I Didn't Hear Them Knock

“Jessica, sweetie, pay attention!” the teacher called to me. I scowled and tried to remain still under her stern gaze, but squirmed with impatience as she read on.

From behind me, a voice called, “Hey Jessica, pssssst, Jessica?!?!” I gratefully broke from my frozen pose and turned around. Adam’s long, narrow face smiled at me. Seeing that he had my attention, he reached into his pants, as though he was going to pull a piece of candy out of his pocket to share with me, and instead a rod of skin appeared above his shorts.

What was that? I twisted my body around to get a closer look, and Kelly, who sat behind me, noticed and turned as well. She burst into peals of giggles as Adam quickly slipped his show-and-tell back into hiding to avoid a scolding from the teacher.

“Did you see his thing? Kelly asked me, in between quiet gulps for air.

“No…I mean, yes, I mean….yes, I saw.”

“Girls!” Called Mrs. Payne from her stool in front of the window. “Quiet down!”

I turned my body back toward the teacher and pretended once again to be listening. My heart pounded and my hands began to shake so furiously that I had to sit on them to remain unnoticeable. I saw his thing! It made me feel all squirmy and disgusting inside, and I blushed so hard that I thought my face was going to fall off. I wasn’t supposed to see anyone’s thing until I was old and married and wanted to have a baby. Why did he have to show it to me now?
It wasn’t fair. I wasn’t ready to see it. I didn’t even want to be thinking about it. And before he showed it to me, I had never even wondered about those parts of the human body. When the rest of the class giggled about the word ‘it’ I would dive alone into a quicksand of discomfiture because sex was an undefined terror, a shameful act that should not be spoken of. If I thought boys were ‘cute’ and I had a ‘crush’ on them, it was only their personality that I admired. If I sighed as I watched Belle kiss the Beast, it was out of love for romance and for Disney, rather than out of a yearning to share in Belle’s love experience.

And yet, while I did not want to fall in love and marry a prince, there was something about Belle that made my eyes water with longing. Was it her sweet voice that I tried to mimic at bath time, my childish notes echoing off the tile? Was it her huge deep brown eyes, or the way her lips were a perfect pink, or her dress that folded daintily about her slim legs? Perhaps it was all of these things, and more. Because of all the Disney characters I ever knew, I saw Belle as the one closest to what I would become as I grew older. She, with her brown hair and eyes, with her love of books, and the way she didn’t fit in with the others in her town, was the way I saw myself. And despite her shortcomings, she was beautiful, and so perhaps when I grew up I would be beautiful too. Her perfect hourglass figure, the modestly large breasts that poised over the slope to her five-inch waist – these were my destiny.

I was in no hurry for this destiny to arrive. It was a distant future, a beautiful and happy future that should leave me alone in peace for the duration of my childhood. When I had reached the age of fifteen, all of these attributes were welcome to appear, to suddenly blossom. They should wait until then, they should leave me alone in my magic garden, and come knocking one day when I was ready to throw off the robes of childhood and welcome the woman I was to be.




But they were early, and when I didn’t hear them knock, they climbed over the fence and crept up behind me, peering over my shoulder as I tended to my flowers. I didn’t even notice their presence until my mother and sister entered my room one morning while I was getting dressed.

“Hey Jess, we have something for you,” my sister said as she slunk over to my half naked body, my arms covering my chest, my eyes aflame with embarrassment and anger that they had so invaded my privacy.

“What is it? Will you just go away? Why didn’t you knock?”

My mother patted my bare shoulder. “Rebecca and I think it is time that you started wearing one of these.” She waved a training bra in front of my face.

What was that? Just because my older sister felt out-of-place as one of the only girls in her class still wearing undershirts instead of bras, why did I all of the sudden have to share in her progression of undergarments?

“You need support. Just look at you, you’re falling out all over the place,” Rebecca criticized. She had a flat figure, while I was already growing curves in unmentionable places. I shrugged and defiantly pulled my undershirt and sweater on, ignoring the bra swinging from my mother’s hand.

But I seemed to have little say in the matter, and under the careful watch of Mom and Rebecca, I strapped myself into the contraption. It took me a long time to get used to moving from the comfort of my undershirts, worn thin from use, to the elastic that dug underneath my chest. I was always conscious of that garment that just ended in the middle of nowhere, that didn’t belong yet on my body.

