Pinus Pinaster

by Amy Greenberg

At the relative time of eighth grade, a girl moved from one house to another house three streets over, and very little changed. Many dresses were packed in congested squares of cardboard, and the girl used them later as small condos for her cat, something the cat did not like. The girl was tall, almost gangly to a fault, but not completely fault-ridden. Enough to get picked on, though, which is why Carrie Winters, on a Monday—The First Monday of School and The First Monday Jonathan Barkin Came to Class—called her “celery girl” in the middle of a very tense and very fast game of four square. The girl was very upset at this, as she already had a hook nose she would (later in life) blame on her father and a slow, wobbling gait she would (later still) blame on her mother. She had very round ankles, and her breasts, although not fully developed, were pink-swollen and sloping, a pair of popcorn kernels waiting for the heat.

At her old house (the better one, the best one) there was a thick green pool, and it was perfect: easy steps, terracotta tiles at the sides and the most terrifying deep end ever created by man. Deep. Full of fuzzy pollen at the bottom. Sometimes she would pop up out of the water (Dihydrogen Oxide, thank you Mrs. Sickman), the strands of her hair parting, parting toward the surface, and oh! just there! tiny floating spiders, right at eye level, the kind that clamp on to the water, ruining the lightness of it. Terrifying.

Six times she had imagined it! the fuzzy thrill of dropping down in there. Deep end it all! like Virginia Woolf. She had learned about her after watching The Hours with her big fat dad, and the whole thing was sort of gross but she had liked Woolf (mainly Nicole Kidman as Woolf, before she knew her big fat nose was a prosthetic) and later Googled her. Virginia just plopped pebbles in each side of her tracksuit. Of her drenched suit. Of her trench coat. And then just sidled into the pond! into the river! She thought maybe the ducks watched the woman-poet with a sad duck feeling, because who could do much to stop her? She imagined that after it happened the body popped up like a bath toy and the whole world was sad until the next Tuesday. She told Jonathan this at recess, exactly ten days after she considered “desk-mate Jonathan,” “friend Jonathan.” But he had less duck-like plans, if it was to happen at all.

“I think I would do it in a big way, you know? At least when I’ve thought about it. Like I would be flying an airplane and then jump off without the parachute. That’s all, folks! That’s how I’d die.”

“That sounds so cool. I wish I could think of something like that. I wish I could die like that.”

“I wish Carrie Winters would die like that.”

“Shut up!”

But she had never wanted to die. Really she hadn’t. Before the girl moved houses and before things changed infinitesimally, she’d put a neon and plastic diving ring around her ankles when she swam in that truculent pool, only to feel what it could be like to be a mermaid, tied up by your own tail and leaving your own wake, which is very much the way boats feel and move as well. But you can’t just play like a boat or a mermaid or a crustacean, these things are all very dangerous. She was found swimming with the ring once and the girl came up for air once and the whole family was there and her father’s toes were yellow and ick! right smack against the pool tiles watching, watching her. She had to tell all of them how simple it could be if something bad happened. And sometimes this bad could happen before she knew, which was why it was the worst to swim this way. After this talk she kept her eyes open in the slick pool and sometimes glanced down at the neon green diving ring round the bones of her feet (behold—they are charming and fuzzy-seeming in the water!) the plastic lifting up and up the hairs of her calf, the whole of her skin lighter and thinner than most things.

Jonathan said he had. Really had thought of it once. For a second! just what it was like. It wasn’t a big deal. Not a huge one, where people had to wheel Jonathan off and give him blue pamphlets on life: how to live it. Ha!—not a pamphlet problem. And this was true, as Jonathan never died.

Although Jonathan did leave. He left after six (count ‘em—six) months of school, not including the week before school when you buy school supplies and excluding summer entirely.

Once, many weeks before Jonathan knew he was leaving, the girl saw her neighbor with a girl. The neighbor had just learned to drive, and his mom had purchased a shined Ford Truck, heavy with expectations. Before the truck, he (Carl) used to stand by his mom’s bird feeder and hurl acorns at the glinting spokes of the girl’s newChristmasbike. But that night he stood clutching the hips of his friend, which made the girl wonder if his friend thought it was funny and liked it when he used to throw acorns at the girl’s bike in a way the girl could not. She told Jonathan of this the next day.

“I saw my neighbor last night walking.”

“Yeah?”

“He was with someone.”

“And so?”

“I heard him say, ‘I Love You.’”

“You were that close?”

“No, I wasn’t so close. His voice just carried.”

A crushed velvet one, with lace at the hem and shoulders. This one, her favorite dress, sat principally at the head of her New Closet. She had worn it as a child, which was (as big fat Dad said) very darn diaper long ago. Practically an infant is when she wore it. But it went well with her saddle shoes and looked good with the tiles of the synagogue atrium, a place where she hid as many a guilty Jew kissed away a year of sin in ancient breaths on Yom Kippur. It was like that, she thought. The feeling of blowing down the glass doors of the shul to snap at the hot air of afternoon after a lifetime of speaking. Services: done! It was like this maybe, with Jonathan. That gasp of air was like ice, thick like custard.

Jonathan’s mother, Edna Barkin, had egg-white long thin hair, and made it to every soccer game. She made friends with the coach in between cigarette breaks, and was well known by the other mothers at school. She had told Jonathan over dinner that they couldn’t afford the school, and this could have been true. Even in this day and age little is known about the warble of a mother-woman’s heart.

