other mushroom, pushed it inside there as far as it would go, and then sat for a while, pondering. Moved it back and forth a little bit, then felt silly. Before she left the spot, she tossed the stinkhorn into some bushes where no one would see it.
Somehow all of this made her feel more alone in the world than she had up to that point. Her dog Top had gotten old, and in her distractions she’d hardly noticed it happening. But then she did, and he was obviously old. Gray-bearded, creaky. She couldn’t understand it.
“Dog ages a lot faster than a man,” her father said. “You knew that.”
“I guess I forgot,” she said.
And it wasn’t much longer before Top went away. She called to him for an hour that afternoon, all around the place and down into the woods, but he didn’t come. Nor the next morning. Her father said dogs sometimes did that, just went off to die.
“Papa. You didn’t take him off, like you did with Hound, did you?”
He looked astonished.
“Lord, no, girl. He was your dog, not mine. I wouldn’t have done that.” He looked perturbed, bothered by the question, like it was an accusation. “Unless you’d asked me to,” he added.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to say I thought you’d done that.”
She waited several days, hoping Top had just gone off on some kind of odd dog journey and would come back around. But he didn’t. Spring arrived in its first stealth, then its open leafing and blooming. She felt something change inside her, felt her old companion’s absence like a weight in her heart. She mourned him.
DURING ONE OF his periodic examinations that summer, Dr. Thompson palpated her abdomen. “Any discomfort there?” he said. No. “There?” No. Then, after pausing his hands a moment, he began palpating a little lower down. “Any discomfort here, Jane?” She said nothing, then placed her hand over the doctor’s and said, “Wait.” The doctor gently took his hand from beneath hers and stood back, removed the stethoscope tips from his ears and hung them around his neck, and looked at her for a long moment before nodding to himself and gathering his bag to leave.
“It would do you no harm should you decide to examine yourself, in privacy, of course,” he said as he was walking toward the doorway. “No harm in becoming more familiar with your own body as you grow on.” And then, without turning around, he took his leave.
After that, sometimes, during her walks in the woods, she would lie back on a bed of fallen leaves (after checking for poison ivy growing among them) and palpate herself in that place until the strange and pleasant sensation returned and a shivering rush of blood ran through her entire body and it was as if she blacked out for a long moment, and when she came to, the world was almost a surprise there all around her, and she lay tingling and warm in a way that she never had before she had this thing she could do to herself.
She didn’t do it very often. The fear that her father or mother or even a stranger might come upon her while she was blacked out like that was too alarming. It would be too embarrassing to ever recover from. And she couldn’t help but feel it must be shameful despite the doctor’s words, because it felt too good, and down there, and the lingering pleasure was always interrupted by the fear of discovery that brought her back to her senses and hurrying back to the house.
IN A LETTER to Ellis Adams in Baltimore, the doctor described the examination and again reminded him to keep his ears open and to let him know if there were any new developments that might be used to help Miss Jane Chisolm, developments that would change the current prognosis. To let him know if anyone figured out a way to work with or around the problems posed by her particular condition.
It would seem the strangest thing to me, he wrote, to have everything a normal person is supposed to have in that regard yet know it is trapped inside my own skin and all but inaccessible to anyone or even anything beyond my own blood, other bodily fluids, the microscopic eyes we might imagine to exist in the very cells that make up what and who we are.
Do You Like What You See,
Who You Are?
The farm next to theirs on the west side was owned by a family named Key. One of them was a boy about her age, maybe a bit older, slim, with fair skin, sandy hair, and oddly beautiful pale blue eyes, not the deep dark blue of her own. And though she remembered him from her brief time in school as just another boy, not someone who’d made any more impression then than anyone else, now he set off a blushing, tingling feeling in her when they looked at one another in the store, the boy silent as his father gathered their few supplies and she totted them up. He looked back at her when they left and gave her a little wave that, when he’d shut the door, she thought might send her heart into a flutter-flump.
On her wandering one day she came up next to the boundary between their two farms, and saw one of the family hoeing weeds in the cornfield there. She thought it was him, that boy. He wore a broad straw hat, so she couldn’t quite see his sandy blond hair. She knew he had brothers. But when he got closer she could make out his features, and she stepped from the undergrowth and up to the barbed-wire fence at the edge of the field. In a minute he seemed to see her, stood up straight, turned away for a moment, then turned back and waved. She waved back. He set down his hoe and made his way through the dozen or so rows between them over to her, walking carefully. He wore a loose white work blouse, worn denim overalls, and a pair of old ankle boots that he stopped to shuck off before he reached her. He wiggled his bare white toes and looked over at her as if he may have embarrassed her, doing that, for some reason. And the look gave her that flushed feeling so suddenly that she felt herself having an accident, and so the feeling turned to shock, her face burning, and she called out, “I’ll come back here tomorrow sorry I have to run I forgot something important,” and she dashed back into the woods and ran all the way home, nearly in tears from embarrassment.
