In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [58]
I didn’t feel like this very often, this close and intimate with my mother. There were things I wanted to ask her—questions about boys and babies, about her life at my age, about why my breasts hurt at night. But I didn’t know how to ask without embarrassing her or myself. Some things, she has always said, are better left unspoken.
Perhaps because of the warmth and the way she hummed, I gathered my courage. “Mom, do you ever use tampons?”
My mother stopped humming and without looking at me asked, “Why do you want to know?”
I told her I hated the pads and uncomfortable elastic belt that caught and pinched. I wanted to try tampons, which seemed much more modern and unobtrusive. My mother looked horrified.
“You can’t use them, Kim. Virgins can’t or they’ll … well, they might make themselves not virgins anymore.”
I had no idea what she was talking about. I knew what a virgin was: a girl who had never had sex with a boy. I was confused and irritated. The way the conversation had turned out was making me feel nasty, and I worked myself out of the room, finding comfort in my grotto beside the fish pond.
My cousin, Lezlie, had her own box of Tampax, and she was a year younger than I was. My uncle Barry had moved his family from the woods years earlier, and the tow-headed toddler was now a teenager with long dark hair and a coterie of cool friends who had shortened her name to Les. The next time I visited her house, I listened to her encouragement, then closed the bathroom door, alone with the thin cardboard tube. I studied the illustrations on the instruction sheet for a long time—the strange postures of the headless women and the simple blue drawings of their insides and orifices. When I emerged, Les looked at me expectantly. I grinned, feeling light and unburdened, triumphant and no less maidenly.
It was not sin I longed for but rather a sense of identity, purpose. Who was I? A nice girl from Pierce, straight-A student, obedient daughter of a logger, someone anyone could just as easily not see. And what did my future hold? I never imagined it, never saw beyond my rigid schedule of school and church, other than to dream of someday marrying Luke and going to live with the Langs. I wondered if I would ever get back to them.
I became more and more sensitive to the way the girls at school snickered behind their hands at my long dresses. The beige tights Sister Lang had bought me pilled and snagged until my mother threw them away and I was again reduced to wearing kneesocks. I envied the girls’ smooth legs and dark lashes, the carefree way they bounced across the field in their miniskirts. I felt a strange longing for the older boys who gathered around them at the bus stop, and I realized it was the same kind of feeling I had had for Luke but somehow more generalized, like the tingling I had felt when studying my madeup face in my grandmother’s mirror.
Instead of smiling at others in the halls between classes, I began to lower my eyes and shuffle close to the wall. When I was noticed, it was to be pointed out as some kind of freak—the girl who wore her skirts long and her stockings short, the one who cringed behind her heavy-framed glasses and never made trouble. My only haven lay in silence, in stillness, and I hid behind my books, folded in on myself until I sat at my desk like a pretzel, a knot of elbows and knees.
I walked home alone, usually behind Maria, a girl my age with full black hair and a chipped front tooth. She walked with Sam, her skinny blond boyfriend two years older, and they wrapped themselves together so tightly—his hand in her back jeans pocket, hers in his—I wondered at their ability to remain upright. Every other block they would stop, turn to each other and kiss deeply. I stopped then, too, maintaining my distance, embarrassed and entranced