Was this Iris's doing? Helen couldn't believe Iris would wish her harm, but there was no denying the succession of events. Maybe it was Iris's mark on her. Like when Lloyd Mackey and Owen O'Brien sliced their fingers to pledge themselves blood brothers. If it were just a mark, then it would be okay. If it were just a mark, it would stop, and she wouldn't have to tell anybody. With shaking hands, she pulled off her pajama pants and was shocked to discover a huge scarlet stain spread across the seat. This was no brotherhood mark. What a stupid idea. This could mean only one thing. She was dying. That's why Iris had come.
She threw the pajama pants into the sink and turned on the faucets. Taking her bathrobe from a hook on the back of the bathroom door, she hastily put it on and hurried to her parents' room.
She knew her mother slept on the side of the bed nearest the door. Clutching her robe tightly, Helen inched forward through the darkness until her knees bumped the edge of the bed. She
gently shook her mother's shoulder.
“Mama,” she whispered. “Mama.”
Emilie raised herself up on one elbow and glanced at the Big Ben alarm clock, whose luminous hands indicated two-thirty. She waved Helen back and got up, pushing her feet into terry-cloth slippers. They went out onto the landing. Emilie shut the door behind her and turned on a small table lamp at the head of the stairs.
“What's wrong?” she said, laying an assessing hand on her daughter's brow.
“I don't know.”
“Bad dream?”
Helen shook her head.
“I think I'm sick. Really bad.”
“What do you mean? You were fine at bedtime.”
Helen led her mother to the bathroom and pointed to the sink. Her pajama bottoms lay in a pool of pink water. Helen began to cry.
“And it's still happening. I'm still bleeding. Down there. My stomach hurt all day, but the nurse at school said I was okay, so I was just waiting for it to go away. But it didn't, and nowâ”
“Sh, sh,” her mother said, pulling out the sink plug. “You're all right.”
She unfurled a long strip of toilet paper, folded it into a square, and handed it to Helen. “Wait here.”
Sniffling, Helen pressed the square of paper between her legs and sat down on the edge of the tub. She was astounded at her mother's calm. All right? How could she be all right?
Emilie returned with a cardboard box and an elastic strap. She drew a thick, rectangular white pad out of the box.
“This is a sanitary napkin,” she said. “It works like this.”
She showed Helen how to fasten the tails of the napkin into two little metal S-hooks on the elastic strap, then she helped
Helen step into the strap and pull it up around her waist so that the pad was positioned firmly between her legs. Although it was soft, its bulk was uncomfortable.
“Tomorrow we'll go out and get you your own belt,” Emilie said, adding cheerily, “You won't mind missing a half day of school, I guess?”
“Whose is this one?”
“Why, mine, of course.”
“This happened to you once, Mama?” Helen felt hopeful. Maybe she was going to be all right after all.
“Yes, yes. It happens every month. It will to you, too.”
“Every month?”
Emilie took both of Helen's hands in hers and looked deeply into her eyes.
“You know, Helen, that babies grow inside their mothers, right?”
Helen nodded.
“Well, a woman's body makes a sort of nest every month just in case a baby wants to grow. When one doesn't, the body throws the nest away, so it can start fresh the next month.”
“A nest of blood?”
“It doesn't sound very nice when you put it like that, but yes, a nest of blood. It's what babies need when they're inside their mothers.”
“But I'm not a woman.”
Emilie bit her lip, as if it might be her turn to cry.
“Actually, my dear, now that this has happened, you are a woman. In one way, anyway.” She leaned forward and hugged Helen tightly. “But you'll always be my little girl, too.”
Emilie straightened up and smoothed her nightgown over her hips. “Maybe you can get a book from the library that will explain it better.”
“Then I'm not going to die?”
“Heavens, no! Everything is as it should be. Just sneaked up on us is all. Now, let's get back to sleep, shall we?”
Helen was excruciatingly aware of her body below her waist. She worried constantly that the outline of the ungainly sanitary napkin might be visible through her skirt. Afraid to turn her back on anyone, she didn't volunteer to write on the blackboard, and she sketched with a dull nub of lead rather than go to the pencil sharpener. At recess, she kept on her long tweed coat even though an Indian summer sun had sidetracked autumn's chill. The coat would have hampered her at tag or jump rope, but the pamphlet in the Kotex box had advised avoiding strenuous exercise, so she'd declined all invitations to play.
Watching the other girls play, she wondered if any of them had been struck yet. She looked at the teachers and at women on the street and even her own mother as if she'd suddenly acquired x-ray vision, like Superman, and had just discovered that beneath their dresses and slips, these women had bodies that did amazing things quite apart from their wills or wishes.
On Helen's third day of sitting out recess, Rosie O'Brien came over and put her foot up on Helen's bench in order to retie the shoelaces of her scuffed brown and white saddle shoe.
“We're gonna play Giant Step,” Rosie said. “Wanna come?”
Helen looked up from the book on her lap, smiled, and shook her head no. Rosie sat down beside her. Helen read a few more sentences of
Lad, A Dog,
then closed the book.
“You don't have to sit here with me, Rosie.”
“Oh, I don't mind. Not enough time left for a good game, anyway.”
Together they gazed at the schoolyard of children noisily engaged in various pursuits, most involving running and tagging, as either part of an official game or as a tease.
“Is it a good story?” Rosie pointed to Helen's book.
