Nonfiction by Megan Verley
When I think of being a child, I think of early morning.
I remember vivid colors, clear birdsong, mystery gathering in long shadows, joy bursting over the horizon at the first sign of light.
Skinned knees, homework and taxes come later, in the heat of high noon and the following dull of midday. The truths we learn as children are ever-present: hung on crucifixes, on bulletin boards, warbling out of Big Bird’s mouth and Mr. Roger’s living room. What we learn in childhood takes on a sainted quality. It hurts my heart to imagine that what we learned was ever wrong.
*
For little girls, one of the first truths we learn is the reality of our bodies. We see our mothers, we notice how they look like us, for better or worse. In our baby purity, we imitate what we don’t understand because we don’t need to. We want to be like our mothers. We want to talk on the phone, fuss over our baby dolls, make our Barbies kiss, go to work, get haircuts, smoke cigarettes, make tortillas, all because we know our child-bodies will grow into Mother-shaped bodies. If we’re lucky, our mothers will teach us what we need to know about growing up— getting boobs, what to do about boys—but regardless of what we want to do, we need to know the rules of the game. Because this is the sainted time, the memory we look back on for the rest of our lives. This is the time to get it right before the dawn bleeds away.
*
Seven-years-old, poking around Mom’s things in the bathroom closet.
Pastel packages on the shelf, unfamiliar.
A calendar, with a red X on every month.
*
When my mother, Dragica, was eight-years-old, she was collected from O’Hare International Airport in a ’73 Lincoln Continental. She wore white knee socks and carried a miniature purse, posing proudly in the Polaroid laid out on the kitchen table. My grandmother Andja—the warm and smiling woman I know—is unrecognizable, standing next to my mother with her arms crossed, her face impassive. She is young in this photo, the same age I am now, but there is no youth in her expression.
The following year, when my mother has her first period in elementary school, not understanding the blood on the toilet paper, my grandmother is cleaning office buildings downtown. While my mother walks home after school, imagining cancer, my grandmother is waiting for a bus. By the time my grandmother crashes through the kitchen door, arms full of groceries for dinner, it’s too late. My mother is face down on her bed, beyond consoling, waiting for death.
There is life, and what we are ready for. When was the proper time to talk about periods? In Sarajevo, saying good-bye to relatives? Silent in the back of a taxi, not knowing the words for “stop here?” My grandmother, barely keeping pace with her new life as an immigrant in the United States, didn’t even notice the new life that was waiting for her daughter, like a ship in the harbor. It never occurred to her that my mother would need a guide, a compass for the long journey. After all, no one had ever told her, motherless as a young child. She was raised by her widowed father and older brothers, “one petunia in an onion patch” as she told me many times. “Jedna petunija u komadu luka.”
*
I’m hiding in the bathroom at school.
A faucet is dripping, dripping.
My head is heavy in my hands, my elbows pressed into my knees.
I’m praying for relief.
Everything throbs in time with the faucet.
Get. Me. Out. Of. Here.
*
I was raised in a conservative Christian home, where our faith practice had the monopoly on truth. In theology, the term inerrancy is used to describe something that is without error because it was made by something without error. I was taught that the Bible was inerrant, and that God was omniscient. Omniscient means “all-knowing.” Through these two principles every lesson I ever learned was fed. Any doubt about the meaning of God’s will or intention had a sure answer: God is omniscient, and his word is inerrant. So, when God wrote the Bible, if He categorically declared women unclean, I was fully prepared to believe it.
My mother, for her part, wanted better for me than her first period. She didn’t want me to be surprised the way she had been. She wanted me to have all the facts. So, she checked out The Care and Keeping of You from the library. I was ten-years-old. I saw the book on the kitchen table, partially hidden by the mail and my mom’s handbag. I knew that it was for me because of the girlish font on the cover.
Even at a young age, I knew my mother had an aversion to sexual topics. She winced visibly during kissing scenes in movies. I could hear her nervous laughter when my dad came home after work and went in for a smooch. As much as I loved her, I was glad that she had gotten a book from the library to talk about grown-up things. I didn’t want to put her through a conversation that would surely kill her. The day finally came: she produced the book from behind her back and shyly handed it to me. “This is a very good book for girls your age. If you have any questions about it, you can ask me anything.”
