Paradise Lost

I run my hand over my stomach, uncomfortably stretched in my eighth month of pregnancy. It seems like the only noticeable thing about me, these days. According to my family, my church, my school, my everyone, I’m just a suitcase for a child people pray will turn out better than I have. Literally. I’ve heard Mama say those words, eyes clamped shut, clutching her crucifix. 

My thighs stick together in the sweltering heat of the cramped sanctuary. The windows of the little Catholic church are dragged up a few inches, but the muggy breeze that crawls through the gaps only seems to be ushering in mosquitoes. Their whining melds with the priest’s monotone and the sound of my mother’s breathing. A symphony of things I put up with. 

A chipping, porcelain statue of the Virgin Mary stands at the front of the sanctuary, beside the lace-draped table bearing the Eucharist. Her painted, downcast eyes examine demurely folded hands. Mild, peaceful. I feel his hands on me, exploring me, consuming me. I am not immaculate.

Shame settles into my pores as I drown in the Virgin's feminine perfection. Purity was my prize, and I lost it. My swollen belly snuffs out my shot at even an honorable mention. What is there to honor, after all? The squirming embarrassment is embedded in my body, braided in my hair, stamped inside my eyelids. Everyone comments on how young I am, but if I’m so young, how have I already fallen so short? 

I realize I’ve forgotten to blink, and promptly do so, yanking my attention back to the priest. I let his words shove themselves into my ears, devoutly ignoring Mary’s phantom stare burning into my body. 

Mama’s elbow jabs into my ribs. 

“Stop that, Lizzie.” she hisses. 

My fingers jump away from my mouth. Mama has always hated my nail-biting habit. My hands wander back to my rounded belly instead, where little fluttering kicks hum through my flesh, imprinting on my palms. Would anyone in this oppressively moral building understand, I wonder, if I told them about the tug-of-war raging in my brain? Would they believe me if I told the truth: that the flutters make me ache to hold my baby in my arms, and simultaneously itch to chew my nails to the quick and then farther, gnaw my fingers off so that everyone can see my God-given blood dripping scarlet onto the holy floorboards?

My eyes are wrenched back to Mary. Her pull is irresistible. My brokenness is the south end of a magnet, her purity the north. I study every line of her enameled figure, pastels and slim curves and modest flowing shawls. Real women don’t look like that. Hell, the real Mary couldn’t have looked like that. How come this fake thing has my conscience in a choke hold? 

My hands drift back to my mouth, the plastic taste of fingernails grinding between my teeth. The morphing of plastic into pennies is a natural progression, and the blood on my lips is a welcome distraction from Mary's bloodless perfection. The mother of Christ would never do anything as obscene as bleed, right? But the mother of a bastard can do nothing else.

When Mama jabs me in the ribs again, I jab her back. She inhales sharply, and her anger washes over me. It can't touch me, though. It is as non-corporeal, as absolutely insignificant as my discomfort. Why is everyone looking at me? Wait, are they? Or do I exist at all? My eyes peel off of Mary, flicking over the congregation. Am I just an empty space on this sticky, lacquered pew? Can anyone see me? Do they ever look away? I don't know which is worse. I am a shadow, and a thunderclap. A spectacle. A flea.

An invisible hand grips my chin and twists my head toward that godforsaken statue. I am flesh. She is glass. How dare she look down on me? Her righteousness is as absurd as my guilt. Both are equally abrasive, like splinters jammed under my fingernails. 

Chanting breaks through my simmering reverie. Hail Mary full of grace…

What a waste, to add three dozen voices to the entire planet’s Catholic population, all regurgitating the same syllables from now until our own funerals. Maybe the Virgin would appreciate a little originality, now and again. 

The metallic edges of my crucifix pendant bite into my palm as I wrap my hand around it and stare down the statue like a gladiatorial opponent. How different are we, really, Madonna and lost cause? The question detonates an untapped anger in my brain, spraying shrapnel words inside my skull. Silent. Cutting. Candid.

