Jo ran five miles every morning, regardless of the weather. She took a different route each day, and over the course of a month, she’d travel most of the roads in town. Only when the ground was covered in snow would she resort to a treadmill. She needed the run to remind her of what she could do. And she wanted Mattauk to see what she’d become.
She’d grown up in town, the daughter of the town’s optometrist. Back then, Mattauk’s loops, squares, and cul-de-sacs had felt like a maze—one Jo was seldom allowed to explore. Her childhood memories all seemed to take place in the same cramped corner on which the old family home sat. That was the one intersection in town Jo did her best to avoid. The moment the brick Tudor came into view, the air would grow close and her claustrophobia would kick in. Jo waited eighteen years to get out of that house, watching silently, teeth gritted, as her three older brothers escaped one by one. Back then, she would have thrown herself into the sound if she’d known she would one day return to Mattauk to spawn.
Jo wondered if any of her neighbors still thought of her as the girl she’d been—the quiet redhead with the prissy, overbearing mother. The girl whose mom chose her clothes and wrote notes to excuse her from gym class. The girl the kids in ninth grade had called Carrie.
Like being the smelly kid or the kid with home-cut hair, it wasn’t the kind of thing you ever really lived down. Jo had carried the humiliation with her for thirty-three years. It was finally something she felt like she owned.
The first time a kid in high school called her Carrie, she hadn’t understood. It seemed perfectly plausible that the boy who’d whispered it had simply forgotten her name. Jo had never called attention to herself. She’d discovered early on that if you stayed still and silent, people often forgot you were there. With a mother like hers, that seemed the right strategy; every movement called attention to a flaw to be fixed. Eventually, Jo was certain, she’d follow her brothers to freedom. Until then, she did her best to fly under the radar.
And then one day, everyone in school was staring straight at her.
“Carrie?” she asked a girl who’d muttered the name as they stood side by side at the bathroom sink.
“Like the book,” the girl explained with a roll of her eyes, as though everyone else in the ninth grade had read it. The revelation meant nothing to Jo. She skulked through the rest of the school day, and when the last bell rang, she bolted across Mattauk to the public library, pulled a copy of Carrie off the shelves, and sprinted all the way home without stopping. It was a five-mile trip, all told, but Jo was through her front door before her mother ever suspected a thing.
She locked herself in her bedroom that evening, ignoring her mother’s demands to open the door, and read the scene that told her what it all meant. Sixteen-year-old Carrie, kept innocent by her freakish mother, is convinced that she’s dying when she gets her first period. Jo reread the chapter twice, her entire body burning with shame. She knew what had happened. Brownnosing Ellen Goodwin had sold her out for a few glorious days in the spotlight.
It wasn’t until years later that Jo read the rest of Carrie. She wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t put the book down back in high school. She suspected things might have turned out differently for her—and very differently for Ellen Goodwin.
Ellen had been sitting in front of her two days earlier when Jo felt the first trickle halfway through algebra class. She instantly knew what it was. Her mother had kept her out of the health classes the other kids attended—not to leave Jo innocent of the ways of the world, but so she could explain it all to her daughter in her own flowery words.
Jo still cringed when she recalled her mother leaning forward and clutching Jo’s hands as if imparting a secret. “Soon you’ll be getting your period,” she’d announced in a hushed, honeyed tone. “It’s a very special day in every girl’s life. It’s the day you become a woman.”
Jo recoiled in horror. She had no interest whatsoever in joining any club to which her mother belonged. When she saw her mom’s lipstick-slathered smile start to flicker, she did her best to hide her feelings. It wasn’t easy. Because there was more. So much more. Over the course of an hour, the woman who had trained Jo to sit up straight, cross her legs daintily at the ankle, and comport herself like a lady informed her (in much more elegant terms) that blood would gush from her vagina once a month and would continue to do so until Jo married a man she “loved very much,” at which point he would use his penis to fill her vagina with his “seed.” Then, for nine months, she would grow into a ravenous, monstrous, “glowing” version of herself until a “gorgeous little baby” popped out of her and the gushing commenced once more. Even more terrifying, Jo’s mother made it clear that the whole process might be set into action if Jo were ever to let down her guard. “Boys who can’t help themselves” would do their best to get past her defenses, and girls who weren’t careful ended up with babies they couldn’t feed, diseases that couldn’t be cured, and lives that were wrecked beyond repair.
At the end of the talk, Jo promptly burst into tears.