I was in fourth grade, and no one else was wearing a bra. While my sister, a sixth grader, entered the gym locker rooms triumphant and self-satisfied the first time we wore them to school, I changed quietly in the corner where no one would see my new acquisition.

If I was the only one wearing a bra, I was also the only one who needed to be wearing one. I didn’t really notice that until I was sitting on the bus on a fourth grade class trip and I overheard a boys’ conversation about girls’ breast sizes.

“I don’t know, none of the girls are that great.”

“There’s Molly, she’s starting to have somthin’”

“Yeah, but have you seen Jessica? She’s got boobs, man!”

“Yeah, I guess she’s got the biggest boobs in the whole fourth grade.”

I looked down at my chest, and tears scalded my eyes. Was I supposed to be proud? I had two giant lumps growing out of me. I hugged my teddy bear and tried to look inconspicuous.



I was about as inconspicuous as an elephant in a chicken pen. Compared to my classmates, I saw myself as some kind of malformed being, the ugly duckling who would never be a swan. I was short, thick-waisted, large-breasted. My lips were too thin, my hair too wild, and when I smiled, my flabby cheeks pushed upwards so that my eyes were reduced to tiny slits above my enormous nose.

While all of the other girls were wearing spring and summer dresses that clung cheerfully to their skinny, shapeless bodies, I was shopping unsuccessfully in the children’s, juniors, petits, and misses departments, finding nothing age-appropriate that fit. Even my Girl Scout uniform, a sweater and stretch pants, clung awkwardly over my massive thighs. We were be sitting cross-legged in a circle around the Rainbow Room when I noticed that my friend Rachel’s pants didn’t become a shade lighter at the top, where mine were stretched thinly over my legs. I pulled at my sweater to cover this embarrassing flaw in my outfit.

“We have a special speaker today,” said my Girl Scout leader, “Debbie Kirzner is going to talk to us so we can earn our ‘My Body and Me’ patch. Everyone give her a round of applause.”

My mother, the school nurse, stood in front of us. She said, “You all know that you are going to start experiencing some changes in your body. I’m here to tell you what you can expect, and to answer any questions you might have.”

I thought I was going to melt into the carpet. This was my mother talking to the entire troop about ‘it’! ‘It’ was still that evasive subject whispered about in the locker rooms or late at night at someone’s slumber party. ‘It’ was embarrassing, ‘it’ was ugly, ‘it’ made you cover your ears with your sleeping bag and force yourself to go to sleep because you didn’t want to listen to the rest of the conversation. My mother had no place talking about ‘it’ – I didn’t even talk about ‘it’!

She began with a diagram of the female reproductive organs, explaining the functions of each part. Then she went on to the bulk of the discussion: puberty. She told us about how we would begin to experience mood swings, how our breasts might begin to develop, and how we would begin producing our own, somewhat repugnant, smells.

“Most of you have already begun to wear deodorant. Some of you have not. That’s fine; it’s perfectly normal. However, if you have a friend that you think needs to be wearing deodorant, you should just tell her. You don’t want her to smell bad and not even know it, do you? You don’t want her to lose her friends just because of the way she smells!”

On the way to the cafeteria the next day, Lindsey sidled up to me. “Hey Jessica,” she asked, “Do you wear deodorant? Because I really think you need to start wearing some.” She snickered as she returned to her place in line.

I walked sullenly to a seat at the cafeteria. I’d been wearing deodorant since I was seven years old. And yet, perhaps it wasn’t enough. Because when I came out of gym class and changed in the locker room, or when I came inside out of the sun on a hot summer day, the stench, my own stench, was terrible. Terrible enough that Lindsey noticed.

Why did I have to be so repulsive? I clenched my teeth down in frustration as I carried my tray to the lunch table.

A few days ago, my mother had said to me, “Maybe it’s about time you started to shave. Let me have a look at your armpit.”

I lifted up my arm.

I knew that it was disgusting in there. Dark, coarse hairs had crept slowly out of my skin long ago. But I’d never felt ready to shave before.

“You can shave your legs too, you know,” my mother told me once she had finished under my arms.

