Worms
Rickey Gard Diamond
The girl isn’t yet twelve, and already she’s skirting her mother’s rule: no dating yet. He's only a friend, Caitlin pronounces to her grandmother, introducing a boy-colt in baggy pants, who ducks his head and grins in agreement.
Ann meets the girl’s eyes, weighing the cost of confrontation in front of him. Rigid rules for such things are probably stupid anyway, she half-decides in the seconds it takes to survey the straight of his teeth, the large of his bones, the blunt of his fingers. They’re just meeting some friends at the movies, Caitlin prevaricates; they do it all the time.
Caitlin’s mother, Rebecca, is away at a conference, the girl entrusted to Ann a few days, and really, Ann thinks, she might as well try to resist the pull of the moon on the girl's tides. So much has changed, that she’s unsure—and isn’t age really more a matter of maturity than a ticking off of months? Besides, he’s sweetly the gentleman. Caitlin seems strangely adult.
Ann nods her permission, waving them a good-time from the front door, excited and worried sick that she’s been remiss in her gatekeeper duties. She’ll report it to Rebecca and probably get scolded. Ann’s own mother, long dead now along with so much else, had never relented on girl-rules, which were never broken in those days without consequences from God.
That world is gone, and so is Caitlin, gone off careless of what she knows little about. Ann defends against her mixed feelings, remembering Rebecca at that age, remembering her own stupid self at that crossroad. Has she ever told her Becky about how she’d sneaked past her own mother’s iron rules with that damned cat? She’s surprised to remember her crime, and to claim how badly it turned out, and how splendid.
Its kitten-beginning got found out in the tall grass of the orchard next to her childhood home. Ann’s mother had believed animals belonged outdoors, same as young boys did, but Ann had smuggled it inside that summer and hid it in her room, until she discovered a sore on its neck, which to her horror had began squirming.
She dropped the cat with a yelp and went running to confess to her mother, who, seeing the wound, gave Ann one triumphant look that said, You see?—didn’t I tell you? She peered into the slit to open it wide. “Blowflies,” she pronounced, and next plunged in a pair of tweezers to pull out a creamy white, living, squirming grub.
The sizeable, red, raw hole it left behind put Ann into shock at the scene: Mother pouring peroxide that foamed, kitten yowling. Ann had let the kitten go wild after that, the bearer of more than she was ready to know, its healing a miracle and also chance luck.
When you are young, she thought now in the living room of her grown daughter, thinking about her daughter’s daughter, you turn away from the horripilations of life and the way living requires these—no, rather how life flourishes because of them.
Ann is as young as Caitlin in that memory, but the more experienced part of her argues that worms and grubs all perform goodly chores, eliminating tasty weak links, digesting garbage, cadavers. That’s how life is, she’d just told Caitlin last night. She and the girl had watched that nature show on television, something underwater about the sex life of reefs and the jellyfish, who on a particular night each year, ruled by the phases of the moon, fill the ocean with their joined eggs and sperm, and sharks and barricudas come especially for the feast, gobbling gametes and jelly babies down.
Gross, Caitlin had said about the violent buffet and turned her face away. But these small disasters lurk everywhere—delicious.
The same summer that Ann’s kitten ran wild, before her youngest brother had been born, army worms had invaded her favorite climbing tree behind the garage. Ann hasn’t thought of the tree since Rebecca was a girl. And now more worms? It seems too Freudian--
She stares out the window to where Caitlin just waved, wanting to connect some thread of herself to the girl, though the quince tree feels dangerous. Caitlin’s glance, shy and in league with that boy, coaxing a smile from those soft lips of his, full of teeth—how long until she’d be home? Ann glances at her watch.
After Ann’s mother had yanked out her cat’s maggot, she became Ann’s enemy, same as Rebecca was Caitlin’s enemy now. A mother did what she had to do, Ann knew this by now, and as well that no daughter could love it.
She puts on music to soothe herself, but some strain in the notes, a half-step of yearning for a minor key, conjures up memories of her first girl-boy dance. Ann was older than Caitlin then, and younger, because everyone had been younger back then. Has she ever told Rebecca this story? Has she even told herself?
Ann’s best-friend, Jackie, had given the first party to mark their sixth-grade graduation. Nothing about it would have induced Ann to repeat it, but her mother and stepfather, Vince, had helped chaperone at Jackie’s, and it was their idea to have Ann’s first real boy-girl party. Ann hadn’t considered it her party so much as her doom.
