Bleeding Through

After the Saskatchewan River Incident, I wasn’t Mommy’s little girl anymore. I watched her at a distance. I didn’t tell her things. It was like living in a lion cage with a long bench between the two of us.

She didn’t know that I walked home from Garneau Junior High at lunchtime to read novels and watch Petticoat Junction on TV. I made grilled cheese sandwiches using the iron and ironing board like a sandwich press. You wrap the buttered bread and cheese in foil and press down, evenly. It sizzles and smells wonderful.

My mother wouldn’t be home until six. She might walk in and crack me across the cheek, she might announce she wanted to curl my hair in cloth rags like Shirley Temple, she might walk into her room and close the door.

But the daytimes were my time at home and they were quiet. I loved how warm it was inside closed doors in Edmonton. They had figured out the heating thing in Alberta, unlike our apartments in California. I could stand in our apartment at the ironing board, warm as a bug, and the sun would pour through the windows, reflecting the snow and glowing on my face.

Petticoat Junction was a half-hour sitcom about three sisters in pigtails: Billy Jo, Bobby Jo, and Betty Jo. They’d have cute problems with their laundry and boys.

There was a paperback copy of The Female Eunuch on the cardboard boxes my mom used as a dresser. She was always reading something new, and I was old enough to take an interest in her books. This one had a female nude on the cover; it caught my attention.

I opened Eunuch up and it fell to a page where Ms. Greer dared you to taste your menstrual blood. She was witty. “Freud is the father of psychoanalysis,” she wrote, “It has no mother.” I said it aloud, imitating her British accent.

She asked women what they were afraid of. I didn’t want Germaine Greer know that that my answer was, “just about everything.” But if I could act like her, talk like her, all my trepidations fizzled. I was a bookworm mimic; everything I read came out of my mouth as if I was a continuation of the script.

Tasting my menstrual blood would surely be a walk in the park. I had been raised to be sensible about bodily functions. I decided I would taste mine as soon as my period appeared.

Voilà— my fourteenth year, before I finished the last chapter of Eunuch, my first period began. —Very conveniently during my quiet Petticoat lunchtime.

I found some Kotex in the broom closet and started to arrange a pad in my bell bottoms. It felt like a loaf of bread in my pants. I couldn’t believe my mother would put up something this uncomfortable. She didn’t wear girdles anymore, and threatened to throw her bras out, daily.

Backwards, forwards with the pad; it felt like a wadded-up diaper. I could only imagine it looked the same. It was time to clean up my ironing board lunch— I had to get back to fifth period. I thought for a half second of calling my mom and asking her, “Is there a trick to Kotex?”

I thought of telling her I was glad I knew the facts of life thanks to her, and wasn’t afraid of my blood in the least. Things had changed since she was a sheltered Catholic girl in the 30s. I knew I wasn’t “dying” or marked by the devil.

But I didn’t want to talk to my mother about anything anymore. I sat on the toilet and stared at the floor. I tasted my blood. Okay, done. Unremarkable.

I saw a blue box on the laundry hamper I hadn’t paid attention to before. TAMPAX. Yes! A new box. It had a paper diagram. Barb Ackroyd, who sat behind me in Algebra, had said tampons would ruin your virginity. I felt like idly ruining something. I slid the tampon into my vagina and it was like folding a perfect paper crane. I felt nothing— in a good way— and the blood was no longer running down my leg. Now I had to clean everything up. I was really late for class.

I was never behind in school. Never late, never missed a test, never started a problem in the cloakroom— I found all the millions of school rules effortless. The one rule I routinely violated was passing notes, and you couldn't really call it “notes” because I passed twenty-page scripts back and forth among my friends— it was our art.

I walked into debate class five minutes after the hour and slipped a quick missive to my best friend Jane, to tell her my glorious bloody day had arrived. She gave me a thumbs-up.

“Susannah,” said Miss MacEachern, who addressed every pupil by the name on their birth certificate, even if it included “Esquire”— “you will report to Dr. Shalka’s office for detention. You will not disrupt our classroom with your tardiness.”

The blood rushed to my cheek now. No Tampax for that.

Mrs. MacEachern was such a piece of work. “Who has triumphed, class?’ she would ask. “Democracy in India... or communism in China?”

Yeah, the suspense was killing us. This same martinet taught art class, where you were graded on how well you stayed within the lines of a picket fence we drew over and over and over, as endless as Alberta’s prairies.

I walked into Dr. Shalka’s office like a mad bear. A mad menstruating bear with Germaine Greer on my tongue.

