Hi Mom, how was your day?
Oh, fine. I went to the cardiologist.
How was that?
She can program my pacemaker for another three years.
That will get you to 105.
Oh, (laughs) I don’t think I’ll be around that long.
The way you are going, you may very well be around.
I may run out of juice before that.
Mom, I was thinking about something, do you remember when you got your first period?
Oh, yes, mine was very late. I had a glandular problem. They prescribed something that made me gain a lot of weight. I was miserable.
Glandular. That’s what they called hormonal problems back in the day, right? Hormones affect everything.
Yours came once and then it didn’t come back. Remember, I took you to the doctor.
Yes, I remember.
I was worried you would be like me.
That was a difficult time for us.
I don’t know what you’re talking about.
***
My first period arrived while I was on an escalator in an A&S department store. As I ascended from boys' wear on the second floor, passing by girls’ dresses on three, to lingerie on four I became lightheaded and dizzy. It felt like the entire gravitational pull of the earth was at the nexus of my lower abdomen. I slumped into a weakened wobble against the side of the escalator, inwardly churning but holding it together outwardly. Then, as if a lead anvil dropped within me, I felt a dull thud.
That’s really odd, I thought. My mother was ahead of me on the moving stairs unaware of my condition. I snapped like a string on an overplayed cranky violin. From restrained screech within, I tried covering my dismay by letting out a tuba roar. “Whoooa! That was something!”
At first, I attributed this state of physical and emotional disorder to being denied the dungarees I coveted in the boys’ department. My mother said they were overpriced and that I should wait for the end-of-the-season sales. I wanted those stiff blue jeans right then. Nothing else in the god damn world mattered. My inner trembling became an enormous desperate sigh into the open air.
My mother grabbed my arm at the top of the elevator. “What’s wrong?”
I couldn’t speak. As we got off she pulled me toward the racks of frilly under things, whispering, “Why do you want to wear boys’ clothes, anyway?”
Boys’ clothes were sturdier and more comfortable, and I liked how the dungarees looked with the cuffs turned up showing the latest hi-top sneakers. Those jeans would help in my quest for acceptance into the boys’ club. I was also enamored with the styling of a longtime literary idol, Harriet the Spy.
As my body continued to go through something completely foreign, I turned inward and brooded. I was fourteen, and even with a few years of sex education, was still unprepared for this hormonal turmoil. Internally a bellowing for the unfair constraints of gender and commerce welled up.
I tried giving my mother a rationale for my fashion choices. “Women’s libbers say I can wear whatever I want. Don’t even think of sending me down the brassier aisle—they should all be burned.”
My mother looked like she wanted to slap me but did not. I wanted to take a whack at what was being forced on me. The reach of the unjust current social order was like a tentacle gripping my neck, bony wrists, and creaking runner’s knees as I stood trapped on the swirl of carpet in the lingerie aisle.
My mother pulled something off a hanger and held it to her chest as if it were a long lost relative who had just arrived from the old country. “Em, isn’t this flowered nightgown adorable? You need something other than boxer shorts for pajamas.”
Nothing flowered, nothing pink. No pink! We left with the nightgown. It was on sale.
At home, the answer to all this turmoil was a small unimpressive stain. Two more days of bandaid-size seepage, then nothing for months. The whole incident was suspect. Did I actually have my period, or enter into my time of being unwell, as my mother called it? Maybe it was the result of the 25-mile rides I was doing three times a week in preparation for a cycling trip to the White Mountains. I rode with the fury of a banshee a boy’s ten-speed Tour de France. It had a hard leather seat. Months went by with no staining. This sent my mother into a panicked consultation with Dr. G, the pediatrician, who surmised it was my high level of physical activity that suppressed the menses--long-distance biking, running, and ocean swim training. For me, this was a triumph. I had taken control over the change being forced upon me and willed it never to return so I could pursue my athletic fantasy of playing second base on the all-boys Junior League Baseball Team. The Grumman Rockets would have won the championship if I had been on the team. In 1970, there was no Title 9, so girls were not allowed to play on the boys’ teams. I also could not to take woodworking or car mechanics in school. My mother was concerned about my dead-end kid camaraderie with the boys, but I was of the opinion girls needed to be tough in the face of the double standards imposed on our chromosomal composition. On the street, I played baseball, touch football, or hockey every night, depending on the season. During those games, I was an equal or imagined I was and could throw a football or baseball, not like a girl. Perhaps I was infected by the double standard rules as well. Why would anyone want to throw with a wilted wrist? No power or control on that.
