Fall 1973
DURING HOMEROOM ON THE FIRST day of fifth grade, the girl sitting at the desk behind me whispered words I could barely hear: “menstruation . . . gynecologist . . . copulation . . .” I knew what the first word meant. I had learned it that summer from my friend Eleanor. Her older sister had shown her in the bathroom. The idea of it grossed me out, but I also wanted it to happen to me. I wanted anything that was grown-up. I couldn’t wait to drink coffee, have ID cards, walk downtown by myself. Bleeding every month had the added bonus of being something boys couldn’t do. They thought they were the best at everything. Menstruation was so private that my mother and sister had never said anything to me about it. (After I found out about menstruation from Eleanor, Claudia did tell me that the huge boxes our mother kept in the linen closet were called “sanitary napkins” and explained how they worked.)
It was my first day at that school. I didn’t know anybody there. I sat at my new desk, too scared to listen to all the names the teacher was calling out. Those three big words I thought I’d heard stayed in my head. If the other two were anything like menstruation, then I wanted to learn them too. I turned around. The girl behind me was Oriental with long black hair and gold posts in her ears. Back home, I hadn’t known anybody my age who had pierced ears. She was watching the teacher take roll. She didn’t notice me looking at her. Confused, I turned forward again. Maybe I hadn’t really heard anything. In front of me, most of the kids were doodling on their desks or passing notes to their friends. Then I heard the voice again, whispering close to my ear. “Cunnilingus . . .”
My family had moved to Mill Valley in August. Before that we lived in Middlebury, Vermont. On a snowy night in March, my parents called Jamie and Claudia and me together in the living room. Standing in front of us, my father told us that the college hadn’t given him tenure. Claudia turned to me and said that meant he couldn’t teach there anymore. My father said he had applied for other jobs and had been hired by the College of Marin. I listened carefully while he spoke, storing the new word “tenure.” He sounded the way he always did when we were all together, like he was giving a lecture to his history class.
“Any questions?” he asked when he was finished.
“Why California?” my brother asked. Ever since Jamie had turned sixteen he sounded like he thought he was talking to the most retarded person in the world. He got up from the sofa, pulled the wire screen away from the fireplace, and jabbed at the burning logs with a poker.
My parents gave each other their look, then my father sat down in an armchair and crossed one leg over the other. “Well, for one thing, I’m fond of it. You’ll remember I was stationed in Oakland before I was shipped out to Japan during the war. That’s the Korean War, not World War II,” he said to me. I glared at him. Of course I knew which war he meant. He had told us his stories about the Occupation millions of times. My father was older than the parents of other kids my age. Sometimes I worried because he didn’t seem to remember the things he had already said. “The Bay Area is terrific,” he told us. “You’ll all love it.”
For a long time the damp wood hissed in the fire. Nobody looked at anybody else. Why weren’t Jamie or Claudia saying anything? Then I realized they had already guessed. They had probably even talked about it together. That meant I was the only one who was surprised by our father’s news. I felt scared, like during a thunderstorm when the lightning was very bright and the thunder sounded like we were being blown up.
I couldn’t keep still. “What about Eleanor and Mary? How will I see them?”
“You won’t, Laura,” my mother said. “Where we’re going is very far away. You’ll have to say goodbye to them.” I wished I hadn’t said anything. My mother was in one of her bad moods. “You just have to get used to it,” she said. “We’ll probably never come back to this godforsaken town.” She crossed her legs, just like my father, and twirled a finger in her short curled hair. “Don’t worry, sweetie, you’ll make new friends right away.” She said that gently, like she was being comforting.
I stared at her. I didn’t feel better. I felt worse. “Why?” I asked. “Why do we have to leave?” Then I started to cry. I thought about the soda fountain my mother took me to sometimes after school where she ordered a brownie à la mode and I ordered a vanilla milkshake and bounced on the seat in the booth. I thought about sledding down the wide hills of the campus (except lately Jamie wouldn’t take me). And I thought about our attic, full of old boxes and furniture, where Eleanor and Mary and I went to play “Mission: Impossible.” I wiped my nose on my sleeve.
Claudia looked like she wanted to cry too. She was just a year younger than Jamie, but she cried a lot, especially at the movies. My mother rubbed her foot against the head of the bearskin rug where Jamie was sitting. Under his breath, Jamie said to me, “You’re such a baby.” He poked at the logs some more, sending sparks up the flue. My father cleared his throat.
“We have to go to California, Laura, because no one will give me a job here. I have to work. I have to bring home the bacon for all of you, right? Right?” He tilted his head, trying to catch my eye. I nodded. I wiped my nose on my other sleeve.
“Laura, for God’s sake,” my mother said, frowning at me.
