The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [171]
“Okay, come inside,” she said. “But my mom gets home at five thirty. You have to be gone by then.”
I said “Thank you” again and again until she shushed me, and then I was silent.
She led me out of the pink plastic cottage and across the lawn. I did not know how long I had been asleep. Over the course of the day—if indeed this was the same day on which I’d fallen asleep—gray clouds had smothered the sun and a few snowflakes fluttered to the earth like ash. The girl rolled open the sliding glass door to the massive house, where a tiny yellow dog was bouncing up and down at us, frantic with yapping.
“Shaddup!” she roared at it, and the little dog skittered out of sight in a diminuendo of whimpers. The girl led me through the opulent interior of the house: through a kitchen, up a long flight of curving stairs, down a hallway, through a door, and into a bedroom. She closed the door behind us.
“Wait here,” she commanded. I stood there, still self-consciously holding the stuffed zebra to my genitals, as she fled from the room and shut the door behind her. The room was decorated in a style similar to the Little Princess Playhouse: painted all around in that slightly nauseating shade of medicinal pink, with white trim. The room was large and featured a four-poster bed with a drooping canopy of diaphanous gauze. Piled up on the bed was a small ziggurat of yet more stuffed animals. More of those rubber effigies of beautiful blond women lay strewn about the room, and a caravan of unrealistically colored plastic ponies cantered, hooves frozen in midstep, across the windowsill. The ponies seemed to wear coy expressions. A dollhouse sat on the floor, bisected and winged open at the hinges to allow an exploded view of its interiors. This and other residues of girlhood furnished the room, but this was a room, like its inhabitant, in a state of transition: I could see the girl’s burgeoning adolescence taking over the décor, the plastic ponies and dolls and stuffed animals reluctantly giving way to tacked-up posters displaying the countenances of the stars of popular music and contemporary cinema—of beautiful young men with wet hair falling tousled in their faces, and of beautiful young women in states of semidress looking down upon us from the walls through eyes heavy-lidded and viscous with sex. As I looked upon the two stages of the girl’s life represented in the changing décor—childhood and adolescence—I realized that the transition was not jarring, but actually a thematically fluid one. The languorous sex-sodden eyes of the women that she tacked to her walls for fastidious emulation were already there, in the heads of these female dolls left over from early girlhood—and indeed, strangely, even in the eyes of the ponies. The rubber effigies of beautiful naked women I had seen lacked sexual parts (like angels!) merely because they were there to represent an idea prior to the exposition of the specifics. Viewed in this context, all the trappings of the first stage—childhood—were not so innocent or so sexless, but rather, could be seen as all part of a careful preparation for the next.
A bathroom adjoined her bedroom, where I looked at myself in a mirror for the first time that day, and inspected the cuts in my naked flesh. The girl—whose name, she told me, was Emily—came back with some clothes for me. But first she told me to take a shower, which I did. It both cleaned and warmed me. I was so dirty the runoff that dribbled down my legs and spiraled down the drain was black. When I had showered, little Emily swabbed my wounds with cotton balls that she dampened with stinging alcohol, and taped over them with dozens of Band-Aids. I lay supine on her bed as she treated my wounds. I tried to be modest before her, but in her no-nonsense office of nurse she swatted away my hands that held the stuffed zebra, and she did not remark upon my indecency. She gave me a pair of men’s underwear, socks, a pair of corduroy pants and a cable-knit sweater as green as a green apple.