I had a semi-six-pack and challenged the boys.
“Go ahead, punch me as hard as you can.”
They humored me, “We don’t punch girls.”
“Go ahead, I can take it.”
I could tell they were holding back connecting with semi-hard punches. These were good kids. My shoulders were broad and strong. In the three-way dressing room mirrors, I admired the muscles in my back and practiced wind-ups and throws, studying my reflection from all angles. With a snap of the wrist, I could throw a football or hardball right down the center line into the sweaty hands or an oiled mitt of a teammate.
We went back to Dr. G. where I was poked, weighed, and measured like a lab rat.
The doctor asked questions.
“How is your appetite?”
“I eat a lot of carrots. No sugar.”
My mother was on the latest diet trend and ate only a can of tuna (in water) and carrot sticks for dinner. There wasn’t anything high fat in the house. Although I would discover a hidden stash of Cheez-Its and Hershey’s Almond Bars.
“Do you have thoughts of suicide?”
I did not, but gory imaginings were ever-present. Amputations, falling from high places, car accidents, and the overall fear of being fat.
Dr. G was very gentle. “You have some acne, I see. Are you using deodorant? Maybe you should start using some and here’s a recommendation for a dermatologist.”
“Okay, but I am not wearing one of those training bras—a sleeveless T-shirt is just fine.”
Dr. G would be my doctor well past my 18th birthday and would see me through this transition and quell my mother’s fears that something was seriously wrong. Hormones were prescribed to bring the menses on. I ingested a week of pills from a rectangular hard plastic bubble pack every morning with orange juice. After finishing the regimen, I felt a surge of cramps that let me know it was happening again. Again, the pain was more impressive than the stain.
The prescribed pills were the most recently developed morning-after pill, a combination of estrogen and progesterone. My brother’s girlfriend found the empty bubble pack in the medicine cabinet in the upstairs bathroom and confronted me. She thought I left the empty package to be discovered like an open journal to let the world in on my sexually active adventures. I was fourteen and told her it wasn’t what she thought.
“I’m a tomboy and a virgin.”
I inquired if she used contraception. She was reluctant to share any personal info about her sex life as she was courting my brother, whom she would marry. But she did tell me the story of a friend she took to an emergency room when the string of the tampon she inserted broke off. It was their senior year at Forest Hills High School. I was fascinated and curious about tampons, something my mother never used. My future sister-in-law explained the worst thing about the incident for her friend was that the emergency room doctor who tended to the problem ended up being the blind date her friend’s brother, who was in medical school, set up for her. She gave no more details about this most awkward of first dates, and we bonded, laughing over the cringe-worthy humiliation of her friend. Since I was still wholly inexperienced in the ways of dating and tampons, and she was relieved to hear I was not pregnant, she suggested I check out Planned Parenthood. There was a new office not too far away in Roosevelt Field Shopping Mall. I wasn’t quite ready, but I kept the phone number in a copy of the Whole Earth Catalog on my desk. I was still more interested in playing football.
I had been induced pharmaceutically into the next phase of womanhood but was not put on any more hormones. The doctor thought my body might regulate itself, but still nothing happened.
My mother related what the doctor told her. “He said that even though you aren’t bleeding, it’s still possible to get pregnant.”
“Okay. Thanks for the warning.”
I was still aways away from doing anything more than kissing a boy during a game of Spin the Bottle. I wasn’t particularly concerned about getting pregnant, but there was still a surge of hormones in this time of nascent puberty that resulted in pronounced sadness, boredom bordering on depression, and other emotional upheavals that were poo-pooed, ignored, or maligned.
My mother was still suspicious I was not going to fully embrace womanhood.
“What are you covering in your sex education class?”
“How the penis works. Ejaculation and such. The ovaries spit out eggs. Sperm swimming upstream like salmon. The wonders of birth.”
There was a campaign to warn us about teen pregnancy, which was looked upon as the biggest mistake a girl could make—emphasis on the girl being the one at fault.
