Outlawed(3)

At night my husband would touch me only during my fertile week; he was tracking me himself now, as though he didn’t trust me to do it. When I reached for him late in the month he told me his mama had said it was better to save our energy for when it counted, and I was not surprised that he talked to his mama about such things, but I was still disgusted by it.

My meetings with Sam, strangely, became a refuge. In Mama’s house no one watched us. Afterward he did not pester me to lie still or put my legs up the way my husband did; he put his clothes on and said goodbye and left me alone so that I could lie in my childhood bed and pretend that I had never married.

Sam and I didn’t talk much, but in the third month of our meetings he asked if I wanted him to touch me while we did it.

“It might help you relax,” he said. “Some people say that makes you more likely to conceive.”

By that time I trusted Sam. He had never tried to do anything I didn’t want, had always behaved like a friend helping me with something—perhaps a dish on a high shelf I couldn’t quite reach. So I said yes, he could touch me, and that was the beginning of the end.

When it came to married life, we girls had other sources of information besides Mrs. Spencer. We had the older married girls and the web of gossip and advice they wove to keep us safe. From them we knew it was dangerous to sleep with someone too many times before you were married—if you didn’t get pregnant after a few months of fooling around, he’d never marry you. Worse, he might spread the rumor that you were barren. We knew, too, that if you married someone who turned out to be cruel, the best thing to do was to have children as quickly as you could. A woman with three children could divorce her husband and she would probably find another man to marry her—she had never said as much, but I knew that was why Mama had waited until after she had Janie and Jessamine to leave our daddy and bring us to Fairchild, where the old midwife had recently left town. A woman with four children could do as she pleased, marry or not, and I knew that was one reason no one spoke ill of Mama when she chose not to take another husband after Bee’s daddy left.

There was also a book that circulated among the girls and younger women of Fairchild, succinctly titled Fruitful Marriage. The book was more explicit than Mrs. Spencer’s lessons, and it was mildly scandalous to be caught reading it, though not altogether forbidden. When Susie’s mother had found the book while cleaning, she had not reprimanded Susie but had merely replaced the book under her bed in such a way that made it seem likely she had read some of it.

Fruitful Marriage included drawings of men and women naked together, locked in embrace. The author, one Wilhelmina Knutson, also discussed something called “climax,” which she described, frustratingly, as “a moment of indescribable pleasure.” The ability to feel this sensation, Mrs. Knutson said, was the sign of a physically and psychologically healthy individual who was ready for motherhood. And Mrs. Knutson was very clear on one point: climax could only occur when a man’s “member” was deep inside a woman’s body.

I had never experienced climax with my husband, and in recent months, I had come to believe that my inability to do so was yet another sign of my bodily deficiency. But when Sam touched the top of my vagina with his fingers, rhythmically and patiently, for an amount of time that might have been two minutes or two hours, I experienced a sensation so extreme that I thought it must either be climax or something very dangerous, possibly fatal. It was something like what I had felt a few times when, awakening from a sweaty dream of hands and mouths, I touched myself under the covers of my bed. But what I felt with Sam was much more intense, and when he took his leave that day I was still shaking slightly, and absolutely sure that this time, I must be pregnant.

I was still thinking about it when I met Ulla and Susie at the barn a week later. Mary Alice was four months pregnant with her first baby so she wasn’t meeting us anymore; Ulla was two months married, and Susie was engaged to be married in November during the harvest feasts. At first we joked and gossiped about our former classmates and their courting the way we always did, but soon I was too curious to keep quiet.

When it was my turn with the bottle I took a deep drink.

“Have you ever had a climax?” I asked my friends.

Susie knitted her brows for a moment, considering.

“I think so,” she said, “a small one.”

Ulla laughed. She had a gap between her front teeth that always made her look mischievous, like nothing would shock her.

“With Ned it’s like this,” she said, miming a hammer pounding in a nail. “Mostly I just feel sore. But my mama says not to worry, you don’t need a climax to get pregnant.”

She took a swig from the bottle.

“Why,” she asked, “have you?”

“I think so,” I said. I should have stopped there, but my confidence buoyed me on. My period was a day late and I knew that what Sam and I had done must have worked at last.

“And do you know,” I said, “I think a man can make you climax with his fingers.”

Ulla looked incredulous.

“With his fingers,” she said.

“That’s right,” I insisted. “He touches you between your legs, above the opening. And then it’s just like Mrs. Knutson says—a little hard to describe, but very powerful. Almost like fainting.”

“Your husband did this?” Ulla asked. “Just by touching you?”