When We Were Animals(13)

My mother hadn’t, and neither would I.

I wouldn’t.

*



It wasn’t something I could look up in books, so in order to learn more about the process I had to undertake a course of research that involved keeping secret notes on the things I heard from others. Of Polly I could ask questions directly—and she, before her own breach, provided much information from her experiences with her sister and her sister’s friends. I could query my father on a few details, but it made me uncomfortable to speak with him about such things. Some of the teachers talked about it in school, but their approach to the topic was more abstract than I would have preferred. Ms. Stanchek, who taught us sex ed, referred to it obliquely and in cultural terms, citing breaching as one of the “many local customs that play a large role in determining how young people are introduced to adulthood.” She went on to say, “Some cultures are very protective of their young people and try to keep them shielded from life as long as possible. Other cultures”—and here she winked at us—“drop you right into the cauldron to see if you can float.” I wrote down her words verbatim, because her analogy was baffling to me. If you found yourself in a cauldron, whether you floated was not the issue.

Mr. Hunter, who taught English during the day and drama after school, referred to breaching in his discussion of Lord of the Flies. “If you want to understand these characters,” he said, “think about how you feel when the moon is full. We might be mysteries even to ourselves. Do you know what you’re capable of? Do you really know?”

His eyes fell on me, and my stomach went sideways. I looked down, focusing on my pencil tip pressing hard on the white paper. He was an outsider, having moved into our town only around five years ago. He couldn’t truly understand our ways, but he liked to speak of them in provocative terms. I liked him and didn’t like him at the same time. There was something in him that I needed magic to ward off.

When my notebook on the subject of breaching was filled, about halfway through my sophomore year in high school, I felt that I had a fair understanding of the process—even a larger and more nuanced understanding than many of my peers, who were going through it firsthand. I had filled in the details little by little over the years, assembling the mystery of it as I would a jigsaw puzzle—certain aspects of the picture becoming clear before others.

Here’s the way it worked.

As a general rule, when people in my town reached a certain age—anywhere between thirteen and sixteen—they ran wild. When exactly this would happen was a mystery. For some boys it coincided with their voices getting deeper; for some girls it came with the arrival of their first period—but these were rare harmonies. Our bodies are unfathomable. They resonate with so many things—it’s impossible to know what natures they sing to.

When people breached, they cycled with the moon. When the moon was full (usually three nights each month), those who were breaching went feral. The adults stayed indoors with the younger children on those nights, because in the streets ran packs of teenagers—most of them naked, as though clothes were something they had grown beyond—whooping and hollering, crying out violent and lascivious words to each other, to the night, to those holed up in houses. They fought with each other, brutally. They went into the woods to engage in acts of sex.

My father referred to the full-moon nights as bacchanals, but a bacchanal, I learned from the encyclopedia, had to do with Dionysus, the wine god, and it refers specifically to drunken revelries. The breachers were almost never drunk—unless they had gotten drunk before the sun went down. Their indulgences came from a place deeper than wine or virtue or vice.

The mornings after the full-moon nights, the breachers found their ways home and were tended to by their parents, who understood that this was the way of the town and there was nothing to be done about it. Sometimes people got hurt, sometimes seriously—and it was accepted that the damage was simply a physical corollary of the deleterious effects of getting older and being alive in the world. My town had a certain secret pride in that it refused to cosmeticize the realities of adulthood.

And of course the breach was temporary—it was just a stage. It occurred only three nights a month, and for each individual it lasted only for around a year. After that time you were a true adult, and the next time the full moon rose you stayed inside with the others and listened to the howls in the distance and were only just reminded of your time in the wild.

Some people called it coming of age—as though you were ageless prior to that time, as though aging were something you enter by going through a doorway. Did that mean that coming of age was the beginning of dying? I looked it up in the encyclopedia—all the cultural and religious rituals associated with coming of age. In Christianity there were confirmations, in Judaism bar mitzvahs. The Apache had a process called na’ii’ees—which was a beautiful word to look at—but that was just for girls, and I never found what the boys’ equivalent was. The Amish had their Rumspringa—and this was as close to our breaching as I was able to find. The sober toleration of wildness. The trial by fire. The wide-eyed gaze upon the violent and colorful sins of the world. Some of the articles I read directed me to something that seemed at first to have nothing to do with coming-of-age rites: mass hysteria. Some people believed that such rituals were related to the kind of localized group thought that led to the Salem witch trials. For my part, I never knew how you could tell an illegitimate witch from a real Jesus or vice versa, so I was always careful to give concession to any magic that might be at hand.