“No,” I said. That was enough shaving for me.
But I couldn’t help thinking about the way it was last spring, when everyone had worn shorts to school. Why was it that my legs were covered with dark fur, while everyone else had only light, almost nonexistent fuzz? Even some of the boys had sleek, smooth looking legs. I stared and stared at their perfect skins and wished with all of my might that growing up could be thrown out of the window to smash into a thousand pieces on the road outside.




Yes, there was so much about growing up that was unpleasant. And every time I experienced a new change, I was once more startled by how much worse it seemed from the change that preceded it.

The worst pain I’d ever known snaked its way up and down my stomach. The bed creaked as I rolled over, trying to force the pain to go away with the pressure of my body. I felt like I was about to explode.

I lifted myself off of the mattress and tiptoed across the floor, trying not to wake my sister and parents as I made my way to the bathroom. We were staying at my grandfather’s house for the weekend, and would be leaving for home tomorrow morning.

I closed the door, turned on the bathroom light, and squinted as I pulled down my panties and sat on the toilet seat, my stomach bulging uncomfortably in front of me.

When my eyes had adjusted to the light, I noticed that my underwear was covered in cold wet brown muck. What was that stuff? I thought that I was suffering from an extreme case of diarrhea.
That night, I must have gotten up to go to the bathroom ten times, and each time I felt no better when I returned to the bed. When I woke up in the morning, my panties were stiff from the muck, which had seeped through and stained my pajama bottoms.

I was too embarrassed to tell my mother. What could she do anyway? It would go away on its own eventually, and I didn’t want to be telling her about my bowel problems. I was eleven years old, and I could handle it on my own.

It wasn’t until we came home that my mom discovered I was menstruating. I had piled all of my laundry from the weekend in my hamper, and as she sorted through it for white items to wash, she came upon the soiled panties.

“Hey Jess?” she called. “What is this?”
I blushed as I entered my room and saw what she was holding. I’d been hoping that it would somehow slip by her notice into the wash and come out clean, and she would never know.

“I have this really bad stomach ache, and I think that’s diarrhea,” I muttered, hanging my head ashamedly.

My mother dangled the panties away from her body and paused for a moment. I was sure that she was going to yell at me for ruining a perfectly good pair of underwear.

She spoke softly. “Jess, I think you’re having your period.”

She might as well have slapped me in the face. My period? I wasn’t ready for that at all! What was I going to tell my friends? We’d promised that whoever got her period first, her really real period, would tell the others what it was like. Did it hurt? Was it slippery? Did it last forever? Did it gush out of you? Could you feel it drip? Did it smell?

I didn’t want to tell them! My gosh, I hadn’t even told them that I was wearing a bra until about a month ago when Rachel said she was thinking about asking her mother for one. “Oh…” I shrugged and blushed. “I…I guess I’ve had one for a little while...”

And…my period? That wasn’t supposed to happen for years and years. It was only something my friends and I joked about. We used sanitary napkins as ‘Truth or Dare’ toys. “I dare you to wear the overnight pad for the rest of the day,” Rachel would say. “Only if you do,” I responded. I remember riding our bicycles with these huge diapers taped to our panties. “It feels so weird!” Rachel exclaimed as we glided down the hill on Oakland Drive. I hoped nobody could see. What if they knew that we were wearing pads? What if they thought we were having our periods! How embarrassing!
Besides, wouldn’t I know if it were my period? After all of those chats with my mother while she tucked me into bed at night, all of those pamphlets about how to put in tampons read over the kitchen table when my father was on business trips. “Rebecca honey, why don’t you read the next part?”

“Insert the plastic tip into your…eeew Mom, I don’t want to say this out loud!”

My mother, the nurse, talked to us about how we should roll our pads in toilet paper before putting them in trashcans. She told us that Motrin was the best pill to take if you were having cramps. I knew everything about my period already.

“I don’t think so,” I said to my mom. “I’m only eleven.”

“Grandma was eleven when she started her period,” my mother told me matter-of-factly.

Why hadn’t she said so before? Then I might have been ready for it. My sister hadn’t even had hers yet, and she was two years older than me. I’d been waiting until I was fourteen at least for it to come. I never expected it to come this soon. I didn’t want it to come this soon. I didn’t want it to come at all.

