Stepping Into Crone by Jennifer Sinor

Crone, from the French, carogne, meaning carrion, carcass.

10.

At sixteen, she felt a boy’s tongue in her mouth for the first time. They were lying on the carpet of the living room in front of her parents’ stereo. Outside, mynah birds jabbered in the palms and neighborhood children galloped from one grassy lawn to the next. She could hear the scrape of a Big Wheel as it neared the end of the cul de sac. Her mother’s footsteps sounded above, first down the hall to the bathroom, then to the bedroom, then back to the bathroom again, water running. All the while, her boyfriend moved his warm, wet tongue in her mouth. 

They went to the Kam Drive-In on Saturday nights in the years just before Dolby Digital and THX rendered such experiences a relic. They never watched the movie, rarely even took the time to hang the speaker from the window. Instead, they headed for the backseat of his car, a black Nissan they called the D-mobile, his father’s car really, and found each other’s tongues.

She felt her first hard on accidentally, while fumbling in the moon-shot dark of the drive-in. The audio track clicked and popped in the tropical air and giant figures moved onscreen in front of them, the thin Hawaiian night gathering, waiting for the movie to be over so the darkness would be complete. Inside the car, she was running her hands along his jeans, not really thinking about where her hands travelled or what they touched. All of a sudden, though, her boyfriend groaned, clutched her at the elbow, his tongue now still in her mouth, paralyzed. She ran her hands back again, over the hard bulge in his pants. He groaned again, more desperate. She did it again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and he came with a sob. Every night after that, she would rub him the same way and every time he would come as though he were crying. In the flickering movie darkness, she searched his face for tears. 

What does it feel like? the girl once asked.

Like when you have to pee really bad and then you get to go.

She nodded her head in understanding.

From then on, when she remembered, she would hold her bladder until she thought she might burst, then run into the bathroom, rake her underwear to her knees, and release a flood of urine into the toilet. It felt good, she thought, the relief, her belly still quivering, but it never made her cry.

9.

When she was nine, her mother gave her a child’s illustrated book on sex: Peter Mayle’s Where Did I Come From? They sat on the floor of the family room in Seattle, and her mother opened the white cover. Outside, it rained in sheets, the spruce in the backyard bobbing in the wind. Her mother read. A cartoon man and woman strode the book naked, thin black squiggles curling into pubic hair. On the first page, the cartoon man and woman declared their love for one another, on the next, they took a bath together, and then came “the tickling feeling” and the “rubbing of parts” and the “giant shiver.”

Any questions, her mother asked.

She had none, but worried for years she could get pregnant by taking a bath. 

8.

Only once did she and her boyfriend make out in an actual bed, his bed, while his parents were away at work and his brother fucked his girlfriend in the shower down the hall.

They’re in the shower? she asked.

Yes.

Naked?

I suppose.

What are they doing, she asked, and couldn’t imagine, though she wondered if showers worked like bathtubs, if it meant they were in love.

Having sex, I guess.

Standing up?

That afternoon, they made out more intensely than usual, the shower down the hall acting as an erotic, or maybe as a license, the bed affording an obscene amount of space in comparison to the Nissan. He was wearing shorts rather than jeans, thin athletic shorts, so she could feel his erection. They rubbed against one another, his shorts, her shorts, his tongue, her hand. When he came, she felt his wetness on her thigh. 

A week later, she missed her period. Panicked, she told him.

Can sperm travel through fabric? she asked.

I don’t know, he said. They were on the phone, she in her bedroom at home and he huddled under the breakfast bar in his kitchen. Her chemistry homework lay scattered by her feet, and she could hear her mother preparing dinner downstairs.

Can you get pregnant without having sex? she asked.

I don’t know.

Ask your father.

Why? He was alarmed at the thought. His father was a large man with dark hair who was prone to mockery.

He’s a doctor. He’ll know if sperm can travel that way.

He’s a dentist not a doctor.

But he’ll know.

He said he would ask his brother who was home from college, but she didn’t trust anyone who would shower with his girlfriend.

In the end, her boyfriend talked with his mother, a woman who became pregnant as a teenager and raised two boys when she wasn’t more than a child herself. Just recently she had left his father, the dentist, moved out of the house they had lived in for twenty years to an apartment on the other side of the island. Now she arranged flowers in a florist shop. She bought them a pregnancy test.

Of course, it was negative. A day or so later, she bled, and she and her boyfriend rejoiced. His mother was relieved as well.

After the test, she didn’t know what to do with the two tiny urine-filled vials that hadn’t turned blue. She chose to hide them in her dresser drawer, underneath the swimsuits she no longer wore and several pairs of outdated eyeglasses.  For the next several years, when she came home from college, she would check just to be sure they were still there and still clear. 

