First I took off my shoes and parked them under a chair. Then I took off my blouse and bra and hung them on the back. I slipped my arms into the robe to cover me, then took off everything else except my panties. I tied the string into a triple knot.
Saved! I stepped up on the stool and then onto the table. Yikes! My bra was showing! I slid off the table and stuffed it into one shoe, then climbed back up again.
Everything in the room looked scary—the strange assortment of instruments on a paper towel, the syringes on a stand, the rubber gloves, the flexible light.…
It was weird, but I suddenly thought about Mom just then—wondering if she’d been sitting in a doctor’s office in a paper robe like this the day she found out she had leukemia. Was Dad waiting for her out in the reception room, or was he with her? Did the doctor tell him first, or tell them both together? Maybe someday I’d ask.
There was a light tap on the door, and then the doctor came in, the nurse behind him, holding a clipboard. Dr. Beverly washed his hands at the sink.
“Now let’s take a peek and see what’s what,” he said. I hugged the robe even more tightly to my body.
The peek he had in mind, though, was in my mouth and ears and nose. He turned off the overhead light and shone a flashlight in my right eye, putting his face up close to mine. I kept my lips tightly shut in case I had bad breath. Then he moved to the other side of me and looked into my other eye. Every so often he said something to the nurse and she wrote it down.
The overhead light came on again and Dr. Beverly pressed his fingers along the sides of my neck. Then he told me to take deep breaths while he listened with a stethoscope—first my chest, then my back.
The nurse pulled out an extension at the bottom of the table and asked me to lie down.
Here it comes! I told myself, and shut my eyes.
“I’m going to examine your breasts, Alice, then your tummy. If anything hurts, be sure to let me know,” he said.
It was the first time a doctor had ever acknowledged I had breasts. My old pediatrician had always referred to my “chest.” What if Dr. Beverly looked under the paper robe and said, “Are these supposed to be breasts?” or, “Nurse, this girl has no breasts!”
He opened the top of my robe and folded back one side of the paper gown. He pressed his fingers in a circle all around the edges of that breast, and all the while, he was talking:
“I’ve got two girls of my own, nine and eleven. Both of them are into soccer. Do you play soccer, Alice?”
He was examining my breasts and talking soccer? I think I loved Dr. Beverly.
“Uh-uh,” I said, my eyes still shut.
“Me either,” he told me. “Sure did have to learn about it in a hurry, though, when the girls joined teams.”
He covered that breast up again, then did the other. Maybe this wasn’t so bad, I thought. I opened my eyes just a little, and then they popped wide open, for there on the ceiling above the examining table were cartoons about doctors and patients! Other people had lain here just like me and lived. Other people had read those cartoons.
“Breasts normal,” the doctor said, and the nurse wrote it down.
Normal? My breasts were normal? I couldn’t believe it. Was normal the same as average? Neither Colorado nor Illinois, but somewhere in between? I was feeling much, much better when he said, “Now your tummy,” and I realized he was working his way down. First the eyes, then the neck, then the breasts, the tummy, and then …
Something was wrong. Something was happening! He wasn’t examining my stomach! And then I realized that Dr. Beverly was trying to untie the knot in my string. Why, why hadn’t I tied a bow? The nurse finally handed him the scissors from the tray, and the doctor had to cut it. Neither of them said a word. I closed my eyes again.
“Tell me if any of these areas are particularly sensitive,” the doctor said, and the five fingers of his right hand pressed here and there. Nothing hurt.
As soon as he’d covered me up again, he said, “Any problems in the pelvic area, Alice? Pain? Discharge or itching?”
“No.”
“Menstrual periods okay?”
I nodded, my hands gripping the edge of the table as though it were a rocket about to blast off.
“Fine. Then I don’t think I need to check you there,” he said. “You can sit up now.”
I blinked. This was it? The worst was over?
“Let me check your knees,” Dr. Beverly said, and after tapping each knee and making my feet jump, he checked my spine to make sure it was growing straight, and then it was done.
