I prefer stemmed barware for my cocktails, when possible.
"How," Helena persisted, "did you come up with black cherry vodka for your Virtual Virgin, my new favorite drink, Delilah?"
"The cherry was obvious and my mood is a bit dark right now." I was not about to explain Ric's addiction to my Midnight Cherry Shimmer lip gloss. "You could leave out the vodka for minors and those who dislike strong spirits."
"Not us, Delilah."
"No, not us."
"What do you want to know?"
I sighed and leaned back in my chair. The numbness was wearing off. My reptile brain was curling back up to sleep after giving almost everyone around me a good tail-lashing.
I'd never had anyone to tell me these things. "This IUD?"
"A method of birth control for decades, of varying usefulness. Not really meant for nulliparous women."
"I'm this nulleperous woman?"
"Nulliparous. The word means non-child-bearing. We're both nulliparous women."
"Cheers," I said, lifting my martini glass rim to hers. "Why is the installation process so gross? Computers do it better."
"Ancient Arabs put stones into the uterus of a camel to prevent pregnancy."
"Sure don't want inconvenient pregnancies in beasts of burden," I noted. "Weird, the Rolling 'Stones' recorded a song titled 'Beast of Burden.'"
"In the last century's twenties, a German named Ernst Grafenberg placed rings of silk - and later, silver - within the uterus of his female patients to prevent pregnancy. Too much bleeding."
"I can testify." That mention of silver unnerved me, so I sipped my Virtual Virgin and let Helena enlighten me further.
"Starting in the sixties IUDs became much more workable and popular. The trouble is the body tends to reject foreign objects unless the uterus has hosted a fetus."
"This all sounds like a biology class at Our Lady of the Lake, where they told you all the scientific stuff, just not exactly how the egg and sperm get together."
"I think we can gloss over that part too, Delilah. What's crucial is that you were not even in puberty, yet you were fitted with a birth control device without your knowledge. Your ignorance of the medical procedures made the act an assault. It was a crime, and it's a sin that it's not prosecutable in a court of law."
"If I were one of these leprous women," I started.
"'Liparous," she corrected. "You'd be used to routine pelvic exams since puberty."
"And that turkey baster?"
"Would be a familiar if not favorite article once a year, when you were given a Pap test for cancer. It's criminal that you haven't had any basic female organ care."
"And the dilator?"
"Would be used briefly to obtain a scrap of uterine tissue to test for abnormal cells. It would be a necessary - possibly uncomfortable, but no more - procedure for your good health."
"So the procedure, the pain, I experienced as a kid was no worse than a woman who wanted an IUD would go through."
"Except such women are usually sexually experienced." Helena stared into her Virtual Virgin. "You weren't. You weren't accustomed to penetration, to intimate invasion. Your fear and natural resistance would make it far more painful. For a young girl of your age and history, it would be a nightmare."
"It was."
"Your highly creative subconscious converted it into an alien abduction dream. Since others went public with such claims, it gave you something 'real' to cling to after what must have been a devastatingly surreal experience. That's not so different from Ric converting his first adolescent wet dream stimulated by a vampire bat bite into an appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The immature mind needs cultural coat hooks. Yours was alien abduction. I'm sorry, Delilah. You needed to know the truth, no pussyfooting around it."
I nodded.
"On the other hand, for those responsible, it was an unconscionable dereliction of duty. Which Ric realized, and which infuriated him. Essentially, the social services powers-that-be then punished you for being attractive to predators. Blame the victim."
Now that she'd put it in bald terms, the injustice of it all hit home. It wasn't even just the single invasive, controlling act. It was all the consequences, even more to my mind than my body.
"It's why I've always hated my looks," I said slowly. "I thought it was my coloring, my white skin looking even paler because of my black hair. I thought vampires went for me because I already looked like a corpse."
"They went for you because they were also teenage boys and you were a very pretty girl. Still a predator-and-prey situation, but one we call 'normal.'"