I said instead, and she sighed, went back inside, and got drunk enough for the sadness to reset itself to happiness, only to go back to sadness again.
MY MOTHER RETURNED home that evening with a small cake to celebrate. A reward, probably, for keeping my first blood as our secret, though she didn’t say that. I lay in the bed we shared, feigning cramps though all I really felt was a small ache in my lower back that radiated into my hips. I could have gone to school with the thick pad in my underwear and been fine, but I had wanted to be alone all day with my sinful lies, the impure vision I’d had of Vern, pray for forgiveness, and wait for my mother.
“Meet sugar, your new best friend.”
She opened the packaged coconut cake, forked off a hunk and brought it to my lips. I swallowed the stale piece nearly whole. I hated coconut, would have preferred chocolate, but I didn’t tell her that. It felt near to the time she forgot my sixth birthday. The next day, when she’d remembered, she had gone to the Wine Baron and filled a brown bag with lemon Laffy Taffy, a random candy I had never shown affection for. I smiled then too.
“It hurts.”
“Get used to it,” she said. “Women have a long history of suffering.”
She lay next to me. Sighed. I smelled the familiar yeast and it turned my stomach. “Do you know there are people in this world who put gingerroot up their heinies?” she asked. “For fun?”
“Mom.”
“It’s called figging,” she said, matter of fact.
I could barely admit this to myself, but sometimes I was thrilled by her new crass talk. It made me feel alive in an unknown way, but I shouldn’t have been surprised by this. That was the design of sin: to be the most attractive thing in the room.
She got up, walked to the kitchen. I heard a can open.
“Most people call a woman’s holy place a vagina,” she said, “but the vagina’s the part up in there, and what they’re meaning is the vulva. So really just saying pussy brings it all together.” She drank so deeply I could hear her gulp from the bedroom. There was the sound of a second can cracking open. “Now that you’re a woman you ought to know.”
Pussy. Pussy. The word sparked and hissed. I should have asked her what was giving her such strange thoughts, but instead I asked her about the beers, and if she’d been praying over them. Surely she hadn’t been taking these sinful thoughts to her weekly women’s Bible study. But as soon as I thought this, I realized I wasn’t even sure if she was still going.
She looked at the can in her hand. Shrugged. “Sure,” she said. “And I woke up to another hot and thirsty day all the same.”
VERN SEPARATED THE girls by blood. Girls who had it and were under the marrying age of eighteen were ready for the true mission, and were set apart. Not yet knitted to an earthly husband, able to offer the church a singular focus, these girls were special, and now I was one of them. I understood that being in this group normally meant a deeper study of the Bible alongside Vern’s wife, Derndra, or perhaps hours of door-to-door proselytizing and rigorous chastity. By the time a girl was eighteen, marriage seemed the most exciting endeavor there could be in a life, if only because of the possibility of newness, possibility of pleasure, even pain. But drought times were different, and the girls of blood would be particularly useful now, Vern had said, though none of us knew what that meant, exactly.
I felt lucky to have gotten my blood at such a perfect time, when it would matter most. I suppose I had strange dreams of glory, that the things I would do as a useful woman would be preserved somewhere, that they would make some difference to dirt and seed and stalk. We were bloody, but around the church we were known simply as the Bible study girls.
Denay and Taffy were my best friends and had already had their bloods for months, walking the church with prim proud smiles, full of use. Now I was in the club. I put my hand between my legs and held myself, looking for the calm it usually brought. My mother’s sleeping back rose and fell next to me. The smell of beer hung around us