The boys had lined up like bricks in a wall at Jackie’s house, flanking the tables loaded with boloney rollups and bowls of rippled potato chips. They’d coughed down celery stuffed with peanut butter, eyes empty of hope, mouths drying shut. Not only did boys and girls not hook up in those days, they stayed separate in a rule-filled romance that was simpler and also more ruthless.
Ann had stayed across the room with all the other girls, her rose-printed rayon dress crinkling whenever she moved, her socks sliding down into patent-leather pumps. She had chosen the outfit and had no one to blame for her misery except for her mother, who had refused Ann nylons and spoiled the whole effect.
Ann had wanted Pongee’s “Natural” lipstick, too, but her mother warned, once applied, Pongee turned fuchsia and cheap-looking, same as shaving your legs at too young an age made you hairier and coarser, she’d pronounced.
Jackie’s mother held fast against nylons, but had allowed Jackie the Pongee. Jackie slipped its metal tube out at the party, phallic as hell, dabbing it on her lips for the other girls to admire, first at her party, and later at Ann’s. Putting their heads together, the girls at both parties had whispered and giggled to discover which boys across the room they found the least objectionable, the only way to view the situation back then.
Boys were never just friends, and the girls’ loyalties to each other and their selection of boys could change positions like marbles in Chinese Checkers, transforming hues of opinion and outcome as quickly and thoroughly as Pongee and double-jumping.
Caitlin had told her it was different now, Ann thinks, though an ocean of sex still rolled, full of species previously unseen and amazing, the reason her stomach flips whenever she thinks of talking about sex to Rebecca, or worse, to Caitlin. Ann had wanted to escape those sure tweezers of her mother’s rules, becoming the ocean herself, savoring those jelly babies and swimming, when, surprised, Ann recognizes in her memory that her own mother had relished it, too, the excitement. Did Rebecca?
All that summer Ann’s mother had planned her party location. It had to be someplace superior to Jackie’s basement recreation room. But their cellar was dark and smelly, and the living room narrow, their furniture overlarge. The kitchen? The tiny dining room? Nothing seemed right. “If only I weren’t expecting,” Ann’s mother had lamented; “I could find a summer job and rent you the roller rink.”
How could Ann have forgotten for a moment that her mother was pregnant that summer? Ann had lost herself to Shakespeare, escaping. Her grandfather had given her a copy of the bard, and Ann took to riffling through bible-thin pages to ponder: What light on yonder window breaks? She practiced gliding her feet, sweeping her arms in what she hoped were graceful Elizabethan movements. Climbing into the low-spreading quince tree, out of sight of her mother, she brooded. Alas and alack.
A rusty oil drum stood on cinderblocks nearby, where Vince burned the garbage behind the garage, as people used to, another innocence of the time, Mother Nature thought forgiving. Surrounded by spangles of milkweed in bloom, Ann would sit in the branches, ignoring her mother’s calls to come in and make her bed. At suppertime she would lie about her neighborhood travels and having gotten permission on the fly, arguing with her mother: Methinks thou forgetteth too easily, old crone. I was at Jackie’s, hither and yon.
Ann’s jump on the Chinese checkerboard of boys at Jackie’s party had left her with a boy named Jonathan, not a terrible fate. He was a good enough baseball pitcher and had pale freckles to match strawberry blonde hair. Her mother said it was obvious: “He has a crush on you.” Until Jackie’s party, she and Jonathan had been unaware of one another. And then it became a painful awareness, a thing to be avoided.
Rebecca and Caitlin would laugh at her prudish naiveté, but for Ann it still seemed awful, climbing back to her memory perch in the quince tree, Hamlet's witches opened on the branch in front of her.
Jonathan had ridden his new bike up the cinder drive and knocked at the back kitchen door. When she leaned a bit, she could see him around the corner of the garage.
“Ann’s out in the backyard,” her mother gave her away. “She’s watching her baby brother. Go look, and I’ll get you something cold to drink.”
Ann’s face reddened, watching her mother turn like a great ship with her hull bulging out in front of her, one hand to the small of her back to tilt her pregnant bulk up the stairs to the kitchen. Her stepfather Vince liked to joke that it was her own fault for swallowing all those watermelon seeds, and her mother would give him a dirty look, saying, “Stop it, Vince!” Then he winked and warned Annie that she’d better be careful of what she ate, too.
Mother’s voice sounded pleased about Jonathan, though.
