I stared at her in surprise and then flushed myself, thinking she must be thinking of Ilsit and wondering if my sister understood something I did not.
Magda pointed to the top of the fruit, where it had once hung from a tree and where the white part of the rind was most thick. “Do you know about this part of your sex, the part at the top?”
We both nodded wordlessly, though I was still unsure what she meant. I knew it was highly sensitive and that it had something to do with a woman’s lust, but I understood nothing else. I knew the inside of my sex grew wet when Thane so as much touched the skin on the inside of my wrist and that it allowed for his fingers to slide inside me and that it felt good. But that exact part of myself, the top of my sex, I did not know anything about. I had thought it was merely more sensitive because it was outside.
Magda tapped that place on the lady fruit half. “This is the most tender part of you. It is where pleasure comes from. It is like the neck of a bottle. All water that fills a vessel has to pass through the neck of it. This part of you is tied to the rest of your pleasure parts, your breasts, your neck, your stomach, the inner parts of your arms. So ifyou are touched there and you like that touch, it will awaken the top of your sex.”
Rowena had brought up both of her hands to cover her mouth. She was staring at her lap, eyes wide, face still hot.
I sat across the table from Magda, embarrassed but fascinated.
“Why are you telling us this?” my twin burst out, hands pulled downward to her neck as if to cover the color there.
Magda set the fruit down and stared at Rowena. “Because you have been told your whole lives how a woman’s body can make and grow and birth a baby, and that’s a fine thing. That’s amagicalthing. But no one here, no one in the low country, ever tells a woman what else her frame can do. Even if Rodwin isn’t in a town. I think a woman has a right to know, don’t you?”
“I suppose,” Rowena replied, bringing her hands back to her mouth.
“Now, a lover can touch you here,” Magda went on touching the top of the rind. “With their hands, their tongue, or when they put their own sex against or inside yours?—”
Rowena made a squeaking noise behind her hands.
Magda gave a slow blink and then said, “But it is best if you touch yourself there first. In different ways. So you know what you like, and then you can tell your lover.” She gave a heavy sigh. “Am I truly embarrassing you? There’s no shame in this, girls. It’s natural. It’s how Mother Earth made women.”
We both looked away.
“Am I not allowed to speak of my own faith?” the midwife asked.
“Please go on,” I pleaded, and Rowena gave a shy nod next to me.
She let a beat of silence pass between the three of us. And then she continued. “This is the great gift of the earth. It is something you can always give to yourself. It is your own magic that has nothing to do with anyone. It serves no purpose other than to give yourself a gift. And that is the wonder of it. The church will tell you it is pointless for a woman to come the way a man does. I tell you the same. Itispointless, and that is the beauty of it. It serves a different purposefor each woman. And it means something different to her each time. It is her own secret to share with whom she chooses.”
“Like a husband?” asked Rowena, and there was a strangeness in her eyes.
Magda eyed my sister pointedly and then shrugged. “Like a husband. Or a lover. Or even another woman if that’s what?—”
“Another woman?” I asked, my eyes darting between my sister and my mentor, who continued to eye Rowena quizzically.
“Some women prefer other women as lovers,” explained Magda, pulling her gaze to me. “It is common in Tintar. Not talked about openly, but it’s common. As it is for two men to find each other that way.”
“But—Coupling is for making children,” my twin argued.
Magda set the lady fruit down and crossed her arms. “There are plenty of children who go without meals and sleep under thin blankets or none at all. You see I simply cannot believe that is true. Not when so many children are borne to piss-poor parents.”
“The Book of Rodwin?—”
“Was written by a man who should have touched his own sex a bit more, if you ask me,” snapped Magda. “Rowena, you’re a smart girl. What is this clinging you have to a faith that would make you a slave of?—”
There was a scrape of wood on wood as my sister stood from her chair and stalked out of the house, the creaky front door shutting behind her.
“She is more reserved about these things,” I said to Magda.
“I owe her an apology,” sighed the old woman. “I keep expecting her to be as smart about matters of the heart and the soul as she is about the body.”
“Is this not about the body?” I asked.
“It is. But in order to simplify it, to understand it as merely a thing her body can do for herself, a woman has to get past all the murkiness of her church and her god and her priest making it a thing about the darkness of her heart or her soul.” Magda stood up and leftthe table to peer out the window that faced the garden side of the house. “She’s in the peas. I’ll go and apologize.”
And perhaps, as rage was my default, after I had figured out what Magda had been trying to teach us—while she and Rowena were at another birth—sitting in the stables, my back pushed up against a hay bale, skirts raised, as I caught my breath, an amazed laugh on my lips, I found myself growing angry that anyone had ever wanted to take this away from me, that it was either hidden from women or condemned when it was discovered.
