Coming of Age
Memoir by Marianne Apostolides
Illustration by Karen Klassen
She initiated me, showed me certain secrets, made me speak an oath. She was, by all accounts, an unlikely guide. These mysteries were simple to Becky, that ‘special’ girl; they weren’t engulfed in a glorious shame, a toxic pleasure, as they were for me. As they are, still, especially as I write this story.
“I don’t want to go,” I said.
“Just for two hours.”
“I don’t like her!”
“I don’t care.” My mother was chopping an onion, efficient.
“But mom, she’s a...” I paused there, pulling the word to the top of my throat.
“Don’t say it,” my mother said. “But I—”
“You can ride your bike there,” she continued. “By yourself, okay? Is it a deal?” She slid the onions into the pan; their sizzle drowned my response.
“I’m gonna bike to the cathedral,” I said.
(I said those words. If she didn’t hear them, that wasn’t my fault.)
“Deal?” she asked. “Deal.”
Within the hour, I was pedaling past Becky’s house, heading toward the cathedral’s grounds. The landscape was open, sloping, a pastoral rectitude that showcased the chocolaty-brown building. This place wasn’t off-limits, exactly; it’s just that ‘things went on’ here.
Things went on: this was all the warning my mother needed to give me when I was younger; the terrain went unexplored for years.
But now I was here, biking through the gates. The single path soon split into four, then eight—diverging, crossing, snaking over contoured hills whose lawns were trim and perfectly shorn. A woman was jogging. The gardeners were mowing. I veered to the left, past a long-limbed church-man on hands-and-knees; he was clipping the stray blades of grass from the path. I didn’t slow for him, that lone churchman on all-fours. Instead, I biked fast toward the cathedral itself.
It rose erect, its Gothic spire the tallest structure in our small suburban town. I sped along a path that billowed out, then drew itself acutely inward, toward the church’s base where the bushes were most dense.
“Unh. . .” a Mexican gardener grunted.
I braked abruptly, my bike squealing to a stop. The gardener had stepped onto the path, hauling a large bag of dirt. He turned toward me and halted, as if stricken. I was about to apologize when he puckered his lips and kissed at me. His face became filled with fake longing as he spoke to me—desirously, incomprehensibly—in Spanish.
He was laughing now, joking with his colleague. They laughed together. They slit into the bags of soil, reaching inside to toss fistfuls of fertilized dirt under the bushes. The smell was overwhelmingly mineral.
Once I’d arrived at the other side of the church, I dumped my bike flat on the grass and approached the bushes. Kneeling down, I crawled through an opening, ducking beneath the branches. When I stood, my lavender corduroy pants were covered in fresh earth. I brushed them off and stood stupidly, not knowing what to do now that I was here.
I looked around. The place was pungent and hidden; it was cramped tight, the bushes tangled, unruly beside the shaft of the church. I looked up. My head dropped back, stretching the front of my neck ’til it strained. I tried to swallow but couldn’t: my voice box wouldn’t slide through that stretched space, my throat arched back. I tried again, wanting that uncomfortable pause—that physical pressure in my throat—and that’s when I saw them: two shapes protruding from the side of the building. They were brown, with beak-like noses, haunches firm and tongues grotesquely out. I stared at the gargoyles. My voicebox was stopped at the top of my soft palate and I breathed. I watched as more figures appeared. Dozens now, perched all over, one body leading to another—bellies, haunches, spiked tails and open mouths—everywhere bulging, pressing for me to see.
The gardeners drove away. I heard the men laugh, freely.
It was then that I swallowed.
Her mother was making cookies that day. She stood at the island in the emerald-coloured kitchen, her palms pressed on the counter. The ingredients were arrayed beside the cookbook, whose pages were warped from an earlier spill.
“How much is a pint?” she asked, annoyed.
“A pint is a pint,” Becky answered. I watched as she ate peanut butter from the jar, sucking her finger then sticking it back in. A pale green slug of snot was suspended on her upper lip. She snorted; it disappeared.
“A pint is a pint—right?—a pint!” She delighted in her sing-song chant. “A pint is a pint—right?—a pint! A pint is a pint is a right is a pint!”
Becky’s eyes were blue, her hair blonde. Blonde hair and blue eyes: that was the prettiest, I’d always said, as if those colours conferred the essence of Barbie. I was at an age, almost, when I’d stopped playing with dolls and stuffed animals.
“A pint is a pint is a pint, alright? A pint is a pint is a pine is a tree is a pea is a nut is a—want some?” Becky thrust her finger deep into the goopy-thick peanut butter, stirring with a tight motion of her hand. “Huh? Want some? Huh? You’re not answering me!” Becky stamped her foot. “Mommy! She’s not answering me!”
Her mother cursed at the cookbook. “What the fuck...”
“Mommy mommy mommy ma . . .” Becky seemed enamoured of this new sound. She played with it, toyed with it, her lips remaining flaccid at the end: “Mommy mommy mommy ma... Mommy mommy mommy ma...”
“One second, okay, Becky? One second.”
Becky was three years older than me. We went to the same school, although she was housed in the ‘Special Ed’ program with all the other kids like her: the other ‘Special’ kids; the other kids who fit in that gap, that pause, the potent hesitation.
My mother forbade me to say the word. I must say ‘Special,’ she warned, even though I’d mean that other word. Even though both words would mean the same thing—the same people—the same strange way they laughed when nothing was funny, and stared while everyone else was learning not to look (not directly); the way, too, they made noises and bleeps and huffs as if we couldn’t hear—as if they could just say and do whatever came into their minds, which were dumb.
Those kids rode to school, all together, in a small special bus.
“No thanks, Becky,” I answered. “I don’t want—”
“Mommy!”
