“Don’t overdo it in this heat,” he said, but I was used to the heat by now, the heat that never set on us, that only maintained through the night, beckoning me from sleep, the damp sheet kicked off onto the floor.
ON MY WALK home through the dead fields, I thought of my mother in the hot breeze of afternoon when I was five years old, just before the beginning of that first bad drought. A patch of watermelons had sprouted up in the small square of dirt under the second-story stairs of our apartment and she was on her hands and knees marveling at their strong vines, the big green leaves and the basketball-sized melons. She patted them and laughed. She brought me close so I could see.
“I threw seeds down here forever ago,” she said. “Who knew all this time they were growing right up?”
The melons were bright and healthy. They were beautiful and ripe. How had we not seen them before?
She talked all night about them. The sapphire-earrings boyfriend grew more and more agitated with her adoration of something that wasn’t him. He didn’t like her when she was up. “Acting like you’ve never seen a fuckin’ watermelon before,” he said. He slurped Bud Light all night. My mother was oblivious to his growing anger. I wished she would just shut up. I knew what happened when she kept on pushing his buttons, but she didn’t seem to have that awareness, not then, not ever. She couldn’t believe the watermelons were there and she was taking it as a good sign. She didn’t want us to eat one just yet. She called Grampa Jackie, who had been predicting the coming drought, could taste it in the air and had taken on a low demeanor of dread. She laughed like we’d been struck by great fortune, tried to cheer him. “You always said the land was a gift, Daddy,” she said. “It still is!” She didn’t drink that night and Sapphire Earrings slammed out of the apartment and didn’t return until early morning, when he shoved me out of my mother’s bed and onto the floor and took my place.
When my mother woke up, we raced out to check on the melons, to pet and encourage them, but someone had smashed them all. Ripped them from their vines and thrown them against the sidewalk. Their pink insides reeked a sickening perfume. She let me miss school and we sat on the steps while she drank brandy out of one of my old plastic baby bottles, waiting for the killer to return to the scene.
But the killer was in the apartment. It was clear as day that Sapphire Earrings was responsible, but she didn’t seem to understand that at all.
“I’m sad sometimes,” she’d said to me as the sun had left us.
How I’d wanted to fix it for her. How I wanted the world to be good enough so she wouldn’t have to feel its rough edges. If someone could just see her when she was at her best, the way she was in the morning back then, getting ready for the day, dancing and singing, the soft dander of her cheek. The way her neck looked when she tilted it back in the car and sang “Great American Cowboy” along with the Sons of the San Joaquin. I didn’t know what to say to fix it, to make her eyes go clear, to make her steps sure and straight, her breath her own without the bite of alcohol on it. “I’m hungry,” I said instead, and she sighed, went back inside, and got drunk enough for the sadness to reset itself to happiness, only to go back to sadness again.
MY MOTHER RETURNED home that evening with a small cake to celebrate. A reward, probably, for keeping my first blood as our secret, though she didn’t say that. I lay in the bed we shared, feigning cramps though all I really felt was a small ache in my lower back that radiated into my hips. I could have gone to school with the thick pad in my underwear and been fine, but I had wanted to be alone all day with my sinful lies, the impure vision I’d had of Vern, pray for forgiveness, and wait for my mother.
“Meet sugar, your new best friend.”
She opened the packaged coconut cake, forked off a hunk and brought it to my lips. I swallowed the stale piece nearly whole. I hated coconut, would have preferred chocolate, but I didn’t tell her that. It felt near to the time she forgot my sixth birthday. The next day, when she’d remembered, she had gone to the Wine Baron and filled a brown bag with lemon Laffy Taffy, a random candy I had never shown affection for. I smiled then too.
“It hurts.”
“Get used to it,” she said. “Women have a long history of suffering.”
She lay next to me. Sighed. I smelled the familiar yeast and it turned my stomach. “Do you know there are people in this world who put gingerroot up their heinies?” she asked. “For fun?”
“Mom.”
“It’s called figging,” she said, matter of fact.
I could barely admit this to myself, but sometimes I was thrilled by her new crass talk. It made me feel alive in an unknown way, but I shouldn’t have been surprised by this. That was the design of sin: to be the most attractive thing in the room.
She got up, walked to the kitchen. I heard a can open.
“Most people call a woman’s holy place a vagina,” she said, “but the vagina’s the part up in there, and what they’re meaning is the vulva. So really just saying pussy brings it all together.” She drank so deeply I could hear her gulp from the bedroom. There was the sound of a second can cracking open. “Now that you’re a woman you ought to know.”
Pussy. Pussy. The word sparked and hissed. I should have asked her what was giving her such strange thoughts, but instead I asked her about the beers, and if she’d been praying over them. Surely she hadn’t been taking these sinful thoughts to her weekly women’s Bible study. But as soon as I thought this, I realized I wasn’t even sure if she was still going.
She looked at the can in her hand. Shrugged. “Sure,” she said. “And I woke up to another hot and thirsty day all the same.”
VERN SEPARATED THE girls by blood. Girls who had it and were under the marrying age of eighteen were ready for the true mission, and were set apart. Not yet knitted to an earthly husband, able to offer the church a singular focus, these girls were special, and now I was one of them. I understood that being in this group normally meant a deeper study of the Bible alongside Vern’s wife, Derndra, or perhaps hours of door-to-door proselytizing and rigorous chastity. By the time a girl was eighteen, marriage seemed the most exciting endeavor there could be in a life, if only because of the possibility of newness, possibility of pleasure, even pain. But drought times were different, and the girls of blood would be particularly useful now, Vern had said, though none of us knew what that meant, exactly.
I felt lucky to have gotten my blood at such a perfect time, when it would matter most. I suppose I had strange dreams of glory, that the things I would do as a useful woman would be preserved somewhere, that they would make some difference to dirt and seed and stalk. We were bloody, but around the church we were known simply as the Bible study girls.
Denay and Taffy were my best friends and had already had their bloods for months, walking the church with prim proud smiles, full of use. Now I was in the club. I put my hand between my legs and held myself, looking for the calm it usually brought. My mother’s sleeping back rose and fell next to me. The smell of beer hung around us like a net. I remembered how before she’d been saved, when we were poor, very poor, she’d drink anything—Listerine, lemon extract, cough syrup she’d steal from Cherry’s cabinets, the Pac. The beer at least was a drink meant for drinking.
“Tell me where beer is in the Bible, Lacey May,” she’d said a few months ago after she started drinking again, when I had held the phone and threatened to call Grandma Cherry and report her sin.
“You don’t want to make that call, little girl,” she’d said. “You want your mama around, and you know it.”
She was right, and now the secret had roped around us, including me in its grip, sickening me from sun up to down. I was trapped. I felt a little crazed by it.
MY FIRST BLOOD dried up within days. I missed the alarm of color waiting for me on the toilet paper when I wiped. On the way to church, I saw someone had plastered signs all down Old Canal Road—SAVE PEACHES! BRING WATER HERE NOW!
Over