Inventing the Abbotts

by Sue Miller

  After I learned to read, she clipped that kind of story out of the paper so I wouldn’t be exposed to such horrors. She saved the clippings for my father. Once a week or so he would read through them quickly and throw them away.

  Once, playing outside on a wintry afternoon, I saw a bunch of them in our trash can and pulled them out. I smoothed them on the back steps with my wet mittens and read them as well as I could. They told of death by fire, hunger, jealous love. They told of other nightmares, which remained mysterious because of words I couldn’t understand.

  I had trouble fitting the world that opened to me with the image of my father at his desk impassively picking up one article after another and crumpling each as he finished, dropping it into the wastebasket like the discarded curved peel of an orange; or of my mother, humming to herself while she clipped them out with her sewing scissors, as busy and happy as when she cut through pattern tissue and wool to make me a new jumper.

  Late one afternoon in the fall of the year I turned eleven, I got sick in school. When the abdominal cramps were so bad that I had to hold my breath, I raised my hand and asked to go to the bathroom. I worried that I might not make it down the three flights of stairs to the echoing basement where we lined up to pee before recess. Now it was deserted. My footsteps rang loudly. Even though I sat so long on the toilet that the black lines around the hexagonal tiles on the floor seemed to rise up several inches and form a wire screen, nothing happened. I wiped myself and nearly cried out when I saw the red stain on the paper. I went straight to the office and said I had to go home; I was sick. The principal at first resisted but finally acceded to the force of my terror. He called my home, and Mother said she’d be there waiting for me.

  I was about halfway home, walking down the windy deserted street, when I felt liquid running down my leg. Bending over, I saw the dark blood make a jagged line on my calf. By the time I got home, the white socks my mother bought for me were stained brownish pink over my ankle bone.

  At the door, I burst into tears and wordlessly pointed to my feet.

  My mother, whose face had been anxious as I walked up the stairs to our apartment, smiled suddenly. “But, darling, it’s your period! Your menstrual period,” she said. She laughed, at me I felt, and I grew sullen.

  “What’s that?”

  “You know, Ginny. It’s the beginning of your being a woman.”

  “I don’t know,” I said furiously, blowing my nose.

  Now my mother looked irritated. “Didn’t you read that booklet I gave you?”

  “What booklet?”

  “Oh, I forget the title,” she said crossly. “A little pamphlet thing. I think it was ‘You’re a Young Lady Now,’ something like that. Don’t you remember? I left it on your bedside table.”

  “Yes,” I said. It had been illustrated with the same kind of drawings of contemporary scenes that were in my Sunday school pamphlets.

  “Didn’t you read it?”

  “No.”

  “Well,” she said. A vertical line appeared between her thick brows. “Well, I went to a lot of trouble to find that book. I wish when I gave you something like that you’d at least…” She trailed off and sighed. “You’d better get your coat off and we’ll clean you up.”

  In the bathroom she knelt before me and helped me off with socks, shoes, underpants. I was mortified. I wished I had read the book. I would have done anything to avoid this scene. My mother’s hair fell forward, and I looked down at the exposed back of her neck as she ran the washcloth briskly up and down my chafed legs, and worst of all, gently washed me down there. Then she outfitted me and carefully explained belts, pads, clots, cramps, all the while avoiding my eyes.

  After I’d waked from a nap, she came and sat on the edge of my bed. Her hands, with their long nails painted the palest of pinks, moved over my bedspread as she talked, pulling at the little cotton tufts which made a design on it.

  “Now that you’re starting to be a woman, Virginia, I want to tell you something, and I want you to pay careful attention.”

  I licked my sleep-dried lips and nodded. I wished my father would come home and end the horrible intimacy into which this change in my body seemed to have betrayed me.

