Free Mouthing the Words by Camilla Gibb Page B

it was such a ludicrous idea. I pictured myself laying an egg like a chicken in my sleep. So I got up the nerve to ask Jackie,” my mother said quietly. (There were a whole lot of Jackie stories—Jackie had been Mum’s best friend at school and she was much admired for being savvy and worldly-wise and wearing Chanel perfume from the Duty Free in Johannesburg.) “Jackie told me that my mother wasn’t lying but the eggs are invisible. It felt like such a conspiracy.
    “It was another year before I put it all together,” my mother continued. “The book my mother had given me called
Where Babies Come From
and the eggs I would soon be hatching in my sleep.”
    “God, Mum,” I responded to her story. “Stupid. It was just your period.”
    Perhaps I’d missed the point or spoiled her one attempt at female bonding, but she rummaged around in the bathroom closet and thrust a box of tampons at me.
    “Thanks, Mum,” I said. “But I won’t be needing these.” She does not realize that I have just decided never to have a period. No thank you very much, I am just not interested in going that route. You can take these straight back to wherever they came from.
    “Well, what the hell did you ask me for, then?” shouted my mother.
    “Dunno,” I shrugged my shoulders.
    “Thelma, you really are an odd bird,” she said, shaking her head.
    —
    I have decided never to be a woman. Decided that I will be thin and little and rigid as a twig and hide in places out of sight from the world. I don’t want to be sophisticated and wear push-up bras like Binbecka. I don’t want to have claws and wear black leather and frighten children like Bunni Lambert. I don’t want to have a stomach and cook dinner and lie back and say, “Oh, Douglas” with my father clambering on top of me and panting like a dog.
    I daydream a lot about being an icicle: hanging from the roof and watching the world, dripping away into watery nothingness in the spring. I want to come and go like winter, be unspeaking, cold and untouchable, crystal clear. No blood, no eggs, no stomach, no breasts, no claws, no sighing, no dogs panting on top of me.
    “You should do something with your hair,” Binbecka has started to say to me. “It’s not becoming. Do something like mine. And clean your nails. What’s wrong with you, Thelma? Don’t you want boys to like you?” she asks me.
    No. I don’t want to paint my lips in Silver City Pink, pull up my kilt and fold it over at the waist, or press my face to the wire fence and giggle through to the other side. I don’t understand this new language where I am supposed to say mean things about my friends like, “Oh my gawd, she’s like, such a bitch,” and then spend three hours that night on the phone with her talking about boys. I don’t understand.
    Binbecka tells me I’d better try to make some other friends because she has things she needs to do without me. There will be no more going to her house after school, making popcorn and watching The Partridge Family and me playing the piano while she pretends to be Diana Ross.
    There is only my house now. Only my house and I don’t want to be there. My mother is there pacing round the kitchen and rubbing her stomach. She looks at me like she’s disgusted. “Thelma, what’s wrong with you?” she says to me. “Don’t you even want to try a little make-up? By your age I was onto my second bra. You look sick. For God’s sake, you could at least wash your hair. Your father can’t stand dirty hair.”
    My father can’t stand. He can only sit at the table or lie down these days. After dinner, which I fold into my pocket and throw down the toilet, Mum sews in the basement and I hide behind my door writing poems. My father turns into a dog then and I daydream about being an icicle. Less dog and more icicle now. Every day less and more.
    He follows me around the house and I can feel his breath on my back and he asks me questions. He tries to trap me. He asks me