Burnt Bread and Chutney by Carmit Delman

Author:Carmit Delman [Delman, Carmit]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-51606-0
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

Struggling between the world of my home and the world I wanted to live in outside it, I turned to my diary to voice my frustrations. I wrote about anger. I wrote about music. I especially wrote about sex. I wrote about fantasy and edged through the clumsiness, defying G-d. I also questioned the strict ideas of sexuality that my family had always tried to convey. Because now, in my confusion, they all began to boil over within me. There was the essence of India that Nana-bai imparted in her stories, where breasts could balloon overnight from just looking at a boy the wrong way. And then there were the methods of Judaism, which my parents enforced in the rules and edicts and bits of Torah and clichés I’d heard since childhood. “Remember the three R’s: respect, responsibility, and the right decision,” they told me again and again. These philosophies seemed at odds with each other now. Nana-bai’s drama would not understand my parents’ sterile words. Their words would not approve of the voluptuousness in hers. And so the truth of sexuality could not possibly be both of these. Where was I in all this? I asked my diary again and again, as if expecting an answer.

I was caught between gross intellectualism and Nana-bai’s boundaries that were deliciously tangible and teasing, at times cartoonlike, at times magical, somehow always stunning. So, as I grew into my sexuality, I was, at different times, a prude, a slut, a flirt, an awkward schoolgirl, and a eunuch. I was an exhibitionist, thrilled to be caught in a white T-shirt during a downpour, where beyond all control, my curves slowly materialized for the world out of sheer, drenched cloth. I was a big talker, leading conversation back to things like blowjobs and sadomasochism before I understood what the words meant. I was even a schemer, playing innocent in order to not appear innocent, in order to hide my innocence, in order to finally seduce by it. And sometimes I was all of these things at once. In my diary, in my awkward accounts and pages of fizzing experiments, there was a joining which I could barely understand, the emergence of a physical presence in words to something that seemed so impossible, so forbidden to exist it could very well have not existed at all.

Dear Diary:

Last night Lynnette and I had a party in the basement. Somehow when mom and dad were upstairs for a while, we got a game going, where you spin a bottle and then go into the closet with the person it lands on. And I went into the closet with Brian Tonelli, and we were on the floor in the dark and he touched my breasts, under my shirt, under my bra. It was the first time anyone’s ever done that! He held them and rolled them between his fingers. And the whole time he was saying, “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it.” I don’t know what it was supposed to feel like.

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