“Pretty good.”
“Good enough to keep you on this bench an awful lot.”
Helen felt herself blushing. She knew Rosie was looking at her, but she kept her eyes focussed on the playing children.
“You got the curse, don't you?”
“The curse?” Helen gave her a startled look. She hadn't heard the term before, but she was sure she was guessing its meaning correctly.
“How can you tell?”
“You don't usually mope around.”
“I'm not moping.”
“You're not playing Giant Step, either.”
Rosie's tone was conclusive. As one of the younger children in a large family, she had learned early to put forth opinions with a confident air, and she could rarely be shaken from them, even by indisputable evidence to the contrary. Rosie believed there was always room for dispute.
“I just don't feel like it,” Helen asserted.
“Could if you wanted to.”
“You don't understand.”
“Do so, too.”
Helen searched Rosie's defiant, freckled face for any trace of bluff. She was not above it. But this was too tender a topic for Helen to let Rosie get away with a fib.
“Makes you feel kinda sick,” Rosie described, “and like you don't want anyone looking at you. And me, I even get worried sometimes ⦠well, can maybe anybody â¦
smell
me.”
Though she stressed the word smell, her voice was almost inaudible when she said it.
“But you get used to it,” she continued more robustly. “And it doesn't always hurt. My mom said it ain't nothin' next to having babies.”
“I didn't ever know you had it,” Helen said, impressed. Rosie was thirteen, too, but a few months younger than she.
Rosie nodded. “A few times. Five now, I think. Or maybe four.”
An electric bell on the side of the brick building rang loudly and long. Children began swarming into lines. A pack of boys some distance from the building were jostling one another against the chain-link fence. There were usually five or six who waited until the last possible moment to line up. Lloyd Mackey was always among them. Helen remembered Billy often being part of such a pack, too, but now he was in his second year at high school. They didn't have recess in high school.
Rosie and Helen stood up from the bench, but neither girl took a step. For Helen's part, she didn't want to leave because for the first time since that alarming night in her bathroom, she did not feel alone. The pamphlet from the library had said menstruation happened to every girl, but she still felt her experience to be overwhelmingly solitary and unique. Rosie's bluntness had broken through that.
“When my sisters got it,” Rosie said seriously, “they stopped being much fun. They used to throw balls with me and jump off swings and all, and after, they only wanted to lay around looking at movie magazines and trying new ways to comb their hair.”
“Why?”
“Dunno.” Rosie looked at Helen appraisingly. “You won't change, will you, Helen? I'm sure I won't. I don't care what anybody says.”
Helen wondered how Rosie could believe herself capable of standing firm against the forces of nature. The library pamphlet, which the librarian had taken from a drawer behind the checkout counter, had revealed that the messy business of periods was only the start. More changes were coming. Some would be upon them soon, others down the road, after they were married. The pamphlet was hazy about men's part in making babies, but it was clear they were essential.
“Rosie, do you know about the nest?”
“The what?”
“You know, the blood. How it's for a baby.”
“Oh, yeah, that. Kinda nutty, huh?”
A few teachers had come out onto the yard, their Miss Thompson among them. The girls started walking toward the lines of children.
“But how do the babies get in there?” Helen dared to ask. She figured in the O'Brien family of eight children such information might be more available than in her household of close-mouthed adults.
“My mom said it's like a garden. The dad plants a seed and a baby grows from it.”
Helen frowned. The pamphlet, though it used medical terms and diagrams, had presented a similarly inadequate metaphor.
Grinning, Rosie linked her arm in Helen's and inclined her head confidentially. “But I heard my brother Jimmy telling his friend Tom a joke about a tootsie roll and a lifesaver, and I think that's the real scoop.”
An ungenerous person would have deemed Rosie's face plain, but even an ungenerous person would have to admit it had a certain elfin charm, especially when Rosie was smiling, as she was now, her upturned eyes sparkling with merriment at her own boldness.
They had arrived close enough to the lines to hear Miss
Thompson clapping her hands to signal for silence. The eighth-graders always led the school in. Rosie ran ahead. Helen reached the end of the line just as it began to move forward. Lloyd and fat Ron Greenberg thundered up from behind and cut in front of her. Ron, his wrinkled shirttail hanging out of the back of his pants, didn't look at her, but Lloyd approximated an apology by turning around and winking at her. Another day she would have said something, and Lloyd would probably have let her go ahead of him, but today it seemed unimportant, a child's matter.
She walked up the two flights of stairs to the classroom in a daze. The joke about the candy was still not the bald information she craved, but it was more vivid and felt more genuine than any of the facts she'd had laid carefully before her over the past few days. She didn't have to puzzle it out. It made sense to her so quickly, she realized she must have possessed the answer somehow all along. She felt embarrassed at knowing and embarrassed on behalf of all the mothers and fathers of her acquaintance. She wished she could un-know it. She resented Rosie for telling her.
Miss Thompson was writing page numbers on the blackboard, and Helen's classmates were taking out geography books. She did, too, opening to a chapter titled “The Dark Continent.” She shook off her disgruntlement with Rosie. After all, she had asked. She had wanted the secret, for a secret it clearly was. It was just that she'd never before considered that asking and finding out could result in a burden of knowledge impossible to ignore, an actual weight on the mind and heart. She wondered if further revelations lay in store. And she wondered what other hidden things she already knew.