CAROLE ROSENTHAL
THE WOODS (1953)
1
The woods behind the school were dark and green with a ribbon of creek running through them. The creek glittered like tarnished silver. The banks were steep, the water shallow. When the sun was high, patches of light shifted like breath on the high grass, and vines muffled contours of trees on the edge of a clearing. I never saw people in these woods, only signs of people, their cast-offs, crumpled cigarette packs, Old Golds, Lucky Strikes, their sodden wrappers, half-stomped into the dirt, cellophane gleaming. I spotted grape Nehi soda bottles, dented beer cans, a twisted argyle sock. I found a paper bag stuffed with used sanitary napkins floating half-in, halfout of the water, trembling in a rivulet on a ledge of stones. What was it? At first I didn’t know.
I crept down to the creek, skidding in mud, clutching a broken tree branch to protect myself, and to poke at the sack. The sack tore, and a dark, slimy-looking pad slipped loose, and floated downstream. I didn’t have a regular menstrual period yet, I didn’t have any period yet, though I longed for one. Would I ever be like the other girls in the seventh grade who already had snappy code names for their cycles like my monthly visitor is coming, or Herman is here? My father said yes, but my mother kept mum on the subject. Keeping mum was a phrase of the times. “Mum” was also the name of the red-capped deodorant my mother hid, along with her own box of sanitary napkins, beneath the sink. She never talked to me about the working of my body, or her own–and she never would. Not that bodies embarrassed her. She freely assessed other women’s bodies. “Flabby thighs” (women in swim suits at the pool), “prominent clavicles” (too skinny), and “trailer tuckhes” (one of my friends). On the contrary, as an artist, she gloried in studying flesh. But words embarrassed her. Words were too public for her, too powerful. She left the frank discussions to my father (“Daddy’s modern,” “Daddy’s so smart!”).
“It’s natural,” my father said. “In puberty you’re going to start bleeding every month. Once menstruation begins, girls need to keep themselves very clean. You’ll need to fold back the lips of your vagina to clean yourself when you bathe.”
“How do boys clean themselves after they menstruate?” Stricken, but smart-alecky (Vagina! Vagina! my father was big on clinical names, not cutie-pie ones), I’d imitated his matter-of-fact tone. He squinted at me, hard. “Boys don’t menstruate.”
“Why not?”
My question made him realize he’d left out an important anatomical point.
But I seemed to be naturally dirty, like a boy–”nasty,” in the southern vernacular.
When Mr. Barnes, the school principal, made me line up in the school hallway each morning, waiting for him to sign my pink admittance slip to class because I was late, I was considered dirty in another way. “Evil-minded,” he’d murmur to me, and I squirmed. “A bad reputation is the worst thing a girl can have.”
My “bad reputation” arose when I talked too much in class, eager for attention. I talked about sex, anxious guesses and boastful lies, trying to encourage other kids who knew more to discuss this subject with me. I had various theories I asserted as fact. One was that boys’ penises were flexible and moved autonomously, like a tongue, minimizing clumsy body thrust, hip bones clunking other bones. Some seventh grade girls bragged about their boyfriends in eighth grade or in high school, so I bragged I had an even older boyfriend who’d graduated from high school. To verify this, I cut my father’s younger and handsomer head out of my parents’ wedding picture and carried it in my wallet, leaving a hole in a tuxedo standing next to my mother and her beautiful bouquet in their wedding album. I was humiliated when Joe Honeycutt, a slow learner in my class, sent me a note asking me to meet him after school so he could “rape” me, and the popular boys intercepted it and laughed, and passed it around. “She’s asking for it,” the boys said.
I followed the path along the creek to the meadow. Even before I got out of the woods, I heard cars on the road, the spin of gravel that led directly to our house, and the occasional motorcycle. The motorcycle might belong to the high-schooler who thought I was “cute,” his little sister told my little sister, exciting and frightening me.
A dog barked wildly, out of sight. Donna, my neighborhood friend, saw me and stiffened and glared, her skirt tight across her belly and hips, wrinkled from sitting in school, her arms crossed under her ample, still jiggly breasts. She was an eighth-grade repeat, a slack-mouthed, wide-hipped kid from New Jersey whose family sent her to live with her elderly aunt and uncle here because she’d gotten in trouble with her “uncles,” young guys, she described them, guys who carried rubbers in their wallets.
Donna tilted her head, and her wavy brown hair swayed off to one side. “Why didn’t you wait for me after school? You said you’d meet me under the tree.” “I forgot,” I said.
Another lie. I wanted respite from my bad reputation, and from Donna, who was part of it it.
Mr. Barnes told my mother I went to the woods to meet boys, but he was wrong. When I wanted to see boys I’d walk home the long way, on the road that passed Ace Hardware, past the barber shop adjoining it with its swirling candy-striped pole, and past the penny-candy store where you could buy cigarettes. That’s where older boys, suave drop-outs with their pegged pants and ducks’-ass hairdo with comb marks, slouched against lamp posts and smoked. The one I had a crush on would smile at me from the front page of the local paper when he was arrested as a cat burglar the following month.
