June 2, 1926
Dear Leroy,
I have been in Wellsford for one whole night and day. This is what I have accomplished so far:
killed a bum
amputated a dog’s tail
drank brandy
took an eye test
Ha!
If you want details, write back.
Please tell Carl I donated my reverse-leather suede boots to the Burlington Railroad.
Say hello to Mrs. Andrews.
How’s your new ice delivery job?
Have you started to miss me?
Your friend,
Iris Louise Baldwin.
(Who you plan to come visit very soon.)
P.S. They keep a shotgun by the kitchen door. I wonder if it’s loaded.
Blood is everywhere—the sheets, the ticking, even my pillowcase!
I’ve stuffed a bath towel between my legs, so now I’m ruining it, too. The only other choice is Mrs. Nesbitt’s hankie.
“When it happens, keep it to yourself,” Mrs. Andrews had warned when she explained menstruation to me last year. The conversation lasted less than a minute, with no time for questions. “It’s a nasty medical condition, a curse on women. Do your utmost to guard against leakage, odor, accidents…”
So far, I have failed. How can I keep this a secret?
I turn on my side, stare out the window. Shifty wind brushes the corn rows—green then silver then green again.
There’s a war in my stomach, or is it my back, or both?
I would like to die.
For the last two years I’ve worried about it to death—that I’d start in the middle of Latin or physical education. Then I feared it wouldn’t ever happen. But why didn’t I think it could start here? How could I have packed my whole trunk and brought nothing—no rags or pads?
Outside our shoe store window I used to watch ladies, some of them mothers of girls in my class, go into Lowen’s Pharmacy and come out with a bulky sack—their “silent purchase.” The store had a system—you put money in a box and took a package of Kotex pads off the counter without saying anything to anybody. I was so dumb not to do that. My stupidity doesn’t go in a cycle. I’m stupid all the time.
Dr. Nesbitt’s got an office full of gauze bandages and clean rags, maybe even a stack of diapers somewhere. But I can’t sneak in there… stupid, stupid. His office is so tidy, he’d notice if I borrowed a safety pin.
I rearrange the towel. From the kitchen come Dr. and Mrs. Nesbitt’s voices and the clink of teaspoons. I smell coffee and toast. Dr. Nesbitt is cooking breakfast. Then he’ll do the rest of my jobs before he goes to work.
I’m trapped. Even if I pretend I’m sick, they’ll see the ruined towel and know. If I had three wishes in the world, they would all be for a box of Kotex and two safety pins.
Oh, God… here comes Marie. Her toenails clickity-click on the strips of hardwood beside the carpet runner. She bumps my door open and looks at me cockeyed. I can see sunlight through the tear in her ear, but she’s definitely fluffier now, almost shiny. I sniff her jasmine perfume.
She puts her front paws on the mattress and sniffs me. “Ugh. For God’s sake, Marie, git. Go get some toast.” I flap my hands. “Shoo!”
But she just sniffs more. She does some doggy circles like she’s contemplating what to do next. I swear she seems to be thinking.
She trots outside the dining room door and barks.
“Shut up, Marie. Bye-bye!”
She barks again, this time more shrilly.
Help. Please, please, don’t anybody come in here.
“Scram!”
She minds me by scramming right back into the kitchen and barking her head off.
An eternity passes. The phone rings—a short and two longs. Not the Nesbitts’ code. Roosters, robins, everybody is up and running but me. I hear tap… tap… tap.
It’s Henry.
In another eternity Mrs. Nesbitt peeks in the door. I’m completely turned inside out, all smelly horribleness.
She assesses the scene in an instant. “Bottom drawer.” I stare at her, uncomprehending. She nods toward the chest. “We’ll do wash this afternoon instead of dusting.” She leaves, shutting the door behind her.
In the bureau are three dark blue boxes with white crosses and one word printed on them: Kotex. My hands fumble trying to pin the thick pad into clean underwear. The wallpaper goddesses watch. What help are they, flying around in their see-through gowns? You don’t read myths about this.
I roll my dirty clothes and pillowcase, and the stained towel inside the sheets so that not one speck of red shows, and waddle down the hall, all the while praying, Please, God, have Dr. Nesbitt be gone by now. I walk on the outsides of my feet. The pad feels like a bale of hay.
“He already left,” Mrs. Nesbitt says with a sympathetic smile when I step into the kitchen. I set the laundry pile on the back porch and shrink into a kitchen chair. She shrugs. “A wash with bluing will take care of it. How are you feeling?”
Mrs. Nesbitt and Marie silently watch me sob into a napkin. But it’s not my “time of the month” making me cry, it’s their motherly help. Like magic, they turned awful to easy.
