Saturday, the Twelfth of October

by Norma Fox Mazer

  Across from the park she cut through a narrow alley between brick tenements, a shortcut to her street. The stench of garbage seeped like dust from the faded walls. Two boys perched on overturned metal trash cans watched her approach, then unfolded themselves and blocked her way. Her heart began banging behind her ribs. The taller one held out his hand. “Your money, Freckles.” He had blond hair cut straight at the shoulders and pale blue eyes. Zan looked past him to see if anyone was around to help her, but the alley was empty. Everyone she knew had either been mugged or knew someone who had been. Now it was her turn.

  “Your money, dummy!”

  The second boy, narrow-faced, wearing sharply pressed green trousers and a green and white checked shirt, kicked Zan’s ankle with the toe of one polished boot. Pain traveled up her leg.

  “Don’t just stand there looking dumb.”

  She fumbled with her book sack. “I haven’t any money,” she said, although she had a five and two ones folded flat in her left sneaker. She didn’t know why she lied, except that, hating her feeling of helplessness, she had to somehow defy them.

  “Oh, come on, don’t give me that shit.” The blond boy jerked her arm behind her back, smiling a little.

  Her book sack fell to the ground. Her arm was on fire. “Junk,” the other boy said, kicking at the books and papers spilling out of her sack. He poked his hands into her pockets and turned them inside out. Her locker key, a crumpled note from Lillian, half a sticky Mars bar, twenty-five cents in change, and her jackknife were scattered on the dirty pavement. He picked up the knife, which she’d bought for around three dollars in the Tru Valu Hardware Store. “Nothing here except this cheap knife,” he said disgustedly.

  “Oh, she’s got money,” said the blond boy. “Everybody has money.” He let go of her arm and, as she started to rub it in relief, he put both hands against her breasts and shoved her. As she staggered back, he shoved her again, harder, and she smacked down on the concrete flat on her back. She lay helpless, without breath. She felt as if she were drowning. The second boy grabbed her feet and yanked off her sneakers.

  “What a liar,” he said, stuffing her money in his pocket He dropped the jackknife, uninterested in it now. “I could tell you were a liar.” He spit toward her. The gob landed next to her, spattering her face.

  She wanted to get up, but was afraid to move. She couldn’t bear it if they touched her again. She hated them both with a hatred so ferocious that she felt it like fingers jammed down her throat.

  “Come on,” the blond one said impatiently to his friend, “let’s go.” Without another glance at her, they loped easily toward the end of the alley, disappearing around the corner.

  Chapter 2

  Zan dropped her books on the telephone table in the little hallway of their apartment. “Aunt Cici? Are you home, Aunt Cici? I was mugged! I was mugged by two boys!”

  “In here,” Cici called from the living room. She was sitting on the floor, using an emery board on her nails. Her daughter, Kim, and Zan’s two-year-old brother, Buddy, were playing with tiny model cars on the floor. “Did you say you were mugged?” Cici got up, putting her hands on Zan’s shoulders. “Are you okay?”

  “The creeps!” Zan said. She had planned to tell the story calmly, but now it came out in a spurt of furious words. “They got me in that alley near Mechanix Park. Oh, I was so dumb! I knew the moment I saw them—”

  Buddy, two fingers stuffed in his mouth, staggered to his feet to lean against her leg. “Zan,” he breathed. She put her hand on his headful of tight red curls.

  “You should have seen them, Cici. This one boy had blue eyes, but not nice blue eyes—”

  Cici’s daughter, Kim, looked up alertly. She was three, a year older than Buddy. “They took Zan’s money?”

  “That’s right.” Zan’s voice trembled.

  “You are all right, aren’t you?” Cici said. “They didn’t—”

  Zan shook her head. In her mind’s eye, she saw herself lying helpless on the ground. “No, they didn’t.”

  “Then forget it, love! Just put it out of your mind. Okay?” Cici gave her a little shake and went to the mirror over the telephone table to examine her face and her hair. Her marriage to Neil Vinson had lasted almost two years. Now she said that she was looking for a good father for Kim. She was sick of being on her own. Neil was off in British Columbia living in a commune with a new girlfriend and hardly ever even wrote Kim. “The best thing when something ugly happens is—forget it,” Cici said.