But the point of my long moody rambles in the woods was to be alone. To get away from my school and from myself, that skinny, flatchested package of fears, longings, and inexplicable compulsions that had me labeled as a “behavior problem.” Ashamed of my inexperience, of being younger than anyone else, of being Jewish in a setting where a classmate had feigned admiring my hair while stroking my head to check for horns– knowing that my shame for being Jewish was wrong, a shondeh for Jews everywhere–I was a baffled outsider in the new territory of adolescence and the Bible belt south, a “northerner” who didn’t speak the local lingo (“I swan!” people around me declared as exclamation, interchangeable with “I swear!”). I often couldn’t fathom them. Hey, good-lookin’ What’cha got cookin’? How’s about cooking Something up with me?
It was late spring, the air sticky and soft, and everybody was singing Hank Williams’ songs. We’d lived in Virginia for almost a year. If it doesn’t work out, we can always move back, my parents had promised. It’s not working out! I shouted each night. But nobody paid attention.
I turned around. Someone was tossing pebbles in the road in front of us. Donna swiveled too. Two older boys strolled up the narrow strip of sidewalk behind, boys I recognized from outside Ace Hardware.
Donna called out, “Hey, you! Don’t be bums. We don’t want you following us! Walk faster,” she commanded me, checking over her shoulder to make sure they were still there, yelling and giggling. “Go away! Get lost! Take a long walk on a short pier,” and to me,
breathless, “Hurry, hurry! They’re catching up.” I began to run.
“Slow down,” she hissed, alongside me for a moment and grabbing at my elbow.
Another pebble landed nearby. These boys weren’t exactly chasing us, but they were closing in.
“Where y’all going?” the tall one asked, catching up with me and Donna. He had carved out cheekbones, long, slitty blue eyes, tight blond curls. This was the one who had been singing at us.
“We’re going home!” Donna skewed her hip defiantly, bumping into him, and slanting her eyes. “Where are you going?”
“We’re going to walk with you.” The boy twiddled his cigarette, blew a smoke ring and then smiled sidelong with narrow lips.
“Maybe we’re heartbreakers,” Donna said, and giggled. “You don’t always get what you want.” She skipped a little ahead of him.
The blond boy stopped and ducked his head, looking serious. For a moment he spoke formally. “Let me introduce myself. My name is Bobby Batey, and I’ve seen you before. This”–he poked his thumb back to the brown-haired boy–”is Jimmy Searcy. He’s a good old son, a gentleman, you’d probably like him real fine.”
Jimmy Searcy caught up with us too. He was cute, lean and doggy-looking, wearing a striped tee-shirt, like a little boy, twisting his thumb in it, with liquid brown eyes and an air of clumsy enthusiasm. Later Donna would tell me that Jimmy was baby-ish, that Bobby Batey owned the good looks. To me, Bobby was meanlooking, his features too tight, as if he’d been skinned.
Jimmy asked me, “Hey, who is your teacher at school?”
“Mr. Koontz. He’s new.”
“What grade?”
“Seventh. This is his first year teaching. He was in the Marines.”
Jimmy looked interested. “Is he tough? Does he whup people?”
I shook my head. There were boys who got paddled in the boiler room, but by Mr. Mashburn, the assistant principal who looked like SnookyLansom on Your Hit Parade on TV, not by Mr. Koontz, who seemed bemused most of the time.
“I used to go to Alexander Park too. I like that school.” I was struck that he was talking to me like a regular person, not someone making fun of you, or flirting, not like a boy. “Then I went to Craddock, but I dropped out to go to weldin’ school so I could work in the shipyard along with my Daddy.”
“Weldin’ school?” I mimicked his accent.
Funny to me, strange, that grown southerners called their fathers “Daddy,” like little kids.
“To learn how to weld boats. It’s good work. You ever been on a battleship? Where do you come from?”
“Chicago,” I said. “We moved here last year and we’re moving back soon.”
That was a lie. The lie I told to myself, the same lie my parents told when we moved down south, my desperate wish.
Donna Motley slipped in front of me, pushing, laughing, and fell into step with Jimmy, so I lagged to one side.
“You and Jimmy, huh?” Bobby Batey said to Donna. He scooped up another handful of pebbles from the road, and flung them past her. He started humming “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” singing the part about how it would make her “blue,” and ending by crooning–”Come walk with me, pretty baby, Baby Donna–Baby Donna–” until Donna laughed and swept her hair back, and slackened her pace, letting him brush her body to catch up.