“I’d rather wash you in that tub than wash sheets in this,” I tell Marie after breakfast. The Nesbitt’s washing machine is yellow with two wooden tubs—one for washing and one for rinse. There’s a wringer that’ll scalp me if one hair gets caught in it. It already squished a grasshopper, leaving a smear of yellow-green on my pillowcase. Mrs. Andrews’ washer was electric. This one’s got a gas engine that sputters grease.
When I’m finished the sheets aren’t shredded, nor are they perfectly white, but they’re close. I’m sure there are traces of grease and grasshopper guts and my time of the month if you took a magnifying glass to them.
Mrs. Nesbitt has gone inside to take a nap. Dr. Nesbitt should be back soon. There is no way he will just say hello and go in his clinic without noticing my sheets—giant banners announcing, Hear ye, hear ye, Iris Baldwin has her period.
Thank goodness there’s a breeze. I shake the sheets and wrestle them over the clothesline. I don’t hear the horse and wagon until it’s all the way up our drive.
Cecil Deets.
He just sits up there on the wagon bench with a smug look. “Strange. Not their usual laundry day,” he remarks, chewing a wad of tobacco. His eyes dart around, probably looking for Mrs. Nesbitt. “You look like you could use a hand.”
“No,” I say too sharply. “No, thank you.”
He jumps off the seat, glances at me, and rubs the hem of one of my sheets between his grimy fingers. “Where’s the lady of the house?”
But before I can answer, Marie leaps off the back porch and charges at Cecil, her teeth bared. She acts part wolf, part bear. Cecil kicks at her, then hops back in his wagon. “Holy shit!” He squints at her, and says, “Oh, I know you. You’re the stinkin’ mutt beggin’ scraps around my place. Your dead hobo musta underfed ya.”
A strip of fur down Marie’s back rises. Her ears flatten. Despite the cuts and bruises she looks ready to attach her teeth to his ankle.
“Marie, stop that,” I say. But she doesn’t.
“Marie?” Cecil makes that burpy laugh. “Huh!” He gives the sheets a good once-over, and then gives me the same. He raises his eyebrows, lowers his voice. “Yep, you’re more matured than my Dot. Just how long they hired you for?” I look away without answering, desperate to hear Dr. Nesbitt’s car.
The three of us are caught together for a long, awful moment.
“You ever need any kind of help around here when the doctor’s gone, just let me know, Miss Iris Baldwin.” He shakes his head, as though I must be confused. “It’s surely a puzzle—you out here with the laundry instead of Dot.”
Go away…
He spits in the dust, clucks his horse, and as slow as a slug, turns his rig around.
. . . and never come again.
“I will not report the events of this day to Leroy in my next letter,” I tell Marie, sitting on my bed later that afternoon. She’s pooped. No wonder—she’s been taking care of me all day. “Yesterday I would have put you through the washing machine and the wringer, and today you’re my new best friend.” I rub her head. “What happened between you and Cecil Deets?” She looks up at me. “You know something, don’t you?”
I lie back. Every part of me either aches or drips or throbs. Mrs. Nesbitt’s still in bed too. She doesn’t seem to feel well today, either.
I have three thoughts—a good one, a new one, and an awful one. The good one is how Mrs. Nesbitt planned for me, looked forward to my coming with the stamps and body powder and Kotex she bought.
My new thought is that I never once considered she’d be curious about me; that she’d talk, much less ask questions; that we’d have anything in common.
Now the awful thought. If Mrs. Nesbitt didn’t go to town for my silent purchase, which I’m pretty sure is right, then who did? I shudder. “Oh, please let it be a catalog order,” I say to Marie, “or even Dr. Nesbitt.
“Anybody but Cecil.”
“Supper from Miss Olive Nish tonight,” Dr. Nesbitt announces, unloading two covered containers on the kitchen counter. “The perfect trade-off for trimming her ingrown toenails—yams marinated in sorghum molasses and green beans in bacon grease.”
My stomach lurches. Mrs. Nesbitt walks into the kitchen with Henry, rested and smiling. Dr. Nesbitt starts to grab her arm, then stops himself. Instead he pecks her on the cheek. After a day of toenail trimming and God knows what else, his hair still looks like he parted it with a scalpel.
“How’d you get along today?” he asks, kneeling beside Marie on the floor. He feels her ribs, parts her fur and examines her stitches and her tail. “Looks like we missed a spot on your ear, but, all in all, you look beautiful.”
“And strong,” I say.
Dr. Nesbitt sorts through the mail. Marie sighs—a long, satisfied sound—and falls asleep. Mrs. Nesbitt suggests we plant marigold seeds by the front stoop. I don’t mention Cecil or the cranky washing machine. I just listen to a soft summer rain drum the back porch roof.