MOON PARTY by KATIE CRAIG

Katie Craig is a mother, writer and teacher in and around Edinburgh, Scotland - she has written comedy for BBC Scotland and her short stories have appeared in several anthologies. Her first novel, Delivery, is seeking a publisher, so if you are one, and liked the above, or didn't, and have pointers, please get in touch, she'd love to hear from you.

Moon Party

by Katie Craig

Mum was repressed, she told us. “Was, not is…” a flourish of her non-steering hand emphasised the point as she navigated the streets of Hull out her tiny, bashy, Mini Cooper. “That’s why I grew up to be a sex-therapist - if you can call it growing up.” Her habit of being somehow both boastful and self-effacing simultaneously, I attributed, back then, to her Americanness. “I was so repressed in my early twenties I couldn’t say the word condom. Say it girls, say “condom.”

“Condom!” we parroted in mindless unison from the back of the little orange car. We were well-drilled, there was no point resisting, she’d never let up, never ever. 

“Yes! Condom. I just couldn’t get the word -condom..”  

We rolled our kohl-penciled eyes behind the thick fringes we’d both grown, in part, I think, as a sort of defence measure against this chat.

“…I couldn’t get it outta my mouth,”

I giggled.

Mum giggled too, but wasn’t easily derailed. “I couldn’t say the word, let alone go get the thing outta my purse, or put one on. I just had to hope the guy would have the idea by himself, or stall, in the hope he’d get the hint.” 

“And if he didn’t?” I asked, despite myself, half-wondering if “the guy” might have been my father, flinching at the surreptitious dead-arm Halle doled out as punishment for breaking our broken unspoken pact- don’t encourage her. “What if he didn’t?”

“Well that’s how I got genital warts, Honey. And I’m lucky that’s all I got.”

“Moooooommmm.” Halle’s mortification presented the perfect opportunity- which I took- to dead-arm her back. “Mooommm,” Halle complained, working up to tears, but from the front-seat, shorn of context, our mother did not perceive the shift in source of her grievance. Or, maybe she did. As I say, she was not easily derailed. 

“What, Halle?” Mom asked. “Eleven is the perfect age to learn how to say “condom” with confidence.”

“So was ten,” Halle complained. She was right, a year previously, mum had introduced us to this stuff, chasing us ‘round the house flourishing a cucumber, a banana, those little silver packets. She hadn’t let up, since. “I know how to say it. I don’t need to know about your… uh, warts, thanks.”

“Ok then. Say lube.” 

“Mooooooooom!”

“Say it. This town has the highest teen pregnancy rate in Europe, and the second to worst education system: if I don’t teach you this stuff, what will? Bitter experience?”

“You chose to move us here.”

“Tell it to your tiny violin. Say lube. Say spermicidal lube.”

“This is child abuse, Mum.”

“You feel uncomfortable *saying* lube? You’ll feel a lot more uncomfortable if you don’t use any.”

“Jessuzfuckingchrist, Mum.” 

“Watch your language, Lady, she told me, swerving wonkily into her grocery-store parking slot. “Vaginal dryness is nothing to be ashamed of, but it’s an issue, you know, for a lot of women at some point in their lives. When I was breastfeeding you girls I dried up like the Sahara.”

“Too much information, Mom,” I told her.

“No such thing, Dingaling.”

When we had our first periods Mum, of course, made the most massive fuss. I walked home from school, and “Welcome to Womanhood,” was hand-written in an elaborate font across a six foot banner pinned across our front porch, also trimmed with helium balloons. Halle cried over my “moon party,” she was jealous, she wanted her period too, if it came with balloons and attention, but when it was time for her own she was just that same pumped mix of mortification and sass that I had been. 

“You should ask your friends along, too” we were both told, but of course we’d rather have died. You told your best friend, maybe, when you got your period, but for the most part, hid away the bloody accoutrements like confessions of guilt, evidence that you had committed the crime of being gross. So the guests at these “moon-parties” were “aunties” who aren’t aunties, really but my mother’s friends. They gave us “grown up” gifts -makeup, a silver fountain pen, the sort of chocolate folk don’t generally waste on children- and we had champagne, which I might have liked more if mom hadn’t called the blackberry cassis that she poured into it a “blood sacrifice.”

“You were so, so, embarrassing,” I told her fondly, when she was dying.

“Damn straight, you were embarrassed by me, right? Not by sex, not by your body, not by…” she took a long, laborious breath, it sounded like the noise in the movies when they break and enter the haunted house, “not by asking for what you needed.” The horror- door creaked open another inch.

“It kind of worked.”

“Of course,” she said, with an effortful lazy wave of her IV-tubed hand. She had a few months left and there was no time for bullshit, not even hippy bullshit, which had always been her favourite flavour. 

When my mum was fourteen, I tell my daughter Thea, who is soon to be fourteen, she got her first period and freaked out: she thought she was dying.

“She didn’t know?”

I shake my head, and she told me, too, that when she was thirteen some kid in her class asked her what “virginity” meant.

“She didn’t know that?” Thea laughs, incredulous.

“Nope. But your gran, she was proud of her vocabulary, too embarrassed to say she didn’t know. She told them it was something to do with being a saint.”

“What’s a saint?” Charlie, asks, carefully putting the little white stars we’ve cut from fondant onto the blue-as-night-sky buttercream of the cupcakes with his pudgy little seven year old hands. It is Thea’s moon-party and she’s too cool to even be embarrassed by this. I fill the ice-bucket, leave the champagne and kir-royale to cool: our guests should be here too, “aunties” in inverted commas, Thea’s two best friends, and Thea’s actual Aunt, Halle, who flew from London to LA to be here, is currently upstairs, getting changed as per the dress-code: red. Thank God for my sister. I need her to hold my hand, as she needs to hold mine, to wordlessly acknowledge the presence of an absence as loud as Mum would, for sure, have been.