by Selena Kitt
The next night was All Hallows’ Eve. They would have a masquerade ball there at the house, and the priests and the nuns and her father’s clients and friends, everyone she knew, everyone her father knew, would wear masks and dance, and then at midnight they would unmask. They would reveal themselves to the world.
The next night, All Saints’ Day, there would be another masquerade, a secret, hidden one. Erica would be there for that one too, she would be on the cross, just like her mother had been. She wondered how many of their masked guests on Halloween would be there the next night?
Erica was going to unmask them all.
Chapter Eleven
No one liked the “new Lizzie.” She waltzed up the stairs into their room carrying two full suitcases, obviously in violation of the rules. All the girls who came to Magdalene House were only allowed to bring their personals and the clothes on their backs. Once the nuns had her dressed in gray wool, and she had been sufficiently humiliated by her first doctor’s exam, Leah thought the “new Lizzie” would change her tune, but she didn’t. Her holier-than-thou attitude pervaded everything, making Marty, Frannie, and Leah tiptoe around their new roommate. She insisted on being called Elizabeth, refused to get her hands dirty doing chores, and spent a great deal of her time manicuring and painting her finger and toenails various colors.
They all waited for the nuns to reprimand her, to take her in hand, to bring out the paddles and pointers they had all been subject to. Leah was relishing the thought of Elizabeth, with her red lipstick and short, dark bobbed hair, sitting alone in the “correction closet,” until she learned her lesson. But that never happened. She got away with murder and no one understood why. Poor Jean, who missed the old Lizzie so much she cried herself to sleep every night that week, had been kicked out of Elizabeth’s bed twice, hard enough to leave bruises. Jean liked to crawl into Lizzie’s bed, but Elizabeth wasn’t having any of it.
“Get this retard out of here!” Elizabeth demanded, kicking poor Jean, literally, out of bed. The nuns appeared, dragging Jean off, and no one said anything about Elizabeth and her attitude or her airs. They had made a little headway, getting Jean installed in their room, in Lizzie’s old bed. This made both Jean and Elizabeth happy, killing two birds with one stone for the nuns. But still, Elizabeth was a problem. Marty tried to talk to her, get her to open up, tell them something about her, but Elizabeth just rolled her eyes and filed her nails and ignored them. Leah couldn’t understand the nuns’ disregard for the new girl’s disobedience, but they all wondered at it.
“Who dropped her off?” Frannie inquired, taking the cigarette from Marty and puffing. “Did anyone see her parents?”
“It was a priest.” Marty piped up. “I saw her come in. He didn’t stay. I didn’t recognize him.”
“She’s not human. She probably doesn’t have parents.” Leah was bored, flipping through one of the magazines Jean and Lizzie had left among the contraband.
“Sure she does,” Marty countered “Her mother is the Wicked Witch of the West and her father is the Abominable Snowman.”
“She sure thinks a lot of herself. Did you see her tattoo? Ew!” Frannie blew a smoke ring, and then another, she’d been practicing, trying to get one ring to go through the other. They had all seen it in the showers, a rose on her thigh. Leah had never known anyone with a tattoo before. “Oh well. If the doctor’s right, I’ll be out of here soon anyway.”
It had taken him forever, and the rest of them had known it all along, but Dr. Glum had finally diagnosed their Frannie with twins. She was carrying two babies in there, so it was no wonder she was so much bigger than the rest of them.
“Do you think they’ll let me keep one, if I give the other one away?” Frannie had joked. “Just kidding. But I hope they keep them together. It would be nice if they could grow up having each other.”
Leah didn’t have the heart to tell her she’d overheard the ghoul talking to the nuns, telling them that giving two babies to two different families was far more profitable than giving two babies given to one family. The Sisters and the church received generous donations from adoptive parents. Adopting out babies was a very lucrative business for the church. Leah had always thought the nuns were doing it in order to save the souls of their young charges, but she understood now. It was all about the money.
“So have you thought up twin names yet?” Marty asked. “I got some. How about Abbott and Costello? Archie and Veronica?”
“Amos and Andy?” Frannie rolled her eyes.
“Fred and Ginger?” Leah offered.
“Roly-poly and Ollie!” Marty suggested, all of them giggling. “This little girl is going to be named after her grandmother. Sarah Louise.”
“What if it’s a boy?”
Marty scoffed. “It won’t be. But if it’s a boy I like Gregory Adam.”
“What about yours, Lily?” Frannie asked.
Leah shook her head. “I haven’t decided.”
“Ugh. I have to pee. Again!” Frannie struggled to her feet, waddling toward the door. If Leah thought her stomach couldn’t get any bigger—and it kept growing—poor Frannie’s was twice that size. She held her belly, supporting it, wherever she went. “I’m just going to go back to bed. Good night, you guys.”
Leah and Marty said good night, and Marty stamped the cigarette out in the ashtray as Frannie descended the back stairs. Things weren’t the same without Lizzie, and her tagalong, Jean. She missed their giggling and silliness. It had lightened everything.
“So are you ready?” Marty asked, glancing at Leah in the moonlight.
