I tell my mother I’ve had my period and she says, “No.” I keep on peeling the potatoes. She says I’m not peeling fast enough. She says I’m young and strong and I should be peeling faster than her. I cut myself. She sighs and tells me to go away. When I’m on the stairs, she shouts, “Disinfect the wound! Alcohol! Do not go outside! Stay away from the greenhouse!”
I wrap my finger in a tissue. My bedroom bores me. I watch a fly struggle against the glass of my window and I say, “Stupid fly, you’re too stupid to live.” I slap a shirt against my window. I kill the fly because the fly is too stupid to know what is glass and what is air. I pick up the fly who doesn’t know anything, and I put it on top of my secret pile of filth in the secret drawer of my desk. The fly is dead with my dead hair and my dead crumbs and my dust and my dirt and some dry grass and my dead fingernails. Pretty filth, and my mother doesn’t know anything.
In the kitchen, I ask if I can change the channel and my mother says, “No.” She stops slicing the potatoes and looks at me and says, “You need to watch the news. Aren’t you interested in the world? Very important to know what’s going on in the world.” I’m not interested in the world. I’m not interested in petrol and milk and farmers and votes and the countries far away and the hurricanes far away. I tell my mother it’s all useless. She says, “Take it back.”
My mother shouts my father’s name. My father loves sighing even more than my mother. She makes us sit on the sofa in the living room to watch another of her documentaries on the bigger TV. “Her education,” she tells my father. “There are other things,” my father tells her. “Not if you die,” my mother says. My father covers my ears and I fight against his hands and I win. “There is nothing else if they poison you,” she says, and my father in between us turns to whisper things to her. I can’t see my mother. My father hides her. They are not looking at me. I shout at them to stop speaking without me. My shouting makes it worse, I only hear myself.
The next evening, we’re removing the stems from green beans and I ask my mother if I’m a woman now. She laughs. She says, “Do you think nine-year-olds are women? That little boys are men?” I say, “I don’t think so. But I’ve started my period. I think.” She laughs again. She says, “No, you haven’t.” I leave the green beans. I go up to my bedroom. I pull out the dirty underwear from underneath my bed. The red has turned brown, and the cotton feels like cardboard. It smells. I walk back down. My mother stares. I say, “I didn’t do it on purpose. It’s not my fault.”
My mother shows me where the pads are. She tells me to never use tampons. “Even if a friend gives you one, you don’t take it. They use chemicals to make them white. Do you want chemicals in your body? Chemicals that hurt you from the inside and that no one can see? You’re too young anyway.” She shows me a special kind of soap that makes me think of milk and babies. She says I need to clean the blood. We go back to the green beans. My mother asks if other girls have had their periods. She asks what we eat at school. She tells me to describe the blackboards and the chalk. Instead I talk about the poems and stories the teacher read out to us: women who turn to lakes, men into fires, girls into voices, birds into bigger birds. My mother cries. She says I have so much to learn, so many stories to read, and one day I’ll read them to my own children, and I say, “No, I’ll never have children.” She looks stunned. She says, “I guess that’s true. Yes, in a way, you’re right. You’ll never have children. If you think about it. In a way.” She gets up and hugs me. I tell her I’ll need a bra soon and also that I have hair down there and that I’d like to get rid of it. She grabs my shoulders and says, “Stop lying. I don’t like liars. My daughter is not a liar. My daughter is my baby daughter.”
I know the word is cancer. I know the word, I don’t know what the word is, I can’t see it, if I can’t see it what does it do, it does nothing, it has nothing, all it does is make my mother angry and my father quiet, the word is nowhere and everywhere, I am not an only child, everywhere, it covers the house, it sleeps in my bed, it makes a belt for my mother’s waist. I don’t ask. I don’t want my mother to think I’m stupid.
Every time my mother makes me cry, I think of all the other times she made me cry, like the time I asked for deodorant. The time I said I couldn’t wait to be married, and she screamed that I shouldn’t think about those things, that today was Tuesday, that on this Tuesday there was no Wednesday and that I was still just a child, wasn’t I a child? Couldn’t I be a child for her? Couldn’t I say it was Tuesday? All the times they add up. They’re stacked on top of each other.
