Come Clean. Terri Paddock
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together instead, creating a dull plop of a sound.
I crouch down to unbuckle my Mary Janes. I want to step out of them gingerly, but my feet have been sweating and, without any hose, my soles have stuck. I pry each shoe off with the toes of my spare foot. Pony Girl’s impatient and nags me to ‘hurry up already’ as she drums her rubberised fingers together. My tartan skirt falls off as soon as I unbutton it at the back. I have to roll your turtleneck up over my head, turning it inside out as I haul it loose. My hair, drawn through the too-tight neck, springs free from the shirt all staticky, like I poked my finger in a socket.
It takes me less than a minute until I’m standing in nothing but my bra and panties, my hands clasped at my belly.
‘Underwear too.’
I hesitate and Pony Girl rolls her eyes. ‘Underwear too!’ she shouts. ‘For fuck’s sake, don’t you people understand English. Howya think a strip-search works?’
I bite my lip and wriggle my arms up behind my back in search of the catch to my bra, but my fingers are shaking and I can’t disentangle the hooks from the eyes. I slip my arms out of the straps and twist the clip round to the front. Even seeing it, though, it takes me four attempts to undo both hooks. I slide my panties down next, hustling them past my knees and ankles, and deposit them on to the dusty carpet with the rest of my Sunday not-so best.
‘Spread ‘em – arms and legs.’ It’s just like on some TV police show, Cagney and Lacey maybe, the one with the lady cops. Except it’s longer now, more drawn out, more humiliating – and without clothes, of course.
She starts in my hair, raking roughly through it with her clumsy, kitchen-glove paws, then she pokes in my ears and I’m wondering how how how could I hide any contraband there and what do they mean by contraband anyway, what does it look like and why do they think I would have any? Then the gloves brush against my cheek.
I remember Mom used to get awful mad when she’d go to do the dishes and those kitchen gloves of hers weren’t there.
I close my eyes and feel the honeycombed grip of the right palm – or is it the left? – abrading my face. Gripped not for scrubbing faces but for holding on to plates, holding on even when they’re wet and slippery.
‘Open your mouth.’
And I open my mouth and in slips a sheathed forefinger, probing my gums and my incisors and molars, pushing down my tongue, poking into my tonsils – or not the tonsils, but that dangly doohicky at the back, the cartoony bit they always show flapping about in Popeye when Olive Oyl opens her trap big enough to swallow the screen and lets rip with an almighty screecher.
Our mother also hated it when somehow we’d accidentally puncture one of those gloves, though I always reckoned it was more likely to be the fork tines than our little hands that were to blame.
Pony Girl’s kitchen-glove thumb is clamped over my nose and I’m inhaling the rubber that smells like balloons and tastes like them, too, this glove in my mouth, tasting like after we’ve been blowing up birthday balloons all afternoon, like we did for our tenth birthday party when all the kids from school came. And I wonder if this is what a condom smells like and tastes like, and I swear I don’t know for myself but I imagine it must be because it’s called a rubber too. The finger is out of my mouth and I have somehow managed to avoid throwing up again.
Whatever the cause, if there was a hole in those rubber kitchen gloves, the ones packed away beneath the sink, the corrosive soap and grime could seep right into your bones and it was as bad as not wearing any gloves at all, according to our mother.
Pony Girl’s finger is trailing my own spit down my cheek and around my neck and down. And I’m wondering what exactly it is that I’ve just had in my mouth, just exactly how many strip-searches these gloves have been a party to and just how exactly do they clean them afterwards? And maybe I am going to be sick on second thoughts.
Our mother always wore kitchen gloves. Up until our family got a dishwasher, anyway, which it was our job to load and unload.
Pony Girl’s rubberised finger is wet and slipping down my sternum, ringing round my neck and scooping under my armpits where usually I’m ticklish. And I’m thinking if maybe I laugh now she’ll stop, if maybe I pretend we’re playing a game to see who’s the most ticklish, it’ll startle her and she won’t be able to go on. But she does go on.
Then we got a cleaner too, as well as the dishwasher. The cleaner, she was named Marjorie. She came in twice a week, so Mom didn’t even have to wear the kitchen gloves for handling the mop or scouring the countertops or anything.
Pony Girl’s finger is snailing down my arm and checking under my fingernails for contraband – what contraband, how small is contraband, how microscopic does contraband come? – and then it’s back circling my waist and skidding down my stomach and then…
I am not going to scream or pee or flinch or cry or sneeze or plead – and then it is delving deep into my pubic hair, down and down and beyond.
Our mother still has lovely soft hands.
My eyes are closed.
And Mommy, I swear I’m a virgin.
I have a memory that floats around in the early-time ether. We’re two, maybe three. I only retrieved the memory because of something my best friend Cindy Gregory told me in the seventh grade. Cindy had this kooky old aunt named Anastasia who was an astrologer, who told us that everyone was supposed to know the time of day they were born. If you didn’t know the exact time, Anastasia said, then you couldn’t ever have an accurate astrology reading because you couldn’t ever know your precise alignment with the stars. Something like that.
It always bugged me that Mom couldn’t remember the time, but we were never big into astrology so on that count, I guess, it wasn’t a disaster. But Aunt Anastasia did cause me to recall this other time. We couldn’t have been old enough to talk properly, but I remember us talking to each other, like cartoon thoughts bubbling up out of our skulls except only you and me could see them. We could read, too. We were bright young sparks, even if nobody else knew it.
We little Einsteins were with Mommy – because we called her Mommy then – nearing the checkout at the A&P. They have all these candy bars, rolls of mints, bubble gum and cheapo pocket pamphlets displayed around the checkout to distract you, because the cashiers at this A&P are high-school dropouts and the waits are always long.
I’m feeling a whine coming on, I want a Chunky bar. You’re bored, too, but easily entertained by the cheapo pamphlets, cardboard that melts in your mouth. You start fingering one that’s got a picture of a fierce but friendly looking lion on it. A lion like Aslan out of The Chronicles of Narnia – only we wouldn’t have known that then because, though we could read, Dad didn’t buy us the C.S. Lewis box set until we were nine.
‘A – U – G – U – S – T,’ you tell me. ‘August, that’s us.’
‘Yes, very good, Joshua, that’s Daddy,’ Mommy pipes in, getting it wrong as usual. ‘What a good boy to remember Daddy’s birthday.’
When you shove the corner of Daddy’s birthday into your mouth to see what flavour it is, Mommy slaps it out of your hand.
‘Tastes baaaad.’ She tidies it in its rack and leafs through the other cheapo pamphlets, until she finds another, much more boring-looking one that’s got a picture of a lady lounging on it. ‘Hey, twenty-fifth of August. That’s you.’
I curl up my lip.
Mommy doesn’t hear. ‘Virgo, the Virgin. That’s you.’
‘What’s a virgin?’ you ask, disappointed as I am that we can’t be something as cool as a lion. Why does Daddy get to be a lion and we’ve got to be some lazy old bag on