“We all have to pitch in and help make this move as easy as possible,” my father went on. “Will you do that for me?” I nodded again. I felt bad for my father. He stayed at the college late. Sometimes he didn’t come home until after I was in bed. Now after all his hard work they didn’t want him. It was unfair. Maybe his job in California would be better. But I still didn’t want to go.
“Good, so that’s settled,” my father said, clapping his hands on his knees. “Why don’t we all go bowling?”
“I hate bowling,” Jamie said. He threw the poker into the fire, stood up, and left the house, slamming the door shut behind him.
I wanted to follow Jamie, but I wouldn’t dare slam the door. I liked him best when we were alone. He explained things to me, like why Mary was sometimes mean to me (because she was jealous I was friends with Eleanor). The poker lay half sticking out of the flames. I was afraid it might melt like the Wicked Witch of the West. If I ran through the snow after Jamie, he’d just tell me to go back to the house.
Claudia said, “We’re still going to Mackinac in June like always, aren’t we?”
My mother crouched in front of the fire and fished out the poker with the long tongs. “Of course we are,” she answered.
“Is it true it never snows in California?” I asked my father. “Will we get to wear shorts every day?”
That first day at my new school, I waited for the bell to ring for recess. It wasn’t hard to find the girl who sat behind me. For one thing, nobody else in the class was Oriental (though there were two dark-skinned boys I guessed were Mexican). For another thing, she didn’t run outside onto the blacktop with the rest of the kids, where they yelled and jostled each other and broke into groups to play kickball and hopscotch. I wished I knew how to join them. The homeroom teacher had told the class that I was new from Vermont, but nobody had said hi to me. They already had their friends that they hadn’t seen all summer. So far, I didn’t like this school at all. In my school back home there had been fewer kids in my class, and the teacher came around to our desks to help us. I watched the other kids through the wide back windows chasing each other and sharing secrets in twos and threes by the chain-link fence, imagining myself out there with them. I would be the fastest runner, the one everybody wanted on their team. I wondered if in California they knew how to play dodgeball. That was my favorite game, even if I wasn’t that good at it.
When I looked back around the empty classroom, even our teacher had left. At the side of the room, the girl who sat behind me climbed onto a window seat that had yellow and orange cushions. She settled into one corner, putting all the pillows behind her against the wall. Then she opened up a book and laid it on her bent knees. It looked like a grown-up book, heavy with a hard cover. She turned a page. The sun glinted on her dark hair. She didn’t seem to care if I stayed or left.
The classroom looked huge with nobody else there, and it was quiet too. I didn’t like being alone in the middle of it. I stood up and went to the window seat, threading my way between the desks. She didn’t look at me even when I pulled myself up and sat cross-legged facing her. I watched her eyes moving back and forth. She really was reading. I could never sit still long enough to get very far in a book. Anything I had to do sitting down made me fidget. I was afraid something important might happen somewhere else and I wouldn’t be there for it.
“What are you reading?” I asked her.
“Small Changes,” she said without looking up. Her eyes kept moving across and back. She turned another page.
“What’s that?” I asked.
She raised her head. I saw from the way she looked straight into my eyes that she didn’t think I was dumb for asking. “It’s a novel by Marge Piercy. My mom’s CR group read it.”
“Oh,” I said, even more lost but not wanting to say so. “Well, what’s it about?”
“My mom says it’s about women who liberate themselves from the patriarchy and have all kinds of relationships. She says it’s a life-changing story. So far it’s kind of boring.”
“I’d probably like it,” I said, trying to memorize her description for later. I leaned forward and rested my forearms on my knees, hoping to hear more.
We watched each other for a few seconds. I could hear the shouts and laughter of the kids playing outside, but I didn’t look away. Then she looked down at her book. “Maybe you would.”
She opened the book to a page where the spine had been broken and passed it over. She pointed to a short paragraph. I read, “She became aware his impotence had vanished when still lying beside her he guided his penis gently between her labia and slowly began to slide into her. She tried to say no, but she could not speak. She shook her head wildly and tried to push him back, but he held her with the full strength of his hands and arms until he was buried in her with his legs scissored about hers.”
I could feel my face turning red. It made me uncomfortable reading this sexy scene in front of this girl. She might see how interested I was. I didn’t know what “labia” was, but I could guess. I started to read it again.
“There’s another good part on page seventy-four, if you want to look,” she told me.
Surprised, I raised my head. Her face looked hopeful and a little pink. Right then I saw we were just the same. She was curious too.
“Where’d you get this?” I asked.
“It’s my mom’s.”
Her mother must have lent it to her, or else she had stolen it from her mother’s bookshelves. Either way, I was amazed.
“Does this have those words you were whispering?” I asked.
“Nobody uses those words in novels.” She sounded just like Jamie. “My mom has this other book, Our Bodies, Ourselves. It even has pictures of women giving birth and stuff. Of course, you can always look in the dictionary.”
