Godshot

by Chelsea Bieker

  “This cloth will become your Birthing Day dress,” Derndra went on. “Everything you do from now until the babies are due is all for the Birthing Day.”

  “What’s going to happen then?” Taffy said. I looked at her belly, oddly high and firm. She saw me and covered it with her hands.

  “The thing you might not know about God,” Derndra said, “is that He loves a party. He’s gonna grant each of you labor and the babies will appear all together as a family. We will let them know they are welcome.”

  Denay smiled. “God is going to really understand how much we love him. He’s going to rain down upon us.”

  “Whose baby is that?” I asked Denay.

  Derndra cut in. “Thank you, Lacey. I was going to get to that. Sometimes God must move as a human to complete His deeds but the specifics are not important. These are God’s children come from a blessed quiver. The babies within you are God’s and no one else’s.”

  She took out a pair of scissors from her apron pocket. Told us it was time for haircuts. “You’re a group now, a special group. There’s more chocolate where that came from if you remain obedient.”

  Denay stood up and Derndra sat her on a stool next to Trinity Prism. “If anyone tries to move, I’ll hold you down,” Trinity said. I laughed. Skinny pale Trinity, allergic to the sun, would hold us down? Please.

  Denay complied perfectly as Derndra cut away hank after hank of her thick long hair. It fell dead to the floor. I couldn’t believe it. Denay, who was obsessed with her hair, the smell of it and finding and demolishing split ends. The cut was a jagged chin-length bob with severe baby bangs. It made Denay look like a big crazed toddler.

  Derndra tossed a small chocolate square to her like a dog, and she ate it with the quick terror of someone who fears it will be taken away. I thought surely no one else would agree to the cut after seeing Denay, pretty Denay, who had just received the opposite of a makeover. But one by one the Bible study girls got up and sat on the stool. Sharon and I shifted our bodies to the back of the room.

  “I won’t do it,” she whispered to me.

  “Me either,” I said. I thought maybe we might hold hands in our unity but Sharon didn’t seem up for that sort of thing. She bit her nails and cracked her jaw. I watched Denay comb fingers through her new short hair, her eyes gone, her smile wide as she watched the others.

  Finally it was just me and Sharon left. I had backed myself practically under Vern’s desk by now. Derndra came close with the scissors. I thought of my hair, how it was like my mother’s, a long curtain that was useful, maybe not as useful as a baseball cap, but still something I could hide behind.

  “Can’t just make it easy, can you?” she said to me.

  “No, thank you,” I said. “I’ll leave it for now.”

  Trinity in all her frailness became like a wiry bobcat. Pulled me up by the arm and the others descended, clamping me against the wall with unexpected strength. I felt like a butterfly pinned to cork. Derndra cut haphazardly as I cried No No No, and then it was done. The girls came upon Sharon next and I lifted my hands to my hair. Chin-length now, and how ragged the hair looked on the floor mixed with all the other colors and textures, how now we were all the same.

  “This isn’t the way things used to be,” I said, after all was done.

  “No,” Derndra said, handing me chocolate. “Things are better now.”

  THE NEXT MORNING I ran to the red house, stopping to breathe, slower now, my belly an indisputable part of me. I kept picturing an artichoke bobbing around inside, with a face and hands, with little listening ears.

  “Don’t say anything,” I snapped at Daisy and Florin on my way in, covering my haircut with my hands. On my mother’s desk was a stack of pregnancy magazines from Quince with a Post-it that said, See, I’m nice.

  I put a hand on my stomach and flipped through them. There was a feature article about a couple who had tried for over five years to get pregnant with something called in vitro fertilization, and they wound up adopting. I could see the kindness in their eyes. I knew they would be good parents. The fine nursery they posed in. The tearful faces as they were united with their adopted daughter. Somehow God had not thought their bodies worthy of a child, but He’d ignited a slew of us Peaches girls with fertility. I didn’t know if I was unsettled by this, if it made me feel wrong and ashamed, or if somehow it was proof that us girls really were set apart. Show off that growing bump! the next page demanded. Wow everyone with a bodycon dress! Under that, a list of embarrassing confessions from “mamas to be.” I peed my pants in the produce aisle! I farted during sex! I barfed in my hands in a restaurant! These women seemed very carefree about these foibles, though, almost a little proud of them.

