Footnote on Metaphor

My neighbor's 13-year-old announces to her mother and me at dinner one muggy summer night that she plans to pierce her navel. Skin luminescent in the candlelight, she looks exceptionally angelic. She refers coyly to her navel as "my belly button," her recently acquired maturity yielding momentarily to that ubiquitous juvenile locution. "What about getting a tattoo instead?" I joke.

"Yuck," she snaps back with a condescending glare. "Of course not. I just think belly-button rings are so pretty."

She has, as they say, suddenly become a woman. She is naturally beautiful, tall, but not yet graceful. I have known her for almost six years and have enjoyed the role of adult friend, play aunt, and "allomother," a phenomenon found in primate groups, in which an often childless female takes on maternal responsibilities for another's offspring. In her case, she has a perfectly good mother, and my self-appointed duties are more of the "Sure, I'll tell you anything you want to know" variety.

Again and again I have watched grown men on the street ogle her breasts and long legs, but she is oblivious, which is good, because their desire would revolt her. She now spends at least 15 minutes in the bathroom each morning fussing with her hair, arranging and rearranging her tube top, and dabbing sparkle gel around her eyes, but it is the unselfconscious vanity of a child, enthralled with her own beauty in reflection. Boys her age are too silly to pay more than goofy attention to her. She toys with them, but she's in charge. By choice, she's something of a loner, a bit of a bookworm, and a straight-A student, but I've heard her turn giddy on the phone with classmates with whom she can spend hours exchanging weird noises and gross-out jokes. When she has nothing better to do, she turns to torturing her younger sister, a precocious age nine, who sits now straight-backed and alert, devouring our every word.

The 13-year-old vacillates between utter silliness (the kind that makes you want to throw your hands up in despair) and adult sophistication. I ask myself, was I ever that silly? I know the answer.

She is a self-proclaimed feminist who contrarily soaks up hard-hitting articles from Twist Magazine on how to "French kiss a boy so he'll never forget you," though if you ask her if she's ever kissed anyone, she screws up her face in disgust and throws back her head in violent denial. She wants to know everything about everything, and asks nonstop questions about sex, but very quickly after being given an explicit answer she'll flush and say, "Enough, enough, I don't want to know that, I'm just a kid," but with a certain ironic flair. She wants to know, or she wouldn't have asked, but there are responsibilities that go along with knowledge.

This physical transformation from clumsy kid to beautiful young woman has occurred so quickly she hasn't quite had time to catch up. Daily alternating between gyrating around the house lip-synching "Lady Marmalade" and playing with her old stuffed toys, she sits now in the half-shadows of flickering candlelight on the screened back porch, her puzzled expression a reminder to both her mother and me of our own mutually tortured adolescences.

She wears the same large-size shoes we both do, borrows our clothes, but still loves watching 101 Dalmations because the puppies are "so cute!" (said with a little squeal). It's that in-between time when you don't quite know what to make of yourself, when the face in the mirror is a coquettish stranger you can't resist contemplating. It's the time when you're neither animal, vegetable, nor mineral, and you spend hours tracking the evidence of mutation, or is it permutation, of your own body's involuntary shape-shifting. You...