sent me another Chicago card, made of a dipped Italian beef and a lock of Rod Blagojevich’s hair. I immediately texted Emily to see if she wanted to meet me for lunch, my treat.
hysterical!
I got my period for the first time, without warning, when I was in the fifth grade. Which, in hindsight, feels incredibly early? How old are you in the fifth grade—nine? Ten? What did I even know in the spring of 1990? Could I accurately identify the president? Had I ever been outside the state of Illinois? Did I know what a penis was? Or the journey, exactly, it had to embark upon to fertilize an egg?
I knew not to take pills from shady dudes on skateboards, because I had a crush on one of the D.A.R.E. cops, so I paid attention to every word that was coming out of his handsome mouth, even though deep in my soul I knew my yearning to be socially accepted would make me take any white powder or “marijuana cigarette” anyone cooler than me offered. But did I know where the uterus was located and whether there was one in my body? I knew why hair turned gray because I watched this informational cartoon about follicles, but I couldn’t tell you where South Dakota is on a map. And I knew all the words to “U Can’t Touch This” because I had Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ’Em on cassette and had lain across my mom’s bed for an hour playing and rewinding that song as I tried to write the lyrics on the steno pad she kept next to her phone, but I couldn’t draw you a fallopian tube if my life depended on it. Also, why do people who don’t conduct any important business whatsoever keep paper by the goddamn phone? Who of any importance was calling my mother in 1990? Also, is he saying “fresh new kicks and pants” or “French new sticks and pans”?! WHAT IS AN INTERNET?
The day the flood came, none of the other villagers surrounded me with offerings, no women keening at the blood moon circled an altar of red candles, and no symbolic doves were released as I submerged myself in a salt bath. I was on a cold toilet gawking at the smear of rust-colored blood in the crotch of my threadbare Hanes Her Way, trying to recall exactly what Mrs. Kantner had said to do when discussing puberty in the two-week introductory health segment wedged into our fifth-grade social studies class.
Having requested a full hysterectomy mere months after squeezing me out into the world (no, I didn’t take that decision personally, nope, not at all, I am very well-adjusted!), my mom didn’t have any menstrual products in the house, so I had to sit on the toilet leaking unstrained beef soup into the bowl while she rummaged through the junk drawer to find a kitchen towel that she didn’t mind being sacrificed for the cause, before folding it into my underpants to tide me over while she went to the corner store whose specialty was scratch-off lottery tickets and cartons of rancid orange juice with the long-past expiration dates rubbed off—definitely not a place with a wide variety of products to serve a young woman’s menstrual needs. You walk into a Walgreens right now and there are: thirty-seven kinds of maxi pads of varying strength and thickness and recyclability, curved or winged or otherwise; tampons for both work and play, with applicator and without; medical-grade silicone shot glasses that you’re expected to wedge up against your cervix while also somehow not turning a public bathroom stall into that blood elevator from The Shining. My mom returned home with a plastic bag of generic sanitary napkins that she had clearly dragged out from the back of a bottom shelf, her fingerprints still visible in the inch-thick dust on the top of the box.
I took having my period very seriously, which for a ten-year-old meant never changing my pads at school or alluding to its existence in any way. I missed the sanitary-pads-with-belts era, thank goodness, and Always had just come out with their revolutionary Dri-Weave technology, the limits of which I tested. Our school bathrooms had low toilets and a big communal garbage bin in the corner next to the sinks; there was no way you were going to