Candles Burning

Fifty

“You’ve seen two dogs going at it in the road, haven’t you?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Well, now you’re ready for that too,” Mama said.

She took a tampon out of a box in her dresser and tossed it to me. I had seen them there for years but without any grasp of what they were. If it were not embarrassing enough to be abruptly asking Mama what the blood meant, I wondered how I could have been so dim not to have asked or made any effort to find out what the tampons were.

I was aware that Mama and other grown women were “unwell” occasionally, a more or less regular unwellness. I did not grasp that bleeding was involved, until after a day of stomachache, while in a warm bath, a feather of blood rose from the vicinity of my crotch to the surface of the bathwater. I took it for the output of an unseen scratch.

The blood dissolved into the water. When I dried myself, the towel came away from between my legs with another trace of blood. With that penny drop of blood, I grew worried. No amount of anxious, awkward, indeed ludicrous, self-examination revealed a break in my skin.

Seemingly over the summer, I had developed quivering little cone-shaped bumps on my chest. They were mostly dark nipple. I obscured them by wearing an undershirt under my blouse or work shirt. Some of the other girls came back to school in September with bumps too, but I was too much of a tomboy still to pay any attention to the incessant giggling and whispering among the more advanced of my female schoolmates. The older we got, the more the girls at school all seemed to be rendered witless by their very femininity. What had I to say to them?

Like Alice, I was growing taller at a headlong rate. If I were going to get any wear at all out of my clothes, I had to buy them too big, for at the end of six weeks, they would be outgrown. I hardly had time or inclination to notice the pale wisps in my armpits and sparse feathers on the little hummock of my crotch, even if I had known what they signified. I peed from the cleft between my legs, effortlessly and regularly, and had never experienced the slightest difficulty in so doing. I had ears to clean out and nails to groom, hair on my head to wash, and teeth to brush, and sand that I wasn’t to track into the house to remove from my person.

When I first told Mama that there was a little blood in my bathwater and showed her the towel, Mama rolled her eyes.

“It’s your damned curse,” she said in disgust. “How old are you?”

She looked at her fingers as if they would tell her.

“Twelve,” I reminded her.

“Damn.” She grimaced, taking up her glass of bourbon. “All I need; my life isn’t hard enough as it is. I am not old enough to have a daughter on the rag.”

Then she said the thing about dogs.

I didn’t pay much attention because I was having an epiphany: why the other girls found the word rag so funny, and why they whispered about a curse, and why monthly meant something in particular to grown-up women.

I studied on the tampon.

“You stick it in,” Mama told me impatiently. She rummaged the box in her drawer and came up with a leaflet, which she handed to me.

The leaflet proved to be directions. I went back to the bathroom and sat on the closed commode and studied it. The diagrams that indicated the nature and arrangement of my immediate inside female parts were news to me. Aware that I still did not really grasp my own anatomy, I made repeated attempts and eventually did succeed in inserting the tampon. It seemed to make me cramp more, raising doubts that I had done it correctly after all.

Miz Verlow was still in her office downstairs. In pajamas, robe and slippers, I went down and rapped gently at her door.

She said come in, with barely a glance up at me from behind her desk. I remembered Mrs. Mank in the same place.

“My stomach aches,” I told her. “I have the curse.”

Miz Verlow sat up straight.

“Oh,” she said, “oh my. First time? Oh, that’s a silly question. And you just twelve.” She rose and came round the desk to take my hand. We went to her room. How many times had I gone there, how many times yet to come, to be anointed with her nostrums, given one of the little orange pills, or comforted in her efficient, professional way?

She brought me a glass of water and two tablets. They were vermillion in color; I had never seen their like, but supposed them to be some sort of aspirin. They scraped the sides of my throat going down, so I drank down the whole glass of water.

“A heating pad can help with the cramps,” Miz Verlow told me. “Now you go to bed.”

I thanked her and left and as I reached the room I still shared with Mama, the ache began to ease. I did Mama’s feet and crawled in next to her.

In the morning, Miz Verlow gave me my own room, an awkward little corner thing previously used for storage. I cleaned it out and Roger and I put a cot into it and fixed a shelf to the wall over the bed for my books and that was it. My own room, that I hadn’t had since I was six-going-on-seven. Since Daddy was alive. The six-going-on-seven-year-old Calley had longed to sleep with Mama. The twelve-year-old was thrilled to sleep alone. No doubt Mama was too.

Miz Verlow took me to the pharmacy and picked out a smaller size of tampon that she said was meant for young girls. She paid for them.

She also started giving me a vitamin that she compounded herself. It had iron in it, she explained, as the monthly bleeding could make a woman anemic.

Fortunately, my first period was brief and very light, and so my periods remained for many years, never more than a mild nuisance. I was able to stay a tomboy and that was good enough for me. I didn’t think of it as “becoming a woman.” Though I lived in a woman’s body, I was still a child and I thought as a child.