by Eryn Allange
Innocence appears in retrospect. Its loss, its death, cannot be mourned in the moment, and it bears no meaning, no weight, no tangibility to anyone who holds it. It is a tragedy unseen, a loss unspoken, until one day, years later, you find yourself standing at its grave and lamenting the fact that you failed to notice it passing at all. And that’s all to wonder if innocence is a whole, or if we instead shave pieces of it as the years pass. A sliver to dirty words heard on the playground, a slice to catcalls and wandering eyes belonging to men the same age as your absent father. A chunk to climate disasters, to sermons, to scenes on tv you dare to watch behind nubby fingers caged over eyes. I wonder if my piecemeal innocence sloughed off, or if I did lose it all at sixteen years old, in a house my family lived in for hardly four months, one that even now I can’t find on a map despite trying.
The day I lost my innocence was unremarkably warm. A breeze caught between the tall, thin pines did hardly anything to offset the Mississippi heat. The back porch was the only backyard we had, a crooked wooden thing where my boyfriend and I sat, our legs folded under us so my jeans stuck with sweat to the back of my knees. The afternoon sun did not beat or pulse but rather persisted, steady.
I tucked my hair, coarse from black dye and cut into a hairstyle I couldn’t maintain, behind my ear, careful not to brush it with paint. Sheet after sheet of thick paper sat before us, some streaked with color and others blank and ready.
My boyfriend of over a year hunched beside me, knee tucked to his chest, his back a tipped-over c, as he worked tirelessly at his own painting. His long fingers were blotchy with stains of colors long abandoned, and I laughed at the yellow splotch in the corner of his work. “Is that a sun?”
“Yeah.” He gave me a squinty smile as he raised his eyes to mine. Dark hair tickled his forehead, and he shook his head to clear it away. “I’m gonna give it a smiley face.”
“You should do sunglasses, too,” I offered.
“Like the computer solitaire game?”
“Exactly like that.”
He laughed and wiped his hands on a crumpled off-brand paper towel, and then dipped his index finger in the black paint. He moved carefully, but without doubt, and I appreciated him for that. He never worried about making a mistake—an improper shade or a misplaced stroke. Even in fingerpainting, an ironic venture for our late celebration of his eighteenth birthday, I was consumed with error. With the threat of a misstep. But he was free from that, and I loved him for it. I loved him for a lot of things, and if we had been alone, I would have kissed him then, streaking his face and hair with mismatched fingerpaints and allowing our teenage hormones to take us where they would.
Because for all my fear of missteps, I found no fear in things we did when we were able to steal away together. Despite my mother’s best efforts, there was no guilt on my mind when I tugged his shirt over his head in the backseat of his secondhand Jeep, pulled off country roads I’d never seen before into fields thick with cane. And despite all the churches she’d brought me to, and all the scriptures I could recite, I thought of heaven rather than hell when we whisper-laughed to each other afterwards, sweat against sweat.
Behind us, the kitchen floor creaked as a reminder that we were not alone. I wiped my brow with the back of my hand and began my painting over on a fresh sheet of watercolor paper. Somewhere in the house, a door slammed, and my mother hollered to my little brother in a way that warmed and reddened my cheeks.
For all her faults, my mother really had tried her hardest with me. If there was any guilt for me to bear, it was that I wasn’t sorry at all, and that I never tried to be sorry for my alleged sins, even if only as a courtesy to my mother, who, at the time, had had three marriages and two kids out of wedlock with two different men. It had been two years and six houses back when she had me stand beside her as she logged online, retrieving a link from an email forward, and then had me provide the answers for the online quiz which begged the question, “How sexually pure are you?” It was one year and two houses back when she had bought me the book Every Young Woman’s Battle: Guarding Your Mind, Heart, and Body in a Sex-Saturated World, with a chapter to be read every night and an oral quiz to be completed, with me standing awkwardly at the door to her bedroom as my brother and stepfather listened to my answers.
But the only thing I ever learned was that people were going to do what they wanted to do, and if everyone on earth had the tendency to make the same awful mistake, over and over again, year after year, then perhaps it was not sin but rather design. But it would be another decade or so before I could admit that to myself.
In the meantime, I thought only once to ask forgiveness for the things I did so readily, knowing full well that any god listening would immediately recognize my words for the falsehoods they were. I was not sorry, and I did not need forgiveness.
“Done!” My boyfriend held up his masterpiece, the sun and its shades wet and warped beneath the weight of the paint.
“I love it. What are you going to paint next?”
