Page 24 of The Light Year

“Yeah, not your stomach.” Jo rubs Frankie’s hand and then pats it soothingly. “Down there. You can tear, so the doctor watches carefully, and rather than letting you rip, they…” Jo swallows hard and winces. “Cut you.”

“Oh, god!” Frankie wails, putting a hand to her chest. “No!”

Jo nods again. “And then they stitch you back up. Sometimes tighter than they need to.” She frowns at the memory of her ownpainful recoveries. “I complained to my mom about it one time—I told her it felt uncomfortably tight—and she said it was called ‘the husband stitch.’”

Frankie looks mad; she actually looks angry as she shifts her body around and tries to stand, putting one hand on her lower back. Jo tugs at the hem of her shirt and forces her to stay seated.

“Jo,” Frankie whispers, looking around the empty park. “Are you telling me they cut you on your—you know?” She waves her hand in a circular motion.

“Yes, in order to keep it from ripping, which is arguably worse,” Jo says, trying to make it all sound reasonable.

“And that when they sew you back up, they sometimes make ittighterfor yourhusband? As if he’s done anything at all except get you into that situation?” Her face is flaming with the indignity of knowing that there is no way out at this point but to gothroughit. All of it.

“Yes,” Jo says, feeling as remorseful as if she herself had invented such a barbaric notion. “See, I told you there were things that no one really passes on beforehand, and it seems wrong to me that we all just sit on the information and don’t share it with one another.”

“I have to say, Josephine,” Frankie says, wild-eyed. “You could have told me all of this a little sooner.” She points both index fingers at the unmistakable swell of the nearly full-term baby under her shirt. “Now I have to dread going into labor because of the pain, which is something we all know about, but also all ofthis?”

Jo lifts a shoulder sympathetically. “You did say you wanted to know,” she reminds Frankie. “And honestly, I think women have a right to. We’re not children. I knew none of that when I went into labor with Jimmy. And I kind of wish I had.”

“What would you have done differently?”

Jo lifts her eyebrows, feeling tired. “I mean, I couldn’t stop whatever happened with the pushing, but I would have been adamant about not getting stitched up like a teddy bear in danger of losing its stuffing. There’s no call for that.”

Frankie’s cheeks are getting less red as she listens and begins to calm down. “Okay, so you think I should say something to my doctor?”

“That’s up to you,” Jo says earnestly. “Your experience is yours, and it’s personal. But I do believe we should all be telling one another every bit of information that we can. It’s insane to me that this cloak of silence is in place, and that women are treated like infants or like barnyard animals just there for the breeding. I do not like that, and I’ve learned a lot just from the things I’ve seen and heard at the hospital.”

Now it’s Frankie’s turn to lift her eyebrows. “But we go into it willingly, Jojo—we aren’t horses or cows.”

“We do,” Jo agrees, “but without all the information. Generally speaking, we’re raised up with very little information about life or our bodies. If we’re lucky, our mothers whisper something to us about our monthlies, or hand us some supplies, but other than that, what girl did you ever know who fully understood where babies came from when her body started to develop? I didn’t even completely understand what would happen on my wedding night until it did.”

They’d covered this terrain before, and Jo knew that, by the time she married Ed, Frankie had been more experienced than Jo had, but she was still willing to bet that no one had sat Frankie down and given her the nuts and bolts and the finer points of sex.

“You’re right,” Frankie says, tugging on a strand of hair thoughtfully. “They keep a lot from us.”

“And once we get married, most of us have babies quite young, and instead of telling us about the process, they distractus with things like baby showers, with decorating nurseries, and picking out names for the babies. Which, for the most part, kind of works.”

Frankie looks mad all over again. “Are you doing things differently with your own daughters?”

A flicker of discomfort passes over Jo’s face, but then she takes a deep breath. “I am. Absolutely. I’ve already explained to them both about their monthlies, why they have them, and how to manage their own bodies. It was hard, because my mother wouldn’t even look me in the eye when I got my first period, but I want there to be no shame in their lives when it comes to these things.”

“Good for you,” Frankie says, still looking miffed by this entire discussion. “If I have a daughter, I’m doing the same thing. I’ll tell her everything.”

“There’s a lot more work to do,” Jo says. “Once they start dating, I need them to understand the things that boys willwantto do with them, and the ways they need to protect themselves, or to make their own decisions. I expect that to be a much tougher conversation, although when I explained her menstrual cycle, Kate was already pretty traumatized.” She laughs lightly at the memory. “So while I will tell them what I know before they settle down and get married and have kids, I’ll do it slowly. It’s too much information for a young girl to handle all at once.”

“It’s like looking right at the sun,” Frankie says, taking Jo’s hand in hers again. “God, what an awful way to run this show,” she says, looking down at her belly sadly. “And the crazy thing is that I would still have gladly gone through it all for the joy of having a baby, I just think someone should have handed us pamphlets about all of this when we were teenagers. Given us a heads-up, right?”

“I couldn’t agree more, Francesca,” Jo says, standing up and holding out both hands so that she can pull Frankie to a standing position. “It’s wrong to keep us in the dark about our bodies.”

They start to walk together again, through the November night. The houses they pass are filled with light and warmth, and the sliver of a moon hangs in the middle of a blanket of glittering stars over all of Stardust Beach.

“Life is so complicated, Jojo,” Frankie sighs as they walk down her street and pause at the end of her driveway so that Jo can drop her off at home first. She rests her head against Jo’s shoulder as they stand there, side-by-side, looking up at the sky over the rooftops.

“It is,” Jo agrees mildly, putting her cheek against the top of Frankie’s head. “And this, my friend, this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

barbie

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