by Lisa Ben-Shoshan
"Hello, may I please speak to your mother?"
"Just a minute, who is this, please?"
"My, such a polite little lady. Wait a minute—don't get your mother yet—I want to talk
to you."
"Who is this, please?"
"I'm an old friend of your mother's. Your mother is Eileen Spiegel, right? Well, I'm an old friend of hers from way back. We used to work together, and I just came back into town, so I thought I'd give her a call. And I think I'd like to just stop in and surprise her, so don't you tell her that I called, okay?"
The little girl smiled, and felt a little thrill inside, like on the morning of a special day. A surprise.
"O.K. I won't tell. When are you going to surprise her?"
"Oh, I think I'll come over a little later, maybe around dinnertime," he said casually.
"Oh, that would be great, we eat around 6:30. Maybe we could have you over for dinner."
"Well, now, that would be a wonderful idea. I'd like that. But I don't want you to say anything to her or your daddy—it's going to be a surprise, remember? So, since I've got you on the phone, why don't you tell me a little bit about yourself? After all, I haven't seen you since you were a baby. How old are you now?"
"Oh. I'm ten. I'm in the fourth grade."
“Goodness, how time flies! And what kind of things do you like to do?"
"I like to read...and sing, except my sister can’t sing the tune when I want to harmonize.
We fight, and mommy yells. Oh, and I wrote a song for Mommy, when she was in the hospital with her back. Do you want to hear it? It goes, “Color and fantasy, nice things are happening, when I open my eyes, there I see a surprise, far away on an isle, with color and fantasy.” Mommy cried when I sang it to her on the phone. Hey, and it was a surprise, just like you are! Do you think she'll cry?"
"No, I hope not. But that was so nice. My God, I never would have dreamed that Eileen would have had such a talented daughter! So, tell me, dear—wait, I don't even know your name yet! How rude of me!"
"My name is Tammy. Do you know my daddy, too? His name is Gary, and my sister is Sharon. She's only seven."
"I'm sure you're a great big sister. How tall are you now, and what do you look like? It's been so long.”
"I'm only four feet tall. I'm the smallest one in my whole grade. I'm always the last one in the line, and I have to sit in the front row so I can see. I hope I grow up soon."
"Oh, I'm sure you will. And what color are your hair and your eyes?"
“My eyes are green, blue, or gray, depending on my mood and the weather and what
I'm wearing. My hair is blond—they call it dirty blond, but I wash it every other day."
"I'm sure you do. That's fascinating about the way your eyes change with your clothes.
What color underwear are you wearing right now?"
She felt a trickle of fear. Nice people didn’t ask about underwear.
“I’m not wearing any. I’m wearing my bathing suit. It’s red, white and blue, and it’s my favorite.”
“Oh, are you going swimming? Are you meeting some of your friends?”
“Yeah, the pool is just around the corner! Oh, but you know that, you’ve been here before, right? Yeah, I’m meeting my best friend Lynn, and Stephie and Lisette.”
“Don’t you have any boyfriends?"
She felt shy. “Well, of course. But they're just friends."
“Oh, come now, you can be open with me, I'm an old family friend. Do you kiss them?"
“No!” She was shocked, and a little ashamed, in a way, that she couldn't say yes. She was only ten, she knew that she was too young, but some of her friends had kissed a boy. Mostly it was while they were playing a game like Spin the Bottle, but they liked to talk about it, like it made them grown up or something.
“Do you think you will?" he asked, in a teasing tone.
“Of course, silly! I’m not going to stay a baby forever: Daddy always calls me his big girl, and that’s what I try to be."
“Oh? How is that? What do you think you can do that will make you a big girl?”
“Well, I can’t make myself any taller, but I try to, sometimes. I do stretches in bed. And I try to do everything that Mommy and Daddy tell me to do, except sometimes it just seems like they’re just picking on me, just because I’m bigger than Sharon, so I have to do all the things that she can’t do. I think she’s glad that she’s smaller than me. She doesn’t have to put away the dishes.”
“Do you want to be like your Mommy?”
“I guess so. She’s pretty.”
“I know that, and I’m sure you are just as pretty. But, do you want to be grown up like your mommy so you can do grown-up things, like kiss?”
“Sure, so the other kids don’t think that I’m a chicken.”
“Do you want to fuck?”
She was silent. She knew what the word meant; she had heard her friend Jane telling a dirty joke once. Jane had all these older brothers and thought she knew everything.
“Well? Don’t you know what that means? Don’t you want to be grown-up and fuck?”
She stared at her bathing suit, the red, white and blue running together in the heat that suddenly seemed to cloud her eyes.
“Are you still there? Listen, I want to fuck you. What do you say to that? It would be so good—“
She slammed down the phone and stood there shaking, her body flushed. She ran into the bathroom, slamming the door on her mother’s questions: “Tammy, who was on the phone? Was it for me?”
She turned on the faucet like they did on all the TV shows so her mother wouldn’t hear her crying. She stared at herself in the mirror. Within the red puffiness that was her face, her eyes were shiny. Scared. Red. She thought how funny it was that the color of her eyes had started the whole thing and that now her eyes were red. She started to cry again, wondering what she had done wrong. She hadn't said anything to him that was bad. What made him be so nasty to her? She couldn't believe that her mommy had a friend who was like—and realized in horror that he was going to stop by around dinnertime. What would she do? What if he still wanted to do that thing to her? What was she going to do? She couldn't tell her mommy that her old friend had said such a thing to her. Mommy wouldn't believe it. She wished she had never answered the phone.
She flushed the toilet so that Mommy wouldn't wonder why she had been in the bathroom for so long, dried her eyes, and walked out, slowly.
“Tammy? What’s going on? Why didn’t you answer me? Who was on the phone?”
She ran across the room and threw herself in her mother’s lap. “Mommy, I don’t want
to ever grow up.”