When I first saw the blood it was spread in a neat pool on white cotton fibers, dying the formerly pink-cheeked flowers of the fabric a muddied garnet. The florescent bathroom lights cast a fuzzy counterfeit glow on the inky red, and as my breathing had stopped temporarily I could hear their faint but tense buzz radiating off the bulbs. I sat there for a moment, just staring at my stained underwear. I was eleven. I was a woman.
I was wearing a Speedy Gonzales pajama shirt at the time, in which Speedy leaned enthusiastically against a jar of salsa that would have been taller than he, had it not been for his sombrero. He beamed up at me, and I stared at his cartoonish colors of the green and red and yellow and brown so long that they started to blend together in an uncultivated flurry of pigment. But a rodent-infested tint trip was more agreeable than admitting to myself that things were going to be different from there on out, so I stared.
I was alright, but stunned. It was a bit like being in a fender-bender. It’s no big deal, but it’s novel in the moment, it’s prickly and embarrassing, and for some reason you can’t remember what to do, though you’ve been told a dozen and a half times. Pull over, alert the authorities, exchange insurance information with the other driver. But no one tells you how to fill in the awkward gaps, like what to talk about with the other driver while you wait for the police to come. And so I found myself there on the toilet wondering the same thing. Gently place a feminine napkin in the crotch of your panties. Replace every three or four hours. But I had more questions, things that we hadn’t covered in fifth grade sex ed. Could I get up and walk? Would I track blood all over the house if I went downstairs to raid my mother’s cabinet of maxi pads? I wasn’t even sure if my mother was home – what if she was running to the dry cleaners, or worse, at Saturday sorority meeting for the morning and I was left sitting on this toilet for the remainder of the day?
Finally, as with most things in my life, I got tired of worrying about it and decided to take action. It occurred to me on my pilgrimage downstairs that I might have the mortifying moment of running into my father, who was a fixture in his forest green wingchair reading on Saturday afternoons, but quickly decided that should that happen I would probably just have to say the word period and he would part from me like the literal Red Sea I had left in my panties.
I pulled my underwear off and left it crumbled on the linoleum floor like a wounded soldier and went to find my mother.
She was home, luckily, and doing laundry. She was stuffing sodden yellow towels into the dryer when she saw me standing there, and the moment she looked up at me I reverted back to my most basic, child-like instinct: I cried.
“What’s wrong?” she gasped, and clutched the dryer door in expectancy. I was crying a lot these days so she never knew quite what to do.
“I think I started…my period,” I sobbed.
“Okay,” she said. Her voice was calm but unusually high-pitched and guarded, the way she always sounds before she knows she has to talk someone down off the ledge, that someone typically being me. “Okay. Well, we need to get you some pads, then. Look under my bathroom sink and there’s a bunch in there. Just strap one into your underwear.”
My eyes blurred with tears and my shoulders heaved.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I’m scared to…wipe.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m bleeding!”
“It isn’t a cut. You’re just shedding your lining because you don’t need it. It doesn’t hurt. I’ve been having a period for twenty years and it’s never hurt me. It feels just like when you normally wipe. Just a little messier.”
I stood with my legs spread equal distance with my shoulders, afraid that if my vagina touched too much it would cause insufferable pain. My nose started to run and I felt transfixed by own sheer abhorrence of myself. I was nothing more than a bleeding, snotting, weeping human body. I had never seen so much blood come out of me. I wasn’t exactly an “outdoorsy” kid, preferring instead to read up on youth-friendly encyclopedias on the heroic escape of the Jews in Europe during World War II, so while the neighborhood children were busy cutting their legs on street pavement skateboarding, I was inside trying to finish the novelette I started about a young Jewish woman fleeing the Nazis on the hand-me-down Tandy my father had lugged up to my room. The most blood I saw came from when I would cut myself on the dictionary pages I kept by my computer trying to look up heroine and sprinklings of Hebrew words. Word processing was still in its archaic days.
Perhaps knowing this, my mother sensed that I needed a little more guidance before I could come to terms with mopping up my own blood. “Let me get you a pad,” she said gently. “Just go upstairs and I’ll bring it up.”
