Read Online Midwives by Chris Bohjalian - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Chris Bohjalian
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no way I’ll wear white. What if the tampon leaks?”
“Tampons don’t leak,” she said firmly, and in a tone that implied I didn’t have the slightest idea what I was talking about. “Besides, why in the world would I want to pretend I was having my period? It’s not like this is some French class I want to get out of.”
I shrugged my shoulders that I didn’t know, but I did. Or at least I thought I did. Rollie and I were both pretty girls, but I had something she didn’t: breasts. Not so large that boys would tease me or I had ever been embarrassed about them, but apparent enough that someone like Rollie would notice. Perhaps because of my mother’s candor about bodies and birth and how babies wind up in a womb in the first place, Rollie and I were aspiring tarts. We couldn’t talk enough about kissing and petting and contraception—rubbers, the pill, the diaphragm, and something that struck us both as incomprehensibly horrible, called an IUD.
Standing among the dog-eared paperback mysteries Rollie’s parents kept in a bookcase in their bedroom was a well-read copy of The Sensuous Man and—behind the rows of paperbacks, against a back wall of the bookcase—a hardbound copy of The Joy of Sex . Rollie and I read it together often at her house, and garnered from it what I have since discovered was a frighteningly precocious comprehension of cunnilingus, fellatio, and all manner of foreplay. We imagined our lovers someday performing the recommended exercises in the books: sticking their curled tongues deep into shot glasses, doing push-ups for hours. I had yet to see a real penis then, and I had a feeling an actual erection might scare me to death when I did, but between the anatomic details of how the male and female apparatus functioned that I’d gleaned over time from my mother, and the pleasure to be found in those organs suggested by the McKennas’ books, I think I was much less squeamish in the summer between my seventh and eighth grades about sex than most girls my age. Rollie, too.
We both expected that when we returned to school in the fall, the boys would begin to notice us. We weren’t too tall, which was important, and we didn’t have pimples. We were smart, which we knew would intimidate some boys, but not the sort we were interested in: Probably nothing, we thought, scared a boy like Tom Corts, and certainly not something as harmless as an interest in books.
And, fortunately, we looked nothing like each other, which we also assumed was a good thing: It would minimize the chance that the same boy might ever be interested in both of us, or we in him. We understood from our years of riding and playing together that we were a competitive pair, and the fact that I was a blonde and she a brunette, that I had blue eyes and she had brown, would decrease the chances that a boy would ever interfere with our friendship.
Or, as Rollie explained it that Fourth of July, “Boys look at us like we look at horses: color, height, eyes, tail. They can’t help but have preferences.” Her horse was a chestnut brunette, and in Rollie McKenna’s cosmology of preference, this meant she would probably always prefer chestnut horses as long as she lived. Human nature.
That afternoon Rollie helped me plot ways to maintain contact with Tom Corts until school resumed in September and we would be together in the same section of the brick Lego-like maze that someone thought was a functional design for a school. Tom had a job that summer that I interpreted as one of those signals (like, in some way, his seemingly endless wardrobe of dark turtlenecks) that he wanted more from the world than the chance to fix cars in his family’s beat-up garage, or to joust on motorcycles until the rescue squad had to rush him to the hospital with a limb dangling by a tendon. He was working for Powder Peak, the nearby ski resort, cutting the lawns around the base lodge where the company also had its offices, and assisting the
“Tampons don’t leak,” she said firmly, and in a tone that implied I didn’t have the slightest idea what I was talking about. “Besides, why in the world would I want to pretend I was having my period? It’s not like this is some French class I want to get out of.”
I shrugged my shoulders that I didn’t know, but I did. Or at least I thought I did. Rollie and I were both pretty girls, but I had something she didn’t: breasts. Not so large that boys would tease me or I had ever been embarrassed about them, but apparent enough that someone like Rollie would notice. Perhaps because of my mother’s candor about bodies and birth and how babies wind up in a womb in the first place, Rollie and I were aspiring tarts. We couldn’t talk enough about kissing and petting and contraception—rubbers, the pill, the diaphragm, and something that struck us both as incomprehensibly horrible, called an IUD.
Standing among the dog-eared paperback mysteries Rollie’s parents kept in a bookcase in their bedroom was a well-read copy of The Sensuous Man and—behind the rows of paperbacks, against a back wall of the bookcase—a hardbound copy of The Joy of Sex . Rollie and I read it together often at her house, and garnered from it what I have since discovered was a frighteningly precocious comprehension of cunnilingus, fellatio, and all manner of foreplay. We imagined our lovers someday performing the recommended exercises in the books: sticking their curled tongues deep into shot glasses, doing push-ups for hours. I had yet to see a real penis then, and I had a feeling an actual erection might scare me to death when I did, but between the anatomic details of how the male and female apparatus functioned that I’d gleaned over time from my mother, and the pleasure to be found in those organs suggested by the McKennas’ books, I think I was much less squeamish in the summer between my seventh and eighth grades about sex than most girls my age. Rollie, too.
We both expected that when we returned to school in the fall, the boys would begin to notice us. We weren’t too tall, which was important, and we didn’t have pimples. We were smart, which we knew would intimidate some boys, but not the sort we were interested in: Probably nothing, we thought, scared a boy like Tom Corts, and certainly not something as harmless as an interest in books.
And, fortunately, we looked nothing like each other, which we also assumed was a good thing: It would minimize the chance that the same boy might ever be interested in both of us, or we in him. We understood from our years of riding and playing together that we were a competitive pair, and the fact that I was a blonde and she a brunette, that I had blue eyes and she had brown, would decrease the chances that a boy would ever interfere with our friendship.
Or, as Rollie explained it that Fourth of July, “Boys look at us like we look at horses: color, height, eyes, tail. They can’t help but have preferences.” Her horse was a chestnut brunette, and in Rollie McKenna’s cosmology of preference, this meant she would probably always prefer chestnut horses as long as she lived. Human nature.
That afternoon Rollie helped me plot ways to maintain contact with Tom Corts until school resumed in September and we would be together in the same section of the brick Lego-like maze that someone thought was a functional design for a school. Tom had a job that summer that I interpreted as one of those signals (like, in some way, his seemingly endless wardrobe of dark turtlenecks) that he wanted more from the world than the chance to fix cars in his family’s beat-up garage, or to joust on motorcycles until the rescue squad had to rush him to the hospital with a limb dangling by a tendon. He was working for Powder Peak, the nearby ski resort, cutting the lawns around the base lodge where the company also had its offices, and assisting the
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