“What are you doing all the way here?” Ann asked him, coming out from behind the garage. He was far away from home. He had to take the bus at school.
“You can go anywhere, if you've got yourself a good bike,” he answered, patting the wide saddle of his new steed, impersonating someone careless about owning the newest luxury model, with a light, a basket, a built-in push-button horn.
They sat on webbed lawn chairs, Ann ignoring him pretty much, picking at a mosquito bite on her arm. “Is that your baby brother?” Jonathan asked.
She nodded, looking up to check on the two-year-old, who sat in the sandbox. Facing them, the toddler kicked his bare heels in the sand, shaking his hands out. He didn't like the sand when it stuck to him. He jutted out his chin at them, scowling.
“We call him Little Iron Jaw,” she explained. “He doesn't talk much.”
“You like to baby-sit?”
“No.” Ann shook her head.
“Here we go,” Mother called sweetly, bringing out three ice-filled metal glasses—turquoise, hot pink and pine green, on a metal tray she saved for special occasions. She poured them cherry Kool-Aid, handing the first drink to their guest. Ann peered down into her glass, drinking to feel cold on her upper lip. When she glanced up, Jonathan’s eyes ran away, horrified by something behind her.
“Brucie, no-no-no, no, no!” Mother said, reaching her arms out to her baby, who had yanked off his knit bathing suit, the flesh between his legs set free. He stood to pound his feet in the sand, crying, all of him wildly bouncing like jelly.
“Brucie, stop, no, you've got to keep your suit on, honey,” Mother scolded, shaking the suit out. “Don't sit in the sand if you don't like the way it feels. Put your foot in here,” she instructed, bending over to block their view.
Ann’s weight fell into her feet. Her face burned, eyes lowered, turned away from her brother, turned away from Jonathan, whose mouth gaped, ringed with red, his cherry-stained tongue a wound she couldn’t look at.
His freckled hands set down the glass on the rough picnic table. “I gotta go now,” he mumbled, getting up. Kicking the kickstand, he pedaled straightaway.
“He didn’t even finish his Kool-Aid,” Ann’s mother moaned sympathetically, holding Brucie in the crook of one arm as she brushed the sand off her maternity top. “It’s not your brother’s fault,” she added, sitting down with the baby on one hip, barrel stomach in the way. “He hates getting sand in his suit. Jonathan must know how that feels, getting sand on your wee-wee.”
“Mother!” Ann protested, while Little Iron Jaw frowned, as if it were self-evident to him as well. Ann got up and ran toward the house, Mother calling, “Come back here and watch your baby brother.”
“I've got to go to the bathroom!” Ann yelled to escape and remembers her relief at sight of her plain crotch: a wizened, smiling dolphin, squirting water, nothing jiggly.
How to ever tell Rebecca and Caitlin about this—when there was more? Days later, Jackie came to her house for an outdoor sleepover, and in those days, you’d put a blanket over the clothesline and weigh its edges with rocks to make a tent, and be thrilled about it. Ann has to re-imagine the whole world to believe her own memories: no clothes dryers, no campers with televisions, no Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show yet, and no birth control, her mother proof of that.
Sex and education had not yet been combined in a sentence, and in those days, girls only heard rumors, or sometimes kabala-like words without meaning, only the sound of phlegm in the back of the throat, intended to appall: suck, fuck, cock, dyke.
Annie and Jackie lay with their heads near the blanket opening, looking out at the stars, excited to be near-grown up, lighting up scenery with the flashlight that Vince had leant them. They could have seen the stars more clearly if her mother had not insisted on leaving the bathroom light on to clear a path to the backdoor. She said that Jackie looked nervous.
“I'm not scared,” Jackie protested, squeezing a pink plush cat to her chest when Ann's parents went back inside.
Jackie was the one who'd first told Ann in a whisper how babies got made. “You know the boy's thing? Well, he puts it in the girl's thing and that's what makes a baby, like planting a seed.” Jackie couldn’t say, “He puts it in the girl's thing,” without placing both hands over her mouth, and giggling the giggle that Vince said sounded like a little machine-gun.
Ann at first believed this was another of Jackie's show-off lies. But her mother turned red as she stood behind her ironing board, when Ann told her about it and asked her to refute something so awful and stupid.
Later Mother would complain to Vince about Jackie’s mom, unable to wait until Ann was in bed. That a mother would talk about that to her own daughter! No wonder Jackie was running wild!