  Zan shook her head. “I can’t!”

  “Take it from me,” Cici said, “it’s the only way I’ve been able to cope. Don’t dwell on ugliness.” She knotted a silk scarf over her hair and behind her neck. “Tell Bernice I won’t be home for supper. I’m meeting Chris.”

  Nearly every day after school, Zan took over watching the two babies so Cici could get out to shop, do errands, or meet one of her boyfriends. Cici blew Kim a kiss and, humming, left the apartment.

  “I really wanted to tell you more about the mugging,” Zan said desolately to the closed door.

  Maybe Cici was right. Forget it. Pretend it didn’t happen. Zan played with the kids, getting down on the floor so they could climb on her back, giving them rides around the living room. “Giddyap!” Buddy crowed, hanging onto her hair. She snorted and reared, making the kids scream. And all the time, she was thinking about the mugging.

  Her mother came home, clutching a grocery bag, newspaper, her pocketbook, and a plastic-wrapped dress from the cleaner’s. “Oh, those mobs on the bus!” she said as she dumped everything on the couch. She picked up Buddy for a moment, ruffled Kim’s hair, looked sharply at Zan. “What’s the matter?”

  “Zan was mugged,” Kim said. Coming from Kim, it sounded cute, not serious.

  Quickly, Zan explained what had happened.

  “Going into an alley—that wasn’t using your head!” her mother chided, almost as if she were mad at Zan for getting mugged. Then she sighed. “I have nightmares about one of you kids really getting hurt. This city . . . ”

  She went into the kitchen. Zan trailed after her and began setting the table, feeling worse and worse. Her mother flipped on the radio, poured hot milk into the instant mashed potatoes. “Listen, let’s not tell Daddy,” she said, beating the potatoes vigorously. “You know how upset he gets about things like this.” Zan nodded. She hadn’t told her mother how the blond boy had shoved her, putting his hands on her breasts. She felt it would disgust and anger her mother and she might say something about it after all, to Zan’s father or in front of Ivan. “And don’t worry about the money,” her mother said. “I’ll make it up to you. Between you and me, all right, honey?”

  Zan nodded again, as her mother smiled at her. Suddenly, Zan wanted to lean against her and cry; she didn’t know why; she didn’t do things like that anymore—she was too big, too old. “I’ll do the garbage,” she said instead, taking the pail from next to the sink and carrying it out to the incinerator in the hall.

  Later, when supper was over, the dishes done, and the family out of the kitchen, Zan pulled on her pajamas and got into bed. Fumbling under the mattress for her diary, for a moment she couldn’t locate it and her stomach jumped painfully. Then she felt the hard metal spiral and, drawing out the notebook, opened it to a fresh page: “Today I was mugged. Lillian and I are always talking about what we’d do if it happened to us. I couldn’t do anything! It was awful. They could have beat me or raped me. Anything. I wonder, could I have a baby, if that happened—I mean, because of not having my period yet.”

  Outside, the wail of an ambulance, like a howling dog, cut across the steady thug, thug, thug of traffic, and then for several moments the rumble of a jet blotted out every other sound. “I told Mom about the mugging, and she was upset, she really cares, I know she does, but she doesn’t understand how I feel inside. The same thing with Aunt Cici. She cares, but she doesn’t understand. I wish I could kill those boys! They made me feel like nothing, lik
e a piece of shit.”

  She looked at what she’d written. Her mother would be furious if she saw it—she hated that kind of language. But the diary was secret, private. Zan wrote everything in it all her thoughts, questions, fantasies, her wonder and dismay at the world. She lay back, tired. The comfortable tock, tock, tock of the dripping faucet and the buzzing of the refrigerator were soothing. Her mind drifted and a line of poetry she’d read somewhere came into her head. I’m twelve and leaking blood. No poetry books at home, so she must have read it in school, probably in the Resource Center because no regular school book she knew ever mentioned anything about girls’ bleeding. There was only the health class, in which cute little Mr. Franko had spent most of the semester so far talking about his new grandson and parading around with his shirt sleeves rolled up to show off his muscular arms. And, oh yes, a few words now and then about keeping yourself clean, about your body preparing itself for womanhood and manhood. Mixed class. Really wild.

