BETWEEN US GIRLS
Eva Hauserová
My mother was always completely impossible when she tried to talk to me in
confidence woman to woman,as they say.I couldn’t stand it.
That evening I had come back from a date
with Jirka and I was feeling rather schizophrenic,because on the one hand,it
was extremely irritating that I was nineteen and still a virgin,but on the other,those
dates with him left me feeling utterly drained.Jirka would always set off silently,
walking at an unbearable pace,and wouldn’t slow down until we reached some distant
corner of a park,or the wasteland beyond city limits where neglected patches
of grass nestled in between enclosed ots.And then he would start to undress
me,regardless of whether it was cold or hot, regardless of whether it was light
or dark,regardless of whether there were people around or not.It bothered me
terribly:before,I had never realised that I needed privacy for sex,solitude
and half-light,but now it was quite clear to me.
I began to consider the possibility that
I might solve the problem by taking him home.On Friday evenings,my mother was
almost always away already from girlhood I had been used to having Friday evenings
to myself.She returned ong after midnight.But a strange thing happened: somehow,quite
selfishly,I found I didn’t want to sacrifice that time to Jirka.Or was it that
I didn’t want to let an intruder,a stranger,into our flat?
I wasn’t sure,and I needed to think it
through.I wanted to creep off to my room to consider it,but my mother wouldn’t
let me.
When I took some emmental out of the fridge
in the kitchen and started to nibble it bit by bit (in the evening,I don’t eat
anything except a little cheese,even when I’m hungry,and even though Jirka keeps
on telling me I should put on weight perhaps just for that reason I want to
slim down and get his goat),my mother came out of the living room and,despite
the fact that she knows I can’t stand it,she sat down next to me.She pushed
the magazines I had been trying to read while I was eating to the other end
of the table,and cleared her throat.She was in a proper tizzy,and was almost
unable to speak she was always like that when she wanted to have a heart to
heart.
“Ah,erm…you know,Monika,we have to talk
about something…”
I stared at her reproachfully,without a
word,and chewed my cheese. Why couldn’t she leave me in peace,when I came home
tired after a hectic day?
“I can’t let it wait any longer.You’re
a grown woman now,and I see you’re going out on dates with boys…”
“Mum,for God’s sake,I’ve already read a
whole library about sexual behaviour and contraception and sexually transmitted
diseases.At school we constantly have some kind of compulsory sex education
classes.I can’t even imagine a more boring topic!So don’t bloody start,I’m not
a ittle girl!”
My mother flushed crimson and winced.She
put on an important expression,which means that she frowned sternly,puckered
her mouth, and started to take an incredibly ong time to choose her words.She
also started to sweat.
“You know that I myself never…never had…anything
with a man… Well,in short,I think that you and I are different from other women.It’s
a very peculiar thing,and I’ve never spoken with you about it openly, because…”She
threw her arms up helplessly,choked nervously,and then burst out:“Because you
wouldn’t believe it.”She fell silent and looked at me almost pleadingly.She
was waiting to see if I would buy it and whether I would hear her out.
I felt my blood pressure rising in response.What,for
heaven’s sake,was this supposed to mean?Did my mother have some kind of bizarre
fixation? It was true that she had always avoided men for as long as I could
re- member,but…What could she have in mind?Was she perhaps a lesbian? Or was
she terribly afraid of something?
“You told me that my father died before
I was born,”I reminded her.
“Well,”my mother’s crimson blush changed
into a scatter of red blotches,spread unevenly over her ashen features,and she
lowered her voice to the limit of audibility.“It wasn’t that he died,exactly,it’s
more that…he was absorbed!”
“What?”I almost screamed.I was starting
to feel genuinely afraid for her,perhaps for the whole of my world,my home but
at that moment,I wasn’t quite able to think it through to all its consequences.
“You know,I didn’t believe my mother either,I
was horrified when she started to hint that something was amiss.I thought then
that she’d com- pletely flipped her id…but it was true.Did you know that,under
certain circumstances,the embryos of certain animals mice,for ex-ample can be
absorbed back into the womb?Perhaps when the female meets a more desirable male?”
No,I didn’t know that.I shivered just to
think of it.But in the final analysis,it was only something done by mice.And
besides,an adult human male was not just a ball of cells ike the embryo of a
mouse.
I shook my head and shrugged by shoulders,both
at once,unable to utter a word.
My mother continued brokenly:“My whole
life…I’ve had the feeling..........