On the day that it happened, my mother cursed him. She clawed his face and marshaled her hatred into a blow that fell like a sledgehammer, thick and heavy, straight over his forehead, knocking him backwards into the street. From the ground he stared up at her tiny, eighty-pound frame and wondered at her strength, a strange red welt already forming at the top of his brows — and then he ran away, quickly, before she had time to muster up for another blow, and nobody went after him.
I was fifteen on that day, on the afternoon that he ran away from my mother and I, later, ran away from his. Mine gave me a word for what had happened, though she didn’t say the word aloud, even in Tagalog, but the volume of her silence was enough to imply a thing or two, and in a moment she had established, mother to daughter, that what had happened, had been done–passive voice, object: me. But only later, after curses had flown, and after he had fallen, and after the look of shock on his face had fleetingly betrayed something not quite like guilt, but not quite like innocence, did I know that she was right.
On that day, before she had noticed the thin, straight streak of dark that stained the inside of my left leg, or the bit of red, obscene against my bright white sock, which had fallen like a tear drop from the sore spot between my legs – before this, and her screams, and that irrevocable curse, I had thought the act was something like love…:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” />
When I told this to my mother, she slapped me, and I grimaced to smell his saliva dried to my lips. The sting she put into my cheek with that slap impressed upon me a measure of shame that felt acutely deserved, and I was disgraced to know the sloppiness of his kisses, and the experience of his lips, as late as that afternoon, forming a seal around my open mouth, sucking like he needed my air to survive. Why did I think of this then, and wonder if she knew? If she smelled him? Even after wiping my mouth with a handkerchief, his smell always lingered at the corners of my lips, or the cleft of my chin, for hours afterward – and did she notice? Did she know that, sometimes, when I chewed my pen in class, the smell of the drying pencap reminded me of him?
My mother drew me a bath, and my aunts fussed around me, the Younger unbuttoning my dress blouse and the Older reaching for the hook of my skirt, all of them causing the blood to beat in my face because none had seen me thus exposed since early childhood. After my mother’s slap, the attention felt warm as well as shameful and I couldn’t help wondering if my mother recognized my body, though it had grown long and thin, or whether this was merely a half-grown stranger trembling on her bathmat. She didn’t answer my curious gaze, only motioned for me to step out of my shoes, which I did, gingerly, and in doing spied a crushed jasmine flower peeking out from the inside of the left one. It would have fallen in earlier that afternoon when I’d stepped out of my shoes at the door of his house, respectful of the fact that his mother was compulsive about keeping the floors clean. I always removed them when I arrived, placing them neatly to the right of the threshold, toes pointing away from the door, so I could step right into them when I left at dusk, the scent of just-blooming jasmine wafting in through the bedroom window always my cue. Now I dreaded that little flower, and hoped that my mother hadn’t noticed it, afraid as I was that its pretty perfume, pulsing out from within that discarded mary-jane, would beat a confession out of me.
But no one said a word, and as I entered the tub on cherry-painted tip-toes I kept silent as well, though I felt my secret throb a little when the scalding water rushed between my slightly parted legs, and I couldn’t help imagining the water entering me from down there, filling me up from where I had been split, until I was warm and heavy around the middle. I thought: before today I had owned no concept of being filled.
My mother washed my hair with ungentle hands, while the other two turned out my panties to remark on the various fluids that had pooled and mingled and dried there. Cringing, I looked away, peering into the gently lapping water where I saw, somewhere between my eyes and its surface, the image of a crumpled white t-shirt, shiny and red and casually thrown onto a clean floor and I didn’t know how to feel about that. The image faded like an opening curtain, showing me my legs, which tinted the water a dirty tawny color, and I noticed my own reflection projected over them and over the water and, looking at myself, I thought I looked pretty well for someone in my condition.
By now I was getting used to the idea of what had happened to me or, at least, this new connotation of what had happened to me, or what I still sort of thought I had done.
They helped me up and dried my hair, but asked me no questions, which I was glad of, because I didn’t know how I would tell them that I had been going to his house after school for weeks, letting him kiss and touch me, occasionally undress me, driving him mad with my inconsistent boundaries such that I only had myself to blame for this.
Then they put me to bed, though I wasn’t tired, and went into the other room where they sat very quietly, as though waiting for something to happen. I was waiting too, for the sound of the television to whirr to life in the next room, buzzing just loudly enough for me to make my escape, unnoticed. But all I heard was the click of my mother’s heel as she slowly, deliberately tapped her foot against the bare tile floor, click-clack, over and over, keeping time for something that I didn’t understand, but which I found oddly foreboding in its calm. I should have known then how this would end, and for what these three so patiently waited.
But young girls don’t have the luxury of foresight, especially ones who fancy themselves loved, and so I slipped out of bed, locked my bedroom door from the inside, and climbed out of my window.
Tricycle fare to his house would have cost next to nothing, and would have been well worth it at such an hour, but I decided to walk despite the darkness and mostly unlit streets, because tonight I wasn’t frightened. Before that day, I would have been, but now I wasn’t. I walked. I thought: I did it. I’ve done it. It was hard to fathom, largely because I didn’t feel any different, any more a woman or any less respectable, regardless of how often I reminded myself of my altered condition.
