To Keep a Sluttish House

1.

The first time I came across the word sluttish as a child, it was printed in a library book. I no longer remember what the book was, but I do remember immediately adding it to my mental list of words to look up in the dictionary when my parents weren’t looking. It’s what I did with sexual intercourse and bitch; it was what I’d done the day before with virgin.

When I felt brave enough, I pretended to need the dictionary for homework so I could sit on the floor and read it at the dance studio while my mom and I waited for my sister to finish tumbling class. Looking up sluttish would solve a dual mystery: the meaning of that word, but the meaning, too, of the one nestled inside it. I’d seen the word slut carved into the back of bathroom doors at gas stations and on the damp soft wood of my playground’s underbelly: I knew slut was profane in that context, but not why or what it meant. And if it was profane, what was its big sister, sluttish, doing in my children’s historical fiction? With one hand acting as shield, I moved the other down the page, my fingertips looking for sluttish and repeating the word in my head as I did so: that lush sillabant slu, like silk gliding across the floor