So it was that Ann learned it wasn't watermelon seeds that had made her mother grow huge. It was a fate that apparently awaited Ann and all females she knew, a felt doom in her young mind that weighed heavy, until she had a sensible insight into the matter.
On mornings when her family read the Sunday papers in bed together, Vince would yawn and stretch his arms out, pretending to knock the chins of Ann and her mother and little Iron Jaw, joking, like in the funnies: “Oof! Bonk! Oops, sorry! Not enough room in here.” It was a small bed for two people, much less four. They all giggled and laughed. Still her parents insisted on sharing that bed.
“I know why our parents sleep together,” Ann whispered to Jackie in the tent on their sleepover, having given this some private thought.
Jackie turned over on her stomach, putting her face close so as not to miss a word. She loved talking about things they weren’t supposed to.
“They do it in their sleep. Nobody would do it on purpose, would they? So people who want babies have to sleep together because that’s when it happens, while they're sleeping.”
Jackie gasped, and then whispered. “When my cousin got pregnant? My mother said, 'You mean to tell me she's been sleeping with that Tarentino boy?'“
“You see?” Ann said, as triumphant as her mother had been with her tweezers, understanding the rules, feeling confident now. “That's why married people get double beds,” she explained, adding about Jackie’s cousin, “Only a dumbhead would go to sleep with a boy if she wasn't married to him.”
“My cousin is stupid; my mother says she is.”
Ann turned over on her back to picture a harmless, blind worm creeping through bedclothes to sleep in its fleshy nest. She cupped her hand between her legs, feeling its heat. Jackie was imagining something similar, because her plush cat and her forefinger came sliding under the sheets to poke Ann in the thigh, giggling. Ann giggled too, both getting louder, both pleased to be here in the tent together, wormless.
“Oh baby-baby, gimme a kiss,” Jackie said, jumping up to press her lips against Ann's, laughing when Ann, heart pounding, pushed her away. Jackie always was boy-crazy, Ann's mother said.
The same week her mother sent out Ann’s party invitations, Ann went out to the quince tree to find its leaves moving, curling in waves like an ocean, or maybe as if held to some flame, a phenomenon she'd experimented with at the garbage can. Up close, she saw hundreds of army worms, their green and yellow striped bodies, long and fat and undulating, rolling together.
Ann watched their palpitation, the rhythm of her lungs matching a muscular pounding at her center, exciting and frightening. She ran to get her parents.
“Good lord,” Mother said when she saw it.
“I should have gotten them before they hatched. Now we’ll have a real mess.”
Vince said he’d seen webbing with some eggs earlier. He squeezed Ann’s shoulder, knowing this was her special hide-out, and then he lit a newspaper torch, holding it to the nearest branch. The worms curled tighter. Some reeled more wildly, standing up on their tiny last score of feet to wave their bodies like Shakespearean actors dying dramatic deaths.
The tree's new unsightliness cinched her party’s location. Guests had to use the front door to avoid seeing it, so the red couch went out to the garage to make space in the living room for dancing and a punch bowl. Her cat, gone wild, would soon have kittens in a box in that garage, its neck no longer a red, open wound. The wound was hers that night, filled with dull ache.
She remembers her mother’s eye, overseeing, laughing and as fierce as some shark at a reef. The way mine might have looked tonight, Ann thinks, picturing herself in that moment of permission. She would try to tell her Becky girl how sweet Caitlin’s flirtation had been—Rebecca might even laugh too with her eye teeth glinting. Because wasn’t that also a part of it? Life’s ocean, jellied and jumping with gametes, and swimming with jokes that could tear you inside out?
That night Jonathan had danced the most with Jackie, ignoring Ann at her own party. She had been left with a big blocky boy, whose name she can’t remember now, only that his breath had smelled of baloney. And their two bodies had swayed in a slow-dance together, hands clasped, rocking in Elizabethan grace—Ann’s appetites, the worms of her awful pleasures begun.
Ann meets the girl’s eyes, weighing the cost of confrontation in front of him. Rigid rules for such things are probably stupid anyway, she half-decides in the seconds it takes to survey the straight of his teeth, the large of his bones, the blunt of his fingers. They’re just meeting some friends at the movies, Caitlin prevaricates; they do it all the time.
Caitlin’s mother, Rebecca, is away at a conference, the girl entrusted to Ann a few days, and really, Ann thinks, she might as well try to resist the pull of the moon on the girl's tides. So much has changed, that she’s unsure—and isn’t age really more a matter of maturity than a ticking off of months? Besides, he’s sweetly the gentleman. Caitlin seems strangely adult.