I waddled my way up the stairs, moving like a cartoon cowboy in chaps with exaggerated, wide steps. I got back on the toilet and waited for my mother. While I sat I stared at the black and white checkered pattern of the bathroom floor, making shapes with the tiles in my mind. I had just fashioned a face of a billy goat when I heard my mother knock at the door.
She opened it a crack and handed me a pad encased in a bubblegum pink wrapper. “Do you need new undies?”
“Yeah,” I croaked.
She moved next door to my room. The sound of her opening the door, which had an odd tilt that announced any movement of the hinges, sliced through the air, and in a quasi-dramatic sentimentalism, perhaps one that I have not lost to this day, I thought, The last time I heard that door swing open, I was a different person. It had only been twenty minutes prior but it felt like I had missed out on something, an innocence in opening your room door and thinking it would be just like any other movement on any other day, but it had been my last moment of blissful ignorance. Just like my first car accident when the tow truck driver shut my driver side door the state trooper had pried open, the ring of finality cut my ears: Well, the last time you shut that door, this hadn’t happened. Things were different. Did you even hear it then? No, I had not.
My mother handed me my underwear, a pair of yellow ones with blue paisley. They were my favorite pair and I didn’t want to risk bleeding in them but something in me was too overwhelmed to say so, and I took them anyway.
“Put them on and slide them up,” my mother encouraged. “Then you can see where you’re putting the pad.”
I slid them up my legs, which were covered in a fuzz of small dark hairs. I knew how to shave my legs but had yet to learn how to keep up with it very well, as it was an involved process of drawing bathwater and lathering with soap and trying to lean in close enough to see where my pink disposable Lady Bic was headed, not to mention the nicks I received when I rushed. It was embarrassing to feel them, like I should have stayed in the habit because it was the womanly thing to do, and I was just a kid with hairy legs, bleeding in the middle.
“Okay,” my mother directed, “Now just peel the bottom off and center it on your underwear.” I stripped the white plastic from the bottom in a long, slow motion, and it curled up like a centipede towards my pinched fingers. I placed it gently on my favorite underwear and smoothed it down. It crackled underneath my fingers.
“And that’s it!” my mother shrugged. “I brought some wet wipes up so you can clean yourself real good. You can keep this up here. I have another package downstairs.” She handed me a plastic container the color of a robin’s egg filled with powder-scented wipes. A baby beamed at me on the front of the package. My mother hadn’t had a baby in the house for a good five years, but was so used to having them around when my brother was born that she continued to buy them for their multi-functionality such as cleaning her hands, wiping off make-up bottles, and swabbing her daughter’s twat.
She shut the door. “Let me know if you need help,” she called, and I heard her walk down the carpeted steps with almost inaudible thuds.
I pulled a baby wipe from the package and it hit me with a punch of artificial scent, like crushed flowers and Hostess Sweet Sixteen powdered donuts. I put it to my vagina and jumped from its clamminess the moment it made impact with my skin. My eyes started to well up again, this time from frustration of not being able to wipe myself, the most basic of training to become a full-fledged human being, and my annoyance with having been on the damned toilet for half an hour grew from exasperation to rage; and suddenly, I had wiped with the icy baby wipe from back to front, and there before my eyes was a smear of ruby, my first triumph. There would be days that my period beat me, of course – I would still have to go through sixth grade where I bled through my jeans and onto the chair of my desk in English class, and even at 25 I would mess up a boyfriend’s favorite pajama bottoms with my poorly-placed pad. Learning to work a tampon would be years in the making, and would even include a surgery to manually break my hymen. But before I would be sixteen lying in my bed, towel underneath, trying to work a Tampax in with deep breaths and a slow-pressing finger on the trigger of the applicator, I had this moment, the time where I was eleven and wiping my tears and learning to clean up my own accidents. I stood up, flushed the strange bits of myself, and walked back to my room to turn the computer on. It would be a good day to work on my novelette, to pour out my heart in a story of a young woman running through the woods to escape her would-be captors; she had left her menorah candles blazing in the house, and was running towards the boats that would smuggle her quietly but gloriously away from harm, my soul on the pages, bleeding effortlessly.


























