Chapter Three

Jungle Drums

Chapter 3

Coming of Age

Adolescence came upon Abigail Mather like a bad dream. She woke up one morning with agonizing, cramping pains, the white sheets of her childbed [!!!] awash in blood. What was happening to her? “I thought I was dying,” she says now. “That I had done something terrible, and that God was punishing me…”

Scotch in coffee really isn’t as awful as it sounds. Abigail really despises Hilda. I always knew she thought Hilda was a fool, we both do, but I never before realized the depth of her contempt. This is really a surprise, and not as unpleasant a surprise as it should be. When I first learned that this book was being written, I knew that Abigail would manipulate the truth, as she always has, but I assumed that her sole purpose was to attract the attention of the world, as if she hadn’t had enough of that already. But really, already this stuff is so ludicrous, so trite, that I can see my sister winking, like the cynical old bawd she is. Who is she winking at? Me?

Abigail’s adolescence came upon the rest of us like a bad dream. We woke up one morning with jalopy tracks across our front lawn, outsized footprints in the flowerbeds, squashed tomatoes from our father’s garden piled in a telltale smelly heap beneath my sister’s tomato-fouled bedroom window, and the air, outside and in, tangy and gross with musk. When I say that from that time on, in the black of night, I sometimes heard outside the house the howling of animals who run in packs, the yowling of animals who hunt alone, I am not, strictly speaking, kidding around. This is actually how I remember things.

When she was out on bail and holed up with me, and the press besieged us night and day and camped out on our porch and we couldn’t use our own telephone, I felt rather as if I had gone back in time, to the familiar nightmare world of Abigail’s adolescence.

The implication that Mother did not prepare her daughters for the fact of menstruation is an actionable lie, or would be if Mother were still alive. But this is how my sister works. She loved our mother as much as I did, but Mother is gone now, and so, in Abigail’s mind, incapable of being wronged.

Mother prepared us by sending us to talk to Father, who prepared us by drawing diagrams on manila paper with a number two pencil. The picture he drew, again and again, was an excellent rendition of that cross-section of the female reproductive system that we see everywhere, in gynecologists’ offices and on tampon boxes, the one as familiar to us as the Bambi face in the “Famous Artists” ad.

I have never had a head for maps. I remember thinking it was interesting, and understanding that it was important, without being able to relate the map to any portion of my body. I still have great difficulty following maps. Spiritually I always face north.

We sat on the couch on either side of Father while he told us about our wombs and the little nests our bodies would soon begin to build and then discard. My mind kept wandering. I would have missed the whole thing except that Abigail’s attention was so thoroughly engaged that I couldn’t help homing in from time to time. She never took her eyes off the diagram and our father’s hands elaborating, shading. Her mouth hung open and she kept forgetting to breathe out, just like a three-year-old child, so that his lecture was punctuated by her explosive little sighs. She was rapt. “This is the egg chamber,” our father said, “and this is the long passageway leading from that chamber to the Great Hall…”

I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t actually say this. The way I remember it now, he spoke, really, to Abigail, while I hung around and eavesdropped in a desultory way. But that is unfair and, I believe, untrue. I believe he addressed us both, and turned to me as often as to my sister. Both our parents were scrupulous in the division of their attention. But of course he was really, really speaking only to her.

And she was listening as intently as a son would have listened to his father explain, for the first time, the mechanics of the rifle. Today we have naming of parts…

Not that it matters in the least, but I got mine first. I hid it from Abigail for three months. I don’t know why I did that. Partly self-protection, I suppose, because I expected her to be jealous and angry; partly the pleasure of secrecy, or, I should say, a twin’s pleasure in secrecy. Something you have to be a twin to appreciate.

When she found out about it she behaved, briefly and strangely, like a handmaiden, honoring me for it, and expecting me to honor myself. She ran and told Mother. I think she hoped we would hold some sort of ceremony. “Well,” Mother said, looking at me, smiling. “Dorcas is a woman now.”

“I am not,” I said.

“You are too,” Abigail said.

“No I’m not.” I was still small—I hadn’t begun to get my height yet—and scrawny. I didn’t even look like a girl, much less like a woman. I looked like a child, which is what I was, and knew it well. My body was built for running and climbing, not for having babies.

Abigail, in contrast, looked ripe when she was green. She was taller than me by a head and outweighed me by twenty pounds. At ten she was as moist and plump and dimpled as she had been as a baby; as she has been all her life. She still used baby talc. She still does. She has always had a baby smell, a sweet and intoxicating scent that makes you yearn, in an immediate, objectless way, and underneath the sweetness you detect the sour; and over the years the sourness grew more complex, jungly, powerful, and the sweetness stayed the same.

At ten she had the breasts of a plump man. You could tell they wanted to be real breasts, and would become real breasts if given half a chance. Mine were just pink disks stuck on a bony little chest, with no promise or inclination to become anything more. They looked like the suction cups of two toy arrows.

As to how I felt about this, I felt very little. I didn’t dread “becoming a woman.” I expected it to happen. But somehow it just didn’t seem very important. To put it baldly, I felt, and was, redundant.

But not sad, or left behind. Having Abigail for a sister made my “becoming a woman” unnecessary. Not impossible: just unnecessary. I could not have become Abigail’s sort of woman, but, after all, there are other sorts of women. Stella Mylonas, the chocolate-haired girl, was going to be a woman, and she was lithe and watchful, like a deer, and a sprinter, and the boys loved her. She got all the valentines in the Valentine Box. Abigail actually got very few. Stella had a collection of toy horses, wooden, plastic, bronze. Stella would be a beautiful woman. (I was wrong about this. She became a nice-looking woman with a trim figure. She was beautiful only as a child.)

And there were other girls, not pretty like Stella, but plump like my sister, who did not, like my sister, look purely functional; who were able to blush and giggle around boys, and give off their own weak, intermittent signals, and still operate on some level apart from the sexual. They were going to be women too.

But not like Abigail.