By Wendy J. Dunn
I remember the day before my thirteenth birthday, so many years ago. On that day I’d slept away another hot day of the summer holidays when my mother woke me from my afternoon nap, placing a large box upon my bed.
‘Debbie! You’ve got a birthday present from Auntie Peg! Why not open it while I get the eggs for your cake? I won’t be long.’ Standing in the open doorway, she combed her fingers thoughtfully through dyed blonde hair, tugging down her burnt-orange hotpants.
Yawning, I sat up, drawing the parcel—sticky-taped and secured with string—onto my lap. When I lifted my gaze again, I saw an empty doorway. The smell of my mother’s new and expensive perfume still lingered, the sole mnemonic of her very short visit.
Cutting its string with my nail scissors, I tore apart the parcel’s brown paper sheets to find a cardboard box. Within that box, enfolded in white tissue paper, lay a folded, shimmering red-silk dress.
All at once fully awake, I jumped out of bed, tossing my shapeless summer nightie to the floor. Pulling up the side zipper of the dress, I twirled around, loving the feeling of the soft fabric. The style of the dress seemed just like Marilyn Monroe wore in the Seven-Year Itch. I looked into my room’s full-length mirror and couldn’t believe the young woman who stared back at me—a young woman with a trim waist, rounded hips and more than just a hint of cleavage. A young woman and no longer a girl still one whole day away from her thirteenth birthday.
Leaving my bedroom, I danced down the hall to the front door. Knowing myself alone in the house, I went outside in search of friends, to show off my new dress.
In the long summer school break, its days seemingly stretching on as if without ending, early evenings usually found the street’s young folk gathered in small groups in front of their homes. But not tonight. Bare-chested, perched in tight blue jeans on the adjacent house’s brick letterbox, the only person around was Rick, smoking a cigarette.
I’d only seen Rick once before, when I played Barbies with Mary, my friend next door. My backside tingled, numbing from the cold concrete floor of her family’s garage, when Johnnie, Mary’s adult brother, came into the garage with a man of similar age and build, laughing and jostling one another.
‘That’s Rick,’ Mary whispered. ‘He’s my cousin.’
As Mary’s brother opened up his car’s bonnet, Rick lolled for a moment against its body. With a cigarette in his mouth, embers glowing red, he stared at me. My face became hot, and I squirmed with discomfort when he sniggered and had turned his attention back to the car’s engine. I don’t remember him glancing my way again.
Mary told me Rick was soon to be twenty-one. All the girls loved him. His parents sent him to stay with them because he had got into some kind of trouble. Mary’s mother told her to stay away from him.
That summer’s evening before my thirteenth birthday, Rick lifted his head at my approach, flicking back black hair almost covering his deep blue eyes — eyes again assessing me as they had done six months ago. He offered an open cigarette pack, his wiry muscles flexing. ‘Wan’a a smoke?’
I looked over my shoulder, and then all around. No one else was in sight. I stepped closer to him, taking out a cigarette. My fingers clumsy, I attempted to hold it like my mother. He lit a match. Putting the cigarette in my mouth, I moved close enough to brush against his body. He cupped his hand close to my face, shielding the match as the cigarette lit up, and I took my first puff. I could smell the nicotine from his fingers, mingled with the hint beer and after-shave. An after-shave that acted like a magnet to my senses. I couldn’t help noticing the light fuzz dusting his chest, and the trail of hair journeying from his navel’s base, disappearing under his jeans. Within me, a strange feeling coursed.
‘Your name’s Debbie, isn’t it?’
‘Yes…’
The smoke caught in my throat, and I struggled not to cough. My eyes watering, I turned my face away from him. Taking the cigarette from my mouth, I remembered how my mother nonchalantly held her cigarette to her side, just now and again bringing it back to her glossed-up lips. Even though the cigarette didn’t need it yet, I flicked the ash, looking back at him.
Evening’s dark fingers pressed bruises into his skin; shadows danced all around, crowding us in. Overhead, the crackle and hum of electrical wires competed with the rhythmical beat of cicadas’ mating songs; somewhere, very close, Nights in White Satin lamented love’s sorrow from a radio. I suddenly recalled promising my mother to be always home before nightfall. But I was home, standing at our letterbox.
‘You look different. How old are you? Sixteen?’
Nodding, I hoped the increasing darkness hid the blush I felt rise from my chest, taking another puff from the cigarette, longer this time because he saw me as a woman. I lowered my gaze, hiding from him my lie. Too late, I realised the consequences of inhaling deep from one’s first cigarette. Dizziness and nausea made me sway, my bowed head stroking against the skin of his upper arm. Shocked at what I’d done, I stared up at him. ‘Sorry! I—’
His free hand gripped my shoulder, his lips all at once possessing mine; on the day before my thirteenth birthday, I received my first grown-up dress and cigarette, and my very first grown-up kiss.
