Risking the Rapids by Irene O'Garden

Author:Irene O'Garden [O’Garden, Irene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633538863
Publisher: Mango Media
Published: 2019-01-07T03:44:55+00:00

Very Personally Yours

While I’d seen them before—as Mom nursed Ro, or accidentally coming into the bedroom when she was strapping on her bra—and I know something is going on beneath the tight-fitting plaid shirtwaists Timmy’s Mom wears on Lassie, I never take serious notice of breasts. A shirtwaist or magician’s-assistant or Tinkerbelle shape is not in my future. Not with my body, it isn’t.

I’m not like anyone on TV or in the movies. Guess I’m not as true.

My awareness is sharpened at sleepaway camp.

•••

I like Girl Scouts, the outdoorsiness, the thing-makingness, the information.

Also with a different kind of mother attached. Mrs. Long, our leader, with high-color sweetfeature face, her firm yellow pageboy, lets me read poetry to our troop, and helps me get all these badges, like cooking, art, and first aid. Plus, an adult around, girls aren’t so mean.

But at camp, there don’t seem to be adults, just kids—high school kids and college kids and us.

Dopey crafts. Stitch two vinyl squares with yarn, stuff with issues of Look and Life, sew it shut for a “sit-upon” at the campfire. Heavy, smelly thing doesn’t belong in the woods.

Then pick long grasses for stupid octopus. They give us balls of Styrofoam to drape grasses over and yarn to tie under grassdraped ball for head.

Divvy up grasses, braid into legs. Tie with more yarn, press plastic black-and-white jiggle eyes in.

This stupid thing I’m trying to make this stupid thing here in my bunk while they’re over there talking about their boyfriends and their sprouting breasts and I don’t have any and I don’t want to hear that hers are like apples while hers are pearshape, and here comes their pubic hair, me as bare as a brown’n’serve roll. Stop talking about all this and laughing at me because I don’t have any, running from the cabin down a grassy bank clutching my octopus weeping on its braidy legs beating its styrofoam head on a stone over and over.

•••

I can’t talk this over with Mom. Thanks to her upbringing, she is loath to discuss any physical function.

The O’Briens never use the toilet. We “go to the bathroom.” We don’t pee. If forced to elaborate, we “go Number One or Two.” “Belly” is vulgar, only used in accurate but reluctant reference to a stomach-first flop into lake water. “Tummy” is what aches with hunger or indulgence. (Or the flu, which went round the house so often in my earliest days that I thought a stomach was a platform on a spring. The food you ate collected on it and pressed it down till…boing.)

I never heard the word “fart” until our racy, grubby neighbor girl Margy (pronounced with a hard g, as in gross, which she loved to be) tells us there’s a special name for that “burp at the other end.” Of course she refers to butts, which we do not possess. Nor fannies. “Rear end” is tolerable, “behind,” preferable. Po-Po is acceptable for the Littles, thanks to the occasional round of that deathless

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