Jonathan’s confession made saying good-byes a ceremony, as both mother-women thought it best the children do something the weekend after Jonathan left school so as to establish a running correspondence. He had transferred to a public school two exits south on the Interstate, and the new friends and the new clothes and the thirty minutes wounded what had been established before. They were dropped off clumsily and awkwardly at the local movie theater and with ten dollars each they saw a movie, and sometimes the girl had to look at the carpeted walls and the dim-lit sconces in between scenes to keep from weeping thoughtlessly (if such a hurt can really happen, if a brain can scream in one note). Keep from Weeping Still! she thought, in the little corners of her pink pink room. Keep from Weeping Still and soon enough, soon enough there will be summer.

In the summer there were radiant things. Hot hot things. The pine needles began to sting when she stood for too long, and many times at the beach seagulls would hop too close, so that they seemed almost like friends, like old aunts who, too weary for the rolling water, sank in the sand by the girl’s side for quite a long time.

It was three (count ‘em—three) weeks into the summer Jonathan Barkin left that the girl felt the thrill to drop down in there. A week before this revelation she had felt a tug at her pelvic bone, and her mother found the chocolate stain laid flat on her panties and slapped her (a Yiddish tradition) the second the girl got out of the shower.

“Honey!” she said, and she grasped the sides of the girl’s freckled (zit-ridden) face, “you’re a woman now!”

The girl cried. Not because of the pain or the sight of it, but because it had once seemed so very far away.

It was after this that she decided to visit the old place, the old house where before, her dresses were hung up neatly and sang in chorus. The pad popped right there in the crotch of her bathing suit—the small stretchy, flesh piece of fabric.

It may have been said that the girl’s sudden and frantic outing to the old house (frivolous! too often the female brain is wrapped in lace) was a result of the boy leaving, as Jonathan Barkin had left heavily, like an angel with Saran-Wrap-wings sticking horribly up up. Yet this, like Edna Barkin might say, is just a “bowl of shallots” inconceivably thought-up, felt out for in the dark like a primary color—Yellow, without a light how quickly and how often you change! Oftentimes inconsistency is found in its own transfiguration, in the minute and the accurate, on the many lines of the pine needles.

The girl walked barefoot three streets over, with a skit-scutt sound as she shuffled, because she walked in the soggy pine needles of the gutter, and because it had just rained. The cotton wings tore gently against what is called the inner thigh—this is imagined to be quite painful, somehow.

Three streets over is not a terribly long walk, especially not in this particular type of suburbia: things are very close-knit. But it’s longer in a red bikini, and when she finally reached _______ Street she got a couple of looks from what people call “neighbors,” although these people lived very far from the new house, three streets over kind of far away. Mr. Lawrence and his two youngest boys were playing with a Nerf gun at the top of their tiny mowed hill when the girl skit-scutted by, and he was so riled at the sight (because of his boys, because of his wife, because of the mundane prettiness offered to a girl broken down in a bathing suit) that he could do little else but holler, “Sweetheart, you should put some clothes on!” And while it seemed odd, but not terribly odd, Mr. Lawrence—a Classics major—had thought it was kind of gorgeous, kind of really artful—this girl he’d seen as an infant naked now growing and skit-scutting by—and not the least bit unattractive, although this is strange to admit.

When she finally stood in front of the house in the red bikini, in the old-time bottoms and the snug red top, she was in fact not the picture of psychosis or of mental breakdown or of any form at all of stress, duress, exhaustion or even fatigue. In fact, the stalk of her was taut, the center part of celery girl. She looked quite determined, almost like Joan of Arc when she had refused to change out of boy-clothes, and snap! (into the pond!) burned at the stake. The tall pine trees filtered the light onto her tummy, where her navel mouthed an accusatory no, snapped in negation and screaming south to where the hairs that skidded down had been bleached blonde, as blonde as Carrie Winters’ hair was when she had dyed it Kiss of Sunshine and paraded up and down the picnic tables in front of both the girl and Jonathan.

“After I took my head out of the sink my mom just looked at me and said, ‘Well, isn’t that wild?’ And I think it is,” Carrie said, the tips of her hair coarse and as fake-looking as a nose.

“Well I don’t think it’s wild. I think you look like a skunk,” the girl said.

“Shut up! I didn’t ask you, stir-fry!” (Things had progressed to “stir-fry,” as Carrie’s stepfather made stir-fry using carrots and chopped celery—an ingredient both completely extraneous to Asian Cuisine and completely unsavory, rude even.)

The girl used to swim in the late afternoon, and her brother and her father would sit on the peeling wrought iron chairs, her father with a glass of Diet Coke and her brother content with poking around, teasing the girl, running his hand in and out of the flame of the charcoal grill before burgers. Still those spiders though! Back then there might have been thousands of them clinging to the top of the water, all invisible with egg-white little hairs, all resembling Ms. Edna Barkin—member of the Stonelark Middle School PTO for about six (count ‘em—six) months.

Charlene McAfee noticed that it was the girl from three streets over. The neighborhood was close-knit: block parties came and went every few months, and the tiny computer-printed invitations, clean with friendliness, were stuck with aplomb on the McAfee refrigerator. When found at the front door, the girl was stopped and walked back to her new house by Mr. McAfee. There she was received by her big and fat father, who was bewildered and almost sort of horror-struck, if you looked hard enough. Later that night Charlene phoned the girl’s mother, recounting with uncomfortable niceties the slide of the girl’s almost bare summer body: her too-round ankles and her bound-up but still sloping breasts.

“She asked if she could swim in our pool. And then she tried to come in and—well, Don had to sort of hold her back from coming in. She seemed—I don’t know, Judy—shaken.”