over into another, unreachable life, just as I had. Maybe we would be too much for each other.
“I’m a midwife and a doula and a woman and a goddess and I love women and I love vulvas and vaginas and cervixes and clitorises, you name it, I love it,” Hazel said. “Whatever you think you know about yourself, leave it there at the door. I want you to enter into this experience completely open-minded and ready to receive.”
“Are you going to summon God?” I asked her.
“Goddess, praise,” she said, holding her hands palm up to the ceiling. “Goddess, praise.”
I looked at Daisy to see if she was smirking, but her face was set. She was into it fully.
“You can undress from the waist down or take everything off if you want, when you’re ready,” Hazel said.
Daisy and Florin got naked easily without hesitation. They had seen each other a thousand times, I was sure. Daisy had a shocking thrush of ink-black pubes in startling contrast to her white hair. Florin was flat chested with tiny pink nipples that were a charm, and unlike her mother, there was nothing covering her, just razor-rashed skin, and I could see the dark of her center, a leaf folded in half, a flower pressed between the pages of a book. The doulas nodded and smiled at us. One made prayer hands and placed them under her chin.
“Can I just watch?” I said.
“Show up for your life, Lacey May,” Daisy said. “Same parts.”
The room was dim, and I thought about myself naked around other naked women. How we didn’t have the same parts. It made me want to be a man, or a woman who loved other women, just to go around exploring all the different combinations of vulvas and nipples and breasts I could find. Maybe men were just as complicated, yet my experience with two of them so far told me they weren’t. But with women—didn’t it seem there could be endless ways to be with women?
I took my clothes off and closed my eyes. Hazel asked that we envision our bowls, the bird’s nest of muscles that made up our pelvic floors. I saw floors and bowls and could not imagine how they were contained within my own body. But once I had thought of my body long enough, a time in the shed came to mind, how after he lay with me, Lyle got dressed and I was still on my back, and I asked him, “Do you think I’m pretty?” And he stood over me and looked for a long time and then said, “Don’t be weird. You’re my cousin.” I had covered myself quickly.
Hazel passed each of us a small mirror. She told us to spend time with ourselves, take a good look around. Open our labia and see what was inside. Examine the all-powerful clitoris, and try to find our cervixes if we were really brave.
“It’s like the most beautiful little doughnut you’ll ever see,” Hazel said. “I’ll be coming around with a flashlight to help.”
In the mirror I looked at my furrowed brow and burned nose. My face held a slight scowl when I wasn’t even angry, I knew. I remembered the time my mother had told me I was no fun. No Fun, she had called me as she tipped back another tall can of beer, when all I had wanted was to have and be fun. I’d decided that when I was a mother I would allow Artichoke the space to be who she really was. I wouldn’t make her worry over me to the point that she’d lose her very self.
I tried to soften my face. In the dim light my freckles were sweet and my lips pale and my eyes big. I’d been told I had sad eyes, but when I smiled or squinted they almost disappeared. My nose was a nose and my neck was average, nothing special. My breasts were swollen and hot and puffed up, tender baseballs. I wondered if there was already milk inside, but no. It was still too early according to Pregnancy Magazine. My belly seemed huge and different. I used to lie on our bed and eat rainbow cereal from the cavern of my sunken-in stomach. I’d never know that exact body again.
“It’s time,” Hazel said, switching on ocean wave sounds from her cell phone. “Let’s look together.”
She sat and urged the mirror down and shone a flashlight into me. “Meet Yoni,” she said.