Transcendent Kingdom(35)

“Come on in, girls, grab a seat,” she said.

I and my fellow church girls took seats at the end of the table. “Do you know what’s going on?” we whispered to each other. The girls who were already there glared at us, mean in their boredom.

“How many of you have already had sex?” the woman asked once we had settled in.

Everyone looked around but no one raised their hand, not even the pregnant girl.

    “Come on, now. Don’t be shy,” she said.

Slowly hands started to go up all around me. I made my silent judgments.

“This here building used to be a place where women came to kill their babies, but God saw fit to turn it around. He laid it on my pastor’s heart to use this place for good instead of for evil, and so now we bring girls like you in here to teach y’all about how God wants you to wait. I’m telling you girls, even if you’ve already had sex before, you can ask God to forgive. You can leave here better than when you came in. Amen?”

For the next eight hours, Miss Cindy, as she asked to be called, took us through her course on abstinence. She showed us slideshows of the spotted, oozing, stop-sign-red genitalia afflicted by STDs. She spoke about her own teen pregnancy. (“I love my daughter and I believe everything happens for a reason, but if I could go back and tell my younger self to keep her legs closed, I would.”) The only good part about all of this was when we got Steak-Out for lunch.

At one point, six hours in, Miss Cindy said, “If you and I were neighbors and we went into a covenant agreement so that our lambs could graze freely on each other’s land, we would have to seal that covenant by slaughtering one of our lambs. A covenant is not a promise. It’s so much more than that. A covenant requires bloodshed. Remember that the Bible says that marriage is a covenant and when you sleep with your husband on your wedding night and your hymen breaks, that blood is what is sealing your covenant. If you’ve already had sex with other men, you’ve already made promises you can’t keep.”

We spent the rest of our time wide-eyed with fear, looking at the wreckage of this woman and wondering who, what, had wrecked her.



* * *



—

    I have made promises I can’t keep, but it took me a while to make them. For years, Miss Cindy’s words were enough to keep me from exploring the “secret world” between my legs lest I destroy my imaginary marriage before it even began. Not too long after my eight-hour session in the abandoned abortion clinic, I started my period. My mother placed her hand on my shoulder and prayed that I’d be a good steward of my womanhood, and then she handed me a box of tampons and sent me on my way.

It’s ridiculous to me now to think about how limited my understanding of human anatomy was back then. I stared at the tampon applicator. I put it against my outer labia and pushed. I watched the white tail of the tampon slip out of the applicator as both fell to the ground. I repeated this with half of the box before I gave up, decided it was best to keep some things a mystery. It wasn’t until my freshman year in college, in biology class, that I learned what and where a vagina truly was.

In class that day, I stared at the diagram in wonder, the secret world, an inner world, revealed. I looked around at my classmates and could see in their business-as-usual faces that they already knew all of this. Their bodies had not been kept from them. It was neither the first nor the last time at Harvard that I would feel as though I was starting from behind, trying to make up for an early education that had been full of holes. I went back to my dorm room and tentatively, furtively pulled out a hand mirror and examined myself, wondering all the while how, if I hadn’t left my town, if I hadn’t continued my education, this particular hole, the question of anatomy, of sex, would have been filled. I was tired of learning things the hard way.



* * *



—

“Sorry for being kind of a bitch back there. It’s just weird to hear people talk about Jesus in a science class, you know?”

Anne from my small group had caught up with me after my outburst in Integrated Science. I didn’t bother telling her that I hadn’t mentioned Jesus at all. I just quickened my pace through the quad, which was eerily empty at that hour. She kept walking with me until we reached my building, and then she stood there and stared at me.

    “Do you live here too?” I asked.

“No, but I thought we could hang out.”

I didn’t want to hang out. I wanted her to leave. I wanted that class to end, school to end, the world to end, so that everyone could forget about me and what a fool I had made of myself. I looked at Anne as if for the first time. Her hair was piled up on top of her head in a messy bun pierced through with chopsticks from the dining hall. Her cheeks were red from walking or the weather. She looked tired and a little mean. I let her in.

That year the two of us became inseparable. I don’t know how it happened, really. Anne was a senior. She and her group of many-gendered, multiracial friends made me feel like maybe there was a place for me in that East Coast tundra. Anne was funny, strange, beautiful, and mordant. She didn’t suffer fools, and sometimes I was the fool.

“It’s ridiculous. Like do you have to spend the rest of your life flagellating yourself for all the shit you think you’ve done wrong that ‘God’ doesn’t approve of?” she said one day toward the middle of our spring semester, when the winter weather had started to relent and a few flowers were just beginning to break ground, stretch toward the sun. We were sitting on my bed while Anne skipped class and I waited for my next one to start. Sometimes she would spend the whole day in my room. I’d finish all my classes and come back to find her curled up in my bed, laptop warming her stomach as she binge-watched Sex and the City for the millionth time.