Ann nods her permission, waving them a good-time from the front door, excited and worried sick that she’s been remiss in her gatekeeper duties. She’ll report it to Rebecca and probably get scolded. Ann’s own mother, long dead now along with so much else, had never relented on girl-rules, which were never broken in those days without consequences from God.
That world is gone, and so is Caitlin, gone off careless of what she knows little about. Ann defends against her mixed feelings, remembering Rebecca at that age, remembering her own stupid self at that crossroad. Has she ever told her Becky about how she’d sneaked past her own mother’s iron rules with that damned cat? She’s surprised to remember her crime, and to claim how badly it turned out, and how splendid.
Its kitten-beginning got found out in the tall grass of the orchard next to her childhood home. Ann’s mother had believed animals belonged outdoors, same as young boys did, but Ann had smuggled it inside that summer and hid it in her room, until she discovered a sore on its neck, which to her horror had began squirming.
She dropped the cat with a yelp and went running to confess to her mother, who, seeing the wound, gave Ann one triumphant look that said, You see?—didn’t I tell you? She peered into the slit to open it wide. “Blowflies,” she pronounced, and next plunged in a pair of tweezers to pull out a creamy white, living, squirming grub.
The sizeable, red, raw hole it left behind put Ann into shock at the scene: Mother pouring peroxide that foamed, kitten yowling. Ann had let the kitten go wild after that, the bearer of more than she was ready to know, its healing a miracle and also chance luck.
When you are young, she thought now in the living room of her grown daughter, thinking about her daughter’s daughter, you turn away from the horripilations of life and the way living requires these—no, rather how life flourishes because of them.
Ann is as young as Caitlin in that memory, but the more experienced part of her argues that worms and grubs all perform goodly chores, eliminating tasty weak links, digesting garbage, cadavers. That’s how life is, she’d just told Caitlin last night. She and the girl had watched that nature show on television, something underwater about the sex life of reefs and the jellyfish, who on a particular night each year, ruled by the phases of the moon, fill the ocean with their joined eggs and sperm, and sharks and barricudas come especially for the feast, gobbling gametes and jelly babies down.
Gross, Caitlin had said about the violent buffet and turned her face away. But these small disasters lurk everywhere—delicious.
The same summer that Ann’s kitten ran wild, before her youngest brother had been born, army worms had invaded her favorite climbing tree behind the garage. Ann hasn’t thought of the tree since Rebecca was a girl. And now more worms? It seems too Freudian--
She stares out the window to where Caitlin just waved, wanting to connect some thread of herself to the girl, though the quince tree feels dangerous. Caitlin’s glance, shy and in league with that boy, coaxing a smile from those soft lips of his, full of teeth—how long until she’d be home? Ann glances at her watch.
After Ann’s mother had yanked out her cat’s maggot, she became Ann’s enemy, same as Rebecca was Caitlin’s enemy now. A mother did what she had to do, Ann knew this by now, and as well that no daughter could love it.
She puts on music to soothe herself, but some strain in the notes, a half-step of yearning for a minor key, conjures up memories of her first girl-boy dance. Ann was older than Caitlin then, and younger, because everyone had been younger back then. Has she ever told Rebecca this story? Has she even told herself?
Ann’s best-friend, Jackie, had given the first party to mark their sixth-grade graduation. Nothing about it would have induced Ann to repeat it, but her mother and stepfather, Vince, had helped chaperone at Jackie’s, and it was their idea to have Ann’s first real boy-girl party. Ann hadn’t considered it her party so much as her doom.
The boys had lined up like bricks in a wall at Jackie’s house, flanking the tables loaded with boloney rollups and bowls of rippled potato chips. They’d coughed down celery stuffed with peanut butter, eyes empty of hope, mouths drying shut. Not only did boys and girls not hook up in those days, they stayed separate in a rule-filled romance that was simpler and also more ruthless.
Ann had stayed across the room with all the other girls, her rose-printed rayon dress crinkling whenever she moved, her socks sliding down into patent-leather pumps. She had chosen the outfit and had no one to blame for her misery except for her mother, who had refused Ann nylons and spoiled the whole effect.
Ann had wanted Pongee’s “Natural” lipstick, too, but her mother warned, once applied, Pongee turned fuchsia and cheap-looking, same as shaving your legs at too young an age made you hairier and coarser, she’d pronounced.