“I’m a little nervous.” Leah shrugged.
She had initially agreed to go with Marty because she had hoped the fifty dollar paycheck would help give her a new start. Now she wasn’t so sure. She didn’t see a way out of Magdalene House, or her predicament. She had been trying to focus on the end, pretending it didn’t matter, that she could hand over her baby and go on with her life. It’s what her mother wanted. Her mother had even dangled the American School of Ballet in New York, the carrot and the stick, even though she knew her mother didn’t approve of her dancing.
They hadn’t talked about Leah going back to Mary Magdalene’s Preparatory College for Girls, but as much as she missed Erica, as much as she wanted to see her and Rob, even with the new, devastating knowledge he was her father and could never again be her lover, she knew she couldn’t face them. She had already decided if she didn’t get a scholarship for ballet school, she was going to take this fifty dollars, and anything else she could save, beg, borrow or steal, and leave Detroit.
“I got a letter back.” Marty stretched out on the floor, putting her hands behind her head, looking up at the ceiling. Marty had a way to send and receive secret letters, unopened, unread and uncensored by the nuns, using someone she’d met on one of their trips to town. Marty was incredibly resourceful. “There’s one in Australia. Can you imagine me in Australia?”
“Lots of koalas and kangaroos.” Leah smiled, but she didn’t like thinking about leaving Magdalene House, about leaving these girls behind. She thought she understood a little what Marty was talking about when she called the women in her Mary Magdalene society “sisters.” Their experiences bound them together. Leah could understand that. And yet, Lizzie was gone, back to her life. They would all go back to their lives, as if nothing had happened, as if this time had simply been, like an operator putting a caller on hold, dead space, a waiting silence. They would never talk about it again. They would pretend it hadn’t happened. That made her sad.
“I thought you said you didn’t want to have anything else to do with men.” Leah teased her.
“Better some Australian bloke who wants a wife to cook and clean than having to give up this baby. It’s a trade-off, I know, but at least I’ll have my child.”
“I hear the statistics on arranged marriage are pretty dismal.” Leah couldn’t imagine marrying a stranger.
“I’ll make it work. I’ll do whatever I hav
e to do. I always do.”
“No more Mary Magdalenes. I doubt they have them in Australia.”
“I don’t know. I haven’t asked. But if I were to guess, wherever there are Catholics, there are Mary Magdalenes.”
“You really think so?”
“Yeah.”
Leah yawned. “Are you ready for bed?”
“Sure.”
They went down the back stairs, quiet as church mice. In their room, Jean was turned to the wall, snoring loudly. She had a cold and had declined a trip to the turret that night. Frannie too, was tucked in bed, fast asleep. Leah and Marty slipped out of their nightgowns and quietly into Leah’s bed, face-to-face, bellies kissing first, followed by their mouths, soft and open, warm and wet.
They had to be quiet, so they were. Their flesh was hot, their bodies burning with fever, longing to be touched. Leah caressed the bulge of Marty’s belly—the protrusion of her navel, finding her sex, hot and swollen. Marty wiggled and rolled her hips forward at Leah’s touch. She had done this enough to know what her friend liked, the stroke of Leah’s thumb at the top of her cleft, teasing the button of flesh, while Leah’s fingers explored below.
Marty’s hands roamed all over Leah’s newly developed curves. Her breasts had blossomed, full and heavy, the areolas even darker, and when Marty squeezed her nipple, little beads of pre-milk appeared. Marty licked it off. For the first time, Leah had hips, full, rounded hips Marty grasped in her hands as they kissed. Their bellies were so big, they had a hard time getting close enough, so they took turns, Marty rolling to her back first, Leah under the covers, creating a humid, musky tent as she parted Marty’s fiery red pubic hair, parting the Red Sea with her tongue, tasting her—no dry, dusty riverbed, but a lush, swollen, flowing crevice.
Marty didn’t speak, hardly moved, but Leah felt her pleasure in the shift of her hips, in the curl of her toes against Leah’s shoulders, in the wet pulse against her tongue. Leah couldn’t help but reach down and touch her own sex, fat with desire, rubbing the spot, that little tender morsel of flesh, round and round and round. She knew Marty was ready, feeling it, just a slight shift in her, the tense, taut pull of her muscles, and a sudden, copious amount of fluid between her legs. Marty sighed softly, quivering, flooding Leah’s mouth. She swallowed it, and swallowed it again, never letting her own pleasure get away from her. She wanted her friend’s tongue between her thighs.
And so they switched, Leah rolled onto her back, pulling her knees up, biting her lip as Marty’s mouth covered her mound, expert tongue, back and forth, up and down. The soft, hot attention between her legs brought her climax into focus. She wanted to wait, she wanted it to last, but she was no match for Marty’s greedy mouth and fingers. She couldn’t hold onto her orgasm, and it got away from her, like a slippery fish hopping out of the boat and plunging back into the water, it was like breathing again, oxygen for the lungs, a primal necessity, and Leah came like that, every bit of her, every atom, every cell opening, expanding, becoming the universe imploding on itself.
