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 like a net. I remembered how before she’d been saved, when we were poor, very poor, she’d drink anything—Listerine, lemon extract, cough syrup she’d steal from Cherry’s cabinets, the Pac. The beer at least was a drink meant for drinking.
“Tell me where beer is in the Bible, Lacey May,” she’d said a few months ago after she started drinking again, when I had held the phone and threatened to call Grandma Cherry and report her sin.
“You don’t want to make that call, little girl,” she’d said. “You want your mama around, and you know it.”
She was right, and now the secret had roped around us, including me in its grip, sickening me from sun up to down. I was trapped. I felt a little crazed by it.
MY FIRST BLOOD dried up within days. I missed the alarm of color waiting for me on the toilet paper when I wiped. On the way to church, I saw someone had plastered signs all down Old Canal Road—SAVE PEACHES! BRING WATER HERE NOW!
Over another sign—PRAY FOR PEACHES!—someone had written, It’s Global Warming Fools!
“What’s global warming?” I asked my mother as she peeled into a parking spot, creating a cloud of dirt around the Rabbit.
“I’ve heard of that a few times too,” she replied. “Maybe we should be a little more curious.”
But I knew I wouldn’t mention it again, and my mother would never bring it up. Curiosity was the first rung on the ladder down to hell.
WE FILED INTO the pew next to Grandma Cherry, who liked to sit smack in the middle of the church to feel the highest holy vibration. It had been nearly a week since I’d told Pastor Vern the news of my blood, and I’d relaxed a bit, stopped looking for signs that my mother could sense the betrayal. She was distracted anyhow, concerned with outfits. Today she wore new clear plastic high heels with stars floating in them. A white dress that buttoned all the way down the front and pressed her cleavage up. It was tight and gave the impression that at any moment the buttons could give way, that private places of rose-smelling skin, shimmery and lotioned, could spring forth and be free. The dress and the shoes were not secondhand. Lately she had been ordering things from catalogues that featured women on the front with huge boobs and tiny tank tops held together barely by strings, wearing shorts so short it appeared their butts were eating them. She had been making out checks and signing them fancy, a star dotting the i in Louise. I had asked her where the extra money had come from and she said, “Doing God’s work all day doesn’t mean you have to be poor. Don’t you see what I’m wearing?” She had held out her arms so I could admire her new green halter top. “Green attracts abundance,” she explained.
Today her legs were slick with tanner and sweat. Lips red and her blond hair thrown to one side. Her wrists were a jangle of beaded bracelets, and Cherry eyed them. Cherry herself was the opposite of my mother, wearing a boring and faded black shift that was tight over her barrel of a middle, her chicken-skinny arms and legs sticking out of it, no grace. Her long white hair was in a single braid down her back. She reached over and snapped one of the bracelets. “Awful flashy, aren’t we?”
“God loves a sparkler,” my mother said. I’d noticed she’d taken to talking down into her chest to mask her breath. I rested my hand on the bracelets, lightly touching them. She could make anything look special and stylish. Something about the angles of her body and the way they held things up.