The Meadow 21 The Penis Goes Ruby Peru I must have been in about the third grade when my mother told me how a woman gets pregnant. I hadn’t asked and wasn’t the least bit interested. In fact, when sitting in the bathtub, I used to place a washcloth over my vagina in order to avoid contemplating its mystery. Shame around bodily functions permeated the atmosphere of our home without ever being discussed or rationalized. One day, Mom simply walked into my bedroom, shut the door, and said, “I’m going to tell you where babies come from.” I now suspect that, like the “there is no Santa Claus” conversation, this had been brought on by my older sister finding out and my mother trying to make sure I heard the news from an adult first. But whatever the reason Mom chose to have this conversation on that particular day, she wasn’t any more eager for it than me. Her rigid posture and pinched face made her look as if she had fallen into a vat of discomfort. Wherever babies came from, it was clearly nowhere good. I knew the grim expression my mother wore. I had seen it many times. It meant that, like a self-programming robot, she had set herself on a mission to complete an unpleasant task, and no power on Earth could change her course of action. I knew I could have picked up my oboe and marched around the room squawking out “Hot Cross Buns,” pausing only to smash the bedroom window with my rusty horseshoe collection and impale myself upon the shards, and she would have just spoken louder. My parents were atheists, or agnostics at best, but behaved just like the strict, fifties-era protestants they had been raised to be. It simply never occurred to either of them to change their attitudes or ethics when they ceased to believe in the
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