The doctor admitted there were hormonal suppressants safer than an eating disorder. There was a white pill that I could take every day but it would make me much fatter and it might make me cry. There was a yellow shot I could take every week but it would make me much hairier and I might stop crying altogether. She presented both options as hopeless, because if I changed my mind, I’d be permanently fatter or hairier, by which she meant uglier, which even doctors equated with unhealthy.
I picked the yellow shot, though it took three hours to convince her. I said I’d starve myself otherwise and then the harm would be her fault. But I left with my prescription and I grew thick, beautiful hair all over my body and gained some lovely weight anyway and tools stopped growing and shedding from my uterine lining.
I was happier, until things changed in the world and medicine got expensive and hard to find and the sliding-scale clinics closed. I knew someone who could get me something under the table, but it would take a while. It would take too long, I felt, but I’d have to wait.
When my period came back, it was worse than before. I doubled over, confined to my bed with cramps for days, ruining all my sheets. I felt the sharp end of a screwdriver pushing down and out between my thighs. I dragged myself to the bathroom, and pulled down my sick day sweatpants and old boxers. The screwdriver handle was still partially wedged into my cervix, and pinching hard. I plucked out the useless, over-saturated tampon blocking it and felt around inside for a grip on the thing until, humming to myself between Hallelujah breaths, I yanked it out. I rinsed it off and looked it over as I washed my thighs and hands. It was a Phillips head.
Reluctantly, I begged my parents for help. Just a little money to get that under-the-table connection to work faster.
My mother said she and my father would always take care of me in my time of need. They paid for lunch and she suggested I go off my shots for a while, anyway. She said I should give my body a break.
I said it did not work like that. I didn’t need to detox. She shook her head, said she was just worried about me. Said it was a mean world out there. Asked me what the long-term effects of the drugs were, anyway?
I pointed at dad, at his bald head and his beard. I said that’s what the long-term effects are. I asked if she would give her body a rest from her heart medication. She shook her head again. It was hard for them to look at me.
Desperate, I finally told them about the screwdriver, and the years of nails and scissors and needles and keys, and how they were getting larger. I thought, if nothing else, they’d see the simple benefit of relieving me of this. They appeared to be listening. They looked at each other with serious faces and then at me with serious faces.
You know, my father idled aloud, it was your grandmother who had all the gadgets in the house when I was growing up. She found it very empowering.
My mother smiled. They can be very expensive, she nodded, as if in agreement. Do you think, she asked, you might be able to get a cordless drill or a nice knife set in time for Christmas?
THE SEED AND THE STONE
The Arbor tells us stories of a time before, when all the dead were kept in orchards that rolled endlessly, and had always been there, and people tended to them constantly in gratitude and respect for their ancestors. All the children in the Arboretum are packed into the seed bank, then filed along to the press room where a circle of granite the size of five of me is lowered down on bushels of apples. The sticky tang of fresh cider stings my nose.
I am ten years old and I ask him how it could be possible for orchards to be endless. He is annoyed but clearly does not expect someone so young to understand infinity and eternity, much less gratitude or respect. But I know how many hours go into tending fruit trees, because I have so many ancestors with their pears and apples coming in that autumn, and I’ve pruned and harvested as much as my calloused little hands could manage. Nothing simply appears, I insist, it must be cultivated. I picked a lot of those apples right there, I add. The Arbor sends me home early, tells me if I’m old enough to make cider and know so much about it, well then I’m old enough to drink it and learn for myself.
My Pah is in his last week of life and jokes that he might become something unobtrusive like a potted fern. My Dah is not having it. Dah would like Pah to decide for himself, but also in a way that Dah is comfortable with.
I am sixteen years old and I tell my Pah that I’ll do the opposite, become an enormous maple tree who can only be reached with laborious care, tapped at just the right time in just the right conditions, gallons and gallons of my sap boiled down by my descendants who’ll get only a small bottle of my smoky blessings. My Pah and I laugh together.
Dah is cross at both of us, the only one in the room taking our customs seriously. He says, don’t you remember what our people have been through? Our struggle, our persecution, how few our numbers?
I say it’s just a joke, because I’m not going to have any descendants, anyway. Dah slaps me and sends me out of the room.
From the hall I hear Pah and Dah’s muffled scolding and pleading. Pah relents, kisses Dah, says he chooses red plum. He dies a few days later. Dah never apologizes for slapping me, never mentions it again. We visit the Arbor and receive the juvenile plum tree and I mouth every word of the ceremony as the Arbor drones through it, and we plant the delicate roots in Pah’s ashes in a cramped plot of our overburdened orchards.
I’m hiding and sulking in the root cellar. I’m twenty-eight years old and have stormed out of a screaming match with Dah. I have failed to make children. Be like the seed of the fruit, says the Arbor; go forth and multiply. Be like the stone of the press; meld the fruit of each to the benefit of all. No one is the least concerned for my happiness. I must do this for the community.
It’s not enough that I’ve kept to the rest of our practices, that I faithfully attend to the ancestors when so many of my peers have left, more each year, assimilating into that other society where they make children with their bodies like animals. Their animal children know nothing of our secrets.
I simply ask other questions of my ancestors. I press other kinds of ciders, wines, pickles, preserves.
In the cellar, I pry open a plum wine and drink about half the bottle. The drink makes me peckish so I open two or three jars of syruped pear, dried apples, jellied melon, and fermented radish. The fruit of the prophets and teachers and neighbors and witnesses and gossips that I devour disintegrates in my mouth, my stomach, my guts. My dilemma digests and I want to vomit, but I lay down and keep still with a tight throat. I need to understand, no matter how repulsive the ingredients.
I listen.
I learn that my parents tried for another child before me, but Dah over-fermented the brew and spoiled the whole batch.
I learn that Pah and Dah became strangers for some time after, and Pah brewed me on his own.
I learn that they reconciled when I was small, and Dah’s seriousness was his commitment never to get distracted from the practices again, never to let our family spoil.
I gorge myself on the secrets of the dead late into the night and wake up in the cellar with a stomach distended and aching, but resolved. I have something special in mind for the stone, something I have pieced together from so many sweet and sour voices at once. I go back upstairs and approach my Dah, greet him gently, take his old hands, and propose another way.