Then, without much warning from one day to the next, I became bored with football, started studying modern dance, and started hanging out with an older crowd outside of high school. My best friend in the group was twenty-year-old Julia, whom my mother despised. We spent a lot of time together. My mother was highly mistrustful and resentful. I know now she was mostly worried that I was being taken advantage of, and she may have been right, but to me, Julia and her friends had the freedom I longed for. She was open about her sex life and much more informative than my mother. Julia had an encyclopedic understanding of the wonders of being a girl and showed me how to enhance even the quirkiest parts of ourselves. Frizzed out hair, small breasts, and a preference for driving barefoot. There was always a healthy stash of marijuana as part of our flirtation toolkit. I thought she was truly liberated. For her, the boys were playthings to flirt and canoodle with and bake marijuana cookies to keep things giggly, expansive, and airy. I thought she was beautiful, with long, straight hair, and perfect teeth, all wrapped up in flowy scarves, a freewheeling hippie with a 1969 Cadillac. I was sixteen when I first started pal-ing around with Julia and was still a virgin.
Joni Mitchell’s lyrics help me, I think I’m falling in love again were Julia’s theme song. The boyfriends appeared and disappeared like traffic snarls on the Long Island Expressway, tossing their bodies at her the same way we threw quarters in the collection baskets at the Throgs Neck and Whitestone Bridges for our escapes from Long Island. She worked as a teaching assistant in a nursery school, so on school breaks with several joints rolled at the ready in the glove box, we would drive to Cobleskill, Ithaca, or Rochester wherever the boyfriends were attending college.
One of the boyfriends, Martin, had a friend, Carl, who expressed an interest in me, even though I was underage. Julia helped me prepare by driving me to Planned Parenthood. We drove to Cobleskill where Martin and Carl were waiting for us with open arms. We hiked to waterfalls and drank whiskey sours. There were four other housemates in the rundown Victorian off-campus house where they lived. All were eager to get to know us, but after two days, we left a trail of lingerie and confusion. Julia broke up with Martin and I was no longer a virgin.
Not long after that trip I started having abdominal pains and spiked a fever of 103 degrees. My mother called Dr. G, who said to bring me to the emergency room. All I remember is being delirious and laughing when a crowd of medical students surrounded my hospital bed, trying to determine what was troubling me. There was an indeterminate infection that could only be detected with a blood test.
One resident quietly asked me, so my parents could not hear, “Have you ever had sexual intercourse?”
“Yes, I have,” I whispered back glancing at my parents standing outside the curtain.
A sexually transmitted disease was a possibility, but the tests for that came back negative, and more blood samples were sent to the CDC. I was given Keflex, a very strong antibiotic, intravenously and sent home after three days to continue recovering. A week after I got home a representative from the CDC came to our house with the results of the blood tests.
“Have you had any recent contact with a parrot or a duck recently?” she asked.
I had contracted psittacosis, commonly called parrot fever.
“There was a duck pond I walked around in Cobleskill.”
The morning after that disorienting night with Carl. Before he dozed off, he told me he was freaked out about my age and said it wouldn’t be a good idea for us to continue.
“You were great. It’ll be even more fun after you turn 18.”
I was stiff and sore and did not sleep, but I lay there contemplating the ramifications of no longer being a virgin. It was humiliating to be rejected for being jailbait, but I was relieved to have finally crossed the great divide. I got up while he slept and went for a walk to a nearby duck pond, where I fed the ducks with a loaf of Wonder Bread I found in the jumbled mess of a kitchen. The CDC rep informed me that breathing in dried dander or feces from an infected avian, parrots or ducks especially, is how this pulmonary disease infects humans.
I stayed home, watched a lot of television, and read Alice in Wonderland for the umpteenth time. A few days into my dreamland of recovery, I found out I was accepted to college on early admission and would be graduating from high school a year early.
I would be going off to college in September, in upstate New York’s idyllic Hudson Valley. It was 1974, and the college had a reputation for being artsy, freewheeling, and open-minded when it came to students’ sexual proclivities. I went there to study dance with dreams of being a choreographer.
I told my parents there was no reason for them to attend my high school graduation since it technically was not my class. I picked up my diploma and met Julia curbside at the high school playing field, and off we went to visit her latest coke dealing beau in Ann Arbor. That trip is unsurprisingly a total blur.