  Usually, Zan hardly listened. Most of the time she doodled stick figures, or wrote her name, “Alexandra Mary Ford,” in elaborate script, or dreamed about dark-haired Steve Sykowski, who was a year ahead of her and blew the trumpet in the school band. I’m twelve and leaking blood. Zan was fourteen and still nothing. Every morning in the locked bathroom she examined her pajama bottoms, both relieved and upset when she found nothing. All her friends had their periods except her.

  In the bathroom on the top shelf of the medicine cabinet was usually a small blue box of tampons. Instructions came in the package on a folded piece of paper. Zan had read it often with the door locked and the water running to cover the sound of the crisp paper. So she knew what to do when it started, though it all struck her as gross—sticky blood and putting those little cotton tubes into yourself.

  A long time ago when she was in the fourth grade her mother had said, “Let me know when it starts,” and had handed her a book, saying, “Read this, honey, it’s all about the things you want to know. Some girls get it early, maybe you will.” It had been night and her mother sat on the edge of Zan’s bed, smoothing the tufted bedspread between her fingers. “I’m not much good at explaining things, honey, but I don’t want you to be ignorant or feel that it’s anything bad. It’s natural, nothing to be afraid of. We used to call it ‘the curse,’ but girls today know better. You should be proud to be a woman, when you get the—when you get it, your time of the month I mean, that will show that you aren’t a little girl anymore.” And she had bent and kissed Zan’s forehead very tenderly.

  Since then, nothing. Five years almost, and nothing!

  Yet, something had happened. In secret, her body had changed itself, and in secret Zan had thought often about the blood she sensed was waiting for the right moment to pour out of her. Sitting at her desk in school, she sometimes looked down at her feet, her stomach jerking, almost expecting to see a pool of sticky blood on the scuffed floor.

  Zan hated the thought of her period; yet she also longed for it, so that all the waiting would be over, and she could be like everyone else. She felt excluded, as if there were a club she hadn’t been able to join yet. Every month, Lillian stayed home for three days with cramps, whether she had her period or not. “Missing school is one of the good things about it,” she told Zan.

  On her cot now, Zan stirred, her eyes heavy, thinking she ought to shut off the light. Her mind floated into a corner of the room; there was something about a river and Ivan . . . The diary slipped from her unresisting fingers to the floor, and she groaned softly in her sleep as she thought again of the boy with the blank blue eyes.

  In the morning, Ivan, wearing baggy gray sweat pants and a tee shirt, opened the refrigerator and stood in front of it for a long time, trying to decide what he wanted to eat. On weekday mornings he usually gulped down a glass of milk and then bought a doughnut on the way to school. But on Saturdays he liked to eat a real breakfast. He was famished because Zan, the pain in the ass, had slept late and nobody could come into the kitchen on Saturday morning till she woke up. Orders from above. “Cripes,” he muttered in disgust. He could hear her out in the hall yakking on the phone.

  He took a long drink from the plastic milk carton, then nibbled a handful of cold spaghetti, dropping a few strands on the floor. Nothing in the refrigerator looked interesting. “Com flakes,” he said at last, turning to the cupboard.

  As he dumped sugar on the bowl of flakes, he hoped his mother wouldn’t come in and tell him again that too much sugar was why he had pimples on his forehead. He shoved a spoonful of sweet, soggy flakes into his mouth and, from the corner of his eye, noticed Zan’s diary on the floor, half under her cot. He stretched out a foot and toed the diary toward his chair. “PRIVATE. KEEP OUT.” Big fat letters. Big fat deal! Ivan touched his forehead, feeling the hateful bumps. The thought of his pimples made him feel sorry for himself and mad at the world. Zan didn’t have pimples on her forehead. He picked up the diary and read a page at random. Something about his sister’s dumb dreams. She was always going on about her feelings this and her feelings that, and, oh, what a dream I had! It made him sick. He flipped to her last entry about the mugging. Oh, hot stuff, she used the word “shit.” He snorted and riffled the pages, then, reading, his face got hot. Holy Cow. Ho-ly Cow! HO-LY COW! Wait till Billy and Carl hear about this.

