Reckless: Shades of a Vampire(3)

At home, most everything revolved around her father’s weekly sermons, from development to delivery, the family’s next meal, Emma’s chores, and bedtime. The Mays’ did not have a television set. They did not have a computer. They did not get a newspaper. She did not have an iTunes account, or an iPod, or magazines to read.

No makeup or curling irons were allowed. Boyfriends were out of the question, as were friends at all, really. Emma had a few peers at church she sometimes wistfully referred to as friends in conversations with herself and her parents, but she knew better.

They were just that – peers at church, since anytime over the years she’d get close enough in the waiting times between church services to one to have more words than casual small talk her father’s admonishment was nearby to break it up.

“Best we keep the members in the pews,” he said.

Sand Mountain United Pentecostal Church had fewer than 100 members on the roll and most of them were older, their children long gone out of the house. There was one girl Emma’s age in the church, but she had dropped out of school the year before when she married her distant cousin and had his baby a few months later.

Judith, the girl, used to whisper and giggle with Emma at the church about what dirty words were, and meant. Emma was often curious, and asked, starting at about the age of 13, and Judith was quick with answers, explaining words like "fuck" and terms for genitals including "cock," "dick," and "pussy." Emma's mother never taught her about sex, and she barely knew the proper terms beyond penis and vagina.

She had never heard those used, either. Emma's mother called her period "the family way" and her vagina was called "down there."

"Here are these," her mother said when giving her thick white pads for her menstrual cycle when she was 13, "for when you get in the family way down there."

That piqued her interest, so when Judith started talking, Emma had started listening.

"To make a baby," Judith once explained, "he sticks his cock in your pussy and it feels good."

"How do you know?" Emma had asked.

"Everybody knows," Judith had said.

"Hmm," Emma had said, trying to imagine how something as large as a cock -- she had only seen her father's limp penis in short glances but that was still hard to grasp at the age of 12 -- could fit in there.

But Judith hadn't talked to Emma much in the later teen years before she got married, presumably thinking the word play no longer amusing. After the baby was born Judith mostly stood between services with the women of the church, not the youth, talking about recipes, children, and chores.

There were four other girls and two boys in the church of high school ages – slightly younger. They went to Ider High, and had little in common with Emma anyway, since they watched television, had driver’s licenses, went on dates, and went to movies sometimes in Chattanooga, despite the fact that her father preached to them from the pulpit that Hollywood was the “Devil’s den.”

Billy, one of the two boys, made Emma’s neck and cheeks splotch red and her crotch throb when he stood near. She thought of him sometimes at night, when the house was quiet and she pulled up her nightgown to do her thing. But Billy’s father was a Deacon in the church and, just as her father pushed her to keep distance from the members, the members and deacons in turn pushed their children to keep a healthy distance from the preacher’s daughter.

“They respect our role as leaders of the church,” her father said.

Or maybe they were just scared, Emma thought.

Similarly, Emma was taught to respect her father’s role as leader of the family, and her role of keeping it all in order as a support agent and worker bee for her mother. Chores were distributed to Emma daily on must-do lists waiting for her at the breakfast table. They were left on top of the napkin, but under the fork, at the morning table set by her mother.

“A woman’s work is never done,” her father said.

He was right about that, Emma thought.

Emma learned to cook at an age so early she didn’t recall. She learned to count from measuring cups. By the age of six, she helped her mother make the dresses they wore, cutting different pastel colored materials according to the same pattern, and sewing the pieces together by hand with needle and thread colored the same as the fabric chosen. Fabric colors were never mingled, and the only deviation involved weight of the material according to the season for which the dresses were made.

Cooking and sewing were neither easy nor hard for Emma. They were just things to do, like breathing, and eating. Schoolwork had been the easiest for Emma. Longing for boys had been the hardest.