Puberty

When my sister and I both turned twelve, my father bought us a dog. It was a pretty cute dog, a chocolate lab puppy, and when Melissa opened the box it hopped out madly and tackled her and she fell back onto the carpet giggling and the dog licked her face like you sometimes see in commercials. I stood beside her and watched disheartened—partly because the dog had chosen to celebrate her birthday and not mine, but mainly because I had really wanted a chemistry set.

"What are you going to name him?" my mother asked.

"Thomas, why the hell did you name Linda 'Puberty'?" He took a swig of beer and sloshed it around in his cheeks. "Seems like a pretty strange name for a snake." "Midnight," my sister said instantly. Whether she had prepared for this moment—plotted the stupid name from the beginning or not—I'm not sure. Now I sometimes think that the name had an intuition about it, a childish prophecy for the dog's brief and dark presence in our fucked-up household.

So it was still my birthday too. My sister rolled around on the floor with the dog and I moped into the kitchen to eat some cake. Given the anesthetic quality of a good yellow cake—and that this was the first cake of two that was made for our birthdays and therefore mine, the older by ten minutes—I sat in the kitchen until the small party cleared outside, to enjoy the late summer evening. I finished another slice, then another, then another with ice cream when I thought of adding ice cream, until the cat walked in the kitchen.

That Damn Cat. She was a tabby and very skinny and she fit inside a cup when my sister tried it for a photograph when we'd found her. I had found her mewing, holding on to the lip of a sharp, rocky cliff for her pitiable life one day on a walk when Melissa and I were seven. I had lied to my parents that she hadn't scratched me and said "She's starving." "Well, what do you want to name the damn thing?" my father asked me.

"That Damn Cat," I said. I had been going through a bit of a rebellious phase at the time, having recently felt the first tinglings of real manhood. To get through the first years of that war, for my arsenal, I labeled much of my life in ironically simple terms—in ways my father might have put it—partly to mock the simplicity of lower-middle income suburbia, partly to mock a lonely childhood in the middle of the dark and eerie woods, and partly because I thought it was funny to make fun of my father.

Now, That Damn Cat was curious about the new smell in the house, the repugnant musty odor of Midnight wafting to her higher senses. She stalked between my legs and looked at me but didn't meow, which seemed to say to me, in her hard cockney accent, "Well Thomas, what the fuck is this all?"

"Hell if I know, gov-nah," I said. I stuck my finger in the icing of the cake and bent down to cat. She smelled the icing and looked at me again. She sat down and looked at me. I entered a silent competition with her—staring into her yellow eyes as I had been prone to do—until I obviously lost. "Alright," I said, and I left the moonlit room to thank my parents for the thoughtful birthday present.

It was a few months later when Puberty attacked the puppy. Puberty was my snake's name. I had let her out of her tank and the stupid mutt thundered into the room and was immediately struck, without the pleasantries of a deathrattle. Midnight yalped and I yelled "Get him out of the room!" and after some family debate I was forced to kill the snake known as Linda to the rest of my family. Kill her with a shovel, in the driveway, right after dessert. I don't want to talk about that, only that at the funeral later that night, during the eulogy, I told my family her real name.

Then, after I dug the hole and put the orange shoebox in, my father asked, "Thomas, why the hell did you name Linda 'Puberty'?" He took a swig of beer and sloshed it around in his cheeks. "Seems like a pretty strange name for a snake."

"Her name wasn't ever Linda," I said, "so I never named her anything but Puberty."

"You didn't? Where the hell did Linda come from?"

"Mom's coworker is named Linda and you don't like her," Melissa said.

My mother scowled.

"Alright, then why did you name your snake Puberty?"

I told him that I had heard the word itself from a guidance counselor, and that an older girl named Carmella told me that the word had to do with snakes. That this happened and that I believed it, was true. I stood for a minute, feeling a suckered literalist.

"Well that's fine," my mother sighed, with perhaps too much relief. She went inside and brought out a glass of chocolate milk, a way she soothed my grief that she always considered to be greater than what it actually was.

"You're weird," Melissa said. "Puberty. That's not a very pretty name."

"I'm eccentric," I said, and the November wind blew in and when they were all gone I said to the bright orange shoebox, "Rest in peace, Puberty."

A few days later it was Sunday and I was still moping around the house. At dinner, I didn't touch the fish nuggets and the green beans got cold and plastic-tasting and that was enough for me to stop.

"Don't you have a game of Hearts tonight Frank?" my mother asked my father.

"Yeah, z'why I'm drinking now," he said. He tapped the top of his beer can lightly.

"Can Thomas play too? I'm sure it could help his mind get off of this whole thing."

"You think you can handle it, in your emotional state?" my father asked me.

"I can," I said. I was pretty good at Hearts, even back then. I finished the dinner's chocolate milk in one deleterious gulp. "Let's go set up."

My father and I moved the card table down to the basement while my mom and Melissa watched and tied a new bandage around Midnight's paw. "You're so cute," my sister said, shaking his injured paw gently. "What a gentleman!" she shouted. My mother laughed and within a minute of them walking up stairs, I could hear and smell popcorn popping in the microwave.