“Oh my goodness, Josephine, what’s the matter?” Her mother had read several advice books and couldn’t understand how it had gone so wrong. “These are things all of us go through.”
“No,” Jo insisted, her fists clenched in her lap. “Not me.” None of her secret escape plans had involved tending to leaking privates five days every month. And never in her worst nightmares had she imagined a life spent defending a hole she barely knew existed against wanton boys, oozing pustules, and squalling infants.
“Yes, you,” her mother informed her. “There’s no way to avoid it. It’s just part of being a woman.”
“We’ll see about that,” Jo said.
The three years that followed were filled with dread as Jo waited for her mother’s prophesy to come to pass. Though she never joined in, she eavesdropped on other girls talking, and by the beginning of ninth grade, she knew most of them had been visited by the curse, as they called it. Jo prayed the curse would just pass her by—the way her aunt Aimee had never grown molars. Instead, it waited just long enough for her guard to come down. Then it struck when she least expected it—right in the middle of algebra class—forever ruining her best pair of Forenza jeans.
She remained in her chair after the other kids filed out of the classroom—until she and Ellen Goodwin were the only two left. Jo was only vaguely aware of Ellen hovering over Ms. Abram’s desk. Her brain could no longer process the barrage of stimuli. She felt feverish and light-headed. Her entire nervous system was buzzing, overloaded by fear.
Later, Jo recalled the concerned look on Ms. Abram’s face when the teacher was suddenly standing over her chair—and the crimson smear left behind on the wood when the teacher and Ellen coaxed Jo out of her chair. Then the scene changed, as if in a time lapse, and she found herself crying in the principal’s office with Ms. Abram’s shawl wrapped around her waist. The men who passed by did their best to ignore her. The ladies at the front desk smiled and attempted to lift her spirits.
“It happens to all of us at one time or another,” one of the school secretaries whispered. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Then why are you whispering?” Jo hissed back. The secretary had despised her from that moment forward.
Back at home, Jo sat in the bathroom with the kit her mother had prepared for her, a white wooden basket with a pink satin bow that had been hidden under the sink behind the toilet paper packages, waiting for that very moment. Inside were six bulky sanitary napkins, a frilly bag in which to stuff them, and a little bottle of Midol. Jo dumped it all out on the floor and sobbed. She’d never felt so betrayed. And over the two weeks that everyone called her Carrie, she didn’t blame Ellen Goodwin or her mother or even God. Instead, she focused her wrath on the body she hadn’t been able to train or control.
The war that began in ninth grade lasted for thirty-three years. Throughout those decades, Jo lived under constant siege. She kept a secret calendar designed to help her anticipate her period’s monthly arrival, only to be ambushed several days in advance. She devised ingenious methods for smuggling bulky pads to the school bathroom—and disguising the lumps beneath her clothes. She crafted cunning excuses for keeping her shorts on at the beach and took to wearing sweaters around her waist. Later, she scouted for hiding places for the Tampax her mother refused to buy—and hoarded quarters to procure the tampons from public restrooms.
The hardest part, though, was keeping her private war secret. No one could know what was happening. Certainly not her father or brothers—or, God forbid, the boys at school. But even females couldn’t be welcomed as allies. Other women showed no signs of struggling. It seemed inconceivable that all of them—all the teachers and waitresses and teenagers and store clerks and cleaning ladies whose paths she crossed every day—were suffering the same way she was. There was clearly something fucked up about Jo.
She expected to claim one small victory once she left Mattauk and her mother behind for college. Tampons, at least, would no longer be contraband. Ads told Jo that a carefree life of horseback riding and snowy-white hot pants awaited her. Then Jo lost her virginity and a new front in the war opened up. The stakes only grew higher. The fear of humiliation had kept her on her toes in high school. Now there were STDs and pregnancy to avoid. She’d wake up, heart pounding, from dreams in which she was forced to confess her sins to her mother. The nightmares didn’t prevent her from having sex, but they certainly made the afterglow less delightful. She now spent the first five days of her cycle battling her period—and the last five praying for it to come.
Then she was with Art and in the working world—no longer at risk of teenage motherhood and able to choose and pay for her own birth control. Yet her body refused to cede control. Her first boss paid more attention to her ass than he did to her work. Her second boss asked if she’d sit on his face—and called her a humorless cunt when she reported him to HR. Guests at the hotels where she worked grabbed, groped, and fondled her. She watched men kiss their mistresses in the lobby, only to return the next week with their wives. On more than one occasion, while wearing a suit and button-down shirt, she was mistaken for an escort. No matter what Jo accomplished, her body—and those of the women around her—made her question what was truly valued.
