Chastity

We all waited for news of the storm, the adults with brows crumpled in worry that what always happened would happen again. The girls were also silent in their expectation, a nameless fear and barely perceptible excitement as heavy in our stomachs as the belts around our waists. The boys, of course, were louder. We heard them for weeks before, across the long hallway, laughing about it into each other’s ears. The black-robed teachers would chastise the boys into gentle murmurs even while their mouths turned up slightly beneath heavy mustaches. I envied the boys the volume of their voices and the strong bulge of their shoulders beneath backpack straps. I envied the secrets they shared with each other. When most of the town came to watch the Opening Games every year, encouraged to celebrate the superior male form in its athletic prowess, I envied the senior boys who would approach the best runners after the matches, naked and slick with sweat, and take one firmly by the shoulder. This was not an official Ceremony but one we all understood and were complicit in, understood as necessary for a young man’s virility, his very nature. I was unsure exactly how their two bodies could fit together and had to force myself to block the thoughts. The wrong thoughts raise body temperature and trigger the belt. I’m not feeling well, Mother. I must have a fever. Say a prayer, child. Go to sleep. Occasionally when one of the older boys graduated and chose his wife, his former companion would wait outside the newlywed’s freshly painted door wailing and beating at the heavy wood, fists already raw and bloody from hours of beating and wailing—despair, the worst of sins. Sometimes the boy could be reasoned with, brought down from his mania and escorted back home. Sometimes he would be Taken, to the same place the girls were Taken when they could not adequately explain an opened belt. Sometimes he would be exceptionally calm after the wedding and walk around school with a secret smile nestled between chin and nose. When Grandmother was in school, before the legal solution was Taking, they Elders still stood those girls in the town center. Pictures of them wait inside the textbooks like a stain, arms wrapped around their nubile breasts, legs tightly shut to hide the dark hair of their pubis, that smudge of ink between their legs—short and pale in one picture, long and dusky like rich clay in another. Tightly printed text explains how the girls were pelted with handfuls of soft, rotting fruit—plums, apricots—and eventually whipped by the Elder men, eyes bright and glassy even in photographs with the ecstasy of performing God’s work. But we are more civilized now. Now there is the arrival of armed bishops at the school, who grasp the girls firmly between them and sometimes push, sometimes drag them. Sometimes she sobs, sometimes stares blankly at the pea-green tile. Now there is just the silence afterwards, the place a girl used to occupy. Grandmother and I seldom speak, nor Mother and I, she and her mother, any mother and daughter. So when Grandmother hears a girl has been Taken it is not that she gets quiet, but that her quiet is interrupted—the clicking knitting needles in her hands stutter. I know from being told that my eyes are the same golden shade of brown as hers, but do not ask if they mirror the strained unnamed expression between her lashes, splintered like broken glass. I do not ask how the Taking is worse than soft fruitflesh bursting open on soft girlflesh. We are more civilized now. Mother moved in tight circles across the linoleum, her sunset shadow cast on the cabinets, her red hands placing cubes of ice into Father’s drink, each one falling with a distinct ring. Father watched the weather report in the den—clouds gathering in the east and swarming across the digitized earth like a red stain. All of us waiting in heavy silence for the storm. Finally he clicked the remote control and the television shut off with a long hiss. He retrieved his Bible from the corner table and delicately licked two fingers, opened the heavy book and read aloud from Leviticus, each word precise as an ice-cube landing against glass. Luke arrived shortly before dark and we sat on the front porch with my father’s blessing, the incline of his head to Luke that said, I understand you. Our natures are the same. A dense knot of hair hung between the sharp wings of Luke’s shoulder blades and swung gently with his movements, like something shifting its girth between feet, something waiting. It would be cut off before our wedding, cropped close to his skull like the other adult men. I would never feel it spill between my fingers or over my face like a breeze. He felt my hair, just the briefest brush to tuck a stray piece back into my braid, something stolen like a pebble from the sea. Did he carry this, the feeling of my hair, heavy in his pocket as a stone? And then the second of a second when he took my earlobe between his two fingers and, the blood rushing through me like an avalanche’s rumble, squeezed. Boyflesh on girlflesh. Ruth taught me how to control my heartbeat, how to slow my breaths, to circle the problem of the belt like a sleeping beast in the grass. Every Wednesday afternoon and Friday night was ours, time meant to be spent crocheting scarves, braiding our hair, listening to the recorded hymns. We are more civilized now, and so the girls are allowed a friend, though not a companion in the way the boys are. There was a problem with hysteria, before. Somehow complete isolation did not agree with our dispositions. It would leave even the calmest girls with eyes splintered like broken grass. So Ruth and I had our Wednesday afternoons and our Friday nights. Ours. The quiet house after her parents or mine went to sleep, the silence of one body lowering itself into the bed of another, wrapping soft limbs around the sameness of soft limbs, new pillowy flesh. Controlling our heartbeats, not alerting the belt with flushed skin, an exercise in being glass without breaking. The previous power outage had only been twenty minutes and perhaps God is not so cruel, because the storm broke on a Friday night. I was filled with the sound of rain on glass, immobile with uncertainty, but