“This is not right,” I said, before he could motion me to sit down. “My period just started at noon and I had to figure out the Tampax all by myself and I am NEVER late and you can’t discriminate against me just because I am menstruating—”

I probably didn’t get that far, actually. I remember the look on his face when I said the “female” word. Was it “period” or the one that started with “M”? You would’ve thought I had just sat on his face with my “vagina.” Dr. Shalina flushed, his giant hands fluttered at his desk, and he coughed repeatedly into his cloth hankie.

“That will be enough!” he gasped, coming up for air. “You will not be kept for detention.” He looked at me as if he were begging. “Please go!”

“Okay,” I said, “I’m sorry,” and walked out of his office, closing the door jamb quietly, as if I were leaving a patient’s room. What was this? A grown man had turned to mush because I had my period? But he had a whole junior high school of girls! On any given day, one of us was probably starting to bleed “for the very first time.”

Sue, Barbara, Joan, Jane, Molly, Agnes, Corinne, and the French Canadian Girls passed notes to me through the next two periods. Mischi invited me outside for a smoke. I was in the club. Sue Lord, the only other person in school who wore glasses, slipped me a copy of “The Godfather,” like she was passing contraband.

“Page 27,” she whispered. “Page 27!”

I went to the cloakroom before gym and tented my down jacket over my head, to cover whatever Sue had in store for me. The magenta paperback was dog-eared. On page 27, this muscled boy Sonny is seduced by a woman, “Lucy,” whose vagina is “so big” that only a gargantuan penis can satisfy her. You imagine her vagina in Olympian dimensions. Did vaginas come in sizes? Did penises come in such different sizes? I had never even considered this whole size thing! The tampon I had just used said “regular”… it was tiny. Was the “super” tampon as big as your arm? That’s what the book said Sonny’s penis was supposed to be like. One of the characters said it would “kill” a normal woman.

The Godfather’s prose was purple. I felt secretive and hot; this was definitely the sort of thing you read under blankets. But then the story went on. I was up to page 35 when I heard Sue calling my name. I stuffed the book into my satchel and came back out in my navy gym bloomers.

I'm here!” I said. “Can I borrow the whole thing? I want to read it to the end.”

“But there’s nothing after page 27!” she said. Her bloomers were even saggier than mine. Michi said the school made us wear these in gym so the boys would lose their boners. I suddenly understood what she meant.

“ I know, I just want to see what happens,” I said.

I got home at four o’clock and started to make supper. I was a big fan of Hamburger Helper. It came in four flavors and you could pretend you were eating around the world. The radio was playing Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot— and then back to Neil Young.

I liked them all but the DJ was sarcastic. He said the new Canadian law was they had to play 70% national artists, but they’d all gotten rich on American dollars.

I picked up the mail. There was a letter from my dad, to me— and a letter from my dad to my mother. My chest turned to lead; I wanted to crumple all of the letters in my hand. What were they up to? He never wrote her.

I opened his letter to me. It contained a few elephant jokes, something we’d been trading over the past year.

Q: What's grey and white on the inside and red on the outside?

A: An inside-out elephant.

Every month he would mail me an elephant joke book, or write down extra ones he’d collected, or send me a comic book with Charlie Brown and Snoopy: Happiness is…

I liked the packages that came with letters he wrote himself, to see his handwriting. He wrote on recycled paper from the manuscripts he was editing, so I would look at the back of his elephant joke note and there’s be some linguistics thesis, a piece he was editing for Language. I never understood the subject, but I always recognized the proofreading code he taught me. “A slash is lower case, three lines is upper case... Transpose this, it’s like a little snake.” It was an international code so even if someone wrote you in Russian you could still follow their proofreading marks.

This time his letter to me had a second page, which was unusual.

Dear Susie,

“My wife Marcia has died after a long battle with breast cancer. I am very sad. I have sold our house in Topanga Canyon and moved to an apartment in Malibu— you will find my address below. I hope I will see you this summer.”

Daddy

I didn’t know Marcia had cancer. Or that she was sick. Or how long. I hadn’t seen either of them since 1969. How long? I put some water in the tea kettle on the stove and steamed open Bill’s letter to my mother.

It said the same thing, except nothing about his emotion. Marcia was dead and he wanted to see me.