  All the magazines, I noticed, referred to the reader and any mentioned mother only as mama, never as woman. Never by name.

  One mama confessed that when she walked it felt like her vagina was breaking open. Vagina’s the part up there, my mother had said. This woman probably meant to say pussy.

  “I have something special for you downstairs,” Daisy said, leaning in the doorway. The late-morning light from the window cast an odd glow on her scars, and while sometimes I forgot about them, other times, like now, they were jarring.

  She put a hand to her face like she knew my thoughts. “Sulfuric acid,” she said. “Random attack at a beach in Florida.” It sounded like a news headline. “Just some man who didn’t like that I was sunbathing topless. Didn’t like it one bit.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. It sounded foolish. Anything would have.

  “Don’t be sorry,” she said, backing away from the doorway. “Sorry doesn’t fix a thing.”

  DOWNSTAIRS, THE DECOR in Daisy’s back parlor was simple. She liked to say that since her assault, patterns irked her, that she couldn’t bear the brightness of a bad fuchsia, the drone of a mustard yellow. Now all needed to be black or white, deep merlots and seafoams, a gentle eye-bath. Her pillows were black and her curtains were black and all of her small stones and crystals and her drawings on the walls of crows and vultures and pigeons were muted, low blues and soothing peach pales, like the inside of a wrist.

  Daisy and Florin and a few women I had never seen before sat on the parlor floor on plump cushions circling another woman wearing a sack dress, shapeless, in a kind of fabric I’d never seen before, a thick but soft gauze with delicate metallic threads running through it, the brilliant blues and greens of an imagined seascape. I stepped closer to see it.

  “It’s handwoven in India on a loom made from a repurposed bicycle,” the woman said to my thoughts. She motioned for me to touch it.

  I stepped inside their circle and came close to her. She was made of lavender and something unfamiliar, earthy and heavy. I touched the dress. It was a soft finger cushion. “A man dyes the fabrics himself by instinct. It’s all very ethically produced.” Her breath was tangerines.

  “Where did you get it?” I asked, true desire for an object welling in me. My own hand brushed the stiff cotton of the dirty coverall I wore and I cinched Daisy’s kimono over it.

  “Online,” the woman said, like it should be obvious. “You can’t find good stuff around here. A bunch of sweatshop shit everywhere you look.”

  “My grandma Cherry makes a lot of clothes.”

  “For you?” she asked, looking me up and down, eyes settling on my stomach.

  “No,” I said. “She has a collection of finely dressed taxidermy.”

  “I’m not one to judge the hobbies of others,” Daisy said. “But this Cherry. Well, she sounds like she deserves to be judged.”

  The woman took my hand and introduced herself as Hazel. “I’m here to bless your pelvic bowl.”

  I pictured a bowl of rotting fruit. “The bowl is full,” I said. “I’m pregnant.”

  She nodded with her eyes closed. “And your bowl is medicine.”

  Hazel introduced the other women as doulas, a word I had never heard before. They had greasy lank hair and flushed clean
oiled complexions. Their hands were mannish and worn, bare nails, no jewelry. I sat on a cushion between Daisy and Florin. I’d never seen Daisy so rapt, so excited about something.

  “I had Florin research natural birthing and this is what we found!” she said to me, beaming. “A natural birth squad!”

  “Birth can be . . . unnatural?” I asked.

  “Oh God,” Daisy said. “They sucked Florin out of me with a fucking vacuum. I was on so many drugs I couldn’t even hold her, and you know that space between your ass and your cunt? They cut it, oh yes they did. I don’t want that for you, no sir. They say you’ll heal good as new but they lie.”

  I felt surprised in this moment. Daisy wanted things for me and had considered me in this way, like she might have, well, her daughter. The image of Daisy’s cut cunt flashed in my mind, abstract yet horrendous, and I felt relieved this Hazel woman was here with us. Certainly I’d do anything to avoid that fate.

