Busting Out

The end of Gloria’s childhood coincides with the Saint Bernard School’s spring break. On the Friday that marks the nineteen hundred and forty-second anniversary of Emanual’s passion, Gloria burgeons into adolescence. She wakes up to find she has stained her bedcovers with blood flowers. After that the seed of the Rabbit Clan is off to a running start. Not especially an early bloomer, but once she shows blood her lucky stars look down on her and see to it that the change happens swiftly and that she experiences it with minimum awkwardness.

She is reincarnated. The messages of fertility appear: an extra-oily luster to her tan and new thickness in the dappled jet and hazel waves of her hair. Although, after her father, she retains hairless, baby-smooth skin on her arms and legs, she grows a second head between her legs. Variegation applies to all her body hair. Like an iris, the little flower has streaks in her beard, silver and gold waves that glow in the dark of her purple-black cat nap. Under her arms and down in her vee there breeds a musty, fruity body odor, like rainy season in the tropics. Most noticeable is the change in her face. Those qualities of balance of feature and evenness of line are enhanced, raised to higher power. She wakes up one morning and her face has become timeless, with all the grace and sweetness of a child. But at the same time, with the right clothes, she could pass for twenty-seven.

By the time that June is busting out, the bombshell has shot up tall, full, and graceful as a rosebud on long legs. She’s head and shoulders above stalwart Miss Lord, a brow over her statuesque mother and just a hair from six-foot Harry, were he standing instead of six feet under, may his soul rest in peace.

“Look at you!” says everyone who sees her. “Aren’t you an eyeful!”

In the past, at school no matter what she did to appear to fit in, she was the oddball out. Now the developments which make her the first full-grown woman in her class are all too clear to her classmates. Seemingly overnight, she has outgrown the uniform that she purchased the previous September and with two weeks of the term left there is no time to order a new one. Her breasts fill out her jersey, her racy legs show. Most of all, the seasoning in her face makes her seem one to be looked up to and respected.

Now she becomes the school cool one. She takes up smoking and drinking black coffee in the Kronos Coffee Shop across the street from Saint Bernard’s, before and after class. Last to follow the gang at school, come final exam time for the seventh grade, the other girls are all at their wooden desks perspiring in their undershirts writing their essays while Gloria puts her answers down with offhanded calmness. Undergoing a revolution themselves, a rebirth in their bodies, her classmates appreciate her for the way she handles the passage. Her adult style and sophisticated attitude make them feel older to know her. On the morning of the history final, first Thalia Windrow, then Regina Robbins and Charlotte Becker, and finally Mary Ella Grenville, all come to sit in Glory’s booth at the Kronos and bask in her coolness.

Never one to look to other worlds for salvation, the feel of physical height and fullness gives Glory a sense of power in this one and a hell of a superiority complex. She’s been uptown and likes to show it. On the last day of the year, when the girls clean out their lockers and say goodbye to one another, Gloria comes in wearing a red silk tunic over black tights and eye makeup. “Why, with my kick, and the way I know how to use it, I have a good mind to chuck it all this summer, go uptown to the Cootie Club and join the Lush Life Revue as a show girl,” she brags, and they believe she’s just the one to do it.

Mature enough in the bustline to be a Cootie Cutie, maybe, but Miss Lord knows Gloria is young at heart and innocent about her own sexuality. Just a few months ago the sitter was pushing her to go out with boys, now she can’t warn her enough about them. A trio from a nearby prep school hang around the corner, waiting for Gloria so they can show off when she walks by. And lately she reports all sorts of strange men on the street stop her and try to say hello. Laudette tells her she must not consider talking to them for even a moment. She considers Laudette’s admonitions unnecessary. She has no intention of talking back. When men stop and stare, or talk to her, it makes her skittish. She gets the idea that they are interested in what she has under her clothes. And if she should stop to return their interest and imagine them undressed she suspects they would expect her to be at their mercy rather than the other way around.

In all her born days she’s never seen a penis in the flesh. So she thinks. Once when she was too young to remember, she hid in her mother’s closet and saw Harry Swan raise his love finger to her mother. This, though, is like something from another life. It’s in the background of her mind. In the beginning of the summer, she visits Thalia. Sharing a common curiosity, the girls go to the Main Branch of the Big Apple Public Library to look for photographs of genitals in medical texts. What they see makes them cringe: the examples in the books are of rare diseases and horrid deformities. With the idea that truth is beauty they go to the museum to look at paintings and stone statues on the theme of male magnificence. But the little drops of marble or paint meant to signify the crux of it are hardly enough to get worked up about.

Life is lonely at the top. It is a rare afternoon when the Bee goddess gets to feel the joy of girl-friendship. Silly girls, the two giggle over ice-cream sodas in the Museum Cafe, whispering about one-eyed monsters and little pee-wees.

But it’s not all laughs. Gloria gets tingles when she thinks seriously about the opposite sex. As boys seem too young and men too old, she turns her fancy on herself. She handles her breasts, runs her hands through her new head of hair, and feels spasmodic reverence for her womanhood. Is what they’ve got between their legs weaker or stronger than what she’s got between hers? She swears she will never let it compromise her independence, and feels her Daddy-o, always one to enjoy the relative and ideal positions the sexes occupied, smiling down on her from heaven.

The warm weather which spikes Gloria’s blossoming also increases her feeling of license. For the summer at least she will be free of ungoddessly SCUBA gear. Like her mother at her age, she has some urge toward showing off her body. She startles Laudette one hot humid Friday in July when she breezes through the kitchen on her way out for a weekend at Thalia’s beach house wearing a yellow sunsuit from the year gone by. Like her uniform, it is far too small. Laudette winces when she sees the baby’s legs all the way up to above her knees. What’s more, she has on makeup, some applied conventionally and some not, suggestive off-colors on her eyes and mouth to make them stand out. And there is paint on her finger and toenails. The sitter, who now has to look up to face the Baby, stamps her foot and hollers like a siren.

