Unease surged in her stomach. She stood straight, looked over his shoulder. Her underwear was still on. Was he breaking her hymen? Carna said hymens were a sexist construct; Lilah said you couldn’t break something that naturally stretched; Poppy huffed with disapproval that her family was vulgar enough to discuss the topic at the dinner table. Daisy had only stared at her mother, who gave her a smile meant to quell any alarm. Age fifteen, the youngest Whitsun, she was always subject to hearing fierce opinions about things she hadn’t yet experienced, especially on the issue of female biology.
“Do you like that?” Hugh said, his voice low.
She didn’t know what to say, so she kissed him again. Inside her body, she ached and almost told him to stop. But then it felt sort of good. She knew she was slippery on his hands; she wondered whether that mattered to him. He pulled back and this time put in two fingers. Was this normal? Had Poppy let him do this? Her whole body lifted as he pushed high inside her, and she fought to keep her feet flat. She didn’t want him to think he was hurting her. After a while of this, he pulled his fingers out.
“Are you a virgin, Daisy?” His fingers held close to her, soft and wet.
“Um . . .”
“It’s okay,” he said. His fingers slid back and forth. “I wouldn’t. Don’t worry.”
She didn’t say anything. She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to be worried about him doing. He pulled his hand out of her underwear in a soft snap of elastic. His wet fingers paused on her lower belly, then came out from her dress. Her underwear was twisted and riding up but she didn’t fix it. He kissed beneath her left eye.
“You’re so pretty, Daisy.”
She looked down, unable to think of an answer. His mouth brushed into her hair beside her temple.
“I think it’s cool how you don’t look like your sisters.”
She shrugged. Though it was sweet how he saw them as sisters; that was how she saw them, too. Even if she was the one Whitsun with dark hair. The one who looked most like her father.
He cleared his throat like he didn’t know what to say. She had no idea herself. The wild thought of jumping through the hayloft door and running into the woods occurred to her. But then she saw he was looking down at his hands, the ones that had touched her, been inside her. Embarrassed, she turned away to look out toward the duck pond, which shimmered in the late-afternoon heat. An ATV shrieked in the distance; the men drinking beer were now all in their shirtsleeves. She focused on the strawberry patch sign, which looked slightly crooked from this angle.
“Hey.” He tapped her shoulder.
“Yeah?” She still focused on the sign, the brightly painted letters in a juicy round font with berries dancing underneath.
“I think . . . I don’t mean to be weird or anything. But I think you’re on your period.”
She whirled around. He rubbed his thumb against his middle finger so she could see the shiny rust under his wide, short nails, a slick strand of blood lacing across his knuckles.
Chapter Two
The first time I bled was on the voyage across the Atlantic. Bess ripped rags into strips and told me where to pin them. Then she returned to huddling over our provisions, James’s heavy waxed-canvas satchel containing all we owned kept tight across her chest. I was fifteen and Bess just twenty, and though some of the women made small chatter at nights when the winds were low, she was short with them. She would chide me for becoming familiar, even with the old ones.
“You must be watchful, Jane,” Bess said. “Here, we are not amongst friends.”
She did not have to say it. Our brother, James—only a year older than I—had been spooked at the docks and sold his passage for coin, which he pushed toward us with tears in his eyes. We were to cross unprotected and had scarcely passed over the gangway when I felt the eyes of the deckhands rake across me and my sister. Our necks were bare to these men who shared our tongue but spoke it slant. I did what my sister asked but chafed beneath her instruction. I did not take to the water, despite Bess’s assurances that it was just a boat, like so many we’d grown up seeing our entire lives.
But a ship is not a boat. A boat is a plaything, a lark. Boats nestle close to their coasts, like ducklings to their mother.
Our mother had sheltered Bess and me, with stories and songs and sewing, our life of tiny stitches and scraps bought with our father’s wages. Our father had been a carpenter; he had always said it was not for him, the sailor’s lot, as his own father had not found luck on the water. As such, all I knew of fishermen and sailors was their drunken swaggering and singing once ashore. None of this prepared me for a voyage that was no breathless adventure. Rather life aboard ship was akin to being confined inside a heaving animal barely tamed by rough men who scrambled about, making sorcery with shouts and ropes. I hadn’t considered that foul weather would be worse at sea. I hadn’t considered that waiting while feeling the tumble in one’s gut would be the main task of a passenger.
I never thought of us as creatures. I thought as Mother had: about the luck and safety within Noah’s ark, the world rescued from sin by gopherwood and faith.
A true ship was nothing of the sort. It was a dank cave of groans, teeming and stewing in fever, kettles of filth the waves flung across our dark quarters. During stormy weather, I tried not to open my eyes. Hearing the din was all I could manage. In a ball beneath my traveling coat, many nights I breathed the thick air while Bess murmured into my ear: This is the water, this is the water, beneath us is the same earth, the same one. Soon, soon we will arrive. But this is the water now, you must believe it, you must accept it just as your insides slosh within you, like a baby in a womb sloshes and makes a woman startle in sleep.
That first time, Bess fed me biscuits. She sheltered me with our quilt each night while I removed my soiled rags and then she folded me into sleep and took them away, to where I didn’t know. Days of nausea passed, one tumbling into another, until one morning, I woke, and felt stillness within me. True calm. The waves were slight, gentle. The rags pinned between my legs were clear of blood.
I went above deck to see the sun and that was how the truce came with the water, at last. Myself and Bess and two other old women looked at the waves and the sun for so long I lost any sense of time. The sailors smiled and the winds were strong, but the ship soared through them, smooth and swift. How I want to remember this day with nothing but the pleasure it was! Bess shared our bread with the old women, and one of the deckhands bowed to her as she walked past him. Later came the sunset, and all were entranced by the light melting over the horizon. One of the sailors turned one of the old women in a polite jig. The dancing woman and the red-faced sailor twirling in the calm of this view, only the creaking of sail and rope and water for music. A deckhand clapped along, his eyes crawling over me, then fixing on Bess.
I should have seen this for the ill omen it was. But I had our mother’s devotion to pretty stories. Our mother saw meaning in all things, would have called the woman dancing as a signal to celebrate—Miriam dancing on the shore after her brother Moses parted the Red Sea. But after our father’s death, our mother was lost to us in Roscommon, confined to the madness that plagued her family for generations. Her pretty stories a jumble of her many wild notions.