“I was thinking—”
The back door swung open, and I shifted my weight to duck out of its path. My mother stood there, hip against the door frame, and stared down at us.
“Hey, mom,” I said, and I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the moment, my voice faltered. I never knew if her moods were readily apparent to everyone, or if I had just learned to sense their subtle shifts over the years. The silence that was just a silence, versus a silence that would last for days until I began apologizing for things I didn’t realize I had ever done. A glare that would break into a laugh, versus one that would break into a slap.
“Come talk to me,” she said. Before I could say anything back, she disappeared into the house, the door shutting behind her with an ominous click.
My legs numbed beneath me. My boyfriend looked from the door to me and asked, “Is everything okay?”
“I don’t know,” I said. But I doubted it. She had said so little. She had moved so stiffly.
I stumbled to my feet, knocking paint water over. My boyfriend rushed to grab it before the paintings could be ruined, but I paid him no mind. My hand was already shaking by the time I swung the door open, and as I moved through the kitchen, one blurry with time and impermanence, the air told me that nothing good would come from what my mother had to say. I rinsed my hands at the kitchen sink, the water cold as the colors blended down the drain, and nervously dried them on my jeans as I stepped to her door.
It is here that the comfort of scene falls away, the resolution in clarity absent. Her room, in memory, is a patchy blocking of shapes. I remember the wall against which her bed was situated and her, one leg bent onto the bed and the other draping over, watching me as I entered. And though the pattern and color of the bedsheets are lost to me now, I remember my red and black cell phone contrasted against them, the glow of the screen against the lines of her face as she flipped it open. And even now, fourteen years later, the terror of that moment lingers so palpably that I can’t even bring myself to joke about the fact that the phone was a flip phone.
She read my messages to me and mutated them with her disgust. My desires were echoed back to me in the tone of her shame and vulgarity, and here now I question privacy. I mull over it as I look to the face of my own daughter, innocence, in all its definitions, in the full bloom of toddlerhood. Was my mother justified in her fear for the things I might be doing, or did her fear create her justifications? It was not the first time my privacy would be tossed aside, and it was not the last time, either.
I wept in the onslaught of her accusations. I wept as she accused me of betraying her by sleeping with my boyfriend, and it’s all I recall as the argument swelled to overwhelm the entire household. I can’t remember my excuses, or anything else I said other than that I was sorry, over and over again. Like prayers up and down a rosary, like verses of a worship song, like speaking in incomprehensible tongues, meaning lost to everyone, I said sorry, sorry, mom, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, sorry, please—
My little brother cowered in the closet of our shared bedroom to avoid the verbal blows, and when my mother went to check on him all she offered to me was that he, too, looked down upon me now.
The clarity found in looking back tells me she spoke from her pain. But I can’t understand the right she had to hurt for the choices my body made, and I can only imagine her hurt came from her own understanding of innocence. Or perhaps the association that her innocence had been taken through the same act with a willingness she never got to experience.
Either way, the forbidden fruit in the garden was the inevitable death of innocence for humanity then, and I was raised to believe that sex would be the inevitable death of innocence for me now. That it was an immutable transcendence, a shift from one form of reality and being into another. That it was a gateway, an act through which our childhood stands behind us and the complexity and terror of adulthood becomes us, and if the gateway is not blessed and sanctified, then it leads straight to eternal torment.
I had been raised to believe that sex would change me, shape me, define me. Prude, slut, prig, skank, Madonna, whore, saved, damned. But my mother’s chosen word that day was ‘harlot,’ and years later when I would remind her of that, she would laugh and say she couldn’t recall using it at all.
But I can see now that my innocence was not offered up in sacrifice with my virginity. Instead, it took a blow with every message she read, and with every threat she levied. It keeled over as my stepfather tried to call the cops on my boyfriend, freshly eighteen and fear-stricken with paint-stained fingers, and it bled as my mother shouted that she would pull me out of school and expose my misdoings to the family to feel the wrath of their judgment.
My loss of innocence ended up having nothing to do with what I gave a man. It was, instead, taken from me by the woman I trusted most, shattered in the fist of my mother’s rage as she pounded crack after crack into the foundations of any future relationship we might have had. Cracks she, halfheartedly, tried to repair over the years with apologies followed by the word “but.”
Cracks she only widened in her allegiance to her indoctrination over her love of her daughter.
A self-proclaimed “Katrina Kid” who was born below sea level in New Orleans, LA, I currently live a mile high in Denver, CO where I am completing my MFA in Creative Writing with the University of Denver in spring 2023.