  “I just want to tell you how careful you have to be now. I mean, I know you’ve always been a good girl, and done just what I told you, but it’s even more important now, do you understand?” I nodded, in spite of my confusion. “Now, I know it must seem to you that you’re still just a little girl, but you’re not anymore, really. And even if someone should seem very nice, you mustn’t pay any attention. Some man, I mean. You must remember that you are really a young woman. You just can’t be too careful.” Her voice thrilled a little in the same way it did when she talked about the newspaper stories. “Do you understand me?”

  I didn’t know what my mother was saying. It seemed a mystery that I would have to solve later. For now, I simply wanted her off my bed, out of my room. I nodded, and said yes, I understood. When she had gone, I lay silently until long after I heard my father come home.

  It was a few months after this that Anna Solmitz moved into our building and became my first real friend.

  Anna was tall and blond, like my mother, and big, almost fat, really. Her father taught at the university too. Her family had left Germany and lived in England during the war, and although her parents had German accents, Anna spoke with a British lilt I admired. She had lived in New York for several years, but they were planning to stay in Chicago now, she told me. We walked to and from school together each day and talked incessantly. We were a peculiar pair—she big and loud, and I small, dark and secretive. The other fifth graders were contemptuous of us: of me because my mother dressed me in such fancy clothes and I was the teacher’s pet, and of Anna because she was fat and strange.

  Anna hadn’t had her first period yet and she didn’t for several more years, even though she was almost exactly my age and so much bigger. She told me it was the custom in her family, when someone menstruated for the first time, to slap her hard across the face. She couldn’t wait until it happened to her. When I thought about it later, I realized my mother had saved her confusing warning for me in just the way that Anna’s mother was saving a slap for her.

  Anna had a little brother named Freddie, who was two, and sometimes we baby-sat for him while her mother did a quick errand. I pretended to like Freddie, because Anna adored him. But secretly I was jealous of her affection for him and repulsed by him. His constant drooling, his piercing screams when he was angry or hurt, the horrible smell he carried around when his pants were full—he was utterly disgusting to me, and it seemed peculiar that Anna didn’t share my feelings.

  Once when I was alone in the Solmitzes’ living room with him, I reached out and pinched his fat creased arm, twisting the bit of soft skin I held between my fingers. He looked at me stupidly for a moment, and then began to scream in short frantic bursts. Anna came running from the bathroom and picked him up. She asked me what had happened, and I said he fell. Within a few days, he seemed to have forgotten it and again played trustingly near me.

  Anna and her parents all played instruments. Sometimes they would have little musical evenings, and invite a small number of friends. I hated to go to these. The punch and the cookies weren’t sweet enough, tasted irrevocably foreign. And Anna, straddling her cello, absorbed in her music, a tiny mustache of perspiration glittering on her upper lip, embarrassed me. I knew my discomfort was misplaced, because my mother, whose nose wrinkled at the merest whiff of the indecorous, only admired Anna and her family for their artistry on these evenings. Nonetheless, I couldn’t bear watching her with her legs spread wide, not even caring that people might be thinking of what they would see if the cello weren’t there.

  But I loved her so that I could forgive her anything. We slept over at each other’s houses. We held each other tenderly in the dark and talked about our plans for a glorious life. Together also we pondered over another book my mother had given
me, this time in consultation with Anna’s mother. It talked about bees and pollination and, putatively, about how babies are made. It told us that the man had the seed and the woman the egg, but it never quite explained how they got together. Anna was sure that it happened in bed at night. She thought that when the man rolled over the woman, his seed dropped down onto her. We had seen a film in science class in which a male fish swam over the eggs a female had laid, and in rhythmic, convulsive spurts, shot out the seeds which floated slowly down to the iridescent eggs. It happened like that, she thought.

  Then one day, on the way to school, as if to answer our questions, a graffito appeared on the walls of the viaduct under the IC tracks. It was huge. It must have taken the artist half the night. Drawn in loving detail, a nude man and woman stood next to each other. The man had an erection which loomed nearly as large as a third person between them. The woman was pointing to her ornate labia. A cartoon bubble appeared over her head. She said, “Stick it right in, honey.”

