I told her how we just wanted Peaches to be the raisin queen she once was, for things to go back to normal. Florin listened and nodded and then said she didn’t care, that the second she stepped foot into this place she knew she would leave it. She stubbed the joint out in the center console and I breathed the interesting smoke.
“You’re probably pregnant,” she said, getting out of the car. “But you know that already.”
I knew about pale blues. How one day I’d live in a bright, light house painted in those blues. Water would flow from our faucets clear and cool. The vines out my windows would be green and lush and of another place. I knew sharp and sudden that if given the choice I would never have stayed here in Peaches. I was only waiting. Deep down, waiting for the day my mother said we could leave.
WHEN WE GOT back to the red house Florin and Daisy crouched next to me as I peed on the stick. They held my hands during the five minutes of wait and no one prayed. They rubbed my back as I threw up in the toilet when the stick said yes.
Chapter 12
Why did women have to suffer so? Why was the bringing forth of another human such painstaking work? I had only just found out about my condition but inside I was stripped bare and replaced. I was already someone who understood I was no longer myself but a vessel in service to another. I would never again know a breath that was only mine. There was sadness in that, a feeling of dread. Perhaps this feeling came with all pregnancies, no matter how planned and wonderful, just a symptom of astonishment, the transformation occurring. I never expected it would feel so dark, this blessing.
I DRESSED FOR church, mother’s sundress, the breezy blue one she liked so well it was fraying at the neckline. She had found it at the Goodwill, pulled it from a pile like a treasure, called across the place to where I was elbows deep in a bin trying to find clothes for a naked doll, that the dress was linen! Linen, my mother explained on the drive home, was what rich people liked to wear on vacation. Liz Claiborne! she squealed. I supposed she got these ideas from magazines, from her life before I was born. Of course the dress was perfect on her, of course it was the color of her eyes.
I wondered if she missed the dress, if she ever thought of coming to get it. The dress fit me nicely now, and I felt relieved that I would still look the same at a glance. Anyhow, most people never looked at anyone else with any clarity, one eye forever turned toward themselves. They wouldn’t care to notice my face had filled out a little, my breasts bigger and the small protrusion of my stomach. After all, I hadn’t noticed myself until I’d had reason to go looking. I pulled the linen tight against the paunch in the mirror. Now it curved outward and I couldn’t suck it back in flat.
At school last year our class almost had someone come from Fresno to talk to us about sex, someone who was rumored to bring condoms and strangle bananas with them, but enough GOTS parents raised a fuss. Instead we had a twenty-five-year-old woman in a pressed white frock give a speech about abstinence. The way her cheeks reddened when she peered out at all of us and said she was a virgin. Cleared her throat. Said it again. Virgin. The GOTS parents lining the room like security broke into applause. It had made perfect sense to me then that since she was not married she would be a virgin. But now her words seemed unlikely. How could she have made it twenty-five years without someone taking it from her?
My eyes burned with tears but none fell. Who was inside me? It could be anyone, I thought. My mind swam with ways out. I was only a body containing another body. But no one had seen the body within me yet, no one knew, so did it have to exist? I was scared. I didn’t want to imagine it in there, becoming. My mother had said being pregnant was like an alien takeover. She hated it. The way I had stretched and rolled inside her. She said she imagined snakes