Back home, my mother was excited I would be going off to school, perhaps relieved I would be out of the clutches of Julia. My mother expressed a desire to spend time with me, since she was on the brink of being an empty nester. My father was busy working trying to figure out the finances of paying for college. My mother and I both loved to swim, so we went to Jones Beach. The late summer ocean waves were rough but warm. When the lifeguards went home, the six o’clock hour was a perfect time to swim, and we could bring the dog. We swam, bucking the waves, and ran with Jenny up and down the beach. As we settled back on our blankets, the wind picked up and the sand whipped around like a scene from Lawrence of Arabia. We wrapped towels around our bodies like terry cloth jalabiyas, and Jenny snuggled between us. Protected from the sand, nose to nose, Mom and I had a heart-to-heart.
My mother spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. “Have you, you know, ever had, had, had, um—"
“Mom, are you asking if I have had sexual relations?”
“Yes.”
“I have.”
“Okay.”
Jenny squirmed and jumped out from between us to chase a seagull.
This was the perfect opening for the plan I had to switch my birth control regimen to something more convenient and less messy than the diaphragm I got from Planned Parenthood. I longed for the freedom The Pill offered, and it could be considered a medical necessity to help regulate my period. In the privacy of our towel cloaks, I became the daughter who wants to share everything with her mother about her most intimate doings.
“Would you set up an appointment with your gynecologist and come with me.”
My mother was wide-eyed, and I couldn’t tell whether she was shocked, horrified, or touched by my invitation.
“If you want, sure.”
My main reason for this playacting charade was that I couldn’t afford the cost of the prescription, especially for a year-long supply. I hoped if the doctor prescribed the hormones for medical reasons, my mother would be on board to pay the bill.
At the appointment, the doctor assured me that my mother did not have to be in the exam room, but I continued my act and said it was okay, she stepped out with the doctor when I disrobed, and only he returned. With a prescription and monthly refills in hand, as well as a brochure on sexually transmitted diseases, we left.
The receptionist leaned forward over the counter and asked my mother, “Where should I send the bill?”.
“To me, of course, as you always do.”
The receptionist nodded and gave me a scrutinizing look over the top of her half-glasses. Maybe she had seen another daughter pull this stunt before.
My mother appeared proud of bonding with her daughter over this delicate threshold of womanhood and turned to me as we left the office.
“Let’s go to Henry’s for burgers and milkshakes.”
“Whatever you want, Mom, but I thought you were on a diet?”
“Not today.”
There was a conspiratorial intimacy between us that I had never experienced with her before. We were still mother and daughter, but more like two friends gossiping.
“Thanks for being so understanding about all this, Mom.”
“Are you going to eat your pickle?”
“Pickles with the milkshake gives me a stomachache.”
“Really? Your father’s the same way. Must be genetic.”
She ate the pickle and asked the waitress to refill the bowl.
While waiting for more pickles she said, “That was a nice swim we had, maybe we should do it again before you go off to school.”
“Sure. Remember that show, Flipper, I used to watch?”
“With the dolphins, sure.”
“We are like dolphins when we swim together.”
“Dolphins are quite intelligent,” she said.
“I heard there are scientists are trying to teach the dolphins to talk by giving them LSD.”
“Drugs? Have you? Oh please, contraceptives are enough for me for one day.”
“No, I don’t do any of that,” I lied, “but one of the dolphins on the show was given LSD as part of the experiment and apparently had bad trip.”
“Flipper couldn’t tell them she was in trouble?”
“It wasn’t Flipper they gave the LSD to, but one of the backup dolphins. I don’t think it ever talked, but tragically she committed suicide.”
“How does a dolphin commit suicide?”
“You’re right, they are smart, maybe smarter than us. They come up for air, only if they want to, and if they don’t—”
“Let’s talk about something else.”
“I’m going to miss Jenny when I go to college.”
“Do you want to take her with you?”
“I don’t think it’s allowed, but I’ll come home to visit you and her.”
“You’ll have your own dog someday.”
Mom ate another pickle, and I slurped the rest of the milkshake. After she paid the bill, we went home, and I started packing for school.
Emily Rubin's debut novel, Stalina (2011 HMH/Mariner/Lake Union), was a selection in the Amazon Debut Novel Award Contest. She is the recipient of the Sarah Verdone Writer Award, a finalist in the International Literary Awards, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her fiction and essays have been published in Red Rock Review, Confrontation, NY Observer, Poets & Writers Magazine, The Smart Set, HAPPY, and All the Restaurants in New York by John Donohue among others. She is the founder of Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose, a reading and performance series that started in the East Village and takes place in laundromats around the country.