“No child I’m sitting for is going out of this house looking like that! Baby, how many times do I have to tell you, it’s one thing to flaunt it when you’re a baby, but quite another when you’ve got development on you! From now on I’m going to see that you wear dresses like a proper young lady should, and stop painting yourself up like some sort of heathen party girl. For starters you need the right foundation garment.”

Laudette reaches up on top of the refrigerator and takes down a package. “Here, I bought you this when I was visiting my sister Florene in Kingsborough yesterday.”

Gloria pokes her hand into the bag and pulls out a pair of starchy white cups, cardboard cotton and wire, sewn onto elastic strips that end in a hook and eye. She laughs so hard her mascara begins to run. “Lawdy Lord! Don’t scare me! I’ll die before I put it on. What’s the point of my having teats if I let you stuff them into this?”

“The point of your teats! You only look like you’re grown up, but you talk like a baby who doesn’t know anything about the facts of life. You have a lot to learn, let me tell you, Miss Smarty Pants. The way you look can get you into a mess of trouble. Just because a girl goes for jazz that doesn’t mean she has to go around dressed like a floozy, letting it all hang loose. Now put this on or I swear you’ll be sorry. There are health reasons, too. Without the proper support your good points will be falling down to your belly button like a pair of salamis. And if you don’t believe me take a look at the photographs in this natural geographic book here. Do you see these native girls? See what going without a brassiere can do.”

“In these tribes girls’ teats get stretched because the men and babies pull on them all they want,” Gloria argues calmly. And in a surge of physical expressionism, lets the straps of her sun dress fall off her shoulders. Her budding glands of milk and pleasure see the light of day. “Salamis, Lawdy? Stop kidding me. Get a load of these, I’m finally not a kid anymore!”

“Never, ever show your nipples in public! Not even if you have a screaming baby to feed!” Laudette gives Glory a slap on the wrist to let her know she means business. “Now if you don’t get upstairs and put on something more fitting, and wash off that paint and polish, you’re not going anywhere this weekend.” Sniff. “And what’s this?” Sniff sniff. “Is this cigarettes I smell on you? Oh my goodness! You’ll stunt your growth! The Dipster always said, ‘Where there’s smoke, the hell of fire water can’t be far behind.’ That settles it, Baby, you’re not leaving this house. No matter what. Now go up to your room.”

Whatever Glory wants Glory is used to getting. She frustrates Laudette by knocking on her mother’s door, thus forcing the sitter to defend her decision in front of Sarah. “Mummy, Lawdy says I can’t go out because she smells smoke on my breath. Is that fair?”

“It’s not just that,” the big sitter grumbles, “if someone would look at the way her daughter’s dressed and the way she’s painted up like the whore of Hanging Garden City, maybe she would come back down to earth and remember what a jungle it is out there and say what can happen to little schoolgirls in tight clothes. They get in tight spots! And someone ought to tell her to wear a brassiere because if she doesn’t every male in the species will figure her on having loose morals.”

Sarah, for all the muck she’s mired in, can’t believe how fast time passes. Yet, a mere thirty-one, she is young enough to remember herself at Gloria’s age. When early eros came to her stifled psyche, her parents greeted it as if it were a plague. They tried to brainwash her, but she corresponded with the Freethinker Press and got packages of poetry, humanist essays, and pornography. No doubt she would have been smoking and wearing party dresses too were any such things available in Zion. Gloria, you’ve grown up before I had a chance to get to know you. Is that fair?

The split peach knows religion is no help in stilling physical urges. If anything, the presence of a taboo only increases the attractiveness of sin. Restraints on sensual expression make sex seem more desirable than it already is. The best advice she can give her daughter is none: let Gloria remain free of preconceived notions about goodness and badness.

Sarah disapproves of the way Laudette lectures Gloria. The sitter’s sermons, increasingly fundamental and deprecatory, are similar to those of her father. On occasion she warns Laudette about it, but it does no good. The big woman talks back to her, but not directly. “I understand someone around here has a dispensation from morals. If someone hires a sitter, it only stands to reason someone wants the sitter to do her best to set a good example for the baby.”

Sarah accepts it because she has no choice. Firing Laudette is out of the question. Laudette is family. In fact, without Laudette there would be no family, just two pretty women going their separate ways. Anyway, Sarah knows Miss Lord has a generous spirit and loves her for it, and knows, even though she is constantly condemning her, that Laudette still loves her too and cares for her. And Sarah has practical reasons for not wanting to provoke Laudette any further. She counts the sitter as of inestimable value in her own further quest for freedom.

“Well can I go or not?” Gloria breaks her mother’s deliberative reverie. “Thalia’s waiting, she doesn’t have all day, you know.”

“Gloria, I would rather you didn’t smoke and that dress doesn’t really fit right. Maybe you should change it.”

“Mummy, I really don’t think so.”

Sarah ventures gently to contradict Laudette, “Actually, Miss Lord, for a weekend at the seashore I think the dress might do. What do a few ounces of cotton, a few dabs of paint matter? As for the smoking, well, we’re not going to be hypocrites, are we? I won’t tell her not to use the filthy things until I swear off them myself. And if we try to prevent her by punishment we’re only going to turn her into a liar about doing it, and make the thing we’re trying to turn her away from seem more desirable, don’t you think?”

“No,” says Laudette, facing aside, “I don’t agree, not at all, not one bit, whatsoever.”

Gloria wins on the stalemate. While the big sitter talks to the wall, and her mother starts saying her “cheese”, she skips out of town dressed for the sun, snapping her fingers and tapping her toes.