She didn’t stop at the house but went straight to the creek in the woods down the hill behind it. She was so overfull with emotion she couldn’t sort out, didn’t sort out in the course of her running so hard she could hardly breathe. When she got to the creek she immediately pulled up her dress, unpinned her diaper, wiped herself with a clean part of it, and plunged it into the creek. The bottom was sand, so she scrubbed it against the grit, then took wet handfuls of it and scrubbed straight into the soiled cloth until there was nothing but a dim stain that would take strong soap and baking soda to get out. She wrung it as dry as she could, fastened the pins into a part of it, sniffed her hands, took off her shoes, lifted her dress again, and lowered her bottom into the creek for a minute, the cool water running over her skin, a shock and then a pleasure. She stood up, calmer now, and walked back up the hill to the house.
She got soap and baking soda from the basin on the back porch, made a paste of the soda and water, but then she thought, What if he is still there? Then, What if he isn’t there tomorrow? She hastily washed her hands and, not even bothering to dry herself, began running down the drive and then through the pasture, still barefoot, dodging sharp sticks and fallen pine cones, one eye out for snakes, toward the narrow ridge of woods between their properties.
She came out of the brush and stopped, out of breath. He was not in the field. She could not see the hoe where he must have laid it down. She felt tears coming up again, this time from anger, then heard his voice call out to her. She looked to her right and he was sitting beneath an oak tree not a stone’s throw away, his feet still bare, a jar of what looked like tea beside him, and eating a sandwich. Probably ham or bacon with fresh tomato slices or just the tomatoes. And then she was impressed that he was eating a light bread sandwich in the middle of the week. Her family ever only had light bread on the weekends, on Sundays, and would finish it easily by the evening meal. She called out to him, and waved, feeling awkward.
“Come on over,” he called back. “You hungry?”
She walked toward him, staying on her side of the fence. And, nearing him, was suddenly mortified realizing she hadn’t put on a fresh undergarment and was naked beneath her dress. She stopped still, feeling the blood rush to her face, but luckily it caused no accident, and when he looked at her curiously, grinning in a questioning way, she tried to put the thought of her near-nakedness out of her mind and went on toward him. She was just a girl, after all, with no big hips to poke a dress out, no big bush of hair down there to pooch obscenely against the dress like she’d seen it do on Grace when Grace sat on the porch after a bath wearing nothing but a summer skirt herself, to cool down, the wet spot on the front of her dress gradually drying in the heat. Until her mother came and saw that and sent her inside with harsh words about the nature of her character. Grace said, “Well, who in Hades is going to be watching me sitting on a porch here in the middle of nowhere, I might ask?”
“God sees you,” her mother had said once, in as cool a tone as Jane had ever heard her use with anyone. Like you couldn’t be sure if she really believed God cared about such a thing or not but it was something she could use on you if she wanted.
Grace had said back, just as cool, “Does he like what he sees?”
And her mother had slapped Grace, not hard, but in a way that ended their exchange. Grace went inside and put on some underpants and a bra and shoes and took herself out to the barn, her brooding place.
NOW JANE WAS STANDING just a few feet away from the Key boy, though still on her side of the barbed wire, and he stood up. Remembering Grace, she glanced down in fear of seeing her own dress wet from dipping herself in the creek but somehow it was not. She looked up again. Except for his hair being smashed down on his head from sweating in his hat, and the fading flush of his skin from the heat as he sat now in the shade of the oak tree, he was the same boy she saw in the store.
“You’re Jane Chisolm.”
“I don’t know your name, except your last name,” she said.
“Elijah Key.” He stepped over with his hand held out as if to shake, like with a man. She took it and returned his grip.
“Nice grip, for a girl. Most girls just kind of, you know,” and he made a pansy-like motion with his hand.
“I don’t really hang out with any girls,” she said.
“I know,” he said, letting the words out slowly like the release of a breath. Looking at her with his head cocked just a bit back on his neck. But not unsmiling.