Jackie’s mother held fast against nylons, but had allowed Jackie the Pongee. Jackie slipped its metal tube out at the party, phallic as hell, dabbing it on her lips for the other girls to admire, first at her party, and later at Ann’s. Putting their heads together, the girls at both parties had whispered and giggled to discover which boys across the room they found the least objectionable, the only way to view the situation back then.
Boys were never just friends, and the girls’ loyalties to each other and their selection of boys could change positions like marbles in Chinese Checkers, transforming hues of opinion and outcome as quickly and thoroughly as Pongee and double-jumping.
Caitlin had told her it was different now, Ann thinks, though an ocean of sex still rolled, full of species previously unseen and amazing, the reason her stomach flips whenever she thinks of talking about sex to Rebecca, or worse, to Caitlin. Ann had wanted to escape those sure tweezers of her mother’s rules, becoming the ocean herself, savoring those jelly babies and swimming, when, surprised, Ann recognizes in her memory that her own mother had relished it, too, the excitement. Did Rebecca?
All that summer Ann’s mother had planned her party location. It had to be someplace superior to Jackie’s basement recreation room. But their cellar was dark and smelly, and the living room narrow, their furniture overlarge. The kitchen? The tiny dining room? Nothing seemed right. “If only I weren’t expecting,” Ann’s mother had lamented; “I could find a summer job and rent you the roller rink.”
How could Ann have forgotten for a moment that her mother was pregnant that summer? Ann had lost herself to Shakespeare, escaping. Her grandfather had given her a copy of the bard, and Ann took to riffling through bible-thin pages to ponder: What light on yonder window breaks? She practiced gliding her feet, sweeping her arms in what she hoped were graceful Elizabethan movements. Climbing into the low-spreading quince tree, out of sight of her mother, she brooded. Alas and alack.
A rusty oil drum stood on cinderblocks nearby, where Vince burned the garbage behind the garage, as people used to, another innocence of the time, Mother Nature thought forgiving. Surrounded by spangles of milkweed in bloom, Ann would sit in the branches, ignoring her mother’s calls to come in and make her bed. At suppertime she would lie about her neighborhood travels and having gotten permission on the fly, arguing with her mother: Methinks thou forgetteth too easily, old crone. I was at Jackie’s, hither and yon.
Ann’s jump on the Chinese checkerboard of boys at Jackie’s party had left her with a boy named Jonathan, not a terrible fate. He was a good enough baseball pitcher and had pale freckles to match strawberry blonde hair. Her mother said it was obvious: “He has a crush on you.” Until Jackie’s party, she and Jonathan had been unaware of one another. And then it became a painful awareness, a thing to be avoided.
Rebecca and Caitlin would laugh at her prudish naiveté, but for Ann it still seemed awful, climbing back to her memory perch in the quince tree, Hamlet's witches opened on the branch in front of her.
Jonathan had ridden his new bike up the cinder drive and knocked at the back kitchen door. When she leaned a bit, she could see him around the corner of the garage.
“Ann’s out in the backyard,” her mother gave her away. “She’s watching her baby brother. Go look, and I’ll get you something cold to drink.”
Ann’s face reddened, watching her mother turn like a great ship with her hull bulging out in front of her, one hand to the small of her back to tilt her pregnant bulk up the stairs to the kitchen. Her stepfather Vince liked to joke that it was her own fault for swallowing all those watermelon seeds, and her mother would give him a dirty look, saying, “Stop it, Vince!” Then he winked and warned Annie that she’d better be careful of what she ate, too.
Mother’s voice sounded pleased about Jonathan, though.
“What are you doing all the way here?” Ann asked him, coming out from behind the garage. He was far away from home. He had to take the bus at school.
“You can go anywhere, if you've got yourself a good bike,” he answered, patting the wide saddle of his new steed, impersonating someone careless about owning the newest luxury model, with a light, a basket, a built-in push-button horn.
They sat on webbed lawn chairs, Ann ignoring him pretty much, picking at a mosquito bite on her arm. “Is that your baby brother?” Jonathan asked.
She nodded, looking up to check on the two-year-old, who sat in the sandbox. Facing them, the toddler kicked his bare heels in the sand, shaking his hands out. He didn't like the sand when it stuck to him. He jutted out his chin at them, scowling.
“We call him Little Iron Jaw,” she explained. “He doesn't talk much.”
“You like to baby-sit?”
“No.” Ann shook her head.
