John Irving - Until I Find You

That Mrs. Oastler thought Emma was too young to have her mustache waxed was a source of contention between mother and daughter. “It’s hardly noticeable,” Emma’s mom would tell her. “Besides, at your age, what does it matter?” And there were other issues between them, as one might expect of a divorced woman raising a “difficult” only child—a sixteen-year-old daughter who was physically bigger and stronger than her mother, and still growing.

Mrs. Oastler also thought that Emma was too young to have a tattoo—an intolerable hypocrisy, in Emma’s opinion, because her mom had recently been tattooed by Daughter Alice. This was news to Jack, but so was almost everything Emma told him. “What’s her tattoo? A tattoo where ?” he asked.

Well, what a surprise! Emma’s mom had been tattooed to conceal a scar. “She had a Cesarean,” Emma said. That old business again, Jack thought. “It’s a scar from her C-section,” Emma told him. And to think he’d once believed this was the ward for difficult births in a hospital in Halifax! “She had a bikini cut,” Emma explained.

“A what?”

“A horizontal incision, not the vertical kind.”

“I still don’t get it,” Jack said.

This necessitated a trip to Mrs. Oastler’s bedroom. (Emma’s mother was out.) There Emma showed Jack a pair of her mom’s panties—black bikini briefs, no doubt a fetching match to the push-up bra. Mrs. Oastler’s scar was called a bikini cut because the incision was below the panty line of the briefs.

“Oh. And what’s the tattoo?”

“A stupid rose.”

Jack thought not. He was pretty sure he knew what kind of rose it was, in which case it would have been too big to be completely concealed under the panty line of Mrs. Oastler’s bikini briefs. “A Rose of Jericho?” he asked Emma.

It was, for once, her turn to be uninformed. “A Rose of what ?”

This was not the easiest thing for a nine-year-old to explain. Jack made a fist. “It’s about this big, maybe a little bigger,” he began.

“Yes, it is,” Emma said. “Go on, Jack.”

“It’s a flower with the petals of another flower hidden inside it.”

“ What other flower?”

There were so many words he’d heard and remembered—not that he understood them. Labia was one, vagina another—they were like flowers, weren’t they? And the other flower hidden in a Rose of Jericho was like the petals, or the labia, a woman had—a vagina concealed in a rose. Jack couldn’t imagine what a mess he made of this explanation to Emma, but of course Emma knew what he was trying to say.

“You must be kidding, Jack.”

“You have to know what you’re looking for in order to see it,” the boy said.

“Don’t tell me you know what a vagina looks like, honey pie.”

“Not an actual one,” Jack admitted. But he had seen a Rose of Jericho—many, in fact. He had examined the petals of that flower. He’d spotted “the lips” within the rose, as Ladies’ Man Madsen had called them—the oh-so-peculiar-but-discernible something that made a Rose of Jericho not quite like any other rose. “Maybe you haven’t looked closely enough,” he said to Emma, who seemed not herself—she was paralyzed with disbelief. “I mean at the tattoo. ”

Emma took Jack by the hand and led him back to her bedroom. In her other hand, Emma was still holding her mom’s bikini briefs; it was as if Jack Burns were destined to bear to his grave the burden of a life-changing relationship with Mrs. Oastler’s underwear.

Emma’s bedroom was everything you would expect of that passage from childhood through puberty to concupiscence. The neglected teddy bears and other stuffed animals occupied positions of no particular importance on the king-size bed; there was a poster from a Beatles concert, and one from a Robert Redford movie. (It might have been Jeremiah Johnson, because Redford had a beard.) And everywhere, on the floor, on the bed—in one case, as if strangling a teddy bear—Emma’s bras and panties were flagrantly displayed. The underwear of a woman-in-progress, which Emma clearly was, indicated (albeit not to Jack) that Emma was in more of a hurry on her journey to womanhood than most girls her age.

In comparison, Jack was in no hurry on his journey to becoming a young man. He just happened to have met Emma Oastler, who knew his father’s story; despite the seven years between them, Emma was eager to see him catch up to her. “So you know what a vagina looks like,” Emma was saying, as she lay down among her discarded panties and bras and teddy bears.

“I know what one looks like in a Rose of Jericho,” Jack replied. She’d not let go of his hand. He had no choice but to lie down on the bed beside her.

“So a vagina is familiar to you—the labia, the whole business,” Emma was saying, as she lifted her short pleated skirt and wriggled out of her panties. Her mom’s bikini briefs could never have accommodated Emma’s hips. Consistent with the general sloppiness of dress (and undress) of the older girls at St. Hilda’s, Emma didn’t bother to take her panties entirely off; she kicked one leg free but left her panties dangling on one ankle, where their whiteness stood in contrast to her gray kneesocks, which were typically pushed down below midcalf, as if the socks were also indications of Emma’s preference for half-dress (or half-undress).

“You have big feet,” Jack observed.

“Forget the feet, Jack. You’re looking at your first vagina, and you’re telling me you’re not surprised?” The hair was again a surprise—though not nearly so much as when he’d first felt it, unseen. But the rest of the business—well, he was prepared for it to be complicated. The intricate folds (“the lips,” as Ladies’ Man Madsen had called them) were of a certain healthiness of pink that no tattoo pigment could imitate; yet this ornate door, for a vagina was clearly an opening, was recognizable from his mom’s Rose of Jericho, of which Jack had seen a hundred. Having seen Emma’s, he would have no trouble (in the future) finding that other flower in the rose, but for how many nine-year-old boys is it no big deal to see your first actual vagina? “Cat got your tongue, Jack?” Emma said.

“The hair’s different—there’s no hair on the tattoo,” he told her.

“You’re saying only the hair is special? You’re saying you’ve seen the rest of it?”

“It’s a Rose of Jericho,” Jack said. “I would recognize it anywhere.”

“It’s a vagina, honey pie!”

“But it’s also a Rose of Jericho,” he insisted. “You just need to take a closer look at your mom’s—at her tattoo, I mean.”

“Maybe the little guy has more of an interest in the real thing than you do, Jack.” Alas, the little guy did not look interested enough to merit Emma’s approval. “Jesus, baby cakes, I think there’s something wrong.” At nine going on ten, Jack simply wasn’t old enough. The unpredictability of his penis—aroused one minute, indifferent the next—wasn’t half as disappointing to him as it was to Emma. “Kiss me,” Emma demanded. “That sometimes works.”

Not this time. Jack would have admitted that the kiss was more aggressive than usual on Emma’s part, and that—notwithstanding how she’d criticized him for inserting his tongue in her mouth and wiggling it like a worm— the probing use she made of her tongue was beginning to get the little guy’s attention. But at the very moment his pinkie of a penis demonstrated a growing interest, which Emma might have called “promising,” he snagged his lower lip on a loose wire in Emma’s newly acquired braces. Before either of them noticed, Jack had bled all over Emma and himself —and her bed, several stuffed animals, and the aforementioned bra. (The one that appeared to be strangling a teddy bear.)