|
Lash |
Mary jumps, crosses her arms, jumps again, uncrosses
and crosses her arms jumping, her skipping rope a
whip-fast rainbow slicing the blue sky, her feet
working with the mechanical regularity of springs.
Mary holds them together with practiced stubbornness,
knowing the power of her will over her body, though
she knows nothing of either will or power. She knows
what she can make her body do.
Mary’s feet are not springs, they are caged in silver
buckles, pinched into the narrow black of her shoes
hiding the feet they hold, for Mary’s feet are, as
Mother has said, too big. Mother in the morning,
Mother who long ago (years ago, it seems, though how
many years could it possibly be? And without
understanding time, Mary knows, of a sudden, that time
is like a telescope, that it holds her whole life in
each second passing, and always will, no matter how
many years she lives. She knows this with her body.)
refused any longer to plait her hair of a morning: You
are old enough to take care of yourself, she says,
though Mary hardly feels old enough to take care of
herself. Now mornings are careful attention to detail,
tucking in blouses, smoothing down tights, brushing
her hair, for Mary no longer seeks Mother’s aid with
these details. Brush that hair properly, young lady,
before I come over and brush it for you. Mother,
turning from the mirror of her vanity (the vanity
Mary’s father surprised Mother with two weeks after
their twelfth anniversary), one half of her lower lip
torn away from the other in a riot of red. Your feet
are too big, she’d told her, and later, in the store,
thrusting the narrowest pair of shoes she could find
at Mary, the only ones that could possibly hide the
ugly bigness of Mary’s feet.
Mary skips. Across the playground she sees Eva, Eva
who she knows from preschool, when learning meant
plastic tea sets and baby dolls and great holes filled
with sand and sieves. Eva is laughing, her own
unraveling braids swinging wildly in the cool autumn
of a playground game of tag. When the two of them knew
less of time, and the sandpit was a day-long
diversion, Eva would strain the sand for debris, twigs
and wood chips and the gumnuts (Mary can name them
now, for she knows what they are really called) that
seemed to lie everywhere, dropping like snow from the
sky-tall eucalypts—these gumnuts Eva called penises.
She once said the word to one of the teachers, and the
teacher had grown red and sweaty and made Eva sit
down, and asked too many questions (each question
tearing away at the time remaining for their vital
search through the sands), questions Eva didn’t
understand except to understand that you should not
talk to teachers about penises. Now, sandpits are for
babies, or dirty boys who chuck sand at you if your
castle is in the way of the innumerable tunnels and
roads their greedy minds seem always to be conjuring
up. And penises, as Mary now knows, do not fall from
eucalypts.
The rainbow blur of Mary’s skipping rope divides Eva’s
motions into frames, like the pictures they show on
the projector at school, and Mary does not understand
the sadness she feels when she remembers bath time with
Eva: the way they dumped the flotilla of plastic toys
into the waiting water in a squealing fit of joy or
madness or whatever makes one squeal at that age, the
duck’s implacable expression as it bobbed up and down
on the water sending them into paroxysms of
laughter—laughter they even then tried to smother in
order to keep the adults at bay—or Barbie sinking to
the hard white of the ocean’s floor, and the
circuitous routes their rescue missions would take on
as they tried to save her. They used to part the lips
of their vaginas underwater and try to stare up into
themselves. Mary feels this sadness and savors it,
knows without being told that it is something to be
savored, even while she doesn’t know why she feels it.
Mary jumps and jumps again. She doesn’t know why she
jumps or even why she would want to know. Sometimes
she misses, and at those times she feels the sting of
the rope as it whips down on her legs and she knows
that this is the penalty one pays for living. She
tastes the sting with her mind, licking at its edges,
feeling it melt beneath her tongue like the hardened
sugar of a lollypop, only it is not sweet, it is salty
hot, it is the taste of everything Mary has ever
wanted and been denied. And then, she jumps again.
copyright 2005
Gene Justice |