“You’re a perfectly normal twelve-year-old, Alice—woops, almost thirteen,” he said. “Everything seems right on target here, your height, your weight.…”
The nurse smiled and left the room.
“Is there anything else you’d like to talk about?” Dr. Beverly asked. “If you’re anything like my own two girls, you’ve got a lot of questions.”
I tried to think. Now was my chance. Wasn’t there any deep, dark question so embarrassing I couldn’t even ask my dad?
“When am I … well, officially, I mean … a woman?”
Dr. Beverly just smiled a little and looked thoughtful. “Well, I know some women of eighty who act like girls, and some girls of eight or nine who act like old ladies. So I can’t really say, Alice. When you feel like a woman, I guess you are.”
He left the room, and I did my quick-change act again, in case the nurse forgot something and came back. When I was dressed, I went out into the reception room to wait for Les.
He came at last, looking like a man who has just been examined by a woman doctor.
“Let’s go,” he said, not even looking around, and didn’t talk all the way back to the car. I could hardly keep up with him.
“Are you okay, Lester?” I asked finally as he turned the key in the ignition.
He grunted.
“Did it hurt?” I asked.
“Only my pride,” he answered.
It wasn’t until later, when I heard him telling Dad how he’d got a young redheaded woman doctor, that I figured what the problem was: He had gone for his checkup in his Mickey Mouse shorts.
7
LOOKING AHEAD
THE NEXT DAY AT SCHOOL, I SEEMED obsessed with bodies and physical exams and just exactly what it meant to be a woman. In Language Arts, I couldn’t help staring at Miss Summers, with her light brown hair and blue eyes, wondering how many times she’d had her breasts examined and if you get used to it after a while.
She was wearing a silky peach-colored blouse with silver buttons. The fabric hung in soft folds, and the embarrassing thing was I couldn’t keep my eyes off her bosom. I decided I wanted breasts just like that when I was grown—not too big, not too small, about the size of tennis balls, I guessed. Yes, that was it exactly. I’d wait till my breasts were the size of tennis balls, and then I’d bind them up at night so they wouldn’t grow any larger.
When the bell rang, I went up to Miss Summers’s desk to turn in my paper.
“I wasn’t sure you were with us this morning, Alice,” she said. “Your mind seemed a million miles away. What were you thinking about?”
“Tennis,” I told her. And then, embarrassed that my eyes were on her breasts again, I said quickly, “I like your buttons.”
“Thank you,” she said.
Pamela and I went to Elizabeth’s to spend the night, and I told them all about the physical exam with Dr. Beverly. Just as I got to the part where he peeled off the paper robe as though he were unwrapping a ham sandwich, Elizabeth said, “I don’t want to hear about it.”
“Yes, you do,” said Pamela. “You always say that, Elizabeth, but you want to hear about it as much as I do.”
Elizabeth’s eyes grew wide. “Pamela!”
Pamela barrelled on. “If you can’t talk about things like this now, how are you ever going to get married and have children?”
“I don’t know!” Elizabeth wailed. “What I can’t stand
is that … well, all the things you talk about with your mother now, you’ll have to talk about with a man someday.”
Pamela shrugged. “So talk! What’s so hard about that?” She looked over at me and her eyes were laughing. “Marvin,” she said, imitating a grown woman. “Would you go to the store and buy some Kotex for me?”
“Stop it!” said Elizabeth, but we continued.
“Light, medium, or super?” I asked.
“Super plus,” said Pamela.
“I mean it, you two!” warned Elizabeth, her face reddening.
“Deodorant or unscented?” I asked.
“Something that smells like rose petals,” said Pamela.
“Extra long or regular?”
“I’m going to leave if you don’t stop right now!” Elizabeth cried, standing up.
“You can’t. It’s your house,” I told her. “Elizabeth, your husband has to tell you embarrassing things too. What if he wanted you to go to the store and buy a new jockstrap for him?”
