Marjorie, Grace and me.
We have our arcane secrets, our superstitions, our beliefs, fact and fantasy mixed. Our sexual fears, both rational and irrational. Our own experiences which we share with each other. They are altogether different from what the novels and text books told us they would be.
We got our certificates, our diplomas, our degrees. We had miscarriages, abortions and babies. Marjorie and I caught the clap. We still cannot name our secret parts. We know them blindly, by feel, and not by sight or name. They rule us.
Grace says women ovulate from sheer astonishment. That’s why innocent girls get pregnant and experienced ones don’t. Grace says she has a corroded cervix: she believes she has a soft and bubbly cyst somewhere inside which no doctor can discover: she says she’s only twice had an orgasm in her life other than by masturbation, which she didn’t discover until long after she’d left Christie, and even then didn’t know that what she did had a name or that anyone else ever did it. Grace feels her bosom daily for cancer and daily discovers a good many different lumps. Grace does not trust the doctors who examine her insides. She suspects they take pleasure from the process. Well, she does.
Grace has had cheap back-street abortions and National Health abortions and an expensive post-Abortion Act abortion. She loves anaesthetics and feels only relief when the baby’s gone and she’s no longer nauseous. Grace tried a contraceptive coil but bled too profusely to keep it in. One woman in three does, says Grace. The pill made her sick. Dutch caps disgust her. These days Grace takes no contraceptive precautions at all. It is her Act of Oneness with the universe, or so she says. She relies on her age, her inverted womb and her imagined fibroids to protect her from pregnancy.
Grace enjoys getting pregnant, but not being pregnant.
Marjorie believes her reproductive energies were drained by her first baby, which she failed to carry to maturity.
Marjorie believes she is infertile, and will never know, because she takes oestrogen pills to regulate her monthly bleeding – not that it does.
Marjorie believes the age of the menarche to be dependent on the weight of the girl. Menstruation starts at ninety-four pounds. She, later to menstruate than any of her friends, need never have worried.
Marjorie believes it is just as well she is infertile – since any baby she had would be born monstrous. A disagreeable young nurse implied as much at the VD clinic she had the misfortune to attend, and Marjorie chooses to believe her.
Marjorie thinks if she had Patrick’s baby it would perhaps be all right, but Patrick, alas, only uses her as a washer-woman.
Marjorie consults gynaecologists, goes to Health Farms, looks to authorities to tell her about the state of her insides, which she sees as a bloody, indeterminate mass and which behave accordingly.
Marjorie gives post-production parties at her flat and would sleep with anyone who cared to remain behind, except her insides will not allow, or very seldom. She bleeds too much.
I, Chloe, believe you shouldn’t get your feet wet when you have a period, that pre-menstrual tension is the result of fluid retention in the brain, that sex is for the begetting of children. That some children are meant – and that the most unlikely people will come together to produce a child, and having done so will part again, astonished at what they’ve done: that some of the most robust and kindly couples can’t help producing thin, weedy and miserable children and there’s no fairness in any of it. That children do not change their essential natures between the day they’re born and the day they leave home, and that there’s precious little you can do to help or hinder on the way.
I, Chloe, believe that if you do not consider your reproductive organs they will function properly, and that the harsh light of inquiry is damaging to their well-being.
Feel your breasts today and have cancer tomorrow. A cervical smear now means the womb out soon. Experience shows it to be true, if not statistics.
I, Chloe, feel my function to be maternal and not erotic. I cannot concede that it’s possible to be both, though reason tells me it is: and that is why I do not mind Françoise sharing Oliver’s bed. It allows me my dignity.
Besides, a mother must be watchful. It is one of the laws of nature that one cannot be watchful and orgasmic at the same time.