After first opening my eyes wide in surprise, I shut them, the cigarette let loose from my hand. I surrendered to the increasing pressure from his lips but opened my eyes again when his tongue came into my mouth — the fright of it almost made me pull away.
Finding myself liking it, I kissed him back again, caressing my tongue to his. Far too engrossed in this next, deeper kiss, I noticed little how he stepped with me behind some high bushes in our front garden, tugging one side of my new dress further and further up my thigh. But when his fingers slipped under my pants and slid in the cleft in between my legs, I jerked away from him, pulling my dress down.
Humiliated, my breathing rasped as if I just run a race. Tears smarting my eyes, I stared at him, or what I could see of him in the black velvet of the night. He laughed, lighting another cigarette; the fall of his long hair almost obscured my brief glimpse of his foreshortened features and thick eyelashes shadowing half-moons upon his white skin. When he took the cigarette away from his face, I peered with tear-glazed eyes at some formless mass.
‘Don’t tell me now that you didn’t like it!’
Looking for any escape, the open front door of my home beckoned. I stepped towards it, saying to the darkness: ‘I better go in.’
‘Yeah. You better. The bogeyman might get you if you don’t. And tell Nancy…yes, tell your mother something for me. I don’t wait for no-one.’
I didn’t understand his last words. But I was having a hard enough time understanding the ebb of feelings churned up by his kiss, when my bones had begun to lose all substance. Even after moving a safe distance away from him, my legs felt turned to jelly.
By the time my mother knocked on my bedroom door, the new dress, after I had first made sure it remained clean of any sweaty hand marks, hung in my deep, wooden wardrobe. Entering my room, my mother came to sit beside me.
‘Is everything alright? You’ve been in bed most of the day.’
I shrugged. ‘It’s too hot. Mum—I saw Mary’s cousin tonight. He gave me a message for you.’
Mum paled, blinking. ‘Who?’
‘You know, Mum—Rick.’
She lowered her gaze from mine; her hands knotted together on her lap, so tight she made her fingers bloodless. ‘You spoke to him?’
‘Yes—when I went out before to show Mary my dress.’ My heart pounded loud in my ears. I slipped deeper into bed, pulling my blankets up higher. ‘He said to tell you he doesn’t wait for no-one.’
My mother flushed. Swallowing hard, she averted her face, staring at the open door. ‘Shall I turn off the light on the way out, Debbie?’
I nodded. That night, the seesawing of my emotions prevented me from wondering at my mother’s odd reaction to Rick’s message; I only felt relief when the door closed after her.
But alone once again, and restless in the dark, I relived Rick’s kiss. I relived Rick’s kiss so many times my body shook and shook. My fingers, following the same path as his, discovered a new wetness and stickiness between my legs. Hours before, I’d thought myself a woman—now I sobbed like a frightened, bewildered child.
#
The next morning my mother looked like she had suffered the same night as me—a night in which slumber came in short bursts, squeezed in-between fretful tossing and turning. Usually so vibrant and pretty, that morning all her years laid upon her like a shroud.
Sitting at the table in my oversized Peter Rabbit nightie, eating my bowl of weeties, I took in my mother’s straw colour, lustre-less hair, and the dark rings under her eyes, the deeper lines running from nose to mouth. I peered more closely and realised she must have worn her full ‘war-paint’ yesterday and forgotten to take it off. The remains of mascara smudged heavily under her lower eyelashes; dark red lipstick delineated the creases of her lips. My mother’s unhappiness seemed almost tangible, but she still remembered to kiss me for my birthday, giving me her present.
Opening up the small box, I found a red velvet jewellery case and, inside that, a fine gold chain.
‘For my big girl,’ my mother said, kissing my forehead again. ‘And what did Aunt Peg get you?’
‘A dress. The necklace will be perfect with it.’ I beamed at her, and she smiled back.
‘Ah—that’s why Peg asked me for your measurements. You’ll have to model it for me after I take another nap—my head’s splitting this morning. I hate this heat too. If you don’t mind, love, we’ll celebrate your birthday tonight, when it’s cooler.’
My mother left the kitchen, and I finished my breakfast alone, doing the few dishes in the sink when I finished. Going past my mother’s room, despite the closed door, I heard the low drone of her voice, talking on the phone. Her upset tone for a moment halted me. I thought I heard her whisper plaintively, ‘Rick! Please!’ but, walking away, I put it down to imagination stirred by my deep shame.
That night I put on my new red dress and entered our lounge-room. Turning from her sewing machine, the blood left my mother’s face.
She rushed over, face screwed up, mouth open in a soundless scream.
Holding up high her dressmaking scissors, glinting from the overhead light, she plunged down as if to stab. My feet rooted to the ground, my mother cut my new red dress from neck to hem and ripped it from me. My new red dress. Destroyed. Spread between us, it lay on polished floorboards, like a puddle of blood. My innocence.
