CHILDHOOD

Blacktown 1970

The wonderful thing about felt pictures is the way you can rub them on your upper lip and they feel like comfort. They are simple shapes cut out of bright colors. The felt sticks to itself with a satisfying grab. If you get very close all the colors blend into each other and the shapes disappear. A horse is no longer a horse. A house is not a house.

I have become obsessive about felt pictures. I lie on the scratchy carpet, pushing my body down against the short pile. The television is on, Playschool or Mr. Squiggle or Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men or some other burble of music and rhyme. My hips press against the carpet and the delightful pressure of a full bladder, full of milk no doubt, a lovely innocent pressure and the feel of sunlight burning a window shape on my calves. Red horse, orange horse, yellow, all of a palette. I save the blues and greens for the other corner of the felt board. I hoard fish and crabs and grass and green houses for the cool color end of things. I am sleepy and the colors blend into each other. They blend into the throb of my bladder and when I cross my legs over each other there is an even greater pleasure. I can hear my mother clattering through the washing up.

Color. I see color. I feel heat and pressure and the edges of everything become indistinct. I hover at the edge of a thought. Perhaps I will fall asleep midhorse. I arrange the horses one next to another next to another. All the orange horses. Perhaps I will just let go, urinate ecstatically on the scratchy carpet. The pressure builds, my eyelids droop, I see orange and red and there is a smell to it, a burnt caramel sweetness and I breathe in deeply, wondering what it could be.

When I fall over the edge I am surprised. Pleased. It is as if I have succumbed to color. I am filled with it, and full of the idea of smell. My skin is burning with all kinds of blue. The down on the back of my neck is sweet as honey. My body pulses in the aftermath of this transformation.

 

 

This was my first orgasm. I can name it now. I can relive it. But back then, at the beginning of things, there was no line between the colors and the heat and the scent. After this moment I fell in love with the process of making pictures with felt. I came back to this activity again and again and again and again. Felt pictures first and then, when my mother thought I was old enough, oil paints meted out onto the upturned lid of a margarine container.

“Not too much linseed oil.”

The oil thinned the color, made it slick and shiny, thin on the canvas. The oil painting was something we did together, my mother and I. My sister was too fiercely independent to sit and listen to instruction. She was naturally talented. She painted horses and dragons and princesses. She made paper dolls for me to play with and the most elaborate dresses painted on cartridge paper. Little paper tabs to fold over the bare shoulders of the beautiful paper women.

I painted till my body hummed with color. I pressed my knees together and breathed in the heady scent of turpentine till my head began to spin. I didn’t know about sex but I knew that I should never tell about the thing the colors did to my body. I lay under a blanket and turned the thick glossy pages of an art book. Chagall blue, my favorite color in the world, and my fist pressed firmly against my pubis. Blue and pleasure, that was all there was to the world until my sister ripped the blanket from my body and left me exposed to the bare gray light of the day.

“I know what you’re doing,” she chanted. “I know, I know, I know.”

But I didn’t know.

No one spoke to me about masturbation. I didn’t know that what I did had anything to do with sex. I didn’t know that people touched each other to make this happen without the smell of paint and the vision of color.

My house was sexless. There were five industrious women, and my grandfather hiding invisible in his room. My grandmother sat above us like a queen bee and the rest of the women listened and obeyed. My father was absent. My sister says I should remember the presence of my father, but it is gone as if the short time he was with me in childhood has been erased. That part of the tape was exposed to a magnet or the sun.

When I discovered the physical way of achieving orgasm, the full knowledge that certain pressures of my fingers would produce such an overwhelmingly pleasurable result, I could not stop doing it. I became an expert at it, finding places that would be private, times when I could sneak away and would not be missed.

Bath times, quick trips to the toilet, and in the evenings, drowsy from the day.

I shared a room with my sister and I practiced staying awake till I was certain that she would be asleep. I was stealthy as a ninja, one finger rubbing so gently that the bed wouldn’t even creak. On the weekend I could sometimes find a quiet spot, private, secluded. There was a crawl space beside the house, overgrown with jasmine and gated by two gardenia bushes pressing their branches together. This was my favorite place, the summer scent, perfumes clamoring, the fat buzz of bees droning sleepy in my ear.

I pulled down my shirt, exposing my shoulders to the scratch of leaves and the finger creep of a lazy breeze. I imagined I was naked. I hadn’t even taken my knickers all the way off. I pulled them to one side and they were a damp obstruction to be worked around. There would be grass in my hair, twin plaits, all that wiriness pulled tight. My skirt would suck the damp from the soil. I would be in disarray when I pushed my way back into the world, blinking at the slap of sunlight. There was no other human being in my imaginings. There was just the sense of all the elements settling on my flesh. The scent alone whispered love. White flowers, sharp and sweeter than honey, a drugged haze of scent pulling me down. There was the Chagall blue behind my closed eyelids. When my mother called I was a long way away, drifting toward a precipice without hurry. With the sound of her voice I was rushing, scared by the possibility of discovery. The fear was a kind of excitement, hurrying toward a quick, barely satisfying climax. I dug my fingers into the soil, masking the smell of my juices with earthworm castings and loamy grit.