All the Beautiful Girls. Elizabeth J Church

and sweat.

      UNCLE MILES SAID, “Tonight we experiment.”

      September’s full moon through the window made everything silvery bright, lit the edges of things, made silhouettes of her desk lamp and her bureau with her ballerina jewelry box. Lily jammed the ends of her fingers into her mouth, bit down to keep quiet. She squeezed her eyes shut, tight. Warm tears eased their way from the corners of her eyes, ran into her hair, and wet her pillowcase.

      Uncle Miles put his mouth to the center of her. He was moaning, which made a buzzing bee vibration that journeyed from his throat, his lips, to her core. And then she felt the growing heat of her own flesh in response. She fought against it but couldn’t help it. “Oh!” she cried, a surprised baby-bird voice. “Oh, oh, oh!” He held her pelvis as if it were a bowl.

      She thought that she might explode, that she was descending, plummeting, and it was release and good and hot and out of her control and sick and bad a disease and the worst thing ever that Uncle Miles had done but it felt good. It felt good. It felt good. Oh, no—it felt good. How could her body betray her?

      “You like it.” His whisper left a hot brand of accusation against the side of her neck.

      Once he was gone, she told herself that tonight was the exception to the rule. Tonight, it was okay to cry. With her face pressed into the wet pillow to muffle the sound of her confusion, Lily cried her shame. Her need. She cried a poisonous blend of gratification and disgust, of wonderment that Uncle Miles had given her pleasure, which was more frightening than any of the painful, awful things he’d done in the past. She cried her rupture, her irreparable breakage.

       5

      

      The light from the gooseneck lamp on top of the church organ turned Mrs. Olson’s face cadaver white as she played “O God of Mercy, God of Might.” Seated next to Aunt Tate in the unforgiving wooden pew, twelve-year-old Lily wrapped her arms around her gut, which had harbored a deep, persistent ache since before the second hymn. Finally, Pastor Lester intoned the benediction and released the sanctified congregation.

      Lily immediately headed downstairs to the church bathroom, which wasn’t much more than a stingy coat closet. When she looked at the crotch of her panties, she saw blood. Oh no oh no oh no oh no. A string of dark, thick blood dripped from inside her, and there was more blood in the toilet bowl.

      Was this God’s doing? Was this one of the things that the all-powerful, vengeful God did to punish bad girls? She knew that what she did with Uncle Miles was evil, and God did seem so very fond of bloody atonement. Lily wadded toilet paper into her panties and then sat uncomfortably through her sixth-grade Sunday school lesson.

      Aunt Tate was waiting in the car when Lily finished class. “What did you learn today?” she asked, waving to some of her Bible-study friends like Margaret Steepleton, who kept a handkerchief tucked between her bulwark breasts and blew her nose loudly at least seventeen thousand times during the pastor’s tedious sermon.

      “The story of the prodigal son,” Lily dutifully reported. Then she took a deep breath, steeling herself to tell Aunt Tate about the blood and possible impending doom. “Aunt Tate? I’m bleeding.”

      Aunt Tate turned to look at Lily. “Where? Did you fall?”

      “No.” It was hard, but Lily knew she needed help, that something was horribly wrong. “Down there,” Lily whispered, looking out the windshield and across the street to the Texaco station, thinking about the smell of gasoline, the way oil puddles on the asphalt formed galaxies of rainbows. “It hurts,” she said, still avoiding her aunt’s stare and holding a hand to the ache in her belly.

      “Between your legs.”

      “Yes.”

      Aunt Tate closed her eyes and leaned forward until her forehead rested on the steering wheel.

      So, it was true. Lily was going to die. Or at least she was very sick, and there would be hospital bills. She’d bankrupt them. They would be roaming the streets, penniless.

      Margaret Steepleton knocked on Aunt Tate’s window. “Tate, honey? You all right?”

      Aunt Tate rolled down her window. “She ’s got the curse,” she said, tipping her head in Lily’s direction. “First time.”

      Mrs. Steepleton leaned in the window and beamed across the seat at Lily, “Congratulations, sweetheart! Now you’re a woman!”

      The curse? Since the accident, Lily had always known she was cursed. But was it a curse simply to be a woman?

      “Lord, help me.” Aunt Tate sighed as Margaret Steepleton trundled off to join her husband and two boys. Her aunt’s voice was flat and unyielding, like the iron skillet that wouldn’t fit in the cupboard and so sat on the stove’s back burner, black, heavy, and inert.

      They stopped at the drugstore on the way home, and Aunt Tate bought Lily a sanitary belt and a big box of napkins with a picture of a dreamy woman strolling through meadows of flowers. She showed Lily how to wear the belt low on her hips and had Lily practice attaching the napkin tabs snugly to the belt’s metal fittings.

      “You’re growing up so fast. A young woman, nearly,” Aunt Tate said wistfully. “So much ahead of you,” she summed up.

      “Does the aching go away?” Lily asked, and for a moment she saw confusion on her aunt’s face.

      “Oh, the belly pain, you mean. Let’s get the hot water bottle.”

      Aunt Tate helped Lily lie down with the soothing heat of the pig-pink water bottle planted squarely over her belly, and they split a special Almond Joy candy bar Aunt Tate called “medicinal under the circumstances.”

      Lily fell asleep wondering about the connection between blood and womanhood. She hadn’t been able to make herself ask Aunt Tate why she was bleeding, if it had a purpose, other than inconvenience and ignominy. Was it something to do with God’s unending wrath toward Eve, the curse Aunt Tate talked about? Was that why only women harbored secret, open wounds?

      ON SATURDAYS LILY swept and dusted. She got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed the kitchen’s green and white linoleum. In the bathroom, she held her breath and washed away the yellow splashes of urine Uncle Miles left on the porcelain toilet bowl.

      Alongside Aunt Tate, she learned how to make stew and soups, chipped beef on toast, casseroles, and hash from leftover pot roast. She mastered pastry, crimping a perfect blanket of crust over apples, cherries, or peaches. Aunt Tate taught her to fold laundry properly, how to iron simple things like sheets, pillowcases, and dresser scarves. When Lily conquered the straightforward items, she moved on to more difficult things like Uncle Miles’ work shirts and Aunt Tate ’s cotton blouses.

      One afternoon, Lily opened the linen cupboard and shifted a pile of sheets to make room for her fresh ironing. Beneath the sheets, she found a cardboard folder that held a portrait of her parents. Her mother wore a light gray suit with a big chrysanthemum corsage, and her father had his arm about her mother’s shoulders, an unmistakable flash of joy in his eyes that Lily thought she remembered, even if she could no longer hear his voice.

      There was a newspaper clipping folded inside, and Lily read the article from the Salina Journal dated June 10, 1957, four years ago. It featured a picture of her family’s car, mangled and topless. Another picture showed the Aviator’s brand-new, black 1957 Chrysler 300-C, which the caption said was a production-line muscle car with enough power to reach one hundred miles per hour in second gear. At the time of the accident, the Aviator was traveling an estimated 130 miles per hour.

      Lily saw decapitated and ten-year-old Dawn Marie Decker thrown from the car and the miracle of Lily Francine Decker’s survival. Sheriff Ingram was described as having