Jumping the Green - Softcover

Chapter One

My discovery of masturbation is accompanied by the sudden epiphany that lovers slap each other around. Passion and love are fraught with this delight between the legs, this slap in the face, this wedding of pain and pleasure.

It happens one summer day, my discovery, three weeks shy of my ninth birthday. I am lying on an air mattress, floating in the Kowolskis' swimming pool. This is not unusual since the Kowolskis are our neighbors -- our parents' best friends -- and as such, share everything with us as we do them.

The air is hot, still and dry. Furry seed pods drift gently on the afternoon winds. I bob in the water, drunk on too much sun and the prospects of yet another orgasm that night. I have discovered my down-there has a toy button that when manipulated in just the right way creates an astonishing response. I have become addicted to this new discovery the way I once was to chocolate milk, though I have yet to fully understand its power.

Floating, buoyed by the clear water and my heady imagination, I conjure up the ways I will touch myself, what tools and gadgets I might find around the cluttered house to put inside me, when I hear Mr. Kowolski begin to shout.

Elaine Kowolski, his daughter who is three years older than me, is inside the pool house with my brother Martin. I can hear Elaine whining. "Quit it, you dork." Words like dork only bolster Martin's desire to annoy people. I can picture him pulling at Elaine's bathing suit, trying to get a peak at her booblets. That is what he calls undeveloped breasts.

The window to Mr. and Mrs. Kowolski's bedroom is wide open. The sights and sounds of one of their notorious fights penetrate my thoughts. I am aware of a slight moistness between my legs and the smell of my sweat. Mr. Kowolski is telling Mrs. Kowolski that she is a stupid, goddamned idiot and if she doesn't write down the fucking check numbers in the goddamned checkbook then he'll fucking teach her a goddamned lesson. Martin and Elaine Kowolski are silenced by this fight for a moment, but when Mr. Kowolski lapses into a stream of Polish obscenities, they break out into peals of laughter.

As I watch this fight unfold from my spectator raft, Mr. Kowolski sets his drink down on the table by their bed and smacks Mrs. Kowolski across the face. It is methodical, iron-cold. It is the work of a machine. The violence of a drone. She stumbles back and cups her cheek with her beautiful white hands. Her eyes fill with a kind of sorrow and pain that is mixed with a kind of arrogance. Mr. Kowolski is instantly contrite. He puts his hands around her, unzips her dress and buries his face in her breasts. She takes her beautiful hands and puts them around his head and holds him as if he is a baby. I see that her breasts are enormous, strikingly white with large reddish nipples. Her eyes close for a long time and her face smooths out, though a lingering attitude of disgust and hatred stays parked around the lines of her mouth. I watch them for a minute more until Mrs. Kowolski opens her eyes, sees me staring at her and smiles slightly, leaning over to shut the blinds.

I swim lazily in the pool, adrift in strange forbidden thoughts of the private parts of animals and the naked images of natives I have seen in the Time Life series of books our parents keep on the living room shelves. When Martin tells me he has had enough of Elaine and her retarded whining, I drag myself from the pool and follow him home across the street.

That night, Maggie and Harold engage in a drunken, nasty fight over dinner. That is when they usually reserve the time to argue. My brothers and sisters leave the table one by one. I am the last to go. I generally stay for as long as I can to try and glean some meaning from the volley of insults our parents hurl at each other. Maggie is calling Harold an imbecile and wonders how he can call himself a father to his children. Harold tells Maggie that if she spent as much time on him and the kids as she did on her fucking hair then maybe they'd have something resembling a family.

I leave the kitchen and shut myself in my room, succumbing finally to the dangerous vision of Mrs. Kowolski's bursting red nipples. When I come, the shrieks of my parents' argument drift through the walls and into my room, where they float around in the sweaty, shameful aftermath of a hundred butterflies alighting from my exhausted, naked body.

We are the progeny of an interfaith marriage. Catholic mother, Jewish father. Five children, meeting both the Orthodox and Catholic requirements for a large litter of heirs to our parents' gene pools. The older three are generally raised New Testament, with a little High Holidays thrown in for solemnity. By the time I roll out, an afterthought of nostalgic love, Maggie's passion for Jesus and the Virgin Mary has waned almost entirely and I learn to worship test tubes, the Big Bang theory and a god of mythic proportions -- half Jewish in His wrath and fury, half Catholic in His conditional forgiveness; a God who surfaces only when I am in need of an explanation for the unexplainable.

I spend most of my childhood roaming the neighborhood, a neatly arranged network of wide streets and ranch-style homes, bordered by old leafy trees good for climbing. Outside in summer, it smells like metal and lilac, peaches and skunk. The ground is a gold mine of buttons, pennies and other shiny, castaway pocket fodder. I collect. I gather. I accumulate. I have boxes of street gems -- odd bits of suburban flotsam -- which I glue together, erect and reinvent into enormous, forbidding shapes. Faces made of pennies. Moons made of broken glass. Hearts made of rocks and cement.

My sister Esther calls our house Monsoon Goldblum. A one-story ranch with a haphazard add-on -- my sad, dilapidated room that leaks in winter, roasts in summer -- in the back. Books and furniture are everywhere, almost alive, disordered and breathing. You do not ever find things in our house, you stumble across them in your journey. Entire closets are jammed with board games, bathrobes, priceless silver, basketballs. Drawers in dressers are a treasure chest of watches, panties, foreign coins and scented sachets. Pets include Harry the Dog, a cat Martin named Bilbo Fucking Baggins after he read The Hobbitt and several fish in a glass bowl. Remnants of our parents' fights lie in pieces throughout the house, broken vases and dishes waiting to be glued, never thrown out, evidence of their brawls. You never know when you might step on broken glass. You never know when you might sleep with a hairbrush.

But the world outside is clean and open. There is logic to stepping on a burr or a rusty nail. There is sense to wilting flowers, new spring leaves, deflated tennis balls. The junior high school borders our backyard, a long field of low-slung buildings, drooping and insolent, made of concrete and wood. In the winter, left untended, the field grows wild with weeds that are hacked off in spring and left to dry out under the sun. We use the dried weeds to make igloos and sometimes you might see six or seven weed igloos scattered across the field, like Monet's haystacks in the burnished light.

Every summer I take on several jobs. The first is to capture lizards and garden snakes on Mr. Milton's land, several acres of apricot and cherry trees down the street from our house. The second is to flee from the salt pellets Mr. Milton fires at me from his drafty old upstairs window. I steal fruit, which I eat nonstop. As a consequence, I have diarrhea all summer.

Meanwhile, my brothers spend their energy erecting a tree fort. They conduct secret meetings that involve blood rituals and double dares. I am not allowed to participate because I am a girl, an accusation against which I heatedly argue. When they're not around, I sneak up the tree and invade their secret fo