I remember that when Daddy gave me the medical books, Momma said, “There’s no doubt. We’ll have a famous and wonderful doctor in our family. He’ll take care of us when we’re old and feeble, and he’ll never let his sister get too sick, even when she’s married and has a family of her own.”
Cathy squinted and looked like she would regurgitate. She was still too young to think of herself as a married woman with children of her own, especially since I’d taken her aside and explained how children really come to be, not just children of animals but people, too.
“You’re making it up, and you’re as disgusting as poop,” she said, and ran off.
Maybe I was wrong to explain it to her while she was still so young. I’m making that mistake often with her and with other kids my age. I just assume they are as ready as I am to learn what is real and what is fantasy. I can’t help it, I guess. I feel I have an obligation to protect Cathy, and protecting her means teaching her important things. What is more important than knowing about sex?
Sometimes . . . sometimes I think Cathy believes we’ll never change; we’ll never get older; we’ll never be anything more than the Dollanganger children.
I would never tell anyone this, but writing it in the diary right now is all right.
Sometimes I go to sleep fantasizing about that, imagining us forever and ever, the perfect little family who couldn’t be changed by time, by bad weather, by sickness, or by anything, for that matter.
But almost as soon as I do this, I snap myself back to reality and berate myself.
You can’t be a child, Christopher, not now, not eve
r.
Is that good or bad?
I’m still not sure.
I put the diary down to think about what he had written. After my mother died, my father would have preferred the human species to be asexual. At least, that was how I saw it now when I recalled the way he would react to any questions I had when I was nine and ten. It wasn’t until I was eleven that he asked my aunt Barbara to have a more intimate conversation with me. I overheard him talking to her on the phone.
“I’ve seen some of the other girls in her class, Barbara. Maybe something’s changed in the air or something, but some of these sixth-graders have the bodies of older teenage girls. Kristin can’t be far behind. I think she and her girlfriends are already talking turkey, if you get my drift. I mean, I know they teach them stuff in school, but it can’t be the same as what goes on outside the school, right? I’d just like it to be someone in the family.”
My dad wasn’t a prude, but he was quite shy when it came to what went on between men and women. There were so many times when I saw him redden after one of his workers or someone else made a remark he considered R-rated, especially if it happened in front of me. Usually, however, it was something that went over my head.
Anyway, he impressed Aunt Barbara enough with the need for my special talk even at my age that she made a quick trip to Charlottesville to see us, or me, I should say. She pretended she had come just to visit, but I knew and anticipated our tête-à-tête. It happened the second night she was there. After dinner, when I went up to my room to do my homework, she knocked on the door and came in.
Aunt Barbara was not an unattractive woman by any means. She had been engaged when she was in her mid-twenties, but her fiancé was in the army and was shipped to Afghanistan, where he was fatally wounded in a roadside bomb explosion. I know it took her years to get over that, and from the way my father talked about her, she had trouble with every date she had afterward. None of the men who asked her out wanted to be compared to her fiancé, and apparently, she let them believe they would be.
She did have another steady boyfriend for almost two years, but they broke up when he cheated on her. Most of her energy after that went into her work and taking care of my grandmother.
She sat on my bed and smiled at me. “You are growing up fast,” she began. “Your father says you’re thinking about boys already.”
I shrugged.
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“Not really,” I said.
“But there’s a boy you like?”
I nodded.
“I was a little older than you when my mother talked to me about all this. You know how she began?”
I shook my head.
“She said, ‘I’m going to tell you about yourself and how you will be when you get close to a boy, and I’m going to warn you about things, but you know what, Barbara? You’re going to do what you want anyway,’?” she said. “Every girl does, and any mother who thinks differently is just fooling herself to make herself worry less. So let me tell you how it was for me the first time I did more than kiss a boy,” she began.
I don’t think I ever paid stricter attention to anything anyone had ever said. When I looked back on that evening and the way she followed up with me often, I thought that even though Cathy had a mother and a brilliant older brother, I was the luckier one for this part of life. At least, that was what I suspected, but I knew I had to keep reading to see if I was right, to see if Cathy ever paid any attention to her brother Christopher’s information about men and women or if her mother gave her the education my mother couldn’t.
Today, Cathy and I were both surprised but for different reasons. I should write that Cathy was more shocked.
We learned something I was beginning to suspect.