“Here we go,” Mother called sweetly, bringing out three ice-filled metal glasses—turquoise, hot pink and pine green, on a metal tray she saved for special occasions. She poured them cherry Kool-Aid, handing the first drink to their guest. Ann peered down into her glass, drinking to feel cold on her upper lip. When she glanced up, Jonathan’s eyes ran away, horrified by something behind her.
“Brucie, no-no-no, no, no!” Mother said, reaching her arms out to her baby, who had yanked off his knit bathing suit, the flesh between his legs set free. He stood to pound his feet in the sand, crying, all of him wildly bouncing like jelly.
“Brucie, stop, no, you've got to keep your suit on, honey,” Mother scolded, shaking the suit out. “Don't sit in the sand if you don't like the way it feels. Put your foot in here,” she instructed, bending over to block their view.
Ann’s weight fell into her feet. Her face burned, eyes lowered, turned away from her brother, turned away from Jonathan, whose mouth gaped, ringed with red, his cherry-stained tongue a wound she couldn’t look at.
His freckled hands set down the glass on the rough picnic table. “I gotta go now,” he mumbled, getting up. Kicking the kickstand, he pedaled straightaway.
“He didn’t even finish his Kool-Aid,” Ann’s mother moaned sympathetically, holding Brucie in the crook of one arm as she brushed the sand off her maternity top. “It’s not your brother’s fault,” she added, sitting down with the baby on one hip, barrel stomach in the way. “He hates getting sand in his suit. Jonathan must know how that feels, getting sand on your wee-wee.”
“Mother!” Ann protested, while Little Iron Jaw frowned, as if it were self-evident to him as well. Ann got up and ran toward the house, Mother calling, “Come back here and watch your baby brother.”
“I've got to go to the bathroom!” Ann yelled to escape and remembers her relief at sight of her plain crotch: a wizened, smiling dolphin, squirting water, nothing jiggly.
How to ever tell Rebecca and Caitlin about this—when there was more? Days later, Jackie came to her house for an outdoor sleepover, and in those days, you’d put a blanket over the clothesline and weigh its edges with rocks to make a tent, and be thrilled about it. Ann has to re-imagine the whole world to believe her own memories: no clothes dryers, no campers with televisions, no Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show yet, and no birth control, her mother proof of that.
Sex and education had not yet been combined in a sentence, and in those days, girls only heard rumors, or sometimes kabala-like words without meaning, only the sound of phlegm in the back of the throat, intended to appall: suck, fuck, cock, dyke.
Annie and Jackie lay with their heads near the blanket opening, looking out at the stars, excited to be near-grown up, lighting up scenery with the flashlight that Vince had leant them. They could have seen the stars more clearly if her mother had not insisted on leaving the bathroom light on to clear a path to the backdoor. She said that Jackie looked nervous.
“I'm not scared,” Jackie protested, squeezing a pink plush cat to her chest when Ann's parents went back inside.
Jackie was the one who'd first told Ann in a whisper how babies got made. “You know the boy's thing? Well, he puts it in the girl's thing and that's what makes a baby, like planting a seed.” Jackie couldn’t say, “He puts it in the girl's thing,” without placing both hands over her mouth, and giggling the giggle that Vince said sounded like a little machine-gun.
Ann at first believed this was another of Jackie's show-off lies. But her mother turned red as she stood behind her ironing board, when Ann told her about it and asked her to refute something so awful and stupid.
Later Mother would complain to Vince about Jackie’s mom, unable to wait until Ann was in bed. That a mother would talk about that to her own daughter! No wonder Jackie was running wild!
So it was that Ann learned it wasn't watermelon seeds that had made her mother grow huge. It was a fate that apparently awaited Ann and all females she knew, a felt doom in her young mind that weighed heavy, until she had a sensible insight into the matter.
On mornings when her family read the Sunday papers in bed together, Vince would yawn and stretch his arms out, pretending to knock the chins of Ann and her mother and little Iron Jaw, joking, like in the funnies: “Oof! Bonk! Oops, sorry! Not enough room in here.” It was a small bed for two people, much less four. They all giggled and laughed. Still her parents insisted on sharing that bed.
“I know why our parents sleep together,” Ann whispered to Jackie in the tent on their sleepover, having given this some private thought.
Jackie turned over on her stomach, putting her face close so as not to miss a word. She loved talking about things they weren’t supposed to.
