The Signature of All Things

place where the water from the pump was fresh and cold. But Prudence gazed at her, expectant and silent. Something would need to be said.
    Alma began, “As I approach the shores of matrimony . . .”
    Alma trailed off and stared at her sister, helpless, wishing against all reason that Prudence would glean from this senseless fragment of a statement precisely what Alma was attempting to ask.
    “Yes?” Prudence said.
    “I find myself without experience,” Alma completed the statement.
    Prudence gazed on, in unperturbed silence. Help me, woman! Alma wanted to cry out. If only Retta Snow had been here! Not the new, mad Retta—but the old, joyful, unrestrained Retta. If only Retta had been there, too, and if only they were all nineteen years old again. The three of them, as girls, might have been able to approach this subject in safety, somehow. Retta would have made it amusing and candid. Retta would have released Prudence from her reserve, and taken away Alma’s shame. But nobody was there now to help the two sisters to behave as sisters. What’s more, Prudencedid not appear interested in making this discussion any easier, as she did not speak up at all.
    “I find myself without experience of conjugality,” Alma clarified, in a burst of desperate courage. “Father suggested that I speak with you for guidance on the subject of delighting a husband.”
    One of Prudence’s eyebrows lifted, minutely. “I am sorry to hear that he thinks me an authority,” she said.
    This had been a misguided idea indeed, Alma realized. But there was no backing out of it now.
    “You take me wrongly,” Alma protested. “It is only that you have been married so long, you see, and you have so many children . . .”
    “There is more to marriage, Alma, than that to which you allude. Further, I am prevented by certain scruples from discussing that to which you allude.”
    “Of course, Prudence. I do not wish to offend your sensibilities or intrude in your privacy. But that of which I speak remains cryptic to me. I beg you not to misunderstand me. I do not need to consult with a doctor; I am familiar with the essential workings of anatomy. But I do need to consult with a married woman, so as to comprehend what might be welcome to my husband, or unwelcome to him. How to present myself, I mean, in regards to the art of pleasing . . .”
    “There should be no art to it,” Prudence replied, “unless one is a woman for hire.”
    “ Prudence! ” Alma cried with a force that surprised even herself. “Look at me! Do you not see how ill-prepared I am? Do I look like a young woman to you? Do I appear an item of desire?”
    Until this moment, Alma had not realized how afraid she was of her wedding night. Naturally she loved Ambrose, and she was consumed with anticipatory thrill, but she was also terror-stricken. That terror gave partial explanation to her sleepless bouts of nighttime shuddering these past few weeks: she did not know how to comport herself as a man’s wife. True, Alma had been consumed for decades by a rich, indecent, carnal imagination—but she was also an innocent. An imagination is one thing; two bodies together is something else entirely. How would Ambrose regard her? How could she enchant him? He was a younger man, and a lovely man, whereas a true assessment of Alma’s appearance at the age of forty-eightwould have called for this truth to be revealed: she was far more bramble than rose.
    Something in Prudence softened, marginally.
    “You need only be willing,” Prudence said. “A healthy man presented with a willing and acquiescent wife will need no particular coaxing.”
    This information brought Alma nothing. Prudence must have suspected as much, for she added, “I assure you that the duties of conjugality are not overly discomforting. If he is tender to you, your husband will not much injure you.”
    Alma wanted to crumple to the floor and weep. Honestly, did Prudence think that Alma feared injury ? Who or what could ever injure Alma Whittaker? With hands as callused as these? With arms that could have picked up the oaken slab against which Prudence so delicately rested, and thrown it across the room with ease? With this sunburned neck and this thistle-patch of hair? It was not injury that Alma feared on her wedding night, but humiliation . What Alma desperately wanted to know was how she could possibly present herself to Ambrose in the form of an orchid, like her sister, and not a mossy