After Sunday comes Monday. I have never seen Monday not come after Sunday. Monday back at school, I tell Rachel I want to play Reality. Rachel invented Reality that time she saw my mother spray and wipe the groceries, even the cartons and plastic bags. Rachel said it was weird and she said, “Nobody does that.” I said, “What else? What do people not do?” When we play Reality, I tell her things I think are true, and if Rachel says they’re not, she wins. I’m not allowed to choose easy things. Rachel decides what is easy. It’s Monday and I tell Rachel I think Monday is named after the moon. Rachel looks up and says she will allow Monday to be named after the moon since it follows the day of the sun. Then I tell her when girls become women they have to wash all the blood away in the shower, that if you eat too much meat you bleed for a month, that when girls use tampons all their lives they die twenty years before girls who don’t. Rachel is red and she says, “Too easy. Everybody knows that.”
My father tells my mother she will be fine. My mother has been both fine and not fine for years. Sometimes he doesn’t think and he shows her the fruit or the glass and he tells her, “Look, it’s not dirty, you can’t see anything,” and then she does that ugly smile and says, “Exactly.”
My mother drinks water from plastic bottles. She hates the sink. She hunts for the word “organic,” will it make an organ, will it clean an organ? She doesn’t reply if I tell her I’m hungry in the supermarket. Restaurants want you to die. The air is evil. Breathing will kill you. Soap is never miraculous enough.
My mother wakes me up on a Sunday morning. She says, “It’s a beautiful day, get up, you don’t want to miss the sun, there’s no time to waste, no time to waste.” It’s true that it’s a beautiful day. Not cold anymore. All sunny, all warm. She takes me by the hand and drags me outside. I’m in my nightdress. I’m barefoot. The grass is soft like plastic, it tingles, it whispers. My father waves. He is washing the car. In the greenhouse, the sky is curved and the sun is white. My mother makes me stop in front of each growth and says, “And this, what is it? What will it turn into?” I say, “Zucchini.” She says, “Very good, and this?” I say, “Beets.” She says, “No, this is radish. You need to know how to tell beets from radish. The leaves tell you what they hide.” She looks happy and she speaks softly, so I smile and I don’t complain. On the raised beds in the middle, she pats the earth and tells me it’s dry. I grab the small watering can and, before I tilt it down, my mother says, “No, stop. Later. It can stay that way a little longer.”
When we come out of the greenhouse, my father steps closer and says, “Stop boring her with the vegetable chat.” He lifts me and I scream. He says I’m heavier than ten thousand houses. He drops me in a hole in the ground on the edge of the potato patch and says, “There! You’re a tree!” and he turns on the hose and waters my feet. I yell, “I’m not a child! I’m not five! It’s not funny! I’m not a tree!” but I’m laughing and my father is laughing and he shouts, “Stop talking, tree! Give us some cherries!” I dig my feet into the mud, my father sprays my legs, and I stretch out my arms and pretend I’m in pain from the fruit growing out of my fingers. I look at my mother. My mother is making a decision. I stare into her eyes and say, “I’m a tree.” She stares back. Droplets of water down my legs. The sound of my toes saying yes yes yes in the wet earth. Nothing on her face. “I’m a tree,” I say again. “I’m growing branches. I’m a tree.” My mother looks at my father. In a low and steady voice, like the voice of the teacher when she catches Rachel cheat, my father says, “Didn’t you hear her, Elsa? Your daughter is a tree.” A smile on my mother’s face. The smile twitches. The smile is a filthy worm that lives in the secret drawer of my desk. My mother looks at my legs. At my planted feet. “A tree,” she says. “Indeed.”