I passed the sari-sari store on my right, closed now for the night but with the lantern still on and conveniently lighting the street just to the point where I would turn left, onto Don Bonifacio—his street would be the next on the right. As I closed in on my destination, still feeling rather unchanged and un-new and painfully familiar to myself, I reassured myself that it had happened, and tried to remember everything about what it was, what had actually happened, sometimes remembering it from a third person point-of-view (myself on my back on the blanket, his left forearm pressing down on my chest), sometimes remembering it in a slideshow of senses (the black of his hair as it fell forward, the smell of pen-caps, the shockingly shrill sound of my own voice as the woolen blanket scratched my back and the palms of my balled fists), and sometimes replaying only the after (standing on the curb outside, in my school uniform, swishing my skirt to dry the moisture on my thighs, while he held my hand and waited for me to finish my Coke, sucked with a straw straight out of the glass bottle.
By the time I reached his block, nervous excitement was swirling around in my belly, erupting occasionally out of my feet, into an occasionally skip past the house with the broken glass shards jutting from the top of a cinder block fence, and past the house with the gate of iron spikes, and past the house with no fence at all and nothing worth stealing either, and on and on until, at last, I arrived at the house with the short, red, spiked gate, crank windows instead of frosted plantation panes and, of course, the tree blooming jasmine. And there, on my last skip, I stepped backwards out of my shoes, leaving them neatly to the right of the threshold, toes pointing away from the door, beneath the jasmine flowers, and I went in.
He told me my mother was crazy, and I kissed the welt on his forehead and smoothed his scratched cheeks with my palms.
I told him it hadn’t been so bad, what we’d done together, and he agreed, petting me sweetly and lowering me back onto the bed where (it now seemed like ages ago) he had already lowered me once today, despite the jasmine’s cue.
For a minute today, he said in dialect, and kissed me, I thought you were going to hit me. And, remembering how one feeble protest had been answered with a sharp twinge between my legs, I thought: almost. But though my fists had released the blanket beneath me, and had threatened to push him away with a violence that surprised us both, they were ultimately unwilling to do harm, and had merely hovered for a moment, then clutched at his billowing shirt, neither pulling him closer nor pushing him away, straining to be indecisive – just long enough, I had thought, until it’s over. And then my pelvis had split, or seemed to, down the middle, like a piece of firewood cracked and divided in half by a bolo knife and it hadn’t lasted long: one gasp, one sob, one full thrust and then he had gasped too, pulling out just in time to squirt pearly beads of white onto my thigh. Afterwards, he had rested his head peacefully on my chest and, remembering this, I said to him now: I could never hit you.
He searched my face for a moment and then, taking my hand in his, kissed my forehead. He asked me if it felt alright and I nodded, wincing just a little, when he entered. This time I wouldn’t protest, and I buried my face in the pillow, careful to make no sound, and with every push and pull, I thought with incredulity: I’m doing it. I can’t believe I’m doing it. And, as his thrusts became quicker and deeper (sometimes a straight shot in and sometimes awkwardly and uncomfortably to the left) I thought that this man and woman didn’t fit together very well at all. We weren’t, as a friend had described it, like a puzzle piece. My legs were tired and my pelvis hurt and it didn’t feel like anything that was down there, belonged down there. He didn’t fit, and he felt like a bowel movement.
And then a gasp, a sob, one more thrust and then the palm of a woman’s hand cracked loudly against the side of his head and he yelped, pulling out, taking the rough, woolen blanket with him, so that I lay face-up, naked, and split-legged beneath the glare of a woman that I had never met but whom I knew, instinctively, to be compulsive about keeping her floors clean.…
And then she gave me a word for what I had done, and screamed it plainly, even in Tagalog, the clap of her palm against my face stamping the exclamation point at the end of her condemnation. She reached for my hair, then, with a meticulously manicured claw, but I rolled off the other side of the bed before she could reach me and, grabbing my shawl, ran naked down the hall, through the sitting room and out the front door where the tidy placement of my shoes contributed to the speed of my departure. I pulled the shawl around me just as I squeezed through the front gate, and then I paused, panting, when I realized that she wasn’t following me, and stopped fully when I realized that he wasn’t either.
And then I stood there for a moment, smelling the jasmine blossoms, now fainter than they had been the first time I left his house that day, and I felt my cheek still stinging from his mother’s slap, sharper than the first mother’s slap I had received that day, and could only think: But I was raped. I sat on the curb in the dark, beside the empty coke bottle that I had abandoned earlier, and grew thirsty watching it glint tauntingly in the light of a nearby streetlamp, such that I could almost taste the syrup on my tongue, but not quite — not over the taste of saliva that was drying at the corners of my lips. I picked it up and, just then, I was overwhelmed by an inexplicable hatred for that silly glass bottle, and I wanted to curse it, claw it, marshal my hatred into a blow that would fall like a sledgehammer, thick and heavy, right over its spout, crushing it into dust on the asphalt.
And then I spun around, flinging it towards that house with all the strength that shame can muster, and then I watched it connect — sharply, loudly — with his unsuspecting head. It was over in a moment: one swing, one gasp, one sob, and then his head cracked, just to the right of my mother’s welt, and above his mother’s slap, in a place that was only mine: the spot where his black hair had fallen forward in an earlier moment of violence mistaken for passion. He crumpled almost soundlessly to the asphalt, fragments of glass raining down around him and I watched, arm still raised and figure trembling as I stood, suspended in the dark by the streetlamp’s spray of light, on a night now devoid of even the faintest scent of jasmine.
Catherine A. Traywick