Elizabeth sat back down. “A what?”
“A jockstrap. To keep his … things in,” Pamela told her, giggling.
Elizabeth looked puzzled. “You mean shorts? Jockey shorts?”
“No, a little sort of harness he wears when he’s playing basketball or something,” I told her, remembering when I’d seen Lester’s in the wash. “So he won’t bounce around.”
“I wouldn’t!” Elizabeth’s eyes were like fried eggs. “I would never go in a store and ask for that!”
“What’s so hard about that?” Pamela asked, and we were off again. “Excuse me,” she said, looking my way, “but I’d like to buy a jockstrap for my husband.”
“Certainly, ma’am,” I said. “Regular or reinforced?”
“Steel-belted,” Pamela said. We howled, and fell back on the bed with laughter. We even got Elizabeth to smile a little.
When we stopped finally, Elizabeth said, “What I really mean is that I’m afraid a husband will think I’m … well, too gross, or too messy, or … too anything!”
We lay there quietly a moment thinking about that.
“When you’re married,” Elizabeth went on, “your husband sees what you look like in the morning. He knows when you have your period. If you get sick, you even throw up in front of him. It’s just too awful.”
“Don’t worry,” I told her. “When you’re married, your husband will love you so much that things like that won’t matter.”
I couldn’t believe I’d said that. How would I know? And yet, somewhere, deep down, I remembered a woman saying that to me once when I was very small, and I don’t think it was Aunt Sally.
It’s strange how something surfaces sometimes in your head; you feel you can almost get hold of it, but it slips away again. I seemed to remember, though, sitting out on the back steps with Mother—I think it was Mother—crying about something. She had told me not to get dirty, that was it. And I’d gone out in the alley anyway and got my shoes and socks muddy, and when she found me I’d cried because I was afraid she wouldn’t love me anymore.
The more I thought about that scene, the clearer it became. Yes, it was definitely my mother, and I remembered hugging her legs as we sat on those steps and telling her I was sorry. She didn’t yell or anything. That’s the part I remember most. She was so kind about it, that I told her I was never going to leave her; announced that I was never going to get married, in fact. And she said something about yes I would, that my husband would be kind too, and would love me so much that little things like this wouldn’t matter.
How could I remember something from so long ago? How could I remember all those details when I couldn’t even remember my mother’s face? I tried to bring back what she was wearing, or how she’d fixed her hair, but I couldn’t. I could only remember her presence.
Pamela had crawled across the bed and was staring down into my face. “Hello?”
“A funny thing happened,” I said. “I just told Elizabeth what Mom once told me,” and explained about hugging my mother’s legs.
Pamela and Elizabeth grew very quiet; I realized that they keep forgetting I don’t have a mom. When you don’t have a mom, though, you never forget.
Another person who didn’t forget was Denise Whitlock, in Language Arts. Now that we were more or less friends, she’d quit saying things like, “Aw, Widdle Alwice don’t have her a mama,” and started asking me questions about my family instead.
At school on Monday I happened to mention that I liked the shirt she was wearing, and she said it used to be her mom’s, that the only time her mother ever gave her anything was when she didn’t want it herself.
“C’mon, Denise. You make it sound as though she doesn’t even like you,” I said.
“She doesn’t. She told me once she should have stopped with five kids. I’m number six.”
Different people are bothered about different things, I guess. The reason Pamela, Elizabeth, and I worry so much about our bodies is that we don’t have much of one yet; Denise, being a year older, already has most of hers—the important parts, I mean; it was families that worried her—not having one she was happy with.
I couldn’t do anything about either bodies or Denise, though, so I decided to concentrate for the next few weeks on my own family—on Dad, in particular. To do all the things for my family that a Woman of the House would do.
“Lester,” I said that night, standing in the doorway of his room eating an apple. “What are you going to get Dad for his birthday?”
“Hmm,” said Lester, looking up from his philosophy books. “How about a redheaded concubine?”
