Give Me, I Give Thee

The girls in our town have always been hungry. I watch from the window to see them pluck handfuls of grass, ripe with pesticides, and masticate until their tongues are stained. Others nibble at their fingertips and at the end of their hair, biting the keratin into neat little pieces with their teeth. I can smell hunger on them, sweet as honey, sour as urine. 

When I bake, as I frequently do, I leave out the goods to cool on the windowsill, inviting the girls to snatch handfuls of sunflower bread, of chocolate brioche, of baklava and pavlova. But no matter how many girls pass by, most of them are too afraid to eat, to take what it is that I freely offer. They know the adage by heart: If you keep a girl hungry, she’ll shower you in diamonds. If you make her fed, she’ll reward you with toads. 

On Spring Festival, Mother’s Day, June First—or any of the other occasions warranting a church bake sale—our mothers baked cakes, but we were never permitted to eat them. Our self-control was tested by bakery boxes and glass-domed platters containing buttercream and lemon glaze; angel food cake, ripe with sugared berries; white cake with silver sugar petals circling the centre, embedded with sugared metallic spheres. These cakes arrived at the church whole.

My mother handed me a Viennese plum cake one afternoon, and I could smell the butter on it. The fruit, pitted and sliced, gleamed violet, bright with sugar, edges darkened. I ate it all in my bedroom, spoon in one hand, the other shoved down the waistband of my skirt. I was desperate to taste, to fill up my stomach and my cunt, and even when my door opened and my mother stepped inside, I only swallowed. I didn’t even spit in shame.

“You deserve whatever you get,” she said, and oh, I did, I did. I knew that, even then. 

*

There are two types of girls in the world: diamonds and toads. The lucky ones spill gemstones when they speak, cutting their teeth and tongues on garnets and pearls and aquamarines. In between the jewels, they drop roses, black-eyed daisies, calla lilies, or poppies. They may need new teeth, 3-D printed enamel attached to silver plugs, by the age of thirty, but at least their teeth have been ruined by beauty. 

Throughout my childhood, I was taught that the virtuous—the good and the chaste—got the diamonds. The dykes and the queers and the fat girls, the girls-born-boys and the boys-born girls, we got the toads. The only good thing a toad could do with herself was to follow the directive to get thee to a nunnery, and gag herself on vows and strips of fabric. 

 “Don’t be surprised when you’re a toad-spitter,” my mother would say, crude colloquialism that it was, whenever she caught me with cake (the Viennese plum was my favourite). I seemed almost certainly a future toad-licker, frog-kisser, snake-sucker. Not my language, but the words my mother used with her ladies church group after a few glasses of vodka-laced punch. A peony, pink and vibrantly striped with broken red, fell from her mouth. 

But, to their shock and hers and mine, I dropped my first freshwater pearls one afternoon. I was murmuring to myself in my bedroom, talking through my history homework, when I felt something in my mouth. I pinched my lower lip, pulling it taut, and reached inside. Freshwater pearls weren’t as good as real pearls, lustrous rosy ones or smooth black spheres, but my mother took them from me, jaw clicking in the way that the dentist warned her about. 

I saved one as large as a sunflower seed, and tucked it into the space between two floorboards in my room, enshrined in an envelope. Baby’s first jewel.   

*

I think about this—the pearls, my mother, how little I used to eat—as I butcher this week’s meat. It’s cheaper to buy whole birds, so I raise my fists and bring them down on a chicken’s vertebrae, snapping it. Spatchcocking is the term, pushing their wings above their necks so that they can roast more evenly. I handle turkeys, partridges, even old-fashioned pheasants and Cornish hens. I sprinkle their limp bodies with salt, and stuff their cavities with bay leaves. I drape the birds’ pimpled skin in bacon strips, and roast them until the fat liquefies and hisses in the oven. 

My first act of freedom was to go to a grocery store. Nora and I purchased veal chops, blue cheese, Italian ground espresso, English muffins, flour, sugar, orange juice, maple candy, and green olives stuffed with roasted garlic. I didn’t know how to cook, then, so we ended up spreading the olives and the candy on the plate, a meal a child would make. 

*

I talked enough that I could take my speaking into the jeweler’s and come home with strands of pearls studded with rubies, necklaces that I could wind around my knuckles, forearms, and neck. I could fill my room with snapdragons and pansies, lilacs and nasturtiums. But the flowers I dropped off at the hospital, and the pearls I gave to my mother. The rest of them, the small flawed sapphires and rubies and garnets, I sold to companies that produce the tips of record needles and drills, or else use them in the building of lasers, as a way to concentrate and then diffuse the light. 

The things we drop from our lips become more and less valuable, depending on the frequency in which they appear in the world. But we are a cunning species. When we have a surfeit, we create new uses: agate and amethyst crushed into powders swallowed for respiratory disease; rubies crusting the walls of art galleries to best reflect the light on Mona Lisa; emeralds refracting heat inside the boilers in our basements. 

