Divide what you have into three equal sections. Grab the right section with your right hand and the left section with your left hand, letting the middle section hang free (for now).
Shame is hard to hold in one hand, its gristle sharp and slimy at the same time. My mother is telling me not to walk that way, not to talk so loud. She’s researching hormone treatments to stunt my growth because I’m five-feet-nine-inches tall in sixth grade and she’s afraid I’ll be a giant. My wrists stick beyond shirt-sleeves. My ankles stick below the legs of my pants. I know I don’t fit the family. I’m different. I’m not right.
These are the messages I hold in one hand.
Hold tight.
What happens when breasts grow early is that other people notice, especially men. At parties, at the grocery store, at the post office in our small town, men touch my arm, crowd me in lines, carry my groceries. The town pediatrician squeezes my breasts for lumps when I am nine years old.
In the New England winter, the neighbors’ garage becomes a movie house where I run the projector on “old movie night.” The black-and-white actors walk on a distant screen, film clattering in the sprockets. At intermission I try to dodge the old men who circle the hors d’oeuvre table and try to touch my butt or brush against my braless breasts. When I mention the way the men act to my sisters, they say, “Oh, that’s Mr. So-and-So,” as if how long he’s been misbehaving excuses him, as if I’m the one with the problem for saying something out loud.
In the left hand, hold silence, greasy and clotted. Let the middle section hang free (for now).
A girl at school changes the words to a camp song:
My Daddy lies over the ocean,
My Daddy lies over the sea,
My Daddy lies over my Mommy,
And that’s what became of me.
When I get home that day, I chase my mother who is retreating into her office and sing it for her because my pubescent mind thinks the song clever. In the dim autumn light, her face drains like the painting called The Scream, and she turns around and walks away.
Her office door closes.
Rumor has it that an eighth-grade girl had an abortion. Other girls I know are sneaking out of their homes at night to meet boys. The mysteries of body and boy are beyond me. When I start my period at age eleven, my mother hands me a Kotex pamphlet about menstruation and never brings the topic up again. No one takes the time to have The Talk with me. There is no sex ed. No one in biology explains reproductive organs.
In biology class, when the teacher asks us to write what we feel about sex, he says, “Be honest.” When I write, “The topic of sex embarrasses me,” the teacher reads out loud what I’ve written, points me out, cannot contain his laugh. My hippie sister with long blond braids comes home from college and tells me to use tampons because they will help with sex. The blush on my face hides the gap in understanding.
Cross the left section over the middle section.
That middle section of the braid is my body.
At my all-girls boarding school I discover Want. Taller than most girls, more developed than many, with no men prowling to rub themselves on me, I grow into my body a little.
Before I am sixteen years old, I go home from boarding school for a weekend to help an old friend and his wife who have a new baby. During the night, this man stumbles into the room where I sleep, and he is drunk, and he kisses me, pouring his beer-sour breath into me, putting his big fingers into me, too. When his hand tries to open my legs wider, I push him away, and he moves away. When he leaves, I don’t sleep. The irony keeps me awake—sweet sixteen and never been kissed. When the saying leaves my head, I wonder about men and fingers and hymens. I don’t know if I’m a virgin anymore.
During the rest of high school, the middle section of the braid—my body—lifts to the top. I hug friends too long. I play varsity sports. One night two friends and I look for mischief and find the door unlocked to the old gym, and the girls and I lie on a stack of gymnastics mats and roll into each other and onto each other and never say a word.
A week before college starts, my mother drops me off to see the town pediatrician who no longer touches my breasts because a nurse is required to be in the room when I undress. He gives a speech about boys in college and how they drink and how, if they jump on top of me, I should “sit back and enjoy the ride.” My mother and I do not speak when she picks me up from the doctor’s office.
Between freshman and sophomore year of college, I ride a train to Arizona to become a counselor at a horse camp. At eighteen years old I’ve never been to a camp, been a counselor, or seen the desert. Horses scare me. The first night the assistant director, whose camp name is Lizard, stands up to welcome everyone, and I think, “That is the ugliest woman I’ve ever seen.” My body cringes.
By the third night in the Arizona mountains, I am freezing because I assumed Arizona would be hot and only brought shorts and T-shirts. Lizard and I meet late at night outdoors, which is very dark and dangerous. (New England doesn’t have mountain lions, bears, scorpions, tarantulas. Arizona does.) For the first time in my life, my body tops my mind. The cringe of a few days ago turns to jitters in Lizard’s presence, her overt desire, her lean twenty-four-year-old body.
Lizard puts her arm around me, and when her skin meets my skin, I feel the earth open up and welcome me as part of all creation. I connect with stars and planets and space. When she kisses me, I’m equally sure that I will grow warts, turn green, and burn in hell.
That weekend she takes me to a hotel in town.
Continue braiding the three strands.
When we drive up to the hotel to get a room, Lizard tells me to duck in my seat so the manager can’t see me. Two young women renting a room is suspect. Homosexuality in Arizona at the time is a crime. Two girls who are one planet, all body and Want, are in danger. She gets the room. We drive around back, and Lizard goes in without me.
Sneaking is part of the strand that was once in my left hand—silence.
When I go to the door and open it, smoke and sour carpet and Lysol hit me. Lizard’s hands pull me in, and her hands and my hands fill with shirts and zippers and skin. My lips are full of lips and fingers and the sinew of her neck. The curtains are closed, and we draw the grimy cover off one bed and fall into it. We have no clothes. I have never felt the long, lean body of someone else on my long, lean body, skin-to-skin, hands all over. When her hand reaches into me, her fingers find spots I didn’t know I had—places of silence and rumor and old-movie innuendo, the place my sister said tampons should go.
I’m sure I will go supernova.
We don’t sleep. Her fingers are in me. My fingers are in her. My tongue tastes her salt. Her tongue tastes my salt. At times I’m not sure which breast is hers and which is mine, and I don’t know what is happening. I have no frame of reference from book, movie, or rumor. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers are black-and-white dancers, and this dance is color and grit and girl.
In the morning the edges of the smelly curtains let light in, and the wall-size mirror facing the bed shows bare legs and shoulders and messed-up hair. The room is full of smoke and sour carpet and Lysol and sex. The bathroom is across the room and to get there means crossing in front of the mirror and that means seeing my body so I crawl under the mirror to avoid it. My body is wrong.
In the bathroom I shut the door, and I sit on the toilet, and I think, “What is happening?” I have no answer. When I walk out of the bathroom, Lizard has the light on, and I ask her to turn it off. In the dark, our bodies are a little more right than wrong, and somehow skin touching skin soothes the friction of the sin I believe I’m committing. We spend the day in bed. By the time we return to camp that evening, I can barely walk I am so sore.
By the end of the summer, the camp counselors and the camp administration have split over the issue of counselors loving counselors. I am an outsider, an East Coast girl, and I am blamed for corrupting the camp. Lizard drives me from Arizona to Connecticut and drops me off.
Tie the braid tight.
Silence braids into shame and body.
It takes years to realize that I lost my virginity. All those long winters of growing up, with movie reels turning and the films clicking through the projector, I learned what virginity was and wasn’t in black-and-white. I thought losing virginity required a penis and penetration and blood and the back seat of a Chevy, so I don’t connect fingers and tongues and fists and clitoris and vagina to a summer of dark hotel rooms and secret meetings and sex between girls.
It takes years to recognize the loss and the gain, the rite of passage, the murky way my body expressed Want. It takes many more years before I untie that braid and finally stand in front of a mirror to see my long, lean body, naked.