We got almost to my house at the corner, a gray-roofed house on the other side of the street with pink corrugated asbestos shingles, and I swerved abruptly away from them and trotted through the back, locking the door. Donna called out to me, Jimmy too, but I raced through the tiny kitchen and dining area to the living room in time to watch them through my screen door as they turned too at the end of the block, Donna strutting now towards her aunt’s house with Bobby, almost arm in arm, Jimmy trailing. I saw them pass our yard with its two strips of cement for a driveway, high grass growing between. See-ment, the southerners pronounced it.
Just as they said Marilyn Mon-roe, with the accent on the first syllable. My father parked his Studebaker on the see-ment strips when he was home. I heard sudden, more frenzied barking, highpitched. My own dog, Tawny–my sister’s dog, really–threw himself against the screen, jumping up, wanting me to come out and play.
Jimmy Searcy heard him too. He’d spied me in the doorway peeking at him, and called to Tawny, “Here, boy, here, boy, here pup, here. . . hooh, hooo, hoooo. . .,” crouching and extending his hand.
“Is that your dog?” He was on the other side of a wide lawn that had no flowers or shrubs, only a single sapling. “That hound sure looks like a coon dog. He could probably go after raccoons real fast. I bet he’s a good hunter. I have a friend in Carolina with a coon dog just like that. If you ever want to get rid of him, let me know.” “He’s ours,” I yelled.
Jimmy bullhorned his hands. “I’m going to come by and see you sometime.”
Tawny was still barking, locked out, pawing the screen and then dashing in circles as he followed Donna and Trixie, and the two guys.
My mother was asleep. Not even the barking or my yelling had woken her. She took naps in the afternoon, sprawled sideways on her bed, fully dressed, black hair loose, splayed across her cheek and the pillow, a bubble of saliva moistening her lower lip and drooling onto the chenille spread. Robbie was playing on the floor of our bedroom. Robbie and I had always shared a bedroom since she was born, but we hardly talked to each other.
2
It was the worst year of my life, worse than last year in Chicago when the baby died and my mother, sad, voiceless, slapped me hard every time I asked questions about it. For weeks, she stopped talking altogether. I worried back then that I’d caused the baby’s death by sheer power of wishing, having previously instructed my parents, after Robbie turned out to be a disappointment to me, not to make any more children. From my mother’s point of view, if she didn’t speak facts and feelings out loud, maybe they would go away. For me, words held the opposite power: if I talked about things, naming them, I had the ability to control what happened, I could restore proportion to alarming events.
“Carole is slow to adjust,” my father said. “She doesn’t make adjustments easily, she’s fallen under bad influences.”
It was true, all of it. Especially the bad influences. Donna Motley had taught me how to masturbate using the projecting corners of desks and drawers, wearing towels around our waists for modesty so that we couldn’t see each other. “My uncles showed me this,” she bragged. I looked up and saw her panting red face and loose mouth and she looked somehow sticky to me, like she’d been eating grape jelly.
3
I watched Jimmy Searcy walk down the street by himself, back hunched. Bobby Batey must have stayed behind, alone with Donna. Jimmy kicked a stone when he crossed the road, then spotting me behind the screen, he cracked a smile. He waved and swung his arm in a giant arc. I ducked back from the door, embarrassed he’d caught me spying.
“Who’s that?” my mother asked. “He’s cute.” She fluffed her hair and glanced at herself in the mirror. My mother liked boys, and she hoped that boys would like me too. She feared they wouldn’t, which would reflect badly on her as a woman and mother. “Anyway, you’re too young to date. Go change your school clothes and cut the lawn.”
I ran to my bedroom. Often we fought, but that day she didn’t want to be distracted by me, she was working on paintings she planned to show off in a local show. I changed into a backless halter and shorts, then examined myself in the mirror. I hoped boys in cars would honk their horns at me, admiring, when they drove by, seeing bare skin and not guessing from a distance how young or old I was. Safe anonymity. Twice that month I’d called boys who didn’t know me and pretended to be someone else. In our yard the grass was high, scattered with dandelions and wild onions. Tawny leaped ahead, barking, joyous.
“Make that dog be quiet. Neighbors will complain.”
Neighbors already complained because we kept our lawn too wild, ungroomed, with blades so high they tickled my legs, while they cropped their lawns like military haircuts, like the military housing these square boxes had been, built fifteen years earlier for families of returning sailors after the war. The power mower was broken, like much in our house. Daddy kept promising to fix it, but never did. The weeds were thick. I pushed the hand mower around the peach tree sapling I’d begged him to plant. It had blossoms, but it was still spindly, like me.
The smell of sliced wild onions layered the air.
“Ouch! Ow!” The hand mower slid away from me. I’d stepped on a pricker.
My mother yelled out the window, “Mowing in your bare feet?
You’re going to lose a toe.”
I limped out of sight to the back, and dropped to the seat of our little red swing set. I watched Robbie through the tangle, dressed in her white pinafore from school, still clean, as played dolls by the sandbox. She’d lined up the dolls by size, big to small, and dressed the tiniest in pink hollyhock blossoms she’d stolen from behind her classroom.