As I started to cry, my mother took a pad out of the bathroom and handed it to me. “Congratulations,” she smiled, “you’ve become a woman.”




Being a ‘woman’ wasn’t quite what I’d expected. There was no outer sign of this new development – nobody seemed to notice that I was bleeding, no one could tease me about this the way they could remark on pimples or body odor.

And yet there were inner changes. I experienced urges, needs, desires that I’d never felt, or wanted to feel, before. I’d learned to read with those pink hard cover picture books decorated with hearts and baby rattles that vaguely described how babies were created. I’d learned over and over again about what two people very much in love did to get physically close to one another. And yet now, all of the sudden, I wanted to know more. Always, I had shied away from these books, from this knowledge, but now I was ravenous for it. I wanted to know how it felt, to experience it for myself.

I knew that people could satisfy themselves sexually. When my mom taught us about ‘the birds and the bees’ it was no short, awkward discussion, it was a whole sex education curriculum. Together, my mother, sister, and I read out loud from a comic book titled Let’s Talk About Sex. We didn’t get very far into it before my sister and I rebelled at the page with the male body parts.

We did, however, get to the part about masturbation. This was a whole new concept to me at the age of ten. My initial reaction had been total disgust. Touching yourself down there? I didn’t even look at myself there - I didn’t want to see myself, never mind touch myself.

But now, when I was eleven and a ‘woman’, the idea slowly began to settle in me, and the more I struggled to fight it, the more eager I became. So one night I waited up until I was sure everyone was sound asleep and pulled down my pajamas.

I had been wrestling with the idea all night. I didn’t want to do that and yet I was so intensely curious that I knew I wouldn’t be able to resist trying. At least I had made myself wait until I knew no one would hear me, or walk in on me to say goodnight.

It wasn’t the first time I’d thought about it. Once, when I was hugging my teddy bear, I placed him down there and held him to me, the way that I imagined sex worked. But I didn’t feel anything special. This time, I was going to try what the book recommended.

I didn’t remember how this was supposed to go. I thought the Let’s Talk About Sex book had said that some girls like to stroke themselves just above their private area because it felt good. But it had been a while since I read that section, and I hadn’t been paying that much attention to the technicalities of how masturbation was done when we read it.
I tentatively prodded myself around my belly button. Growing more courageous, I stroked, I pushed, I kneaded the skin.

And I felt nothing. Was I doing something wrong? Was there something wrong with me?
I wasn’t just about to go look at the book and see what I was supposed to do – I didn’t want to admit to myself that this was such a planned gesture. Besides, I usually remembered most of what I read.

Maybe the book was wrong. Maybe it didn’t tell the truth because even though it said that masturbation was normal, it was actually a very wicked thing to do. Or maybe I was just dysfunctional. Guiltily, and very disappointed, I pulled my pajamas back up, and tried to go to sleep.

But I couldn’t. Because even though I couldn’t make myself feel anything other than the slight pulling of skin, I still couldn’t stop thinking about masturbation, and about sex.

I thought about how sometimes, when we were playing Barbies together and no one else was around, my friend and I would place the dolls on top of each other and make grunting noises like we saw on TV. It never felt wrong until afterwards, until the way I felt now, having pulled up my pants and realized the full weight of what I’d done. I always felt embarrassed, and guilty, as though I was experimenting with something I knew to be wrong, to be harmful, to be absolutely off limits. Barbie sex became almost as bad as real sex in my mind, and the empty plastic void in Ken’s crotch was as intimidating as Adam’s thing had been so long ago.




That same spring I went with my parents to the house of a family friend. They were wealthy, and had an indoor swimming pool. Their seven-year-old daughter, Danielle, led me to the changing room and left me to get into my swimming gear. I pulled my bathing suit over my body, looking critically at myself in the mirror. I shivered at the hairy legs, the smelly armpits, the pimpled face, and the fleshy curves.

Last summer, my family went to the water park, and we were standing in line for the tallest slide when I noticed something despicable. There was a woman in front of us who was wearing a wet bathing suit and you could see her nipples through the spandex. I was flabbergasted. With all of these men here, all of these men, each of whom had things, why would you let yourself be seen like that?

