She lost the first baby when she was nineteen. Two years before she’d meet Julius—named for a dictator, born with the soul of Saint Francis.
It was her sophomore year at Marymount, the only college her father would pay for. An all-women’s teaching college with curfews, prayers twice a day, and elocution classes.
The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain. Your father was a peer, my dear—remember who you are.
She wore spotless white gloves. Memorized the place settings of a formal dinner table. Learned to pour tea with a steady hand. This was the education of a proper young lady. Refine. Constrict. Tighten that girdle. Suck it in until you were fit to burst. Sit like a lady. Eat like a lady. Talk like a lady. Think like a lady.
The girls were kept busy. Candle-lighting ceremonies where they wore crowns of flowers and white dresses that were more like nuns’ habits than party frocks. Hoop-rolling races—the winner, it was predicted, would be first to find a husband. More prayers. Before class, and vespers after dinner. God forbid they should have too much time to think. Look out their barred dorm windows and take notice of the war stealing America’s poor young men.
The baby’s father was a boy named Tracy she’d met at a Champagne party with their brother college, St. Thomas Aquinas. She hadn’t wanted his baby, or any baby, and so when she woke six weeks after her missed period, the white sheets of her dorm bed stained brown with clotted blood, she’d been relieved. Her roommate Beverly Schneider slept deep and didn’t stir as Leslie balled up her sheets, crept down to the basement, the cement floor cold under her bare feet, and tossed it all into the cafeteria dumpster.
She bled for weeks. Went through boxes of maxipads. Even had to hitch a ride to the small-town drugstore near the college to buy more. The nuns who taught the girls noticed how pale she was, arranged to have liver and onions served at her table. An extra dose of iron that made the girls wrinkle their noses in disgust. She didn’t think to go to a doctor. Then there’d be all that explaining to do. And she was sure that was the end of it. What was it that her mother always said?—When life gives you lemons …
She tried to believe she was lucky. A problem had been solved. But then she’d have to run to the stark dorm bathroom with its many stalls, all without doors—Heaven forbid a girl should have an iota of privacy—and put on a fresh pad, wrap the blood-soaked one in toilet paper, and reach down into the trash so no one would find it. The nuns were militant about keeping watch and she wouldn’t have been surprised to find Sister Mary Bartholomew rummaging in the wastebasket.
Like all the girls she knew, she avoided talking about the messiness of the female body. What her mother called “woman’s problems.” As if the ability to create life were a curse. A disease. Is that what they wanted Avalon’s little girls to think, she wondered. Did they hope smearing womanhood would make the island girls less likely to drop their panties in the dunes for a Tom, Dick, or Harry?
How her mother had known about Leslie’s first period, she would never figure out. She’d been dressing for bed in her pink bathroom in the Castle, the shelves lined with porcelain poodles with blue sequin eyes and fringed lashes, when she saw the dark stain on her girdle. She stuffed a wad of toilet paper between her legs and then tossed and turned all night with cramps.
The following afternoon, when she came home from a tortured day at school, hours spent fearing her blood would leak onto her desk chair, she found the kit outside her bedroom door. It was a long, rectangular cardboard box. Unmarked. Inside, a bunch of thick cotton pads to be attached to a plastic belt with a tiny silver buckle. There was a pamphlet. What It Means to Be a Woman.
Years later, when she carried Brooks to term, she’d know every word in the pamphlet had been a lie.