  As I remember, we didn’t comment on this immediately, except to giggle because it was dirty. But on the way home, passing it again, Anna asked, “Do you think that’s how they do it?”

  “Make babies, you mean?”

  “Yes, do you think? That the man puts his thing inside?”

  We looked around to be sure that no one could hear us. I tried to think of my father and mother doing that. It was grotesque, impossible.

  “No,” I said.

  We walked in silence down the gritty street. Ahead of us, a bigger boy was kicking a can as he walked along. She turned to me. “I think they do,” she said. Tears glittered in her eyes.

  We were shaken. It seemed cruel that this least probable of all possibilities we had discussed should be it. Hadn’t we in fact dismissed it as too unthinkable, too unlike our parents? Particularly our mothers, both of whom knew so well what was ladylike and what was not. We made a pact to stay up and listen to them.

  The two or three times I managed to stay awake until after my parents had gone to bed, there was a silence behind their door, broken only by a cough or, itself horrible enough, a fart. But Anna had more success. Sitting in the darkened hallway after everyone had gone to bed, she listened as first her parents talked for a while. Then she said she could hear them rummaging around in bed for a long time, the springs squeaking and bouncing; and then they made noises as though they were doing just what the picture under the IC said, just the noises you’d expect. Her mother cried out over and over, and finally her father grunted, like a big pig, several times. Anna crept back to her room and, huddling under her covers, she cried and cried.

  Although I couldn’t look Mr. and Mrs. Solmitz in the face anymore, I was glad it was they who had done it and not my parents. We had to accept this then as the answer to our mystery. But it presented a still deeper one: Why would anyone want to do such a thing?

  We played mostly at Anna’s house, because her mother was preoccupied with Freddie and left us alone. In her bedroom with the door shut, we began to act out the way we imagined it must be. Usually, Anna would be the man. She would grab me, and wrestle me down, sometimes even pulling my hair back. When she had pinned me, she would yank my skirt up and push her pubic bone against mine. It hurt. I would make the noises she had told me about. Sometimes she stopped me to correct the noise. “No, no,” she would say, sounding like an English nanny. “Not so fast as that.” Then she would grunt once or twice and we would roll away from each other, laughing hysterically. We often swore never to marry. We would live together, chastely.

  When summer came, Anna and I began to break the rules. Her boundary lines were wider than mine, but we wandered even beyond them. Together we rode the IC downtown and walked along Michigan Avenue, eating ice cream cones among the adult shoppers and museumgoers. In defiance of polio and our mothers, we played in the crowds at the beach on Fifty-seventh Street. We crossed the Midway and wandered the fringes of the black ghetto. One day we went tree-climbing by the lagoon behind the Museum of Science and Industry. Afterward we lay together on the grass, slapping at the mosquitoes that bred there. Anna was wearing shorts, and her fat white legs were splotched with raised bites. She scratched at them until they bled.

  As we walked along the bridle path on the way home, a man who had been walking behind us caught up. He was probably still a teenager, but he was a grownup to us, although he wore blue jeans, which the grownups in our world did not. He was small, not too much taller than Anna, and dark, with a shadowy stubble on his chin. Because he was good-looking, we were excited and pleased that he spoke to us. It was thrilling, too, to break the rule about talking to strangers.

  He asked us to watch the path for him for a moment. He stepped into the bushes and although he had his back to us, we could hear urine splashing on the dead leaves and plants. We caught each other’s eye and suppressed our giggles. He turned and came back toward us, his hands awkwardly crossed low in front of him. He had a gentle, high-pitched voice, and he talked to us, asking us where we lived, what we’d been doing by the lagoon, whether we’d been to the museum, what our favorite things there were. After a time, only I answered. I looked at Anna. She was staring at his front. His hands had dropped and he had an erection. It seems impossible that I hadn’t noticed it, but I hadn’t. Perhaps because it was so unlike what the picture under the IC had led me to expect. We stood in silence.

  “Oh, this,” he said. “Does it embarrass you?”