I looked down at my own chest and, horror of horrors, my breasts were showing too. It was like I was advertising to the world, “I am Jessica, and I had the biggest boobs in the whole fourth grade!” It was horrendous.

Now, I hated to wear bathing suits. I hated the way there was no hiding behind baggy material, that it didn’t cover anything but the bare essentials. I self-consciously wrapped my body in a towel before leaving the bathroom.

I followed Danielle to the swimming pool and handed my towel shyly to her nanny before I jumped into the warm water. I plunged my head into the gentle ripples, my long hair flowing behind me like a mermaid’s silky tresses, my skin soft and smooth as I drifted under the water. I held my breath and pushed it out so bubbles blobbed and burst near my ears. I pushed my arms over my head and pulled the water back and back, forcing myself forward.

As I pulled myself upward for air, Danielle catapulted herself into the pool, splashing me. “I’ll race you across the pool!” she shouted. We raced doggie style, underwater, freestroke, butterfly, again, again, again. I was having so much fun that for once I didn’t care that I was hairy, that I was ugly, that my nipples might be showing, that I had the biggest boobs in the fourth grade. I just raced my way across the pool without abandon until my skin was ridden with wrinkles and I was out of breath.
We finally dripped our way to Danielle’s nanny, who wrapped us both in dazzlingly white towels and led us to the bathroom. Her shoes squeaked on the tile as she turned on a double-headed shower and told us to undress and get in to wash the pool water away.

I obliged, and found myself standing in the shower with the 7-year-old girl, her naked body staring at me, untainted by hormones that tried to prod her into adulthood before she was ready, still tending to the flowers of childhood. And suddenly I was embarrassed again, painfully embarrassed. I saw her there (although I tried not to look), so clean, not a strand of hair, her skin so white and soft, where mine was covered by blackness. It was almost nauseating, looking at this reflection of my body as it used to be, at this reflection of my once untainted body. I was infinitely relieved when the nanny handed us fresh towels and told us to get dressed.





Why is it that some people accept change with open arms, and others cower away from it, crying with the passing of every year? Why do some look forward expectantly to the future and others reject it, refuse to acknowledge what already is or eventually will be?

I wanted to be a little girl forever. I wanted to always be innocent - to save myself from the urges, the needs, the responsibilities, and the sensibilities of being a grown woman. And so I ignored maturity until suddenly I was shocked into realizing that it had finally come. There, across from me in the shower, was a child, and I, I was an adult.

There are so many questions that I had then that never got answered, so many wishes I thought would come true that did not. I thought that a fundamental part of puberty was getting prettier – that my lips would be suddenly fuller, my face longer, my figure more slender, that I would reach my Beauty and the Beast ideal, my destiny.
This certainly didn’t happen. It almost felt that the older I became, the thinner my lips seemed to be, the rounder my face, the thicker my waist.

Looking at pictures of myself five or six years ago, I see a girl that I think is beautiful, or at least more so than I am now. But it was always that way for me. The past always seemed somehow more beautiful than the present.
Because in the past, there was the wonder, there was the magic, the belief in fairies and dreams coming true. And in the past, there was the physical purity, the soft skin, the wide, hopeful eyes.

Now there is only hard cold me, facing facts without imagination, asking no questions of myself or of the world, looking forward to nothing.

And yet, after that day with Danielle when I thought all of the innocence was gone, I still didn’t know what PMS was until two years after my first period, when a boy in my eighth grade class had to explain it to me, rather incredulously. And I still didn’t know what a French kiss was until after I’d had one.

So maybe the expectancy is still there, or at least, there is still something to expect. Maybe there are other visitors who are waiting their turn to tap on the garden gate. Maybe I don’t know it all, I haven’t seen it all yet. Maybe I still have a lot of growing up left to do.
Because nothing that I’ve learned has been as great as I expected. If so much of the world is driven by the hungers of the groin, maybe there is still some hidden mystery about ‘it’ that I haven’t been told yet. Maybe there is some gaping hole in my knowledge, the secret to all of this puberty, something that makes all of the blood, all of the blushing, the embarrassment, the pain, the smell, the hair, the darkness, the loss of self, the clouding of identity, something that makes all of this worthwhile. I am a child waiting for the still fleeting answer to my many questions. Maybe I’ll never really grow up.