An Incident at the Park One Summer or (Spit)

A memory from a long-ago July.

“Do you swallow or spit?”

I’m seven the first time I’m asked this by a boy around my age at a park where I would one day play soccer. My dad brings my twin sister and I to the park during the summer to play with the Supie since the friendships we make during the school year rarely survive the summer, if we make any at all, and disappear by the time Fall comes around again. So we go to the park and play with the Supie, the Supervisor hired by the city to keep us and the other neighbourhood kids entertained during the day. At seven the Supie seems like someone wise and responsible but over ten years later I recognize her as a teenager, a young girl who is probably working her first job over the summer before school resumes in the Fall.

“Swallow or spit what?” I ask because I don’t understand the question, don’t understand what it is I would be swallowing or spitting. My own question is hilarious to the boy and his friends who sit in the circle with me and the other kids. I remember that day was hotter than the others that week, that the Supie had already exhausted us playing Grounders on the playground equipment and making gimp bracelets under the hut where my dad sits in his foldout chair reading his newspaper. She’s lead us down the small hill to the copse of trees between the hut and the play equipment where we’ve tried to play Wink Murder but have given up with the heat. I know my sister is in the circle, playing the games we all were but I know the question hasn’t been directed at her. I don’t know if it’s because I’m sitting closer to the boy and his friends that he decides to ask me.

“Just answer the question,” the boy says as a smile pulls up the corners of his face. It’s the smile of a joke I don’t understand. “Do you swallow or spit?”

“Don’t ask that,” the Supie says. She lies on the grass with her backpack under her head, her sunglasses covering her eyes. The Supie knows the boy somehow, is classmates with his brother and believes that those three words will be enough to get him to stop, but it’s his familiarity with her that lets him get away it.

The question feels like a trick. I look up the small hill at my dad reading the newspaper. I wonder what would happen if my dad knew what I was being asked. But I can’t think of a good reason to leave my spot in the circle, to ask him about it because it doesn’t feel like a question I should ask my dad. I start picking at the grass instead, collect a pile of it by my feet.

“Do you swallow or spit?” the boy asks again.

I shrug, “I don’t know. I swallow food and water.”

The boys find this funny and laugh, the Supie doesn’t say anything this time. I wonder if she’s asleep, I try to find her eyes through the dark shade of her sunglasses. I’m seven and I’m a practicing Catholic. I go to church weekly. In three years, the year I begin to play soccer at this park, I’ll also start altar serving at church. I’ll pray, I’ll sing hymns, I’ll join the Youth Group, I’ll go to church until I’m twenty-one and then I don’t go to church again unless it’s for weddings or funerals (and four other times). But at seven I’m a Catholic, and as a young Catholic there are rules I follow and things I don’t know yet, many things that are deemed inappropriate that I am protected against, so many things that I will learn much later when I am more than old enough to know them already.

Right now, at twenty-nine, I wonder how the young boy and his friends know about oral sex. I wonder if they really knew then or if they just knew it was adult and thought it was funny for that sake. I wonder if the boy did know, if it was his older brother, or if the boy was allowed to watch more than just The Simpsons when Teletoon at Night came on at nine and picked it up from that. I don’t remember when I finally understood the question, the middle of high school at least.

“Okay, like saliva then,” the boy says, and I look up from the pile of grass I’ve been making. “If your mouth is full of it. Do you swallow or spit?”

“Oh,” I wipe the bits of grass off my hands, look at the creases the blades have made in my skin. “Swallow, I guess.”

Which is the wrong answer, because they laugh, but at twenty-nine I know that any answer I gave them would be wrong. The boy and his friends would have laughed at me either way, no matter how I answered. The Supie tries to hide a smile when she says, “Come on guys, you have to stop.”

And they do after that, now that they’ve gotten an answer. I don’t remember what we do but I know we stop sitting on the ground, that we play some sort of game and that the boy and his friends make no reference to the question again. I don’t think about it either, I’m used to being asked trick questions by my classmates in school and now that the laughing is over and the teasing has stopped, I move on with the afternoon. I don’t think about the words, swallow or spit take their places with sex, rape, abortion, and other whispered words I’ll someday learn and be taught are not to talk about out loud.

I don’t know if this next part happens on the same day or a different one. If this were a piece of fiction, then it would work thematically if it were the same day. From a story perspective it works to have both these things happen together, it would make more of a point, I think. But I can’t remember that, only that I remember both of these things and that the people are the same but the days might be different. But they might be the same.

Since I’m writing it down, it’s the same day.

There was a water fountain near the road by the park. It sat beside the dusty baseball diamond and there was no button or typical faucet that the water came up from. It was like a small dish in a bigger dish, the water sort of pooled from it, never stopping. Sometimes people would have their dogs stand up against the fountain and drink from the bowl where the water collected and drained. My dad always told me to be careful when drinking from the fountain.

After playing with the Supie, I want to get a drink from the fountain. My dad takes his folding chair and his bag of papers and walks through the copse of trees to the car with my sister while I walk to the fountain. The water fountain wasn’t far from the car, I would meet my dad and sister there after getting my drink.

As I start walking from the hut to the fountain the boy and his friends see where I’m going. They have bikes and when they see me heading towards the water fountain one of them says, “We have to beat her!” I try to run but I’m a chubby kid, I can’t outrun a bike if I try but even when they ride past me on their bikes and beat me to the water fountain I don’t stop running until I get there.

The boys surround the fountain, circling it and put their heads close to the bowl. I try to shove past them to get my drink but they won’t let me through. But then they turn towards me.

And they spit.

They fill their cheeks with water from the fountain and spit on me. Over and over. I try to shield myself, cover my face. I think I tell them to stop. I want them to stop. I must’ve told them to stop but they didn’t. They don’t. They fill their cheeks with water and spit at me over and over before suddenly biking away in a hurry.

For a moment I stand at the fountain and look down the road and see my dad coming towards me, the reason for the boy’s quick departure. I walk away slowly from the fountain and start crying. At seven, tears come easy, easier than they do anymore. A high-pitched keening escapes from my throat while hot tears stream down my cheeks as I walk slowly towards my dad. He is fuzzy from the tears.

“It’s okay Sarah, get your drink,” my dad calls to me as he walks towards me. I remember shaking my head, continue to cry, “It’s okay, I’m right here. I won’t let them do that again.”

I go to the water fountain. I get a drink. My dad stands beside me, keeping watch.

I don’t remember what happened after, but I do remember we came back to the park the next day. The boy was there, but his friends weren’t. He was with the Supie and a few other kids who were gathered around her. My dad called to the boy and the boy went to him. My dad started talking to the boy. Swearing, I think, that was what some of the kids said afterward. They recognized the words that I didn’t, which was most of them. I had never seen my dad this way before but it didn’t scare me, not after what the boy and his friends had done.

The Supie watched this happen. I remember there was a half-hearted attempt at moving the rest of us kids away from what was happening. At twenty-nine, I think about the teenager at her summer job who knew a parent shouldn’t yell at another child at the park and how she must have known that she had let one seven-year-old imply to another seven-year-old that she was practicing oral sex. That she had found it amusing even though she knew it was wrong, that she hadn’t tried very hard to stop it from happening. That this parent might call the city, might find her boss and tell them what happened. How maybe to save her job she let a brat of a boy get yelled at in the park one summer.

Afterwards, the boy came back to the group. He didn’t cry but came right up to me and started talking to me about The Simpsons.

The boy was kind to me after that.