And when they were satisfied, the girls rested again, belly to belly, Leah’s hands on Marty’s, and Marty’s hands on Leah’s, their babies kicking, riding the wave. Leah found herself drifting off to sleep, and Marty kissed her on the lips, a purging sweetness, before slipping back into her own bed for the night.
“You didn’t tell me I was going to have to be naked!” Leah hissed in Marty’s ear. That was the least of her worries, under the circumstances. As the miles passed, traveling in an unmarked white van, Marty chattering into her ear about her latest letter from her Australian intended, Leah had begun to see the familiar. The closer they got, the more familiar it became, until they were pulling up to the church she had attended since she was a baby. Of course, she couldn’t tell Marty. They weren’t allowed to talk about where they were from.
“I didn’t know.” Marty adjusted the red mask on her face. Marty was completely naked. “I’ve only been a Magdalene for six months. I’ve never been to an All Saints’ Day ritual.”
“I can’t do this.” The girls were tucked away in a corner, whispering together. Leah had recognized not only the church, but the basement they were led into. Leah undressed in the very room she and Erica used to sneak out through when they were skipping school. It looked like an old bomb shelter, with bunk beds, but now Leah wondered. She was already wearing a mask. They were instructed to put them on before they got off the bus, Leah’s blue, Marty and Elizabeth wearing red.
Elizabeth was a Magdalene too. That much was obvious, although she refused to talk to either of them on the trip over, and she’d been whisked away by the nuns, many of whom Leah recognized, the moment they arrived. They had gone down into the bowels of the church, and not unlike the secret room hidden in the middle of the warehouse, under her father’s bed, there was something hidden in the church. They had undressed, listening to the nuns instructions with growing horror, but what else could she do? Once they had left their clothing behind, and they had followed the nuns down twisting corridors, Leah had no idea how to get back, or where she was in the labyrinth underneath the church.
“You’ll be okay,” Marty urged.
“Let me come with you.” Leah clung to her friend, the only familiar thing she had.
“Can’t.” Marty tried to loosen Leah’s hold on her. “You’re not a Magdalene.”
Marty gave her a quick one armed hug before being pulled away by one of the nuns. Another nun was ushering the blue masked girls down the hallway, and Leah glanced over her shoulder, searching for her friend, but she was lost in a sea of red masks and flesh.
All the blue masked girls were gathered together in a room, presided over by nuns. The presentation was short and to the point. They were to refill drinks and keep the hors d’oeuvre trays full. If someone touched them they should remember they were receiving fifty dollars for their service tonight. And they were all to sign a waiver stating they would never say anything about what they had seen or heard. The waiver was two pages, front and back, no time for any of them to read it. They all just stood in a line and signed, printing their name—Leah used her real one—at the top.
Once the nuns had collected those, they were ushered down the hall again, more twists and turns in the darkness, the tile floor cold under Leah’s bare feet. She was freezing! How did they expect them to serve people in this condition? She just kept reminding herself of the fifty dollars and what it could buy her.
It wasn’t until they were directed through another entrance, past heavy black curtains, like the kind they use on stage, that Leah understood. It was as big as a football stadium, or at least it felt like it, so many people, all of them wearing masks but none of them naked. There were two large screens up on either end of the room, like movie screens, but they were blank, nothing projected there. Tables lined the outer rim of the room, and Leah tried to remember the nuns’ instructions. They had stopped briefly at a makeshift kitchen, where the hors d’oeuvres were being heated, where they would find refills—wine, beer and other refreshments for the guests.
It was a whole new world. Where did all these people come from? Who were they? And what were they waiting for? She couldn’t hear herself think over the laughter and the talking, but the other girls were already in motion, checking trays, making sure drinks were filled, doing exactly what they had been told. Leah excused herself, going back out the door, only to find a nun standing guard.
“Where you going?”
“I have to use the bathroom.”
The nun sighed. “Fourth door on your left. It’s marked restroom. Don’t go anywhere else. I’ll be waiting here watching.”
Leah did as she was told, counting four doors down, finding the one marked restroom. It was quiet, blissfully quiet. She wondered if she could backtrack, if she could find a way out. Then what? She didn’t have any clothes! Leah glanced in the mirror, full-length. They didn’t have any full-length mirrors at Magdalene House, so she hadn’t seen herself completely naked in mon
ths. Astounded, she turned to the side, seeing her belly, how big she was. She still had another month to go! Unbelievable.
She heard voices coming closer and she slipped into one of the stalls, closing and locking the door. It was two women—two girls—talking.
“If I have to suck off one more old priest...”
“Shh! Someone might hear you.”
“I don’t care. I don’t even know why I’m doing this.”
“You know as well as I do why. How many girls do you know who end up with a bun in the oven like us who’ll have enough money to do anything they want when it’s all over?”
“You really believe that?”
“It’s true. Ten thousand a year, after our service is up—once we give up our babies for adoption. Who wouldn’t take that? We’re gonna be rich! I’ll suck anyone’s dick for ten thousand dollars.”