“A what?”
“Never mind.”
“No, what’s a concubine?”
“Forget it, Al. Joke! Joke!”
“What’s a concubine?” I demanded. I hate it when people don’t tell me things. How are you ever supposed to grow into a woman if they don’t tell you?
I knew he could tell me himself, but Lester reached for his dictionary and looked up the definition: “1: a woman living in a socially recognized state of concubinage.’”
“Lester!”
“A mistress, Al.”
I rolled my eyes. “Be serious; what are you going to give Dad for his birthday?”
“Something wild to help him forget he’s fifty,” Lester said. “I don’t know, but I’ll think of something.”
Lester would too, but I drew a blank. I couldn’t think of a thing. Around nine o’clock, when Dad was reading, I called Aunt Sally on the upstairs phone. I figured that someone who had been fifty herself once would know what fifties like. “I wondered if you had any ideas,” I told her.
“Can’t Lester think of something?”
“You don’t want to know,” I said. I was even beginning to sound like Lester.
“Of course I do!” said Aunt Sally.
“A redheaded concubine.”
There was silence on the line. I knew I shouldn’t have told her that. “Joke! Joke!” I bleated.
Aunt Sally cleared her throat to ward off any more nonsense. “When Milt turned fifty, I gave him an electric foot massager.”
“Something besides feet,” I told her.
“Okay, what about baking him a healthy batch of cookies? Anything made with bran is a good idea.”
“Something besides bran.”
“A dad can never have too many socks or underwear.”
“Besides underwear.”
“Well, dear, ask your father what he would take with him if he had to live on a desert island and could choose only one thing besides the basics. Books? Music? Crossword puzzles? Then, whatever it is, buy him more.”
“Thanks, Aunt Sally,” I said. “That’s a help.”
I went in the living room and stood behind Dad’s chair.
“What is it, Al?” he said, half turning. “I always feel you’re going to grab me when you do that.”
I moved around in front where he could see me and asked what he would take to a desert is
land besides the basics if he could choose only one thing. His lips started to smile.
“Besides Sylvia Summers,” I said, and we both laughed.
“Black olives,” said Dad, and went back to his book.
That was easy enough. I went upstairs and sat down on my bed. I had enough money to buy him several cans. But I wanted to give him more than olives.
I closed my eyes and tried to think of anything I’d heard Dad say that he liked, other than music, which he could get plenty of at his store. Pineapple upside-down cake—I knew he liked that. And then I had an idea.
“Lester,” I said, going into his room. “I’m going to cook a gourmet dinner for Dad’s birthday.”
“Deal!” said Lester. “If you do the dinner, I’ll buy the gift, and make it from both of us.”
I went back downstairs and got out the recipe box that’s been sitting on our counter as long as I can remember. I’d seen Dad use it now and then, but I never bothered to open it. And thumbing through the cards with their worn edges, marked with grease and spaghetti stains, I realized that the recipes weren’t in Dad’s writing. I was holding cards that my mother had written, cards that she had held, and my heart began to thump. It was as though a little bit of my mother had been sitting there on the counter all these years, just waiting for me to open the box, and I didn’t even know it.
My fingers had reached the Ps, and there it was: Pineapple Upside-Down Cake, it said, in black ink. And over in one corner, beneath a smudge of flour, was the notation, “Ben’s favorite.”
8
MENDING FENCES
THE THING ABOUT SEVENTH GRADE IS that most of the time you’re sitting around waiting to see what’s going to happen to you. While I was waiting to find out what state I would be named after at school, and whether I could go on living when I did, Mr. Hensley, in World Studies, gave me a reason to think about a long productive life.
The seventh-grade class, he said, was going to bury a time capsule in the school courtyard. Then they would fill the hole with cement, put a marker on top, and we would all be invited back to dig up the time capsule when we were sixty years old. Provided the school was still there, that is. If it wasn’t, the county had promised, they would move our time capsule somewhere else.