In fifth grade, they divided us for the afternoon. The boys were sent to the gym to play kickball, while we girls crowded into the windowless room next door. The school nurse was there, and so was the guidance counselor, along with a lady we had never seen before. She wore makeup and a tall blond wig, and she was busy setting up a film projector.
The kickballs thunk-thunked like distant drums.
“This is going to be gross,” my best friend, Tabitha, said.
In fourth grade, she’d told me what Keri Hommerding had told her: that to make a baby, a man stuck his thing up inside you, there. “That’s not true,” I insisted, but just to make sure, I checked with my mother. Instead of denying it, as I fully expected her to do, she’d sighed and removed the pins from her mouth—she’d been sewing a Halloween costume for my brother—and said that there were beautiful explanations of conception and then there were ugly ones, and that Keri Hommerding’s was one of the ugly ones. She said that before I was born, she and my father both had gone to church and prayed very hard that God would send them a baby, and because they were very much in love with each other, God had sent them my brother and me.
It was so unlike my mother to lie that both of us blushed until my mother said, “OK?” and put the pins back in her mouth. I crept out of the room, feeling sick to my stomach, for I knew that the truth had to exist in some terrible in-between place. That night, just as I was falling asleep, it came to me like an incubus. It sat on my chest and sucked my breath and there was absolutely nothing I could do. Sex was what Father Stone did to people in the confessional. Hadn’t I seen all the mothers and fathers lining up to see him, week after week? Hadn’t I watched them step, one by one, behind the red velvet curtain? Hadn’t I always wondered what really went on in there?
“Are you sure you want a baby?” Father Stone would say, pulling up his long, loose frock under which—all the kids would have bet their lives on this—he wore absolutely nothing at all. “Will you be good parents?”
I’d tried to put the whole business out of my head, but now that my First Confession was drawing near, it was often on my mind. Once, I’d asked my mother if I might delay my First Confession until I was older, but she’d replied that I was mature for my age. In her opinion, I was ready.
“Ladies,” said the lady in the tall, blond wig. Her voice was calm, respectful. A frenzy of kickballs battered the wall; she paused until the sound subsided. “Your bodies are going to start changing soon. Your hips will widen. You’ll develop breasts. You’ll notice hair growing in places you never had hair before. Some of you may already have noticed some or all of these changes.”
“Barf,” I whispered to Tabitha.
“I told you,” Tabitha said.
But the film the blond lady showed wasn’t gross at all. It was a cartoon, and it was very funny, with this wild-eyed crazy sperm darting around after an egg who, looking bored, batted her very long eyelashes. And after the film, each of us got a paper bag of gifts: Kotex of various sizes, a pink, pocket-size calendar, and a slender, matching pen. Very Personally Yours was written in gold script across the front of each calendar. The lady explained how to mark the calendars on the first day of our periods, how to calculate when ovulation—the release of an egg—would occur. During ovulation, we could become pregnant if we engaged in sexual intercourse. Did we all know what sexual intercourse was?
Nobody breathed. I imagined Father Stone’s red-knuckled hands tugging his robe up over his knees.
“Sexual intercourse occurred when a husband put his penis inside his wife’s vagina and moved it rapidly back and forth,” the lady said. The friction was enjoyable to both. Sperm came out of the husband’s penis and fertilized the wife’s egg.
Next door, the boys cheered. Somebody had scored.
“Do you have to be married?” Martha Sheinke asked.
“Yes,” the lady said.
All around me, girls were murmuring squeamishly, but I thought I might faint with relief. The lady’s voice was so calm, so matter-of-fact, that I knew she was telling the truth. My First Confession would be fine now, it wouldn’t be any big deal. I wouldn’t have to have sexual intercourse until I got married, and Father Stone would have nothing to do with it.
Did anyone have any questions?
Adrenaline fired through my veins. My hand shot joyfully into the air before I realized it had done so.
“Yes?”
I leaped to my feet. I was grinning, an ear-to-ear foolish grin. All the other girls were looking at me. I didn’t know what to say.
“Yes?” the lady said again.
“Can you sleep on your stomach if you’re pregnant?” I blurted.
Everybody laughed and I laughed, too, only then I kept on laughing. I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t sit down. Tears leaked from the corners of my eyes. The other girls looked at me uneasily.
“Can you sleep on your stomach if you’re pregnant?” the lady repeated soothingly, as if she understood. “Now that’s a good one. I don’t know if I can answer that because I’ve never been pregnant. Do either of you have children?” she asked the school nurse and the guidance counselor. But neither of them did.
“It is probably safe to use common sense,” the lady said, “and assume that the answer is no.”