“They do it in their sleep. Nobody would do it on purpose, would they? So people who want babies have to sleep together because that’s when it happens, while they're sleeping.”
Jackie gasped, and then whispered. “When my cousin got pregnant? My mother said, 'You mean to tell me she's been sleeping with that Tarentino boy?'“
“You see?” Ann said, as triumphant as her mother had been with her tweezers, understanding the rules, feeling confident now. “That's why married people get double beds,” she explained, adding about Jackie’s cousin, “Only a dumbhead would go to sleep with a boy if she wasn't married to him.”
“My cousin is stupid; my mother says she is.”
Ann turned over on her back to picture a harmless, blind worm creeping through bedclothes to sleep in its fleshy nest. She cupped her hand between her legs, feeling its heat. Jackie was imagining something similar, because her plush cat and her forefinger came sliding under the sheets to poke Ann in the thigh, giggling. Ann giggled too, both getting louder, both pleased to be here in the tent together, wormless.
“Oh baby-baby, gimme a kiss,” Jackie said, jumping up to press her lips against Ann's, laughing when Ann, heart pounding, pushed her away. Jackie always was boy-crazy, Ann's mother said.
The same week her mother sent out Ann’s party invitations, Ann went out to the quince tree to find its leaves moving, curling in waves like an ocean, or maybe as if held to some flame, a phenomenon she'd experimented with at the garbage can. Up close, she saw hundreds of army worms, their green and yellow striped bodies, long and fat and undulating, rolling together.
Ann watched their palpitation, the rhythm of her lungs matching a muscular pounding at her center, exciting and frightening. She ran to get her parents.
“Good lord,” Mother said when she saw it.
“I should have gotten them before they hatched. Now we’ll have a real mess.”
Vince said he’d seen webbing with some eggs earlier. He squeezed Ann’s shoulder, knowing this was her special hide-out, and then he lit a newspaper torch, holding it to the nearest branch. The worms curled tighter. Some reeled more wildly, standing up on their tiny last score of feet to wave their bodies like Shakespearean actors dying dramatic deaths.
The tree's new unsightliness cinched her party’s location. Guests had to use the front door to avoid seeing it, so the red couch went out to the garage to make space in the living room for dancing and a punch bowl. Her cat, gone wild, would soon have kittens in a box in that garage, its neck no longer a red, open wound. The wound was hers that night, filled with dull ache.
She remembers her mother’s eye, overseeing, laughing and as fierce as some shark at a reef. The way mine might have looked tonight, Ann thinks, picturing herself in that moment of permission. She would try to tell her Becky girl how sweet Caitlin’s flirtation had been—Rebecca might even laugh too with her eye teeth glinting. Because wasn’t that also a part of it? Life’s ocean, jellied and jumping with gametes, and swimming with jokes that could tear you inside out?
That night Jonathan had danced the most with Jackie, ignoring Ann at her own party. She had been left with a big blocky boy, whose name she can’t remember now, only that his breath had smelled of baloney. And their two bodies had swayed in a slow-dance together, hands clasped, rocking in Elizabethan grace—Ann’s appetites, the worms of her awful pleasures begun.
Working notes
I wrote this story in different forms quite a while ago, and it kept getting rejected. I kept wrestling. I sensed it was talking about important revelations--for me, at least--but of course, a writer always looks for the reader who will say, oh yes, I see that too. Women within families, or at least in my family, seldom talked about sexual feelings. The horrors of sexuality, when I first discovered its details as a girl, equates in my mind with first learning about killing and gutting the fish I had caught with my dad. The worst was its being delicious. Nearly all of my stories, including my novel Second Sight, seek a deeper connection with the ferocity and will of women even when cloaked in those conventions of good-mother-daughter-wife that bind us. Our subterranean body of communication, the glances, a shifting of weight, speak with unspoken power.
About the author
Rickey Gard Diamond is both a journalist and a fiction writer, but her work in both realms most often concerns women and economic issues. She earned an MFA in Writing from Vermont College, where she was a professor of liberal studies in the undergraduate program for 18 years. Her fiction has appeared in The Sewanee Review, The Louisville Review, Other Voices, Kalliope, Plainswoman, and other journals. She has also written a novel, Second Sight. Diamond is the founding editor of Vermont Woman, where she has widely published articles and book reviews. She is among the recognized writers in Vermont Odysseys: Essays on the New Vermont. Recently, she won an investigative journalism award from the National Newspaper Association for her Vermont Woman series: An Economy of Our Own.