When We Were Animals(6)

Except that I miss my father.

They said I had his mind.

Polly admired him as well. She always told me it was okay that I didn’t have a mother—that I didn’t really need a mother because I had the best father in town. He made Polly and me grilled cheese sandwiches with ham and the tomatoes from the garden that he and I had cultivated with our own hands. Polly liked hers with cocktail toothpicks sticking out of each quarter. He called her Sweet Polly and said that when the time came she would have so many boyfriends she would never be able to choose just one and would have to marry a whole passel of them.

He stood smiling, tall and skinny at the kitchen island. She glowed for him.

*



Summertimes, Polly came to my house, and my father would greet her at the door.

“Sweet Polly!” he would say. “Lumen’s upstairs.”

The long, hot days of July, he would turn on the sprinkler in the backyard, and we would put on our swimsuits and play in the dancing water. The sprinkler was on the end of a hose, and it shot a Chinese fan of water in a slow back-and-forth arc that we liked to jump through. The only rule was that every fifteen minutes we had to move the sprinkler to a different part of the lawn to assure balanced coverage. Polly never remembered, but I always did.

We were the same age, but at thirteen it was clear that Polly was developing before I was. Her swimsuit swelled at the chest where mine was loose and puckered. She stood almost a full head taller than I did, and she did cartwheels through the shimmering water, her long limbs a dazzle of strength and nimbleness. When I tried to cartwheel, my body didn’t move the way I wanted it to, and I came toppling down into an awkward crouch.

After a while we were tired and simply lay on our stomachs in the grass, liking the feel of the fan of water as it intermittently showered us with cool needles. We lay in single file, our faces just inches from each other, our chins supported on our fists.

“Shell didn’t look so good when she came home this morning,” Polly said.

Shell was Michelle, Polly’s sister, who was fifteen and a half. She’d begun breaching just two months before. The previous night had been the last night of Hod Moon.

“My parents found her sleeping on the lawn this morning,” Polly went on.

“With no clothes on?”

“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.”