Marcia had a daughter, I thought. Karen, she was a year older than me. What about her? I remembered Karen from when we shared a couple of “both-kids-at-the-same-time” custody visits. Marcia saw her little girl and Bill saw me. We shared a bed in the guest room. I liked her— of course, she was older than me and I assumed she knew everything. She was so poised. Daddy said Marcia had given birth to Karen when she was seventeen, with an older guy, and that the guy took the kid because Marcia wanted to go to school and the birth dad said she couldn’t do both.

“But wasn’t she upset?” I said. I was eight. “Doesn't she want her daughter?”

Bill told me that it was better this way and Marcia loved her daughter very much, even if they didn’t live together. Then he told me he loved me very, very much.

When my father died, in 2005, he told me Marcia’s dying story more completely. My childhood intuition was right. Marcia was not “fine” about her daughter’s absence in her life.

Bill explained, “Her parents were Swedes. They didn’t speak to her when she got pregnant. It was never mentioned. The baby was supposed to be put up for adoption but the birth father, who was an older fellow, said he’d raise it, with his then-new wife, and Marcia would have to “accept her punishment.” It was like she had done something wrong and he was the savior instead of her impregnator.

When Marcia was diagnosed with cancer, she went to her bed, like Barbr’y Allen, and looked up at Bill one last time. “Karen . . .” she said, “Karen. I have failed her completely now.”

I was finally old enough for that to sink in.

In that 1972 letter Bill wrote me, on the not-an-elephant-joke page, he said, “I am sad.” That was the thing he didn’t repeat to my mother.

I had never thought about my dad losing people. He must’ve been sad— more than that— to lose my mother, or me. Yes, that must be true. And then his second wife, Janie— they had barely been married eighteen months when she was killed on the road by a drunk driver. What did he do after that? I hadn’t seen him for a long time after Janie died. He married Marcia a year later, and now she was dead too.

I’d never heard of someone who lost two wives in a row to untimely deaths. Was he going to kill himself? That’s where my mind went. What was my mom going to say when she found out? She wasn’t good with letters like this.

I rubbed my cheek. She would be hurt. She might say Bill loved Marcia more. Loved all of them more. She might start hitting. She’d cry and want me to comfort her.

I could endure Elizabeth’s blows but I could no more stand to comfort her. I took Bill’s letter and folded it back in the envelope, licked the seal with a little bit of school-supply paste, and pressed it all back together, so it would look like it hadn’t been opened. Then I put it with the bills that sat on the table.

I wrote a note on some yellow foolscap pad Momma kept at her desk:

“I am practicing my P.E. class routine with Vivian Haffke at her house. I will eat there. There is Italian Hamburger Helper and potatoes in the oven.” I took my letter from Bill and put it in my jacket pocket.

I bundled up for the snow. I would ask Vivian if I could stay the night. Then I wouldn't have to see Elizabeth until the next evening and by then, she’d either have calmed down—or she would have killed herself. I was a blank considering this prospect. Not sad, not anything. I could walk into the apartment and find her body and it would be calm and I would call the emergency operator and they would be nice to me. I could do that.

Vivian’s family were Estonian. Her dad was talented at making ice sculptures. He had carved a Santa and eight tiny reindeer on their front lawn. His wife and he slept in miniature twin beds with pink crocheted coverlets, like Ozzie and Harriet. Vivian was their only child, just like me.

‘What do you want to practice?” Viv said when I plopped on her bed.

We had a modern dance final coming up, which thrilled me. I had not excelled at our month of field hockey.

I pulled a Simon and Garfunkel 45 record out of my satchel. “Have you heard this one?” I said. “It’s really good.”

She looked at the label. “The Sound of Silence,” she read. “That sounds a lot better than “Puppy Love”— that’s what Betty Buggers is doing!”

The most unpopular girl in our school was nicknamed “Buggers” and nothing made me happier than laughing at her runny nose. In Canada, I was no longer the pariah as I was in the States. You could read a book here without getting your ass kicked. I was bleeding and I was part of the elite.

Vivian had me laughing in stitches, crooning in her best Osmond wail, “And they CALL IT, (pause, huge breath) PUPPY LUH-UH-UH-UVE!”

“My tampon is going to come out,” I begged her, “Stop it!”

Vivian looked impressed. I could tell she had never used one. “My Oma won’t allow it,” she said, “It will ruin you for marriage.”

“We are never going to get married, Vivi,” I said, putting the needle on Simon and Garfunkel. “Married people just die and get sad and that is never going to happen to us.”

We reached up with our hands in a ballet flourish and then caught each other, leaning back until we could spin, faster and faster, pivoting on our toes, until we fell into a heap on the floor.

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