7.

In college, she didn’t date. Boys scared her. They drank, they smoked, they followed her with their eyes when she walked past Broyhill Fountain on her way home from class. Instead, she studied and maintained a 4.0. 

Lisa, her freshman roommate, had grown up in western Nebraska where high desert prairie stretched in every direction and sex was something you did on the weekend because the town had no movie theater. Against her parent’s wishes, Lisa dated a boy named Curt, several years her senior and not in school. One day, she walked in on Lisa and Curt having sex in their dorm room, a small, cinderblock cell painted mustard yellow. One minute she was turning the key in the lock and thinking about the mail she might receive that day and the next she almost stumbled over two naked bodies twined in sheets. Their heads were where their feet would be, or one head was, or none, or both, a flurry of body and sheet, sweaty arms, the metal frame screeching against the tile floor. Much later she would recall Curt’s tan, his hard, brown body, a back long familiar with the sun. At the time, though, she only saw Lisa grab a pillow to cover her pale breasts.

I’m so sorry, Jennifer, Lisa said, but she had already shut the door, slammed it really, taken her key from the keyhole.

She had moved more than three thousand miles from her family who remained on Oahu, breathing air as soft as cotton. She had nowhere to flee, couldn’t go to her bed, so she knocked on the door of the RA, a woman with eyes blue like the ocean she had left behind, and cried.

When her mother described the emotional responsibility that came with sex, she heard abstinence. Or maybe it was Dr. Dobson’s Preparing for Adolescence that scared her into virginity. Or maybe she just didn’t have the chance as a teenager to have sex, wouldn’t have unzipped her boyfriend’s pants any sooner than she would have taken his penis into her mouth.  In college, she watched reruns of Remington Steele rather than go to frat parties. At least until she met her future husband.

6.

She fell in love with his tongue first and the quiet way it sent electricity through her body. When they first kissed on the steps of the Sheldon Museum of Art, the architecture building in front of them with its cathedral-like spires and stained-glass entrance, she could have been on the floor in front of her parents’ stereo. He was the first man she had kissed since her high school boyfriend. She was twenty-one.

Months later, they had sex. In her head, she was going to marry him so it wasn’t outside of marriage. She didn’t know he was also sleeping with her sorority sister. Even in the dead of winter, winds screaming across the plains and ice frozen to windshield and door handle, she made her boyfriend drive her back to the sorority house in the middle of the night so that no one would know that she was having sex. Under falling snow, she would stumble up the walk and enter the house, careful to use the back stairs, then slide into her bed without even changing her clothes. She fooled no one. The sorority even had a name for the girls who arrived home the way she did: the walk of shame.

It was only when she had her first orgasm that she would understand “the giant shiver,” how the physical world fell away in the hurricane of desire, but just as quickly her soon-to-be-husband would tell her to keep it down, that her noise, those sounds of pleasure that erupt unbidden from deep within her, would disturb the neighbor upstairs. So she did. At the time, she did not name the flowering of her body, didn’t know what to call it, but she understood from him that the moment when she was no longer in control was the very moment she must avoid. And she kept it down, remained quiet, never allowed herself to tumble over the brink, for four years, until they divorced.

In his reasons for leaving her, her husband listed the fact that they didn’t have sex every night. She felt inadequate, cursed her board-flat chest and narrow calves. In his reasons for leaving her, he didn’t name the affair he was having with the woman from work. It would take a decade before she fully understood what was hers to own and what wasn’t. 

5.

Crone parses the invisible, a past that vanishes like smoke. Known by what she lacks—the not-maiden with no virginity to offer, the not-mother unable to birth another being—Crone is dry, like the desert, elemental, the waning moon.  She types at the kitchen table during a winter that will not end. Her knees ache, veins erupt from the fingers and wrists, swollen and angry. Crone will not help you feel better about the girl or the world in which she walked. Having washed her hands of reassurance, Crone gnaws the bones of her own diminishment.

This is not a story of decline, or it if is then decline is not what you imagine. Dressed in black, wisdom marking her body in the form of crease and slag, Crone refuses to tell a story of the female body that is palatable. Show us the beautiful moments, you say. But Crone won’t. Crone won’t take you into the bed of her second marriage, won’t give you moments of ecstasy and bliss. Not because they don’t exist but because the story of the female body is one of hijack. And Crone derives her power by accepting loss, not refusing it. 

4.

At twenty-five, the girl told her mother she felt free to have sex with anyone she wanted, since she was no longer a virgin and no longer married. She imagined meeting men in bars, in coffeeshops and grocery stores, wheeling her body into their beds as easily as her cart.

