2.38 What Did I Know?

1958 • Honolulu ~ I remember a Friday afternoon soon after what happened with Bobby: a girl and I were playing the cigarette game on our way home from school, racing and keeping score of who stomped first on the empty packs of Kents, Kools, and Lucky Strikes flung from car windows and littering the roadsides. There was a random trail of tattered Viceroys, Marlboros, and Winstons, of Pall Malls, Camels and Salems, some faded, some fresh. She was older, a fifth grader.

“I bet you don’t know what sex is.”
”Well…” I knew that a baby boy had different things than a baby girl, so did dogs, and I also figured that’s not what she was talking about.
“It means sticking his up hers,” she informed me with all the superiority of someone older and wiser.

I made her spell it out—stick his what up her what—then explain it again, real slow. It stopped me dead on an empty pack of Camels. I’d never heard such a thing, and I was sure she was making it up. Until it sank in. That’s what happened. I still couldn’t make any sense of it, but at least I now had words for it. I thought about the conversation at the psychiatrist’s office and about Bobby. I thought about it all for the rest of the day until the final scraps of light were gone. I thought about it clear until it was time to climb into bed with the silent back of my mother, until the time when I no longer said my prayers. I knew what happened in the apartment with Bobby wasn’t okay, and I knew my dad would think that too.

And that’s what I remember about Hawaii. So much for living in paradise.

to be continued…

© 2018. Catherine Sevenau.
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