By the time I turned thirteen, my mother insisted on smelling my hands before she would let me leave for church, studying them close enough that I could almost feel the flutter of her lashes when she blinked, then pressing my fingertips to the base of her nose. One inch lower and it would have been a kiss, and those years would have unraveled so differently. One fucking inch can be all that divides love from pain.

“Blood,” she said, spitting the word like a bad taste, dropping my fingers so that my hands swung back, thudded against my thighs. She had probably noticed my pads in the wastebasket, carefully wrapped in toilet paper, so that my father and brothers didn’t have to see them. And still I’d get sent to the sink, scrubbing until my knuckles were raw. Then my hands actually did smell of blood from all of the little cracks in my skin. My mother thought an ability to endure pain was a sign of godliness, too. At least in a woman: Pleasure corrupted. Pain improved.

My brothers went to church with dirt darkening the creases of their palms. Maybe the three of us could have been aligned, at some point, but her attention separated us, made them sheepish around me, me resentful of them. We couldn’t look at one another, or if we did, our eyes met in startled gazes, as though we didn’t know one another very well.

I DIDN’T do the things I did with men to get back at my mother. But her anger, her bitterness, was how I knew what to say when I met with the kind of man who wanted to be punished, who wanted the spike of my stiletto thrust into his back or to crawl across the room on his hands and knees. Those men had the freedom to crave that kind of disdain because their whole lives they had been told how good they were, how treasured and perfect and adored. Their lives kept bearing them up, granting them promotions and money and beautiful things they didn’t necessarily deserve. Men for whom oppression was a novelty. I couldn’t imagine a life like that.

I didn’t share their desires, but I respected their dogged pursuit of pleasure, and I tried to honor that. My name was passed around in the right circles, among the bankers and doctors, and for a while, it was as reasonable a way as any to build a life. More reasonable than my mother rushing to Pastor Roy with her jam thumbprint cookies or her apple pies or her goddamned banana bread. When I see her in my mind, she’s always in the kitchen wearing an apron, a red checked tea towel tucked into one of the strings, thinking she’s a better person than everyone else because she never expected anything from her life, not even the smallest bit of joy.