Ruth did not hesitate to press her mouth against mine. Girlflesh. On the porch Luke nodded, could have been nodding with the satisfaction of a softly falling dusk, but I knew he was expecting my consent, so I nodded back. The storm clouds gathered at the edges of town from the bottom of the skyline up, like Luke’s plan, like pages burning at the edges. His ochre eyes shone with pleasure or maybe the expectation of pleasure. In the days before the storm he had slowly, secretly told me how to open the belt in the period of its deactivation, when the surges from the storm would render the city’s power grids useless. More than twenty minutes this time, he assured, in words scattered throughout the homework he helped me with on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Lukedays. Hidden lukewarm Lukewords in the basic compositions, the pencil pressed just slightly harder, pressure darkening the lead on the page and revealing the directions to me like breadcrumbs through the grass. His eyes shining under pale brows with a distinct possessiveness. When Luke had first approached our table at the Cotillion I waited expectantly to make eye contact with this hard, lean, beautiful boy who was considering me, who strode directly up to our table and shook hands with Father. I saw the owning in his eyes when they fell on me and felt the assuredness of being owned, the confident safety of possession. Afterwards (it was a Friday) Ruth and I compared our observations. I didn’t share the feeling of being plucked and held in yellow-brown-owning-eyes but commented in scattered murmurs on the sweet curve of Luke’s nose. Ruth’s father had shaken hands with a boy we only knew tangentially, who performed poorly at the Games and had no senior boy grab his sun-reddened shoulder. Ruth said she hated him for it—the weakness—his leaking eyes and slouching shoulders. Not like you at all, and she touched my knee beneath my dress. Her eyes like cold glass waiting to be doused with scalding water. Not like you at all, and her fingers rested on my skin above the heavy belt. During those weeks I was glad that my eyes were expected to stay downcast, that I could nod to Luke without looking away from my homework. If he looked into my eyes he would surely not see his own hard cheekbones reflected back but Ruth’s soft round face, revealing us, insects under a microscope. But Luke trusted that his plan was also mine, and he did not try to see. Extra guards joined the nightwardens in the street, the evening the storm broke. The lights they shone into every corner were not bright enough to cut through the deluge. The familiar warmth of my bed was like something that had happened to another person, and the rain penetrated my bones. The homeless and other dangerous streetfolk would have their own agenda on such a night, Luke had assured me, and so I took the alleys that ran through the crumbling fringe of town like veins, towards the dense orchard. Too dark to see, I navigated by memory and instinct, only knew I had entered when I felt bark press into my shoulders, sturdy but softened from the downpour. Minutes, hours, years later I crouched beneath an overhang of trees that formed a canopy like laced fingers and finally there was Ruth, hunched beneath a curving-scythe of a rock, her eyes cutting through the rain like no light could. I had memorized the feeling of twenty minutes, all of its tops and corners—this chunk of time before Luke was supposed to find me—knew it like the inside of a tooth, felt it press me like Ruth pressed against me, felt it pass like a sidewalk disappearing under moving feet. I unlocked Ruth’s belt as deftly as my hands would allow, shaking as they were like tree branches in the storm. My knees sank into the muddy ground. Then the taste of Ruth, like apricots and plums but not like them at all, erased any taste that had come before, erased every meaningless movement of my hands. Somewhere in the back of my mind, behind the ecstatic hymns that rose like steam, behind the ticking away of minutes, was an assuredness that we were the only things that had been, and ever would be, real. Not the grainy bread, the unadorned wooden churches, the hard sting of kneeling in rice when I spoke out of turn, before I learned how to fold away my words. Not the books that taught us how things had been before, the hot and distant sun, the puncture wounds from Grandmother’s sewing machine, the sonorous sounds of Latin and Greek. Not the back and forth sway of Luke’s hair. Not the waiting. Not even the cold and heavy belts that girded us from ourselves, kept us safe from transgression, that delivered us from evil. Not the mud beneath my knees. Then Luke was there as if dropped down with the lightning, too soon, and his face full of thunder. I didn’t know then, but only months later when the heel of his hand would land heavy against my cheek, that the hesitation in his eyes was whether or not to leave me there for them to find. But he said, They’re in the orchard. I was able to crouch behind a cluster of blackberry bushes just as the guards pushed roughly through a cleft of delicate fruit trees, the trunks bending around them, framing them like an open mouth. Luke’s hands were raised above his head, Ruth’s arms wrapped around herself, her belt lying open at her feet. She stood suspended for a moment, sharp rain falling around her dark edges, illuminated by the searing flashlights. Stuck between before and everything else. Then they grabbed her by the arms, pushed her face into the dark mud and the fallen plums and apricots their boots had crushed. Fruitflesh on girlflesh. When I could no longer look I found Luke’s eyes, visible through breaks in the blackberry bush where he stood watching. They shone with a feverish light—possessing something that wasn’t theirs, rapt in the owning of a moment, the lightning that follows thunder, the ice cubes that drop into a glass. As punishment for being out after curfew he would be kept from all sports and fraternal activities until graduation, though this ban was lifted before our wedding. Perhaps God is not so cruel, because I was home before the storm settled, my dress stained by mud and crushed blackberries, my Wednesdays and Fridays silent.