“Hey. You. Least ignorable female to ever live. Can you see me? Can your perfect, dead eyeballs see me? Do I look like a stain on the pretty blank page of immaculately knocked up girlhood? That’s what everyone in this town thinks of me. But these people, these people who look at me like Jezebel reincarnate, worship you. Must be nice, huh?” 

The rising tide of reckless words in my head is pressing on the inside of my lips. The unrighteous indignation claws out of my mouth in a torrent of staccato muttering. Muffled, buried in the chanting mass of other people’s prayers, the way a woman’s anger is supposed to be. 

“We’re not so different, you and I. Go on, Holy Mother of Christ, deny it. I dare you. You were, what, fifteen? Sixteen? Same here. Someone more powerful than you was so persuasive that yes fell out of your mouth? Same again. You weren’t married. Would you look at that, neither am I!” 

I hold my left hand out towards the statue, wiggling my ring finger. Mama whisper-shouts, “Lizzie, what are you doing?” 

I drop my hand, but the torrent of words is unstoppable. 

“You went tiptoeing to your man, told him you were pregnant, and he threw you away like a used up tube of toothpaste. You had nothing left in you he wanted. Guess what? We’re in the same boat again, you and I. Lucky for you, our merciful Father was considerate enough to tip off your fiance that you weren’t a slut. How nice for you.” 

My hand wrenches the crucifix from around my neck, scattering beads across the floor. Mama grabs my wrist, so tightly that her flesh feels like metal.

"Let go of me, Elizabeth!" I snap. She deserves to be reminded that I am Elizabeth too. That hissing Lizzie at me can't separate her from my shame. That if I am a real woman, she sure as hell is too.

When her iron grip doesn't loosen, I yank my own wrist, clutched in her fingers, to my mouth. I bite. She shrieks. I smile. We both bleed like mothers.

My muscles move of their own accord, audacity pummeling shame into the dirt, where it lays there, not bleeding, because it is as fake as the glass statue who judges me. My arms shove my body up, knees straighten, swollen ankles creak. The prayers around me falter. Good. Mary can manage without.

I stomp, trip, stagger, catch myself, and stride straight up the narrow aisle as if carried on a riptide. I’m too sick of guilt to care that the liturgy has wilted to silence. I’m too worn thin on suffocating shame to swallow the mumbling that swells to a shriek in my throat, bursting out of me in a furious lament. I scream at the inanimate porcelain, because the real girl who once lived is worshiped and I am hated. Two thousand years ago, we could have been neighbors. Friends. I could have been the pregnant Elizabeth whose child leapt for joy inside of her when Mary came to call. But instead she is glass and I am flesh and I want to shatter her.

“We both love our inconvenient children! I didn’t abort it, did I? Look at me, moral in exactly the way you told me to be! And yet everyone still stares at me like my child is dragging me to Hell!” 

No one mutters. No one interrupts. I am too real to love and I am am too alive to silence.

I stalk up the three shallow steps to the platform from which the priest conducts the service, flanked by the body and the blood and the inanimate Virgin. I stand, recklessly guiltless, in front of her. My voice bounces off the walls of the sanctuary. The windows might rattle, but I can’t hear over the rage rushing in my ears like blood. 

“So if we’re so similar, how come your motherhood was a gift from paradise and mine is loss? How come this lot-” I gesture expansively over my shoulder to the sickeningly pious congregation “-looks at me like dirt and you like a deity? How come I’m a slut and you’re a saint? How come my child is a bastard and yours is GOD?” 

The last word echoes around the church, slowly absorbed into the stifling heat. My cotton dress sticks to my real body and real blood drips from under my fingernails and I glare at the fake woman with real tears salty at the corners of my mouth.

I don’t have to look to know that every member of the congregation is crossing themselves as I stare down this pale imitation of another teenage girl who made a choice, and say with crystal clear frigidity, 

“Go to Hell.” 

The poke in the ribs is like cold water dumped on my head, ripping my eyes from Mary to fix on Mama. She’s looking down at me. Everyone seems to be standing up. 

“Get up, Mass is over.” She glances at the Virgin, then back to me. Confusion is painted on her face like the pupils in Mary’s glass eyes. “Lizzie, what are you staring at?”

I shrug. “Nothing.”