“I guess people must talk about me.”
He shrugged, glanced at the corn he’d have to be hoeing again in a few minutes.
“I don’t listen to rumors.”
“What kind of rumors do you not listen to?”
He looked down, suppressed a grin, and shook his head.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Nothing true, I imagine, you think about who all it comes from, that sort of thing. I don’t put any mind to it. It’s girls that talk the most, and I don’t have much to do with the girls at school.”
“You don’t seem to like girls too much.”
“No, it’s just some girls. Mostly the popular girls.”
“What’s the matter with them?”
“Nothing. They’re just . . . kind of mean-spirited sometimes,” and he waggled his head, shrugged. “I don’t know. Knuckleheads.”
“I thought only boys got called knuckleheads.”
“Huh,” he said. “Maybe so.”
Then he said, “So how come you decided not to go to the school?”
Now she wished she hadn’t approached him. She said, “I’d have figured those rumors would cover that.”
“It’s been a long time,” he said then. “I don’t even remember them, really. I’m sorry for bringing it up.”
She didn’t say anything, wanting to walk away now but unable to make herself do it.
“I used to hate it—school, I mean,” he said. “That’s one thing I thought about you before. That you were lucky they let you quit. Whyever they did.”
“You like it better now?”
“It’s getting a little better,” he said. “So don’t you know how to read and write?”
“Yes, I do.”
“So you learned that without even a whole year of school. Yeah, I remember you coming just that one fall, but you were just first grade and I was already in fourth. I’ve seen you at church every now and then. You must not like it much, either, no more than you go.”
She shrugged. “It’s all right.”
“What about numbers?”
“What about them?”
He laughed. “How’d you learn numbers without school?”
“Tending my papa’s store.”
“That’s what I thought.”
He looked at her for a moment with that curious smile again.
“You’ve just about grown up. You don’t have a secret boyfriend, do you?”
“I don’t have any friends at all.”
He looked almost alarmed at that. Then as if he were thinking. Then as if he couldn’t decipher his own thoughts into a reply. Then, “I guess it’s hard to have any friends out in the country, if you don’t go to school. I guess it was that way for everybody, back when they didn’t even have schools up here, and folks had big families. They just got along knowing each other.”
“That’s the way it is with me, I guess.”
“I guess they’d know some people from going to church, though.”
“I guess so.”
“But you don’t have to do that very often, either. I’m feeling a little jealous of your freedom.”
“Huh,” she said, then shut her mouth.
“Are you an atheist?” he said then.
“What’s that?”
“I thought you were smart.”
“I just never heard of it.”
“It’s somebody doesn’t believe in God.”
“No, then. Though I really haven’t thought about it. I just thought everybody believed in God.”
“Well, everybody I know says they do.”
Then they were silent and awkward for a minute. She realized she was staring at him. He squinted at her.
“Don’t do that,” she said, teasing. “I can’t see your pretty blue eyes.” Then she couldn’t believe she’d said that.
He blushed and looked down, then reached into his bib pocket and pulled out a pair of thick-lensed wire-rimmed eyeglasses, hooked the earpieces over his ears.
“I hate wearing them,” he said, with a kind of gloomy grin. “I was hiding them, didn’t want you to see.”
“I saw you take them off one time before y’all came into the store.”
“Oh. Well.” He looked at her again. “My pretty blue eyes are blind as a bat.”
“They just got bigger and bluer,” she said, and they laughed.
“I’m glad I put them on, now, so I can see yours. They look like—I’ve never seen blue eyes like yours. They almost don’t seem real.”
“Well, they are. My papa and Dr. Thompson told me they -haven’t changed a bit since I was born. I guess that’s a little unusual.” And thought, Like everything else about me.
“Do you know about the dances?” he said.
“What dances?”
“The ones at the community center. Damascus.”
“Oh. Right. Grace told me.” They were at a loss for a brief while, like social animals, after a greeting, gone into other distractions.
Then he said, “Are you happy with it?” Kind of soft-voiced, like he didn’t know how she’d respond.
“With what?” she said, her own voice quieter, too.
He hesitated, then shrugged again, glanced back at the corn, said, “Everything, I guess. Your life.”
She didn’t know what to say. She’d never put a word to the sadness she could sometimes feel, especially in the last couple of years, that would linger at the edge of her thoughts like the invisible ghost of someone she thought she recognized but didn’t know who it was, some kind of familiar she couldn’t quite grasp.