  Footsteps broke into his concentration. Zan was coming back. He started to throw the diary on the floor again, then changed his mind and hastily slipped it under his tee shirt. He’d just tease her a little when she noticed it was gone. He jumped up from the table and, grinning, held his arm pressed stiffly across his belly to hold down the diary.

  “What’s so funny?” Zan said, entering the kitchen. Then, “Phew! You sure are sweating. You need a bath, El Smello.”

  “Go to hell!” He walked out of the kitchen. It would serve her right to find her diary gone. Give her a good scare, the bigmouth, teach her to take better care of things that were so PERSONAL and PRIVATE. In his bedroom he dropped the diary into his top bureau drawer. His pimples felt as if they were on fire.

  About an hour later Zan heard shrill guffaws leaking out from behind Ivan’s closed door. His two friends, Billy Gold and Carl Whitman, had come over, and all three were in Ivan’s room. For a while she paid no attention. She talked to Lillian again on the phone, then cleaned the front hall—orders transmitted through her mother’s closed bedroom door—wiping up the floor, the woodwork, and the telephone table on which assorted odds and ends always accumulated. Then she went into the kitchen to make her bed. Folding her pajamas, she thought of her diary and slipped her hands under the mattress, but felt only bare steel springs. She worked her hands up and down the length of the springs, then bent to check the floor. Nothing but dustballs and a pair of sneakers. Then, from Ivan’s room, she again heard Billy Gold snicker. She thought of Ivan’s grin and his stiff-armed walk. “Oh, no!” She ran to his room and pushed open the door.

  “. . . don’t know why I haven’t had my period yet,” Ivan was saying. Reading from her diary, he sat on his bureau like an Indian guru, legs crossed, feet tucked beneath his thighs. Skinny Carl Whitman and fat little Billy Gold were sprawled on Ivan’s bed, choking with laughter. “My breasts are developed and I’ve got pubic hair . . . ” he read.

  “Ivan. Ivan!”

  Ivan looked up, his forehead blazing, and instinctively tried to hide the diary.

  “Give that to me,” Zan ordered. “Give it to me!” As she grabbed for the diary, Ivan tossed it to Carl, who, still laughing, curled up with the notebook under him. Zan dived for Carl, knocking off his glasses. “Give that to me. It’s mine!” Tears of rage filled her eyes. It was yesterday all over again. She was being robbed and humiliated. She pummeled Carl with her fists.

  “Ow! Hey, cut it out, you’re hurting me.”

  “Give it to me, give it, give it!” She pounded on him, sick with fury and shame.

  “She’s going crazy,” Billy said, with a touch of awe.

 
“What’s going on here?” Mrs. Ford was at the door in her green bathrobe. “Zan. Alexandra Ford! What are you doing?” She pulled Zan off Carl.

  “Ask him!” Zan tried to reach Carl again. “Ask Ivan! Ask him what he did.”

  Sweating, Ivan tried to appear unconcerned. “Aw, she left her dumb diary lying right out in public, in the middle of the floor.”

  “He took it, he read it, he read it to Billy and Carl. He read them my diary.”

  Mrs. Ford looked at Ivan. “Is there never to be any peace around here? Ivan, I’m ashamed of you, I’m ashamed of all you boys. Carl, give me that diary.” She took the notebook. “Now, Ivan, apologize to your sister. Then I don’t want to hear—”

  “No! What good is an apology? An apology won’t change anything.” Zan pushed blindly past her mother. Cici was at the door to her room in her blue pajamas, her mouth pale.

  “Zan? What’s the matter?”

  Zan ran out of the apartment, her mother’s voice calling after her, “Come back! Don’t be silly!” She ran down the stairs, down and down, aching, hurting, out the front door, into the street. She didn’t know where she was going, only that she had to go somewhere, away from her brother, away from her mother who thought that saying “Sorry” made everything all right. Soon she found herself at Mechanix Park and knew that was where she wanted to be. Throwing herself down behind the boulder where the grass grew high and tangled, hidden from sight Zan pressed herself into the earth and the shadow of the rock. Words leaped into her mind. Words she had written. Words Ivan had seen and read to Billy and Carl. Her skin felt as if it were melting off her bones. Then Ivan’s voice rattled down the street. “Zan? Zan Ford. Zan, are you there? Hey, come out come out wherever you are, I gotta talk to you.”