“Oh, well, yeah.” Actually, I hadn’t thought of that. I’d seen a large dictionary lying open on a stand in the school library. I could look up all the bad words I wanted without anybody knowing what I was doing. Maybe this girl would come with me and help with the spellings. Maybe we would find some words even she didn’t know. “What’s your name?” I handed back her book.
“Min. That’s M-I-N. It’s a Korean name, but I’m not Korean. I was adopted.” She riffled the pages of her book with her thumb.
I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “I’m Laura.”
“I know.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, either. We watched each other, while the clock on the wall ticked loudly and I heard a boy outside yell, “Hey, pea-brain, over here!”
“Do you want to play Scissors, Paper, Stone?” I asked.
“Okay,” she answered, a huge smile on her face. I’d never made anybody so happy just by asking them to play a game before. She scooted closer and sat cross-legged too and put out her fist.
“One, two, three, go!” I counted. She had paper, I had scissors.
“I won,” I said, and I wetted my two scissors fingers on my tongue and slapped her hand hard.
“Hey! What’d you do that for?” Min pulled her hand back to her chest, covering it with her other hand.
“It’s how you play,” I answered.
“It hurts,” Min said.
“Well, yeah, if you lose.”
“Are you making this up?” she asked me.
“No. Me and my friends played all the time. Isn’t that how you play?”
“No.”
My mother had warned me that people in California were different from the rest of us. “Okay,” I said, “here’s how it goes. If it’s paper and stone, you slap the other person’s hand with your whole hand.” I slapped her hand. “If it’s stone and scissors, you punch them on the shoulder.”
“Don’t show me,” Min commanded.
I dropped my hand and waited, starting to feel scared. Now she wouldn’t like me. Min was frowning, thinking hard. I wondered how you could play the game differently. With Mary and Eleanor and me, we played to hurt each other. That was part of what made us friends.
“Well,” she said, “can you play it the way we play it here?”
I nodded. I was sure if I said no, she wouldn’t talk to me anymore.
“Okay. Let’s start,” she said. We held up our fists. “One, two, three, shoot.”
We had the exact same thing as before, scissors and paper. I grinned at her. She didn’t notice.
She said, “Okay, now you open your scissors and put my paper in between.” Min moved the side of her hand against the tips of my fingers. I parted them, and she moved her hand right in. “Now cut.” I tried to close and open my two fingers around her hand. It felt like chewing with my fingers instead of with my teeth. It made me tense, the way I got when I was in the front during a dodgeball game and I had to be extra alert. I looked up at Min. Her head was bowed and her hair was falling in her face. I couldn’t tell if her eyes were closed or not.
We started over. This time I had stone and she had paper. She covered my fist with her open hand and held on to it. “See?” she asked, looking up. “Paper wraps stone. That’s how it’s supposed to go.”
“Are you making this up?” I asked her. She smiled. I was teasing, but I also didn’t really see the point of playing this way. It seemed silly. But I wasn’t bored.
Her hand over mine was very warm. Her fingers were long and thin, and she didn’t have chewed fingernails like I did. I wanted to put my other hand over hers, and her other one over mine, and my bottom one over hers, stacking our hands, changing the game. But I pulled my fist away.
I pointed at the book in her lap. “So is that a dirty book?”
She smiled, just a little. “No.”
“Then why did you take off the paper cover?”
“So I wouldn’t mess it up. All the other girls are passing around Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Have you read that?”
I shook my head. “No, but I want to.”
“Well, I can lend it to you. You’d probably like it. She moves to a new town too.”
“Can I also borrow Small Changes when you’re finished with it?” I asked.
Min grinned, looking into my eyes again. I grinned happily back. We were going to be friends, I knew it. Here I was, sitting with a girl named Min near a mountain called Tamalpais in a state where palm trees grew all over the place. Everything was new, and for the first time since we had moved I was excited, even about coming back to school the next day. I remembered Eleanor and Mary, wondering if I was being disloyal. I’d written each of them every week since we had cried saying goodbye, but I’d only gotten one letter from Eleanor. I imagined them going to Mary’s house to play together after their first day of school. Missing them made me want this new friend even more.
The school bell rang. The rest of the class lined up outside and started coming back into the room, still talking and laughing. Min jumped down off the bench, taking her book. I watched her, wanting to talk with her about everything. I wanted to make pretend ID cards with her and play “Mission: Impossible.” Her black hair was almost as long as mine. She walked to her desk and stuffed the book in her backpack. She didn’t speak to anybody else. Seeing that, I felt sorry for her, and I also felt glad. Her calmness amazed me. When she sat down, I remembered the games I had watched the other kids playing at the beginning of recess. I looked outside the big windows. Near the playground area, two boys kicked a red gym ball back and forth between them.