Russell Banks - Outer Banks

“What’s with her?” Ham asked Daniel after Ginger had sneered at the boys’ request that she join them in a game of Monopoly. It was raining, and the boys were sitting by a window in the front room, slightly bored, watching the rain dribble down the glass.

“She’s big stuff now,” Daniel explained. “She thinks she’s Miss America. All she does at home is look in the mirror. At night she locks herself in her bedroom and studies her titties in the mirror. No kidding, I seen her. I looked through the keyhole once an’ saw her doing it.”

“Doing what?”

“Looking at her titties.”

“Her titties ? Has she got those ?” Ham didn’t remember noticing any pointy things protruding from her chest when she arrived.

“Yeah, little bitty titties!” Daniel laughed. “I seen ’em, lots of times.”

“How? Does she show them to you?”

“Naw. But I look at her through the keyhole in her bedroom door, and sometimes I walk in on her when she’s taking a bath or getting dressed or something, like it was an accident. Boy, she hates that. And sometimes I sneak up on her from behind and yank up her shirt or sweater and take a look and run away before she can even hit me. She doesn’t run as fast as she used to, so it’s real easy.”

“Yeah?” Ham was astonished by these turns in his cousins’ lives, and he was equally astonished by Daniel’s boldness.

“You want to see ’em?”

“See what?”

“Her boobs, the titties, stupid!”

“Sure,” Ham quickly answered. “How?”

“Easy. You call her in here, tell her you want her to explain something to you, something like about the Monopoly rules, and I’ll circle around through the living room and sneak up behind her and yank up her shirt. Okay? Got it?”

“Sure.”

“But when I do, you better be ready to take off, because she really gets mad,” Daniel warned.

Ham said he’d be ready, and Daniel went out of the front room into the living room. Then Ham started calling Ginger to come and explain something to him. “A Monopoly rule!” he yelled.

She sighed, got up from the kitchen table, and strolled through the downstairs bedroom to the front room. When she appeared at the door and asked, “Okay, what is it?” Ham momentarily lost his courage and was about to say “Never mind,” when he saw Daniel tiptoeing out of the bedroom behind her, his blue eyes gleaming excitedly, his fingers and hands poised to grab her shirttail, which he did, snapping it up to her armpits and exposing to Ham’s amazed eyes a tiny white brassiere strapped across her chest. Then, as she screamed, Ham started running, backward and out the door to the living room, through the living room to the kitchen and into the bedroom, where he ran into Ginger, who had remained standing in the doorway, her arms folded defiantly across her chest. Daniel, who had first fled into the kitchen and then had turned to follow Ham as he passed through, bumped into his cousin from behind and yelled, “Hurry up! Get going!” And then he saw her too.

They started to spin around and head back through the kitchen again, but she said, “Forget it, Daniel! I’m through chasing you. If you two want to be disgusting little sex fiends, go ahead. Here, take a good look,” she said, and she lifted her blouse and showed them her brassiere. “Satisfied?”

Ham felt his ears redden at the sight, and he turned around and ran from the room, all the way upstairs to his bedroom, where he sat down on the bed and waited for Daniel to come looking for him. While he waited, he promised himself, over and over, that he’d never look at Ginger’s titties again, no matter what her brother said, never.

EXCEPT WHEN HE happened to be in the front room, he hadn’t thought about it since it had happened. It was like almost forgetting it, or like having only dreamed it, parts of it — the part where Daniel sneaks up behind her, his eyes gleaming, his fingers outstretched and hooked a little, like Dracula’s, while Ginger stands in front of the door to the bedroom, talking peacefully to Ham about the Monopoly rules, when suddenly she bares her breasts to him, stands there leering, calling him a disgusting little sex fiend. That’s what he remembered whenever he had to spend more than a minute or two alone in the front room.

And inevitably, if he remained there, he remembered two other things, both of which caused him discomfort that was extreme and similar in feeling to the discomfort caused by the first memory. Like the one, the other memories were of events that had taken place in the front room. In one of them, he is with Ginger. She is about ten, and he is only six, and they are looking at each other’s genitals, touching them with fingertips, prodding, pulling tissue back, scrutinizing with excruciatingly gentle curiosity their respectively tiny organs.

They were not found out. No one burst in on them and pointed a huge finger and called them disgusting little sex fiends. Yet the memory gave Ham terrible discomfort, a deep sense of shame, and always, if at that moment he did not leave the front room, he would remember the other event that had taken place there. He would remember one spring morning, a Sunday before church, going into the front room from his parents’ bedroom, taking a short cut to the stairs, and as he runs through the room, he glimpses a tiny mouse huddled on the fireplace hearthstone, a brown mouse the size of a man’s thumb caught in a brick-walled corner. Ham stops and tiptoes over to the mouse, which cannot escape its corner and, as a final ruse, is stilled, trembling, waiting. The boy leans to his left and with his two hands removes a brick from the stack of a dozen or so that his father placed there, probably for some intended chimney repair, and the boy drops the brick onto the mouse, crushing its body but not killing it, so that it squeaks wetly, like an orange being squeezed for juice, and the boy must retrieve the brick, hold it up to his chin and drop it a second time, and then a third, and finally a fourth, when the mouse is dead.

HAM SLOWLY GOT to his feet and walked from the front room to the kitchen, on his way passing through his parents’ bedroom, where the new baby slept in her white, gauze-shrouded basinette. His mother was resting. She was seated at the kitchen table looking at her fingernails. When he came into the room, she smiled and said hello to him and asked him to come stand next to her.

While she stroked his hair back with her hands, he asked her one more time if he had to play in the front room. She relented and said no, he didn’t have to.

But she wanted to know why he hated that room, when he used to love it so.

He was going to tell her about the mouse, but when he opened his mouth to speak, he remembered that she already knew about it. It had never been a secret. He had run proudly from the front room to the kitchen and had brought both parents back to see the dead animal. They had been pleased and amazed. His father had patted him on the head and had said, “Good boy,” and his mother had said, “I never would’ve been able to do that. I just would’ve run for the cat and let him do it!”

So he said nothing to his mother, nothing of the mouse and of course nothing about his cousins. He shrugged his shoulders and looked at his feet.

“You’re a strange one, Ham,” she told him, smiling. “But if you want to be here with me and the baby, I guess I’ll just have to give in and let you.”

After that he forgot about the mouse and did not remember it even when, now and then, because of some errand or helping his mother or father, he could not avoid going into the front room. And when he had forgotten about the mouse, he no longer remembered staring and poking at his cousin’s body, or her hands on his. And eventually he forgot the day she pulled up her own blouse and exposed her breasts to him.