Riverine by Angela Palm Read Free Book Online Page A

from Macbeth , though I’ve never read Shakespeare, and quote it out loud: “My dull brain … wrought with things forgotten.” I have someone else’s memories in my head. A blue jay lands on my hand and talks to me in blue jay, and my papa says, “Don’t talk to blue jays. They’re mean.” I wear Indian beads on my fingers. I point my toes and float above my house, above the river, so high. Everything is possible.
    Blood, 11
    Heaven would be something different for everyone. It would be each person’s unique earthly happiness, manifesting in different ways. My heaven had wide sidewalks made of pure gold and castles made of milk chocolate with gold-plated widows that stretched toward another sky, another heaven, another layer in the great beyond. All day, and it was always daytime, God played a chocolate piano that had no white keys, and the music fell onto white-clad angels moved to monastic silence, like chocolate rain.
    Over spring break of fifth grade, I started my period. I was the only girl in my class who had gotten it, and I was both ashamed and prideful. It did not go the way of the pancake ovaries and uterus with a smiling mother, sensitive and informative and helpful, helming the spatula, like we saw in the video at school. Instead, I was camping near the swamp with Corey and Marcus when it happened. A canoe’s ride away from home, I was surrounded by birds that we’d maimed with overcocked BB guns. Instead, my mother was nowhere to be found and I had to sneak the cordless phone from the living room, leaves still nestled in my matted hair, while my father watched television after work. I was not allowed to use the telephone unless I stayed in the room with my father and he approved the person I was calling. When I told him I wanted to call my mom, he demanded to know why. “Because,” I told him, which wasn’t enough. We went around and around like that until I was sobbing, pressed into a corner, and I finally told him the reason: blood. With that, we were both defeated, and I was permitted to leave the room. After I called my mom at work, hiding in the bathroom, she bought me a new denim dress that buttoned to the neck and still screamed “girl,” and my father looked awkward and angry. He would stay that way for years.
    A few weeks later, when I still believed in my chocolate heaven, my parents decided I would take a bus to the Baptist church in the next town over every Sunday. While my father mowed the lawn with his shirt off and my mother napped or washed the dishes, I would go to church. My brother got to stay home, presumably because he was a boy. It could have been that they knew I’d been looking at the Playboy magazines in our bathroom, wedged beneath the stack of mismatched towels at my eye level. But no one mentioned that, and in any case, no one removed the magazines.
    Once I was unloaded from the creaking bus and brought inside the aluminum-sided structure that was the church, strangers asked me if I was ready to be saved. This preceded the asking of my name and the shaking of hands, which was bad manners. From what I needed to be saved, I wasn’t sure. I wondered if my mother knew about that, but I said, “I am.”
    A teary-eyed woman ushered me into a semicircle of souls volunteered for saving, all adolescent girls like me. Together, we formed an arc around another woman with curly hair and thick thighs. There were plenty of fat girls in church, I noticed. My father had told me that if I got fat, no one would marry me. The width of my hips concerned a shocking number of people, and I sensed that I was growing too quickly for their liking. In fifth grade, I was five feet, five inches tall and 103 pounds and already a B-cup. The other girls my age still looked like children; the boys snapped my bra and called me names. I was an island of growth and hormones.
    “Do you accept Jesus as your savior?” the woman asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Will you let Him into your