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By Root 634 0

of Pierce—a development called Whispering Pines. The rent was often more than our budget allowed, but my mother had learned early the worth of hard work. She took the most abused houses, the ones left filthy and broken by previous residents, because no one else wanted them and the owners would lower the rent. Then she would barter a month’s payment for fixing up the place, scrubbing and painting, trimming shrubs gone wild, planting colorful, even rows of marigolds. One house was littered with straw, the floor covered with the leavings of dogs and goats that had been allowed the run of the home. She shoveled and bleached until her back ached and her hands were blistered. No one would have guessed the tidy rooms trimmed in calico curtains were once a stable.

It was my first real neighborhood, a place where children gathered at the end of the block to play hopscotch, a place where my brother and I could set up a lemonade stand and depend on a customer an hour. It was also the first place where I saw clearly how different the world was outside our extended family. The couple next door filled the evenings with screams and curses; even the voice of Jim Reeves singing his heart out on our old stereo couldn’t compete with the noise. I never asked why the man and woman were screaming, nor why the woman often appeared at our door, bruised and bleeding. My mother would lay her on our couch, call to me to bring her a cold rag, then shush me from the room. I’d lean against my bedroom door, straining to hear their muffled conversation: the woman’s voice high and hysterical, my mother’s sometimes soothing, sometimes stern. Before she left, I knew the woman would bow with my mother in prayer.

I never knew what reasoning passed between the two women, but I cannot imagine my mother counseled her to leave her husband. Even my grandmother once told me that sometimes when a woman got to thinking too much of herself, got a “smart mouth,” she needed to be “shaped up,” “put in her place.” And while the church never condoned abuse, I always understood that it was the woman who was responsible for her husband’s actions toward her. I wondered what it was our neighbor had done to deserve her beating.

The last year we lived in Whispering Pines seems a golden time in memory. I had a best friend, Glenda, who believed that her dolls came alive at night to keep her company and that her mother’s washing machine groaned when it worked: I don’t WANT to wash, I don’t WANT to wash. I saw nothing strange in this and chose to think that whatever spirits possessed toys and appliances must be friendly. Glenda and I listened to her older brother’s music, jiggling our larynxes to mimic the quivering voices of Tommy James and The Shondells singing “Crimson and Clover.” I watched with fascination as her mother melted wax in an aluminum pan and then applied it to her upper lip, waiting a specified number of minutes before ripping the mustache from her face.

That year, I had one of the few conversations about sex I would have with my mother, when she asked me if I knew about menstruation. I said yes, my best friend Glenda had told me, which was true, and my mother seemed satisfied. Glenda prayed for the day she would “get her little friend,” as her mother put it, and kept a pink-belted pad in her top drawer just in case. Every time I went to her house, we’d get out the Kotex and consider its mysteries. When finally it was I and not Glenda first beset by the ritual bleeding, she was mute with envy. I would have gladly given her my status. I didn’t tell her that when the rusty stain appeared on my panties, I thought I was dying and locked myself in the bathroom to await my fate. Finally, after much cajoling, I let my mother in and explained my condition. Her shoulders slumped and a look of pity and regret showed on her face. “Oh, honey,” she said. “You’ve started your period.”

She brought in her purple box of Kotex and handed me an elastic belt like the one Glenda kept in her drawer, then left me to work out the mechanics of attaching the pad to the two hooks, which