Jewels and flowers—or toads and snakes—don’t appear with every word. The ratio, although variable, is closer to every other sentence. And everything has an effect. We have to be more careful with insects, now, especially the pollinators and pest-killers. Spiders are cradled in tissue paper, bees guided from apple tree to raspberry bush. Teenagers go toad-killing where they used to have paper routes. 

Sometimes I catch those teenagers near our cottage, and, spitting chunks of jet and tiger’s eye at their feet as I swear, I chase them off. After a few incidents, I hear they call me a witch, and I don’t mind. Our cottage is not in the woods, not precisely, but in a wooded lot that turned wild after a three-house fire. Developer disagreements mean that the shells of the houses are still there, full of snakes and toads and frogs and lizards. 

“So we’re the witches in the woods,” Nora says, delighted by the thought. 

*

I met Nora at church-sponsored group for girls of a certain age and disposition. Diamonds like me, who barely earned the name. And the toads, the future nuns and factory workers, who would spend their days on assembly lines reciting manuals and spitting the resulting reptiles into plastic boxes. The room we sat in was thick with the smell of algae and dead water. 

“Say what you pray for,” trilled the woman in charge, cupping her fingers around her mouth. Nothing came, though; a woman’s jewels and toads slow with age.

 “I pray to be redeemed,” said Nicole mechanically, her fingers searching for a cigarette, echoing the phrase they wanted to hear. She had recently re-dyed her hair, this time to an onyx that seemed more like a shiny sheet of plastic than hair. We were old friends from junior high. She attended culinary school now, and brought us her failed cakes, the squashed Battenberg squares and the crumbling meringues. I wasn’t sure if she was a terrible cook or if she thought that was what we deserved. I watched a coral snake squirm out of Nicole’s mouth before she leaned forward and retched, spitting its body into the basket. 

“I pray for a goddamn break.” Cara rarely spoke, preferring to remain silent most days. When she did, soft porous gemstones like coral and amber and onyx fell out of her mouth. 

“I pray,” said another whose name is probably now Mary Francis, or Mary Rose, or Mary Ursula, knowing her. It came out garbled by a toad. She coughed, trying to cover her mouth, but the horntoad that emerged caught her lip. She sneezed blood and mucus on the floor near Nicole’s feet.

“Jesus,” Nicole said.  

Some kids, I recall, kept horntoads as pets then, but nobody moved to take it up.

“It’s all right,” said the last girl. Nora, she’d said. Her hair was nearly the same colour as mine, dark enough that it could swallow the moonlight. A midwife toad, just a few inches wide, popped from between her lips. She unfurled her tongue and let it climb onto her palm. 

 “Go screw yourself,” Nicole said to her. The pallid screw, that was interesting. I wondered if that meant that she liked the new girl. Nicole and I used to drive around after our work at the gas station ended. We would drive up the canyon together, eating pilfered candy. 

 “Just screw?” I said. 

“Fine,” said Nicole, “you can go fuck yourself.” 

We laughed for different reasons; some of us were desperate for any excuse to laugh, some hiding our shock at hearing the word so as to not seem like prudes, and some laughed just because we had to sit in this circle, clutching weak coffee with low-fat creamer, green packets of false sugar, waiting for Nicole’s dry carrot cake, overstuffed with walnuts. We were allowed to eat all we wanted now that we were fixed, for good or for ill. I was hungry for it already. 

After the meeting was over, I followed Nora outside. She gestured to her midwife toad. 

“I’m taking him down to the pond.”

“Him?”

“Midwife toads, the males, they fertilize the eggs by wrapping their legs around them.” 

I had never heard anyone speak about reptiles like that. I wanted to say something wise, about how tender her curiosity was. But her gray eyes looked as eyes sometimes do when they open after sleep. Her body was soft in all the places that tend to softness, like mine, but every curvature, every joint, was perfectly rendered, etched with a chisel. 

“After the female lays the eggs, he’ll have to keep them wet,” she explained. “So I’ll take him by the creek.” 

I didn’t remind her that the teenage toad-killers would almost certainly smash this toad with a shovel or brick before any eggs could be laid. I didn’t warn her that next day we would find constellations of raised mosquito bites on our skin, in spite of the number of reptiles by the creek. Mosquitos are like that. Persistent. Certain other insects have evolved to cope too. Moths are more toxic, they say. The monarch butterfly takes an extra generation to cross the continent. 

While Nora talked, tiny frogs, golden and lovely, emerged from her mouth, small enough that they didn’t interrupt her speech. I wondered if they might be poisonous, and when we stopped, I said so.

She shrugged. “It wouldn’t matter if they were. Nobody attacks their own mother. And maybe we all look alike to them—maybe that’s what keeps our toad-hunters safe.” 

We sat in silence by the pond for a while after that, smelling mold and sulfur and dying green things.

C.A. SCHAEFER‘s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, Phantom Drift, Passages North, and elsewhere. A former editor of Quarterly West, she holds a Ph.D. from the University of Utah. She lives in Salt Lake City with her wife and two literary cats.