  We were polite girls. In unison we shook our heads, the blond and the dark. I said, “No.”

  “Good. It’s just that when it’s big, up like this, it’s more comfortable not to have it in my pants.” I looked at it. It seemed very pink and rubbery, like some toy Freddie would have for his bath.

  “You can touch it.”

  I heard Anna’s sharp intake of breath. Neither of us moved. He stepped toward us. Anna stepped back. He reached out and took my hand, and put it on him. His skin was soft and dry, like silk. He moved my hand gently up and down. His hand was damp and warm, holding mine.

  “You too,” he said to Anna, but he was watching my face. I saw her hand come forward. Her fingers brushed him close to mine, and then her hand flew away. He let go of me and squatted by us. He asked us if we liked to play games. What games did we like to play? His face was lower than ours. I looked down at his penis. It seemed to point at me. Any game we liked, he said. Hide-and-seek?

  Anna grabbed my hand. “We can’t,” she said, sounding very British. “We must go now. We must.” She was pulling me back, away from him. He didn’t get up or try to follow us. His eyes didn’t leave mine. She jerked my arm and pulled me through the bushes out onto the street. We had been, all along, only thirty or so feet from Stony Island Avenue. A clump of people stood waiting for a bus on the corner, and a woman strolled past us with a baby carriage. I blinked in the bright light.

  “Come on now,” Anna squeaked. Her face was wet with tears. “We have to get away from here. Come on.” She started to run, pulling me. I had trouble keeping up with her long strides. Once or twice she nearly pulled me forward over my own feet. She made a funny blubbering noise as she ran. We went to her apartment, straight into the bathroom, and locked the door.

  “We have to wash our hands,” she said. “Or we’ll get infected, do you see?” She lathered her hands and passed the soap to me.

  She seemed hardly aware of me. She was whispering to herself. Her face was streaked and blotched and clear liquid flowed like tears from her nose. She scrubbed furiously. “This won’t do,” she whispered. She grabbed the can of bathroom cleanser and sprinkled the powder on her hands. It formed a thick white paste with the soap as she rubbed it in. There was a small stiff brush on the sink, used for clearing fingernails. Anna picked this up and fiercely scrubbed her hands. I watched until I could see the blood seeping up pink through the cleanser.

  “That’s enough, Anna,” I said. “That’s clean enough.”

  “We’re infected, oooh, we’re infected,�
� she whispered. A bubble formed and popped over her mouth. I took her hands and rinsed them under the spigot. I washed her face with a cool washcloth. We went into her room, and I lay with her on her bed until she was calm, although her eyes were red and her lashes still gummed with tears. We held each other and promised never, never to tell that we crossed Stony Island Avenue.

  But Anna told. A week or so later, her mother warned her about the park. A little girl had been molested behind some bushes a few blocks from the museum. Anna asked what molested meant. Her mother explained it to her in a general way. Anna went into her room and thought for half an hour. Then she came out and told her mother she thought we had been molested too.

  My mother was upset and furious and, for once, wanted to discuss with me exact details. “It comes from living in this horrible, horrible city,” she said. “I wish I’d never heard of Chicago.” She told me she was bitterly disappointed in me. She was shocked that I would disobey her, and hurt that I hadn’t told her right away what had happened. “I always thought we had such a good relationship, Virginia; that we could talk about anything.” I was sent to my room while the grownups decided what they would do. When my father got home, he came in and sat on my bed for a while looking sorrowfully at me, but I lay staring at the wall and kept my own counsel.

  Anna and I were forbidden to go outside or to play together again that summer, and in August my mother took me to Connecticut for a month. But I saw Anna twice before that. Once the police came to talk to us, and showed us hundreds of pictures of men’s faces. They all had numbered tags around their necks. And one other time we went to police headquarters downtown with our mothers to see if they’d found the right man. Both women were tight-lipped, and my mother was slightly tearful. Our part of the room was very dark. Anna and I looked at each other across our mothers’ angry profiles. Her eyes seemed accusatory, and I looked away first.