When I was younger, I rode the school bus home one afternoon – as I did every afternoon, every weekday, every week, every month. I was the daughter of a Midwestern farmer – my life was consistent, scheduled, regimented, comfortable – some day in the future, in a future poem, I would refer to the Midwest as a “monstrous armchair” – and so it was, comfortable, cushioned, entrapping. That day – that specific day – I remember, quite vividly, the feel of the bus window on my forehead, the way the farms looked – three-dimensional models springing from the flat landscape. It was spring, and hot. The bus had no air conditioning. In the upper Midwest, hot spring days are always humid, and the wet, flattened air pressed against my chest, my arms, my thighs. I was thinking of – who knows? -- school – a math test – some old anxiety or another – when – from an utter, utter nowhere – a chill – a shudder – crept, slowly, deliberately, from my ass to my cunt to my stomach to my spine. I glanced around – Had anyone noticed? My world, though, had not changed. The students – the backpacks – the arrogant, quiet teenagers – all were in the same place. No one was staring. I glanced back out the window and, for the first time, began to think of sex.
Of course, I didn’t know, really, how to think of sex. I had seen the pigs, the cows, the cats, on the farm – had watched them mount each other frantically, maniacally. I had seen birth – of kittens, of piglets, of calves, and knew, of course, of the connection. But human sex – I knew of furtive, whispered, heated conversations between my sisters – I knew my mother was concerned if my brother and his girlfriend were in the same room, alone. But specifics? I knew, really, nothing – but I did know, at that moment, that this wonderful chill had something to do with it – that this thing – this sex – could, and should, feel good – no, not good – beyond good, a word I could not even yet imagine. Perhaps a word that did not yet exist. I shivered, pressed my head against the window pane, and thought of the boys in my class.
That night, I took a bath. I touched my tits – I had never done that before, and, at the time, was unaware that this touching – the light caress of tight young nipples – was a common part of foreplay. But it felt good, that caress, and I continued it, lying in the warm bath water, looking at my body with wonder. I was jolted out of this new kind of reverie by my sister’s desperate knocking – we were, after all, eight kids and only one bathroom.
My sisters – they were twins -- were four years older than I was, and, I thought, much more cosmopolitan. I had heard them speaking to each other in flushed whispers. I had not cared to know, at the time, but of course they were talking about sex. After my bath, as I lay in my bedroom, watching the cottonwoods sway through my second story window, I conceived a plan. I knew how they spent their weekends – they would lie out, they would tan, they would talk on the phone – but also, they would read. They didn’t read what I read – not into the classics, my sisters, or Trixie Belden, or Nancy Drew. But I’d watched them devour whole books in single days, sometimes lying in bed to do it, sometimes lying out, barely clothed, on the deck. My mother would sigh and say, “I don’t know what you see in those books,” and “You know – you really don’t have to bring those books to church with you.” I saw them exchanging these books, grinning and sometimes whispering, “Don’t let Mom read this.” That was the secret, then – there was something in those books.