  Florin sat straight-backed, her legs curled under her. I tried to catch her gaze but she studied her palms. I wanted her badly as a friend but I worried she didn’t see me that way. I liked how she was interested in drawing and math. In nature and the catching of dreams. But I had the sense that Florin had already crossed over into another, unreachable life, just as I had. Maybe we would be too much for each other.

  “I’m a midwife and a doula and a woman and a goddess and I love women and I love vulvas and vaginas and cervixes and clitorises, you name it, I love it,” Hazel said. “Whatever you think you know about yourself, leave it there at the door. I want you to enter into this experience completely open-minded and ready to receive.”

  “Are you going to summon God?” I asked her.

  “Goddess, praise,” she said, holding her hands palm up to the ceiling. “Goddess, praise.”

  I looked at Daisy to see if she was smirking, but her face was set. She was into it fully.

  “You can undress from the waist down or take everything off if you want, when you’re ready,” Hazel said.

  Daisy and Florin got naked easily without hesitation. They had seen each other a thousand times, I was sure. Daisy had a shocking thrush of ink-black pubes in startling contrast to her white hair. Florin was flat chested with tiny pink nipples that were a charm, and unlike her mother, there was nothing covering her, just razor-rashed skin, and I could see the dark of her center, a leaf folded in half, a flower pressed between the pages of a book. The doulas nodded and smiled at us. One made prayer hands and placed them under her chin.

  “Can I just watch?” I said.

  “Show up for your life, Lacey May,” Daisy said. “Same parts.”

  The room was dim, and I thought about myself naked around other naked women. How we didn’t have the same parts. It made me want to be a man, or a woman who loved other women, just to go around exploring all the different combinations of vulvas and nipples and breasts I could find. Maybe men were just as complicated, yet my experience with two of them so far told me they weren’t. But with women—didn’t it seem there could be endless ways to be with women?

  I took my clothes off and closed my eyes. Hazel asked that we envision our bowls, the bird’s nest of muscles that made up our pelvic floors. I saw floors and bowls and could not imagine how they were contained within my own body. But once I had thought of my body long enough, a time in the shed came to mind, how after he lay with me, Lyle got dressed and I was still on my back, and I asked him, “Do you think I’m pretty?” And he stood over me and looked for a long time and then said, “Don’t be weird. You’re my cousin.” I had covered myself quickly.

  Hazel passed each of us a small mirror. She told us to spend time with ourselves, take a good look around. Open our labia and see what was inside. Examine the all-powerful clitoris, and try to find our cervixes if we were really brave.

  “It’s like the most beautiful little doughnut you’ll ever see,” Hazel said. “I’ll be coming around with a flashlight to help.”

  In the mirror I looked at my furrowed brow and burned nose. My face held a slight scowl when I wasn’t even angry, I knew. I remembered the time my mother had told me I was no fun. No Fun, she had called me as she tipped back another tall can of beer, when all I had wanted was to have and be fun. I’d decided that when I was a mother I would allow Artichoke the space to be who she really was. I wouldn’t make her worry over me to the point that she’d lose her very self.

  I tried to soften my face. In the dim light my freckles were sweet and my lips pale and my eyes big. I’d been told I had sad eyes, but when I smiled or squinted they almost disappeared. My nose was a nose and my neck was average, nothing special. My breasts were swollen and hot and puffed up, tender baseballs. I wondered if there was already milk inside, but no. It was still too early according to Pregnancy Magazine. My belly seemed huge and different. I used to lie on our bed and eat rainbow cereal from the cavern of my sunken-in stomach. I’d never know that exact body again.

  “It’s time,” Hazel said, switching on ocean wave sounds from her cell phone. “Let’s look together.”

  She sat and urged the mirror down and shone a flashlight into me. “Meet Yoni,” she said.

  “I’ve seen it,” I said, staring at her face. But it wasn’t really true. I’d never looked like this.

  “And what did you see?”

  “You know, regular stuff.”

  She nodded. “Let’s try again.”

  “Where’s the cervix?” I asked.

  “It’s not far.”

