T. Boyle - Riven Rock

Later, much later — it must have been past midnight — he ventured out into the hallway. He’d missed supper and Mama hadn’t come for him, which meant she was suffering with one of her headaches and mewed up like a prisoner in her room. He’d heard Marie calling for him, and then later Missy and Anita, but he’d just burrowed deeper among the towels and bedthings. He didn’t need them — he didn’t need his big sister or his mother or anybody — and even if he did, he couldn’t have done a thing about it. Once he climbed into the big bottom drawer of that wardrobe and inched it closed by applying his right shoulder to the rough unfinished surface of the plank above, he was powerless. There was something inside him gnawing its way out, something he’d swallowed, something alive, and it wouldn’t let him catch his breath or move his arms and legs or even lift his head to see where it was slashing through the skin of his belly with its claws and teeth and filling that hermetic space with a beard that wouldn’t stop growing till there was no room left in the box and no air either. For Stanley, a good boy, a bright boy, a pleasing and normal boy, it was the beginning of terror. From now on, there would be no place to hide.

The evening became the night, and all that while Stanley lay there rigid, listening to the enveloping sounds of the house, all the noise of the comings and goings and the clatter of silverware and crystal and the murmurous voices of the servants in the hall. He fought down his hunger, denying himself, shriving himself, lying there as still as the corpse of his father in the drawing room below. Finally, though, it was a need of the living that drove him out of his box: he had to pee.

By the time he crept from the wardrobe and stuck his head out the door to make sure no one was about, he had to go so badly he was squeezing himself, squeezing his peepee, though Mama wouldn’t let him call it that anymore. It wasn’t a penis either, not in Mama’s vocabulary. No: it was just a dirty thing little boys had attached to them for a dirty purpose and he wasn’t ever to touch it except to make pee, did he understand that? He didn’t understand, but every time she told him he nodded his head, looked down at the floor and let his eyes lead the retreat.

The hallway was deserted. Someone had left a light burning at the far end of it, outside the room they still called the nursery, and there was another light on in the bathroom across the hall. There wasn’t a sound anywhere. The mourners had taken their big blunt shoes and their furs and jewelry and their long condoling faces and gone home, and everyone else had turned in for the night — there was a funeral to attend in the morning, after all. Stanley squeezed himself. Two miniature goads stabbed at him down there, on either side, just above the groin. He held his breath a moment, listening, and then he darted across the hall to the bathroom, swinging the door shut behind him. He was peeing — relieving himself, and yes, it was a relief, the only relief he’d had all day — when he glanced up at the mirror and saw that someone was easing open the door behind him.

“I’m in here,” he sang out, turning away instinctively to shield himself. There was no answer but the faintest metallic grating of the hinges, the door swinging inexorably open, the noise of his urine in the porcelain bowl a sudden embarrassment, a steady boiling pent-up stream he was helpless to stop. He shot a nervous glance over his shoulder, expecting Harold. “Just a minute!” he cried, but it was too late.

It wasn’t Harold standing there in the doorway, but Mary Virginia, in her black shift and bare feet. She looked puzzled, as if she’d never seen a bathroom — or Stanley — before.

As for Stanley, he tried to force his penis back into his pants before he was finished and got hot pee all down the front of himself. Dirty, dirty, dirty, he could hear his mother saying it already. His face flushed. The blood thundered in his ears. He backed away from the toilet.

For a long moment, Mary Virginia stood there rocking to and fro on feet that were so white they seemed to glow against the checkered tiles. “Stanley the elf,” she said finally, and her voice wasn’t right. Her words were slurred and slow, as if she had something in her mouth. “The little hobgoblin,” she said. “The boy who can snap his fingers and disappear. ”

Stanley watched her feet move across the floor, fascinated by the way her toes gripped and released the tiles. “Don’t be afraid,” she said, and she reached out to tousle his hair, “they’ve sedated me, that’s all. For my peace of mind. So I can rest.”

Stanley tried to smile. His pants were wet and uncomfortable, and his underpants too, already binding in the crotch, and he was hungry and tired, exhausted from the strain and terror that had crept up on him as he lay in that drawer all through the day and into the night.

Mary Virginia — Big Sister — gave him a wan smile in return, and then, just as casually as if he wasn’t there at all, she hiked up her shift and sat on the toilet. She looked off into space and he heard the fierce hissing sound of her pee as he turned away to wash up— Always wash up, his mother told him, always. He was confused. His face was hot. He wanted his mother.

But then Mary Virginia began to laugh, a high hoarse chuckling laugh that startled him and made him turn round again despite himself. “Stanley the moper,” she said. “You’re always so mopey, Stanley — what’s the matter? Is it Mama?” And then: “I’ll bet you’ve never seen a woman pee before, have you?”

Stanley shook his head. His sister’s legs were white, whiter than her feet, and the shift was hiked up over her knees.

“Women sit down when they pee, did you know that? Because we don’t have a little peepee like boys do — women are different.” She rose awkwardly, as if she couldn’t catch her balance, and muttered something he didn’t catch. Then she said, “Would you like to see?”

He didn’t know what to do. He just stood there at the sink, frozen in place, and watched his big sister pull the shift up over her head until she was white all over. Hugely white. White as a statue. And he saw her breasts, heavy and white under the glow of the gaslamp, and her navel, and the place where her penis should have been and there was only hair, blond hair, instead. “You see?” she said, the words thick in her mouth, and he thought for a minute she was eating candy, caramel candy, and she was going to give him some — she was only teasing him, that’s what this was all about.

But there was no candy, he knew that, and he wanted only to run, run for the drawer in the wardrobe that would never give him a moment’s comfort again, run to his mother, run to Harold, Missy, Anita, anyone — but he didn’t. He stood there at the sink and stared at the white glowing naked body of his sister, his big sister who was very beautiful and very sick, until she bent for the shift and covered herself again in the featureless black of her mourning.

After that, after the funeral and the letters of condolence and the black crepe, Mary Virginia went away. Stanley couldn’t place the time exactly — it could have been a week after the funeral, two weeks, a month — but Mama saw to the arrangements, and Big Sister was gone. He never told anyone about that night in the bathroom, not even Harold, but it stayed with him long after the funeral, a deep festering pocket of shame. Girls were different from boys and women from men, everyone knew that, but now Stanley, alone among his friends and schoolmates, knew how and why they were different, and it was a knowledge he hadn’t asked for, a knowledge that complicated his dreams and made him shy away from his mother, Anita, Missy and all the other females who crowded into his life. He looked into their faces, looked at their hair, their skirts, their feet, and knew how white they were underneath their clothes, the palest bleached-out belly-of-a-frog sort of white, with breasts that hung there like the stumps of something missing and that scar between their legs where there should have been flesh. It was an excoriating vision, a waking nightmare, more than any nine-year-old boy could be expected to carry with him for long, and it took all that spring and a summer in the Adirondacks before it finally began to fade.