“You ever want me to stop, you tell me,” he said, taking off his socks.
I did not want him to stop. I wanted him to do what he had to do quickly so I could go back to my husband with a baby in my belly and never be afraid again.
After our fourth meeting, when I was waiting to see if what we had done had worked, I asked Mama what really made women barren. Mama knew many things that Mrs. Spencer and the other people in our town did not know. She knew, for instance, that the Great Flu that had killed all eight of her great-grandparents was not, as everyone else said, a judgment from baby Jesus and Mother Mary. Mama’s teacher Sarah Hawkins, a master midwife, had taught her that the Great Flu had come to America on ships along with spices and sugar, then spread from husband to wife and mother to child and trader to trader by kisses and handshakes, cups of beer shared among friends and strangers, and the coughs and sneezes of men and women who didn’t know how sick they were and went on serving food and selling cloth and trading beaver pelts one day too long. Sarah Hawkins said the Flu was just a fever, a sickness like any other, and the only reason people put a meaning to it was that otherwise their grief would have overwhelmed them. Mama said Sarah Hawkins was the smartest person she had ever known.
But when I asked Mama about barrenness, she just shook her head.
“Nobody knows,” she said.
“Why not?” I asked. I’d never before asked Mama a question that didn’t have an answer.
“We don’t even know exactly how a baby forms in a mother’s womb,” she said. “How can we know why sometimes her womb stays empty?”
I looked down at my hands and she could tell I was disappointed.
“I know one thing,” she said. “It’s not witchcraft.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“People cry witchcraft whenever they don’t understand something,” she said. “Remember, the town ladies said a witch had put a curse on Mayor Van Duyn, and when he died the doctor found his lungs all filled up with tumors. The only curse on him was that pipe.”
“So why don’t you tell people?” I asked. “Everyone listens to you.”
Mama shook her head.
“I used to tell my patients,” she said. “Every woman worries about a curse if she’s not pregnant two months after her wedding. ‘That’s just a silly story,’ I’d say. But they didn’t believe me, and what’s more, some of them got suspicious, like maybe I had cursed them.”
Mama delivered all the babies in the Independent Town of Fairchild and cured most of the illnesses besides. She had set more bones than Dr. Carlisle and heard more confessions than Father Simon. Her reputation was so secure that even when she took to her bed after Bee was born, her patients were all but lined up at our door the day she got well. Nobody was suspicious of Mama.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Why didn’t they believe you?”
“When someone believes in something,” Mama said, “you can’t just take it away. You have to give them something to replace it. And since I don’t know what makes women barren, I’ve got nothing to give.”
I didn’t get pregnant that month, or the month after. At my husband’s house my mother-in-law watched me all the time, like she might catch me in the act of witchcraft. Once she came into our bedroom while I was washing and began making small talk with me, forcing me to answer politely as I washed my underarms and private parts. I felt ashamed of my body then as I never had before, of my small breasts, stomach flat over an empty womb. She began to make me pray to baby Jesus in the mornings; we knelt together and asked him to send our family a child. My mother-in-law was not a particularly religious woman. She kept a crèche above the hearth and a copy of Burton on the shelf like everyone in Fairchild, but went to church only on holidays or when she was seized with a desire to appear pious. The fact that we were praying now—in stumbling words I imagined she half-remembered from some childhood catechism—showed me how desperate she’d become.
At night my husband would touch me only during my fertile week; he was tracking me himself now, as though he didn’t trust me to do it. When I reached for him late in the month he told me his mama had said it was better to save our energy for when it counted, and I was not surprised that he talked to his mama about such things, but I was still disgusted by it.
My meetings with Sam, strangely, became a refuge. In Mama’s house no one watched us. Afterward he did not pester me to lie still or put my legs up the way my husband did; he put his clothes on and said goodbye and left me alone so that I could lie in my childhood bed and pretend that I had never married.
Sam and I didn’t talk much, but in the third month of our meetings he asked if I wanted him to touch me while we did it.
“It might help you relax,” he said. “Some people say that makes you more likely to conceive.”
By that time I trusted Sam. He had never tried to do anything I didn’t want, had always behaved like a friend helping me with something—perhaps a dish on a high shelf I couldn’t quite reach. So I said yes, he could touch me, and that was the beginning of the end.
When it came to married life, we girls had other sources of information besides Mrs. Spencer. We had the older married girls and the web of gossip and advice they wove to keep us safe. From them we knew it was dangerous to sleep with someone too many times before you were married—if you didn’t get pregnant after a few months of fooling around, he’d never marry you. Worse, he might spread the rumor that you were barren. We knew, too, that if you married someone who turned out to be cruel, the best thing to do was to have children as quickly as you could. A woman with three children could divorce her husband and she would probably find another man to marry her—she had never said as much, but I knew that was why Mama had waited until after she had Janie and Jessamine to leave our daddy and bring us to Fairchild, where the old midwife had recently left town. A woman with four children could do as she pleased, marry or not, and I knew that was one reason no one spoke ill of Mama when she chose not to take another husband after Bee’s daddy left.
There was also a book that circulated among the girls and younger women of Fairchild, succinctly titled Fruitful Marriage. The book was more explicit than Mrs. Spencer’s lessons, and it was mildly scandalous to be caught reading it, though not altogether forbidden. When Susie’s mother had found the book while cleaning, she had not reprimanded Susie but had merely replaced the book under her bed in such a way that made it seem likely she had read some of it.
Fruitful Marriage included drawings of men and women naked together, locked in embrace. The author, one Wilhelmina Knutson, also discussed something called “climax,” which she described, frustratingly, as “a moment of indescribable pleasure.” The ability to feel this sensation, Mrs. Knutson said, was the sign of a physically and psychologically healthy individual who was ready for motherhood. And Mrs. Knutson was very clear on one point: climax could only occur when a man’s “member” was deep inside a woman’s body.
I had never experienced climax with my husband, and in recent months, I had come to believe that my inability to do so was yet another sign of my bodily deficiency. But when Sam touched the top of my vagina with his fingers, rhythmically and patiently, for an amount of time that might have been two minutes or two hours, I experienced a sensation so extreme that I thought it must either be climax or something very dangerous, possibly fatal. It was something like what I had felt a few times when, awakening from a sweaty dream of hands and mouths, I touched myself under the covers of my bed. But what I felt with Sam was much more intense, and when he took his leave that day I was still shaking slightly, and absolutely sure that this time, I must be pregnant.