When We Were Animals(7)

“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.

Over the previous year, Polly had begun spending more time with Rosebush Lincoln and the other girls from school. She never excluded me, and I made a concerted effort to join together with all the girls when they sunbathed by the lake or got a ride into the next town to go shopping at the thrift stores. But Rosebush always made it clear that I was only to be tolerated because I was allied with Polly, that my visa into the world of Rosebush Lincoln was temporary and most definitely revocable. I was put on notice.

When there’s nothing else to do, you can always watch the birds. The finches, their twitchy and mechanical little bodies—they go where they want to go, driven by impulse and instinct. The finch does not dwell in consideration of its nature or the nature of the world. It is brazen and unapologetic. It hammers its little bird heart against the blustering wind, and its death is as beautiful as its life.

*



It was that year, that summer, that I followed the other girls to the abandoned mine. What did they used to mine there? I want to say gypsum, because gypsum is a lovely word and a gypsum mine is a pretty thought to have. It was on a different end of the woods from the lake, and the entrance to it was at the base of a small overgrown quarry. The parents of our town instructed us to stay away from the quarry because of lurking dangers, but it was always beautiful and peaceful to me. In certain seasons there was rivulet of melted snow that came out of the mountains and trickled irregularly down the stony sides of the quarry and ran finally into the mouth of the mine. If you went there alone, you could just listen to that plink-plonk of water and be tranquil. You could lie in nests of leaves, all those dying oranges and reds, all those deep browns that come from what green used to be, shaded by the old-growth trees that leaned over the lip of the quarry, and you could be nothing at all.

The mouth of the mine itself was weeded over with sumac and creeper vine, and there were two sets of mine-cart rails that emerged from the opening like tongues and ended abruptly on the floor of the quarry. You could wonder for hours about where those tracks went. Miles of underground passages beneath the town, maybe a whole underground city, with tunnels that opened in your basement! I explored our basement once, looking for an opening into hidden Atlantis—but all I found were forgotten mousetraps with hunks of dried-up cheese.

It was almost exactly a year after my conversation with Polly under the sprinklers, and her sister, Shell, was still breaching.

“I don’t think she’s ever going to stop,” Polly said miserably. “What if she doesn’t stop before I start?”

“You? But we’re only fourteen.”

“It’s not unheard of. My parents said it’s not unheard of. It’s different for different people. Plus I’m developing early in other ways.”

“Well, I don’t think it’s going to happen yet.”

“It better not. My parents are going to throw a big party for her when she’s done. That’s how relieved they’ll be. They said I’m not going to be half as bad as her.”

It seemed as though this were a source of disappointment for Polly.

So when she came to my house on a weekday morning in July, telling me that everyone was going to the quarry and that we should hurry to join them, I followed her. If I didn’t follow her, I reasoned, I might be left behind forever—a child who simply misses the chance to grow up.

So we took our bikes, pedaling hard and purposefully. On other days we might have been leisurely about our pace, weaving in lazy arcs back and forth across the empty roads. But that day was different.