  Suddenly I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want to meet myself.

  Hazel put her hand on my stomach and squared her eyes with mine. “The universe brought us together,” she said.

  I knew the universe was just code for God among people who didn’t believe in God, but really truly did believe in God deep down and didn’t want the responsibility. And maybe she was right. Maybe God wanted me to have help. People who knew what to do. The idea seemed so delicious. When I felt Hazel’s hand on my belly, how I wished it were my mother’s. I wondered what my mother would have seen if she could have met herself in this way. I wanted to take her along for this experience somehow, reach my hand out to her cosmically, carry her like a child.

  I looked into the mirror. My first thought was wow. I felt sad then, for who my mother was, for the girl I’d always been. The one who until this point had never seen.

  AFTER WE CHANTED a final yoni blessing, Hazel swaddled us in thick blankets and put pouches of lavender over our eyes and performed what she called a sound bath. I wanted to relax during this part but the whole thing had me jittery. I just knew I didn’t want her to leave. Soon sounds filled the room, they seemed to come from everywhere, even from within myself. It was hard to think while hearing them. I opened my eyes to see Hazel stirring nothing in a metal bowl, creating an orchestra.

  After she unswaddled us, Hazel told me I could have an appointment with her whenever I wanted. She’d see me for free. I wondered if she would still offer this if she knew the whole truth, that it was my cousin’s baby. I didn’t say anything.

  Daisy stretched her arms up and touched her toes, then studied me as I got dressed. She came close and patted my back. “Florin says you’ve been talking to Rick. He’s not supposed to call here anymore.”

  I looked at the doulas and Hazel, who were packing up, thankfully not paying attention to us. I hated that Daisy was reminding me of work right now. I didn’t want to think of any of it.

  “He’s money like all the rest,” I said.

  “Sometimes all the phone would have to do was ring when that man called, and a chill went up my spine, but your mother didn’t have any intuition.”

  Yes, so why didn’t you cut her off from him? I wanted to say. Why didn’t you do anything?

  “People are one way, you think. You watch them every day and you think you know all they’re capable of. That’s how I felt about your mother. I felt I knew just what she would do in any situation. But that’s always wrong. You nev
er really know what any one person will do, or has done.” She pressed her fingertips into the mask of scars on her face.

  “Do they hurt?” I asked.

  She brushed me off. “This is where your life gets fun,” she said. “All these trials will bring forth a whole lot of gifts.”

  “You sound pretty religious sometimes,” I said.

  She smiled. Held my hand. “Your mother is lucky to have a girl like you.”

  “She’s selfish,” I said. “That’s all. Disobedient to God and selfish.”

  Daisy squeezed my hand hard, looked to Florin, who was deep in conversation with Hazel. “I’ll tell you the truth. I didn’t want to be a mother. Sometimes still I think maybe it was all a big mistake.”

  “That’s awful,” I said.

  “Is it? Why does it have to be? I loved her anyhow. Even her sharp little fingernails scratching me like a wildcat when she was a baby. The dumb things I loved.”

  I sighed. I liked imagining them together so many years before, when everything was still unknown, wrapped up in the future.

  “But slowly as she got older and older and needed me less it seemed she was becoming a stranger,” Daisy went on. “I found I didn’t need to smell her head or hold her to my body as much. Whole days could pass and I would have barely seen her. But then out of nowhere I would long for her. I’d reach out to find her and she was gone. A person had replaced her. It gave me wild thoughts. Leaving, starting over. Being a person in the world again not needed so deeply. I suspect most mothers have those moments, those thoughts. But they go away. You catch your breath.”

  “My mother’s didn’t go away.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  I wanted to ask her then. Take me to her now. Take me in your car, let’s blow off this life and head down the highway. I imagined picking my mother up in Florin’s fast car, all of us together, women untethered on the road. Men? What men? We didn’t need them. We’d forget them all. We’d never see another man as long as we lived and it would be good.

  But I didn’t ask her. I had begun to feel self-conscious around her when it came to my mother, for I saw how greatly she wanted me to not want her, for me to charge forward into my own strength, somehow above it all.