In addition to birth and death, sex was also right outside the picture window on our farm in Condon. To be out in the chicken yard meant seeing a rooster flap his wings and hop on the back of a hen, her contented clucks going screechy under his fast flutter. He jumped off. She high-stepped away, proud-necked and casual as if it hadn’t happened in front of all those other hens and whatever of us kids were around. The rooster had already gone on to another.
To look out onto the pasture meant seeing a bull or steer buck up on rear legs and mount another cow. It meant Cris saying, “Look, they’re playing piggyback.” And me saying, “Yeah,” remembering that I’d once thought that too.
I don’t know when I knew it was something else, that it was sex and that calves would come in the winter. But I understood what Mom meant to be an adult joke when she and Dad and their friends watched one cow mount another. “It’s a real Peyton Place around here,” she said. Peyton Place was the raciest show on TV, with people kissing the wrong people and sex out of view. All the adults laughed at my smart and funny mom.
But when it came to talking to us girls about these things, Mom’s cleverness turned nervous. One afternoon, she stopped Leanne and me as we were passing through the archway between the living and family rooms. I was ten or eleven or twelve. Mom said she wanted to have a talk with us. A talk.
It was a usual afternoon: TV on, boys out doing the chores, Dad gone to town, Cris playing on her own. Mom wasn’t acting normal. She pressed her lips tight, and small creases showed up between her eyes. This was not a you-are-in-trouble talk. This was not a lecture or a lesson.
Leanne and I stood side by side, Mom in front of us. Mom spoke in quick words, short sentences. About when you become a woman. Bleeding and pads. Her eyes stayed on us like maybe we should do something, smile or a nod or ask a question, to make it easier for her to say what she felt she had to say right then. About what a man has and what a woman has. How they put these together and babies happen.
They’d already shown us a movie at school. Girls first and then the boys. Cartoon tadpoles going after eggs. A gray-and-black drawing of the twisty tubes in girls like the half-paper paintings we’d done in art: fold the painted side to the unpainted side and press, open it up for a perfect match.
At recess after that movie, not one word was said from a boy to a girl or a girl to a boy. This new knowledge kept us at a constant distance, like the matched poles of magnets, girls by the tetherball, boys out on the softball field.
A girl in my class had already started. She whispered her secret behind the back of her hand to each of us, her news damp in my ear. This new secret of her body meant she knew more than I did.
I’d heard that one girl in grade school had already gone all the way with a high-school boy. The friend who told me about that girl planned to wait until she got married to do it. I said I would too. I thought it would be easy.
Mom told us where the pads and tampons were: in the bathroom in the dresser with the gold pulls.
Maybe Mom’s discomfort gave guide to my own feelings. I felt exposed and embarrassed. I looked everywhere but at her.
I said, “Uh-huh,” and my sister did too.
I already knew where the pads and tampons were. I knew what to do when I started. I knew about sex. Besides the animals on the ranch and what girls told other girls, I’d had looks at the sexy Playboy magazines Dad kept in the cupboard by his easy chair. Pretty women with big breasts and hair between their legs, cartoons of girls with their thighs spread and a man standing between them. I’d read the sexy romance books Mom kept in that cupboard. The covers of these books had dark-haired women held in the arms of handsome men. The man, shiny with sweat and moonlight, leaning into the red lips of the woman, her long black hair trailing down to her waist. Books where men captured women and gave them pleasure. Books with words like tumescence and pulsing and throbbing and member.
I went back to those pages with one hand while I touched myself with the other. The ripple wave of that touch moved through my body. Not long after I’d turned eight I learned how good it felt between my legs to climb a pole or a rope. I didn’t tell anyone. The secret added to the pleasure.
Now Mom’s words sped up like they were trying to find a way out of the room. She said she’d been a virgin with Dad and she was proud of that and we should wait too.
Maybe she worried because a high-school girl was pregnant. Everyone knew about her belly and the baby and the boy who put it there.
Mom said if we didn’t wait, we should be careful. We should talk to her. She opened her arms, as though she was pulling back a curtain to show us mothers and daughters who shared personal things.
Then the talk was over, and Mom and Leanne and I and went off to our own things. My relief that it was done must have been Mom’s relief too. She never brought it up again. One more thing checked off the list of important things to tell your daughters.
As each girl in my class started her period, she whispered it to her friends, who whispered it on. I watched these girls. They made trips to the bathroom with their purses and complained of cramps and sat on the sidelines during gym class. They pretended having a period was something awful. The pain! The blood!
I saw this as bragging, like a race they’d won. No one complained out loud about truly bad things.
Each girl, and her new secret, left me behind. I made my own trips to the bathroom with the slightest hint of a cramp or twinge or damp, and checked for blood. By the end of eighth grade, only me and one other girl in class hadn’t started.
Getting your period was like learning to drive or having a boyfriend or drinking alcohol: it’s how you knew you were growing up.
Dad kept a 1956 Chevy pickup for us kids to practice driving. I’d been jamming gears and bouncing that pickup over gravel roads since my thirteenth birthday.
I got drunk for the first time in the summer I turned fourteen, on a visit to my Portland cousin. We took sips from the bottles her parents kept in a cupboard, sips small enough not to be missed, large enough for me to see blurry and laugh hard as we ran through the neighborhood, enough to get sick and have to pretend I felt fine the next day.
I’d had a few grade-school boyfriends, nothing more than a ring handed to me by another girl who said, “Rick (or Carl or Steve) wants to go with you.” I wanted a boyfriend. I wanted the way it made the other girls seem special and loved and far ahead of me. So I took the ring. But I kept it hidden in a pocket at school, in a drawer at home. Mom would think I was too young for it. I felt too young for it.
We would never talk, the boy and I. One day he would tell his friend, who would tell my friend, who would say to me, “He wants his ring back.” Or I’d give it back through that chain of kids, because that boy’s pants were too short, or he’d messed up reading out loud in class, or I didn’t think he really liked me because we never talked.
I didn’t tell any of this to Mom. Not about the boys or drinking and especially not my worry about not having my period. I figured she’d laugh. It wasn’t a laughing matter. I felt ashamed of not being part of the woman club.
I never told Leanne either, and she never told me when she got her period. I only knew because she was older and she must have. Plus there was a new box of junior tampons in the dresser drawer.
I felt far behind Leanne even though we were less than two years apart. She had blond hair and a big smile and those blue eyes and a woman’s body. My hair was dark and my chest still mostly flat. All the boys liked her even though she had an out-of-town cowboy boyfriend.
I wanted a boyfriend. I wanted to know the secret to getting boys to like me. I was sure happiness would come with a boy.