The first man she slept with after her ex-husband had an enormous penis. They had met at a wedding where the other bridesmaids had complained that the dress showed their underwear lines. She said she wasn’t wearing any. He never left her side.   

When he entered her, she wanted to turn the light on to be sure it was his penis inside her and not a baseball bat. She thought she felt him in her belly, bursting from her hips. The last time, the condom broke. Moments after he pulled out of her, he went to the bathroom cupboard, still half-erect, his penis slapping his thigh, and returned with a Massengill Summer’s Eve Disposable Douche. She was no longer sixteen and knew that, while sperm couldn’t cross fabric, a douche was no kind of back up. Still, she headed to the bathroom, opening the box on the way and pulling out the instructions. The waters rushed from her body, douche and semen pattering the toilet like rain. 

They ended things when he called her late one night. Her graduate school apartment echoed in its emptiness as she talked with him on the phone. Hours earlier, the neighbors in the apartment next to hers had made love, each taking turns with the other’s body. The shared wall seemed to vibrate with their movements, and she had put down Habermas’s Transformation of the Public Sphere to stare at the plaster. When the woman came, she felt a sadness inside her own body. 

In the wedding man’s voice, she heard a reserve not normally there. Their conversations usually tripped from one sexual innuendo to the next. She had slept with him because she could, because he wanted her, but found she enjoyed his easy laugh. That night he offered little. She asked what was wrong. That’s when his ex-girlfriend made her presence known on the line.

You’re a whore who opens her legs for every man.

It felt like her voice came from the empty room around her or from her mother or her father or her ex-husband.

3.

Eventually, the girl becomes a mother and tethers her body to those of her babies, literally at first but later through laundry, lunches, and rides around town. Her children are never far from her; she carries them in her belly even though they left that space long ago. Mired in breastmilk, snot, and play dates, a decade passes, a decade in which she answers as her children’s mother, assumes the responsibility for the future of two beings, hefts a diaper bag packed for any eventuality. At the time, the days seemed endless, the nights even longer. When she emerges from their childhoods, she faces a new reality, one that proves equally difficult as living under the male gaze: the moment when she realizes no one is watching. The man at the register doesn’t graze her hand when returning her credit card. The one holding the door calls her ma’am. The man at the movie theater looks past her shoulder when taking tickets, eager to lock eyes with the twenty-something behind her. It will take time for her to grow angry. Not at the lack of attention but at the part of the story where she is made to feel sad about the loss of something that has so often harmed her. In a story where girls are devoured in their youth and then, as women, mocked in middle age for trying to retain an unlined brow, she can never win. She wants out of this tale.

2.

Her nurse practitioner releases her at the age of fifty-two. The girl/woman/mother arrives for her yearly exam and is told that she is in menopause, handed the information like a receipt: thank you for your business. “Pop the champagne!,” the nurse says. She is in her thirties, with long blonde hair and tattoos that run up the backs of her bare legs.

 It did not feel celebratory. The girl would be lying if she said it did. A caged rat, when given an open door, chooses to remain inside the cage.  She had walked into the office a mother and left a crone.

1.

Crone sits with her crow. She presents a fearsome figure, described in the ancient stories as ugly, unsteady and angry. In the east, she is called Dhumavati and is often pictured bearing a winnowing basket as well as a broom that marks her as the witch that she is. Withered breasts and wrinkled skin, Dhumavati is the most inauspicious of the goddesses. Young married couples and families are told to avoid contact with her. No longer fertile, no longer youthful, she appears purposeless. In fact, she is often pictured in a chariot led by nothing. Stalled. It would seem that she has nowhere to go. 

Crone doesn’t mind the dark and shadow. It’s why she lives in the woods. When there is nothing left to lose–hair falling out, skin drying up, bone speaking to bone in every joint—there is nothing, then, to fear. Crone grows in strength the longer she lives at the edges. Only from the hut in the forest, the horizon of life, can the center can be named and challenged.

Above the moon waxes, or it wanes; Crone feels the weight of crow on her shoulder. Her chariot is still, eyes closed. It could appear to another that she is dead.

0.

No horse pulls the chariot of the Crone not because she has nowhere to go but because she has finally arrived.

Jennifer Sinor is the author of several books, most recently, The Yogic Writer: Uniting Breath, Body, and Page. Her essay collections include Sky Songs: Meditations on Loving a Broken World and Letters Like the Day: On Reading Georgia O’Keeffe. The recipient of the Stipend in American Modernism, her work has been anthologized in Best American Essays 2024 and The Norton Reader. Jennifer teaches creative writing at Utah State University where she is a professor of English.