THE FIRST PORNOGRAPHY

It was hot the day of the school swimming carnival, a languid summer day smelling slightly acidic like the juice of an ant squashed between your fingertips, and I was signed up for the 200 meters.

I have always loved to swim. I swim very slowly but I can swim for hours at a time without tiring. I love the breathy rhythm of it, the way the surface of the water creeps above your ears, obliterating the world.

There were whispers about the photograph before anyone had seen it. Apparently the red-haired boy had it in his bag, a photograph of a woman with a carrot in her vagina. I lay on a towel in the sun and thought about how it would be to put a carrot in my vagina. I thought about the candles I sometimes smuggled into my bedroom and used late at night. I knew a carrot would be essentially the same, but somehow the idea of a vegetable inserted into someone’s vagina played on my mind.

I thought that if there was a photo, there would have to have been a photographer. Someone watching the woman insert the carrot into her vagina. I wondered if she had gone into the next room, like an artist’s model, and emerged with the carrot inserted, removing the light cotton sheet from around her shoulders, then lying or sitting on the divan with the carrot neatly in place.

My race was next. I had never been in a race before. I had never worn my swimsuit in front of my peers. I wondered suddenly if I should have signed up for the race at all. I still had the usual exemption note from my mother; would it be too late now to table it and have myself scratched?

I was wondering this when someone brought me the photograph. Not a real photograph but a picture of one, torn from a magazine. Sepia. Old. It reminded me of the elegantly posed portraits of our great-grandmothers, only this grandmother was not wearing any clothes and there was a carrot in her vagina.

I needed to take my school dress off. I was wearing my bathing suit underneath. Everybody else had already changed into their suits and lay in the lazy spread of the hot bleachers or flat on their backs with their knees spread to make an even tan.

I could never lie like that.

I folded the photograph into the novel that I had been reading, even though Wendy Jones was waiting to see it, and stashed it deep inside my schoolbag.

I pulled the sack of check fabric over my head. The corner of it snagged on my glasses. New ones, pink government-issue glasses with little upward curls at each edge. In a few days I would lose them as I always did and it would be six months before I could get a new pair. I wondered when my mother would tire of replacing them. I folded them roughly and shoved them in beside my novel.

I stood at the starting block. The other girls wore bikinis and had sleek flat chests and skinny hips. I was too round. I was aware of my new breasts, which were already so large that you could hold a pencil under them. I had read about this in someone’s magazine. Are my breasts too floppy? Answering the multiple-choice questions when no one was looking.

I missed the starting gun but I plummeted anyway, a moment’s delay and then the fat slap of water, the bliss of submerged oblivion.

I thought about the woman with the carrot in her vagina. Did the cameraman adjust the carrot, moving it a little this way or that, pushing or pulling? I wondered how these things could be orchestrated. I wondered if the woman had family, if she told her mother about the photographer, if she married him or perhaps had children with him. I wondered if the photographer might have been a woman. Would it be easier to have a woman moving your carrot a little farther in, a little farther out? I wondered about the hundreds of people who had seen this photograph since then. I thought about that woman with the carrot and her ability to bring a whole new generation of teenagers to orgasm.

I saw the blue-tiled wall approaching. Half the race over. I kicked and my arms windmilled and I reached out for the tiles, felt them beneath my fingers, was about to turn and head for the finish line when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

I bobbed to the surface, panting. One of the teachers was leaning into the pool and tapping my head. There was a waterfall of hair in my eyes but I could see that there were no other swimmers in the pool. The others had finished their race. I was only halfway through.

“I can finish,” I gasped. It was only another fifty meters.

“They’re waiting to start the next race. You can get out at this end now. Better not hold the races up.”

I nodded, ducked under the little colored floaties marking the lanes. I emerged from the pool in my one-piece swimsuit and everyone was watching me. I knew that I should be embarrassed, but I wasn’t. I sat with my towel and my schoolbag beside me and the photo of the woman with a carrot that I would sneak home and stash under my bed. I had just procured my first piece of pornography. There would be many more.