Apologize, Apologize! - By Elizabeth Kelly Page 0,25

Ma found his promiscuity oddly charming, though she didn’t extend the same latitude to me. When it came to my love life, Ma assumed the role of disgusted adolescent being forced to contemplate her parents “doing the hoob,” as Uncle Tom referred to intercourse, insisting it was a proper biological term. Thanks to him, I got the strap in grade five for referring to coitus as hoobalah in sex ed class after Uncle Tom “corrected” my terminology.

Unlike Bingo, who lost his virginity at thirteen to the island’s official deflowerer, Melanie Merrick—he had to scramble around the kitchen, emptying cupboards to find Saran Wrap to create a makeshift condom—I was a late bloomer, relatively speaking, struggling to catch up with my younger brother. When it came my turn, I was sixteen and I told Ma I was spending the night at a friend’s house.

Instead I pitched a tent in the conservation area near home, and that’s where I lost it to Eleanor Parrish, who undid the zipper on my jeans as casually as if she were pulling her blond hair into a ponytail.

Her parents found out and went nuts, though their response was mild compared with Ma’s reaction. She let out one long scream when she saw me the next morning, and gathering up my shirt in her fists, twisting it into a noose around my neck, she pinned me against the nearest wall.

“How dare you take advantage of that innocent girl,” she said. “Animal! You have no idea what you’ve unleashed! Girls are very emotional about sex. She may never recover from you exploiting her.”

Pop looked at me as accusing and disappointed as if he’d caught me trying to set fire to him while he was sleeping. He and Ma grounded me for three months.

Years of Catholicism burning a hole in my conscience, I crawled into the study and stretched out on the sofa and stared up at the ceiling and thought about how much I loved Eleanor Parrish.

“Say, what were you thinking?” Uncle Tom appeared in the doorway.

I don’t know who was more horrified, Uncle Tom or me, when I began to cry. I covered my face with my hands.

“I just wanted to see what it was like,” I said, sobbing and unable to stop. I hadn’t cried in front of anyone since I was a little kid.

“Well, I could have told you that you’d like it,” he said, wandering over to the sofa. He sat next to me and took my hand.

“It’s all right,” he said. “And you’re not grounded.” He reached into his pocket. “Would you like some peanut brittle?”

“No thanks,” I said, starting to regain some composure, rubbing my eyes with the sleeves of my shirt.

Uncle Tom and I sat together in silence, the only sound the persistent buzz of a circling fly.

“I’ve been listening to him for the last few minutes. It’s true what they say about flies humming in the middle-octave key of F. And it’s a good thing they do,” Uncle Tom said, pausing, inviting the question, refusing to continue unless he was satisfied I was fully engaged.

“Why?” I asked him, powerless after so many years to resist.

“Think about it. The possibilities are staggering. You wouldn’t want a common housefly with a magisterial high C. Say, he’d have the power to break your heart.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

I WAS SEVENTEEN, JUST ABOUT TO GRADUATE AND TRYING TO decide what to do after Andover. Ma wanted me to organize migrant workers. I wanted to go to Brown with my friends.

“Friends! Hah!” Ma shrieked. “What friends? You don’t have any real friends. They’re all a bunch of vacuous social climbers, and you’re the worst of the lot. Just once I’d like you to express a single unconventional thought. I’m surprised you weren’t born wearing a tie.”

“You get that from your grandmother McMullen,” Pop said to me after the long weekend at home. He was talking about my conservatism, a family preoccupation generally referred to as if it were a disease or chronic condition, like syphilis of the soul.

“How I detest conservatism in a man,” Ma said as she lit the gas stove.

What passed for conservatism in our household, however, could get you arrested anywhere else.

Pop was more accepting of my flaws than Ma, since in his quixotic but definite view of things, you were the preordained sum of all your parts. My mother was simpleminded over Bing, but according to Pop, it was in the DNA.

“She gets it from her mother. The Buntings are fixated on good-looking people