I walk alone to school because my father is at work and my mother has an appointment in town. It’s a Friday, which always comes after Thursday. Rachel and I are both early, and we wait on the ground in the middle of the basketball court. Rachel wants me to help her find a job. “Maybe I’ll be a doctor for my dream career,” she says. I tell her doctors need good grades, and Rachel never listens in class. “I’ll be smart later,” she says. “Or instead I’ll be a TV presenter. All I have to do is wear makeup and say people’s names. And you can be the camera woman.” “No,” I say. “I won’t be the camera woman.” “The ticket woman, then.” I say, “No. I will never have a job.” “You need money,” Rachel says. I say, “No. I will never have a dream a career. I will stay here forever. I will have fun all the time, and I’ll never pay taxes, and I’ll never drive a car.” Rachel stands up in front of me and says, “Reality.” I tell Rachel I don’t want to play. “Fine,” she says, “I’ll give you all the answers. Reality: you have to have a job. Reality: you have to have a house and a family. Reality: you’ll get a driver’s license and drive your kids to school. Reality: you’ll be very old and your parents will be dead and I’ll be dead and you’ll be in prison because you’ve never paid your taxes.”
My mother returns from the center of town and slams the door and spreads sheets of paper on the dining room table and she doesn’t even wash her hands and she shouts and my father says he’s sorry and so sad but that it’s not our fault, that she shouldn’t act like it’s our fault, that she should let him be sad with her and not against her, and my mother says, “Whose fault is it, then?” It is a question. She is asking my father a question. No strength in my mother’s voice. I’m not used to that. To her voice sounding like it’s only trying on the words it’s making. “I’ve never smoked,” she says. “I’ve avoided sugar. I’ve been good, mostly.” My father holds her and shakes his head. They look at each other, my mother and my father. My father blocks my mother. I make a sound, and they see me hiding, and my mother leaves and my father tells me to sit in the chair next to him. He says, “People who have an illness, sometimes, they’re like . . . like in history. Kings and queens. You know. You’ve heard. Tyranny. Not her, but, as an idea. A concept, if you will. And, well. She’s lived with it a long time. There have been no breaks. We hoped before today. It looked like it might be better. It’s hard. For her. For you, too, isn’t it? Well. I am . . . You know. Always. If you need. Anything, really. Your menstruation? It’s natural. Cycles. People get used to it. No need to panic. You know. If you need.” My mother comes back into the room with scissors. She says she needs to cut my hair. She says it’s too long.
My mother uses a photo she took months ago for reference. She says, “It needs to be the same length as it was before. I need to bring it back to the same length.” But then she cuts it shorter, and she says I’m perfect now. She says my skin is like baby skin. “Perfect baby skin,” she says. “Perfect baby hairs on your forehead still.” She tells me to sweep away the dead hair. After I’ve thrown my hair into the trash I tell my mother what I told Rachel. I say, “Are you happy? I’m never going to be Rachel’s friend again. I told her she was dead to me.” My mother looks at me for a long time. She takes the broom and the dustpan from my hands, leans them against the wall, takes my face into her hands, and tells me to call Rachel and apologize. She watches me say sorry.
Spring disappears. Summer gives up. Fall fills up the hole. Less anger in my mother. She watches the leaves change and does not make us rake. The piles grow on the ground and she lets me play with them. She lets me be buried. She is tired, often. From the kitchen table she holds my gaze while I fill my glass at the sink, but she doesn’t tell me to stop. She closes her eyes. When she opens them again, she looks surprised to see me there. Once, she whispers, “Your hair grows long. They will dig the earth.”
On my birthday, still no anger in my mother. My father takes a candle off the cake to make her smile, and she does. I don’t prefer this peace. I don’t trust its life. I tell her I’m on my period to get anger out of her, the anger I know, but she holds me tight. I tell her I’ll never have children. “I promise,” I say. “I’ll never do it.” She says, “In a way, no. If I’m not there, it’s not there either. Doesn’t exist. Hasn’t. Will never. You will be eleven years old. There is time for you and time for me. In time for you, you might be twelve. I live in mine. I can’t choose. None of the other times are mine.”
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Artwork by Jessie Wong