“—any.”
“She said no! She said NO!”
Becky’s mother banged her fist on the counter. “What is it!” Her pink headband held back her hair; I could see the line where her face changed colour—where the makeup ended and her skin began. “What’s the problem!” She shoved the cook- book, starting a chain reaction.
“Mommy-mommy!” Becky said, pointing to the counter’s edge; her finger was slick with peanut butter smoothed by saliva. “Mommy-mommy!”
“Shit!”
The cookbook, which was shoved by Becky’s mom, had pushed the bowl, which had pushed the bag of flour, which now was falling.
“Fuck!”
Her mother continued to curse, a whole long list of forbidden words.
“God damn it!”
Becky clapped as the bag of flour burst. She said it was pretty, like snow before the dogs had pissed on it.
The visits continued, once a week for two months, each one with this same pattern: argue with my mom, bike to the cathedral, get through the hours with Becky. Spring grew warm during those weeks. The Mexican gardeners swooned when they saw me; they also swooned at mothers who jogged past, their bodies zipped tight in pink track suits. The gargoyles vomited water on the days after rain.
During that time, I celebrated my twelfth birthday, excluding Becky from the party, of course. My friends gave me pop music cassette tapes (Strip, Like a Virgin, Love is a Battlefield, etc.) all wrapped with pink paper and scissor-curled plastic ribbon. In the same week as my birthday, the cathedral’s bushes budded then bloomed: lilac, pink, fuchsia, yellow. For the first time, I was drawn to the yellow bushes most. The pink flowers, always my favourite, now seemed stupidly obvious. Unlike the pink’s insipid hue, the yellow petals seemed alluring, saturated—so fully saturated, their colour threatened to drip into liquid. I crushed a petal be- tween my fingers; the pigment stained my skin.
By the end of the month, the bushes had turned shaggy with green leaves. That’s when the kids from high school found fertilized pockets of privacy and I found them doing ‘things’ under the drooping branches. One of my friends, whose sister was in high school, whispered about ‘oral sex’; I imagined those kids there, at the cathedral, kissing with their faces suctioned: oral sex. I imagined them kissing, then talking, and talking, and talking, and I didn’t know what she meant by ‘zipper fuck’ but I didn’t ask. I didn’t even make that sound with my mouth: zipper fuck.
The last time I went to Becky’s house, she was dancing outside, on a marble pedestal beside the front stairs. Her ringletted blonde hair was frizzed in the humidity.
“Hey Marianne! What’s black and white and red all over?” Her pelvis punched up three times: red—all—over. She moved like a Solid Gold dancer: lewd without any allure.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“A newspaper!” she squealed. “It’s read all over!” She hopped and clapped. “It’s read!” She wiggled (all over), ending with her hands on her hips, one knee bent, chest thrust out. “Hey Marianne!” she called.
“What.”
“How many balls can a boy carry?”
“I don’t know.”
“Three! One in his hands and two in his sacs! Hey Marianne!”
“What.”
Becky stopped her compulsive squirm-dance. “Marianne? Where do beavers live?”
“Beavers?” I asked, bored. I straddled my bike seat, sliding imperceptibly to the right, reminding myself of the pleasant sensation I’d recently discovered. “I dunno. . . ” My thin flip-flops dug into the gravel driveway; their thong cut into the skin between my toes.
“I can’t remember,” she continued. “Because bears live in a cave and wolves live in a den but I can’t remember where beavers live... Bears, wolves, beavers... bears, wolves, beavers . . . where do beavers live? Marianne! Where do—”
“In a dam.”
“A what?”
“A dam.”
“No, you’re wrong.”
“It’s a dam, Becky.”
Her eyes bulged. “Ooooo,” she said, lewd and squirming.
“What..?”
“Dam...” She articulated clearly now, her mouth working itself distinctly. “Dam... dam... damn... damn... you said a curse!” She bit her bottom lip, her half-smile curved, exaggerated in its glee. “Oooo, you said a curse, you bad girl.”
And it was nothing, really. I said a curse: ‘damn.’ So what.
“So what,” I said. I was flushing, filled with her accusation. So what: I said a curse. My first curse: so what.
“So I never knew you were a bad girl.” She giggled, bringing her fingers to her lips, covering her mouth with one hand. With the other, she clutched at her skirt, hitching it up her thigh. Her panties were lavender, lined in pink.
I shifted on my bike seat as she jumped off the pedestal. She said she had a trick she wanted to show me.
“Marianne, how bad—”
“I won’t—”
“Why not!”
I spoke the rest slow, so slow: teeth bared, lips swollen and apart. “Because,” I said, “she’s a fucking retard.” I stared, defending those words.
“What - did - you - say?”
“I said,”—grotesque—“she’s a fucking retard.”
I stomped up the stairs, to my bedroom, which looked like hers. There, where she’d lain on her plush carpet, panties off, chuffing. The muscles were tight on her face, a succession of grimaces; nothing was loose except that sound from down, that wet and slurp. I stared at her face so as not to see the dark hair and then the pink. But I couldn’t help but sense it. You can’t help but sense it: that twitchy motion, the deeper motion, the slow wave that filled me. Her breath was soft and panting.
She offered me her fingers to smell afterward. To taste. Then she put them in her mouth and skipped downstairs.
“Do you want some peanut butter?” she called.
And it’s nothing, really: a coming-of-age story, unconscionably vile in its baldness and honesty. It’s nothing, except for one vital fact—the fact that this story is mine, and I choose to tell it. I choose to let it fill me with my necessary shame. »
“Coming of Age” is from Marianne Apostolides new book Voluptuous Pleasure: The Truth About the Writing Life (Book Thug, 2012).