[Editor's note: be sure to read the first and second installments of this four-part short story.]
Soon comes the day of Tandy’s mother’s vagina sitting around exposed at the breakfast table only now it’s become hard to see because her mother has gained weight and distended belly has descended upon the vagina, seemingly swallowing it whole. Tandy didn’t see this coming.
“Gimme a U,” Tandy cheers to herself. She has switched to Alphabits Cereal and has the F and the C and the K, and is looking for the U. She has poured so much cereal out in her quest that she has a pile-up of letters heaped into a sugary triangle. She considers making the U out of a W or is it an M, but that would be cheating and too pointy where it should be rounded. She looks at her mother in the housecoat and wonders if she ever swore to herself as a much younger woman that she would never be a woman in a housecoat. Tandy thinks she sees a U but it is a C, the wrong way instead. She considers, but no, she wants to keep it authentic. The Alphabits Cereal box is for the non-birth control sized families, and is grossly oversized. Tandy thinks if fortune tellers can do it with tea leaves, she ought to be able to do it with a language cereal, and what a novel way to teach kids who are not good with books how to read.
“I ’m on to something here,” Tandy thimbles, which for her, is a think/mumble hybrid.
“Yeah, so before you go congratulatory on yourself here, maybe you should think about how you didn’t become a real teacher so there’s no reasonable way for you to test your cereal-reading theory.”
The voice is not her mother’s. The housecoated woman looks straight away, not really connecting optically with anything in the kitchen. There is a boarded-up house quality to her visage. Tandy starts to say something, mouth open, words almost ready to fling themselves out, but then she shuts it, slamming her lips together. Their collision causes her head to lurch forward.
“I’m just saying.”
Tandy looks down, considers the floor, then looks straightaway at the vagina which is, it would seem, looking straight at her. The electricity in Tandy’s brain seems to be dying out, fizzing away its goodbyes to the rest of her.
“I’ve known you since forever, you know,” so says her mother’s vagina. “Before you were you. You-you. I knew you when you were a sperm and when you were an egg. A different
sperm and a different egg and you would have been a whole different you. But it didn’t turn out that way. You turned out to be you.” The vagina sighs.
“Did you just ... ?” Tandy starts to ask.
“Vart?” the vagina gets indignant. “No, I didn’t vart. I sighed. A sigh is a controlled release of air. A vart is not. I was controlled.”
Tandy shrugs her mouth. “Okay.”
“No. No,” the vagina demands. “You’re just acting like you believe me. You’re not talking to the asshole, you know.”
Tandy checks in with her mother. Nothing. The F, the C, and the K are swollen with milk, bloated and listless.
“You can maybe understand,” Tandy says. She’s tentative, walking a fine outline around the words. “how different [?] it is speaking to, well, a ... the ... down there.”
“Say it,” the vagina says.
“Oh no,” Tandy replies. “I’m perfectly comfortable. Why label? Why get messy with name calling?”
“Because a vagina is a messy label,” the vagina says.
Tandy announces how she is going to be late for work. She pushes the kitchen chair out and when she goes to step away, it topples over onto the floor. The thud seems to last forever on the checkered linoleum.
“Idiot,” the vagina says as Tandy hurriedly straightens up the mess.
“Don’t leave your bowl in the sink,” Tandy’s mother screams. “I’m not the slave.”
“It talked to me,” Tandy tells Christoph and then Marlys. Marlys picked up a ‘1000 and One Things You Can Make With Pipe Cleaners’ class to make up for the one she lost to Christoph.
“No way!” Christoph makes a long hole with his mouth framed by one hand on either side. It is a classic ‘oh my god’ look that he wears well.
Marlys has to sit down after being told. She grabs two seats in the lobby that are beneath an air vent that constantly tussles invisible fingers into her hair. She is not one to wear wind- blown well. “No wonder they’re dying off of pneumonia,” Marlys says.
“Let me see the vagina,” Christoph says, seriously.
“Like you have anything to say to a vagina,” says Marlys. When a pipecleaner she is twisting will not twist the way she wants it to, she mashes it up and slams it onto the floor. “Goddamnit. There are NOT 1000 and one things you make from a pipecleaner. I think there might be only 2. My classes shouldn’t have been cnacelled!”
Sensing the peeling of a jealousy, Christoph takes off with the parting words, “I am serious about that vagina, and nobody knows what to say to a talking vagina anyway because they don’t talk. We could do a sleepover and surprise it in the morning. It would be a vagina land gang-up.”
“He’s never even seen the inside of a vagina,” Marlys says when Christoph leaves. “Other than the one he came out of and he probably had his eyes shut real tight. Listen, I read once that if you are being haunted by a ghost you are supposed to confront that ghost head-on and ask it what it wants. So too with your mother’s vagina maybe. Ask that flap what it wants.” She collects her things. Pipecleaners fall everywhere. “Goddamn these things,” are her departing words.
Tandy decides that she would be embarrassed for her friends to see her mother’s vagina. She nixes the sleepover idea deciding, instead, to confront it like Marlys said.
“You can do this,” Marlys says in a phone call wishing Tandy well. “Oh and I’ve decided to add glitter to the whole pipecleaner experience. Glitter makes everything better. Pretend I’m throwing glitter on you, no maybe at you because I wouldn’t want to accidentally get any in your eyes ... oh just forget the whole glitter thing. Nothing will make these damn pipecleaners work.”
Christoph calls to make sure the outfit Tandy is wearing is vadge appropriate. “I don’t think there’s anything that is exactly vadge appropriate, I mean, I don’t think anything can be deemed particularly appropriate when you’re confronting a vagina, but you still should go with good flow, breathability, comfort and stunning. If nothing else you can dazzle that old vagina into remission. Beat down with flair. That’s it, of course. Am I your you-don’t-know-what-or-what guy? Flair. Bellbottoms. Wear a pair and you’ll be wearing the new superhero costume of daughters confronting mothers everywhere.”
“Can I ask you a question?” Tandy asks, calling Marlys back.
“Why not?” Marlys answers. “I’ve got time. The fucking glitter spilled. I just finished cleaning up the goddamned pipecleaners again for the millionth time and now the glitter. My floor looks like a tacky downtown whore exploded all over it. All I need are some feathers and venereal disease.”
Tandy, downstairs in the kitchen, thinks she hears her mother getting up in the screaming of the floorboards. She asks Marlys if a vagina has ever spoken to her. Marlys, in a heap on her sparkly floor, thinks. “I can’t say that I have. My own vagina doesn’t even talk to me. I don’t think it even likes me. Do you know what it’s like when your own vagina wishes it was on somebody else?”
Sharon Goldner is the author of numerous fiction pieces, including George Stories over at dispatch litareview.
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