I wanted to believe her. But I was already on a journey of my own; I didn’t need any more proof that I was unclean. She didn’t know what happened in the Sunday school classroom after everyone else had left; she could never know that I too dreaded a certain footfall, the sound of a door opening. I read the book. This was not my first womanly act; I already knew how to hide in plain sight.
*
The “bad” underwear, for sleeping in.
*
I was fifteen; my mother and I were in the car. She was driving me to meet my piano teacher, the one who waited for me after class in Sunday school. He was waiting for me now. I was sweating, rehearsing what I wanted to say out loud, not just in my head: “Please don’t leave me here; I don’t want to go.” I hadn’t practiced anything all week; even if this wasn’t a phony lesson, I would have nothing to show for it. But what could I say that she would believe? She wanted to believe that she had protected me, that the book from the library all those years ago had saved me, that she had done her part. How could I tell her that she had been too late? That I was a little girl only for the length of the car ride, and as soon as we arrived and the door opened, nothing could protect me anymore?
*
I didn’t have a particularly traumatic first period. I didn’t have a harrowing walk home from school convinced that I was dying from internal bleeding, like my mother did. And I had a mother, unlike my grandmother Andja. I knew the basics of what menstruation would entail, and when the fateful day arrived, I knew where the necessities were kept in the downstairs bathroom closet. I marked my first red X on the calendar hung on the door for that very purpose. And just like that, there were two women in the house.
But not without great cost. The silence between my mother and I on the topic of sexuality would hobble me for the rest of my childhood and well into high school. Because we could never talk about periods, even though we talked about everything else, it meant we could never talk about sex. And I had some pressing questions about sex. Like, in the Bible, when God establishes the law for the Israelites and commands for a woman be stoned to death after she is found lying with a man “because she did not cry for help though she was in the city… so you shall purge the evil from your midst” (Deuteronomy 22:24), what counts as a city? Does a house in the suburbs count? What about a busy church building on Sunday morning? Does it matter that I’m only thirteen? Does God really think I’m evil?
*
My grandmother’s hands.
Her hair, her skin, the scent of Oil of Olay.
Her jewelry, around my neck.
All I have of her.
What she couldn’t say, I already knew.
Her love for an only daughter.
*
Andja, the stern woman in the photograph who came home from work to find my mother crying in her room? She softened over the years. I knew her as my grandmother, a beautiful old woman with white hair swept into a perfect French twist. She loved gold jewelry. She spared nothing: kisses, laughs, ice cream sandwiches. We lived with her when I was small, before I knew anything about men and women, during the sainted time and everything was still bathed in the morning light.
Like my grandmother, I too was the only petunia in the onion patch. I was the only daughter, her unabashed favorite. She taught me everything, how to prepare uštipci donuts, how to put rakija on a mosquito bite to quell the sting. There was nothing she couldn’t do. She had an enormous vegetable garden that fed the house all year long. She braided flower crowns for me out of weeds. She cut thread with her teeth. I never feared the future; I didn’t worry about anything as long as I was with her. I was the daughter that she could mother, for real this time. This time, she would be there for every moment.
But she couldn’t. Our family moved away, leaving my grandmother behind. I grew up without her, far from any place that felt like home. When I came back to take care of her during the last year of her life, I was not her carefree girl. I had become a woman while bearing my own burdens and keeping my own secrets. At the end, she could hardly remember any English, and I had long forgotten the Serbian language I once spoke. But as she lay dying, she would stroke my hair, murmuring endearments. “Moja lutka, moja sunce.”
She understood all too well the lonely journey, the interior landscape of the woman’s memory. She didn’t know the specifics, but she could feel the chill when my husband and I were in the same room. She read between the lines of my blank expression. When she finally was beyond words, the last few days of her life, the tears I shed were not only for losing her, but for myself. For all the moments I had spent alone, without hope, far from the light.
Andja was not there for Dragica at the start of her long journey, but she wanted to be there for me. I know that, even though she couldn’t express it the way she wanted to. She wanted to hold me, to cover it all, to go back to that shining time even if only for a moment. Dragica wanted to be there for me, but she had wounds of her own and secrets she couldn’t tell me. I don’t hold it against her. Eve’s long shadow casts her pall over all of us. But that’s the beauty of the dark night of the soul. Even in the coldest places of earth, where the night is dark all winter long, the sun returns.
