Sweet Talk Read Free Page B

water entered his body,” said my father. He paused to let us think about that.
    “Well, what does that mean?” my grandmother said at last.
    My father rested his arms on the fence and gazed pleasantly at the Falls. “He went insane.”
    The river fascinated me. I often stood between the yellow curtains of my bedroom and looked down upon it and thought about how deep and swift it was, how black under the glittering surface. The newspaper carried stories about people who jumped over the Falls, fourteen miles upriver from our house. I thought of their bodies pushed along the soft silt of the bottom, tumbling silently, huddled in upon themselves like fetuses—jilted brides, unemployed factory workers, old people who did not want to go to rest homes, teenagers who got bad grades, young women who fell in love with married men. They floated invisibly past my bedroom window, out into the lake.
    That winter, I thought I was going to die. I thought I had cancer of the breasts. My mother had explained to me about menstruation, she had given me a book about the reproductive systems of men and women, but she had not told me about breasts and how they begin as invisible lumps that become tender and sore.
    I thought the soreness had begun in a phys. ed. class one day in December when I was hit in the chest with a basketball. I didn’t worry about it, and it went away by New Year’s. In January, I found a pamphlet at the bus stop. I was stamping my feet in the cold, looking down at my boots, when I saw the headline— CANCER: SEVEN WARNING SIGNALS . When I got home, I went into the bathroom and undressed. Iexamined myself for enlarged moles and small wounds that wouldn’t heal. I was systematic. I sat on the edge of the tub with the pamphlet by my side and began with my toenails, looking under the tips of them. I felt my soles, arches, ankles. I worked my way up my body and then I felt the soreness again, around both nipples. At dinner that night I didn’t say anything all through the meal. In bed I slept on my back, with my arms stiff against my sides.
    The next Saturday was the day my father came home late for lunch. The squash sat on the back of the stove and turned to ocher soup. The chicken fell away from the bones. After lunch he went into the living room and drank scotch and read a book. When I came down for supper, he was still sitting there, and he told my mother he would eat later. My grandmother, my mother, and I ate silently at the kitchen table. I took a long bath. I scrubbed my chest hard.
    I went straight to my bedroom, and after a while my mother came upstairs and said, “What’s wrong?”
    I didn’t say anything.
    She stood in front of me with her hands clasped in front of her. She seemed to lean toward her own hands. “But you’ve been acting, you know”—and here she laughed self-consciously, as she used the forbidden phrase—“you know, you’ve been acting different. You were so quiet today.”
    I went to my chest of drawers and took the pamphletout from under a stack of folded underpants and gave it to her.
    “What’s this?” she said.
    “I think I have Number Four,” I said.
    She must have known immediately what the problem was, but she didn’t smile. She asked me to raise my nightgown and she examined my chest, pressing firmly, as if she were a doctor. I told her about the soreness. “Here?” she said. “And here? What about here, too?” She told me I was beginning to “develop.” I knew what she meant, but I wanted her to be precise.
    “You’re getting breasts,” she said.
    “But I don’t
see
anything.”
    “You will.”
    “You never told me it would hurt.”
    “Oh, dear. I just forgot. When you’re grown up you just forget what it was like.”
    I asked her whether, just to be safe, I could see a doctor. She said that of course I could, and I felt better, as if I had had a disease and already been cured. As she was leaving the room, I said, “Do you think I need a bra?” She