That all ended when she got pregnant. The moment she began to show, the spotlight shut off and Jo disappeared. She’d dreaded pregnancy her entire life, only to find it was the respite she’d been waiting for. While her body was preoccupied and men turned their attention elsewhere, she managed a feat that her colleagues had long thought impossible.
A month before she announced her pregnancy, she was made staff manager at the hotel where she’d been working for two years. The promotion came as a surprise to Jo. Though she knew her performance had been exemplary, she’d struggled to catch senior management’s eye. Six hours after her new title was made public, a colleague informed her that it was considered as a dead-end position within the hospitality company that owned the hotel. Jo had convinced herself that was just jealous gossip when she received a phone call from a reporter at the New York Times. Was she aware, the reporter asked, that turnover among the hotel’s female workers was three times that of its male employees? Jo said she had seen nothing to suggest that was true and referred the reporter to the chief communications officer of the organization. The company’s C-suite knew all about the problem, the reporter informed her, and the problem was hardly unique to the New York location. Staff managers seemed to make convenient scapegoats whenever stockholders or the media took notice. Where did she imagine her predecessor had gone? If Jo cared to discuss the issue in the future, the reporter said, she would gladly make herself available.
That night, Jo went through the HR files and realized it was true. Fifteen women had quit in the previous year alone. Thirteen had signed NDAs and were sent home with several months’ pay in their pockets. Two had filed suit against the hotel for failing to protect them from known sexual predators. The blunt reports of harassment and assault turned Jo’s stomach. A room-service waitress had been held hostage in a bathroom for hours. A member of the cleaning staff had barely escaped being raped by a guest. Jo made careful copies of all the files. She wanted it to stop, and if it didn’t, she’d use them. The previous managers valued the guests and considered employees expendable. The women Jo worked with were worth something to her.
The next day, Jo introduced a handful of new policies. Going forward, the cleaning staff would work in teams of three. No woman would ever enter a guest’s room on her own. Room service to male guests would be delivered by men. Female employees would see to the women guests. Guests who harassed waitresses in the hotel’s restaurants and bars would be flagged and served by male staff—the buffer, the better. Those who managed to do it twice would be banned.
It seemed so obvious, and too easy. Surely, Jo thought, similar policies had failed in the past. But in the six months after Jo put her plan into motion, no female staff members resigned. No hush money was paid and no new lawsuits were filed. When she first found out she was pregnant, she’d worried about being laid off following maternity leave. It happened, she’d noticed, more often than not. Instead, she was welcomed back with a promotion. The policies she’d introduced in New York had saved the corporation so much money that they were being instituted around the world. Within two years, Jo was general manager of the Manhattan hotel.
Jo’s body did not welcome this development. After a yearlong truce, it returned to battle with a vengeance. The periods that had long been unpredictable trickles of blood were now torrents. For three days in a row, Jo would pass multiple clots the size of plums, each filled with enough blood to overwhelm an ultra-size tampon and a mattress-thick pad. Her gynecologist assured her she wasn’t dying. It was a common problem—a common problem, Jo noted out loud, for which no gynecologists had bothered to find a solution. She wondered how other women managed to survive in workplaces without hundreds of toilets. At least once a month, Jo found herself slipping into an empty guest room with just seconds to spare before her body released a horror movie’s worth of gore. She knew the day would come when she wouldn’t make it on time, so she kept a change of clothes tucked behind some files in her bottom desk drawer. When anemia drained her will to live every month, she swallowed iron supplements and devoured chopped liver to get through the day. She learned the location of every public bathroom between work and home. She discovered it was possible—though uncomfortable—to wear two tampons at once. She looked forward to cold weather, when a winter coat would hide anything that might leak through her pants.
She thought she was a champ for managing to hold it together. Then the hot flashes began. That was when Jo finally started to crack. She was thirty-nine—far too young for menopause. When her gynecologist told her no one really knew what caused them, she almost exploded. Her blood pressure skyrocketed. She lost liters of pit sweat every day.
“I can’t live like this anymore,” she said.
“Try exercise,” she was told.
Those two flippant words from a doctor who was staring straight at her vagina when he uttered them were the only advice that ever made a real difference.
Jo was forty the first time she set foot in a gym. She stepped on a treadmill and began to run the rage off. Five miles later, she almost felt human. When she hit ten, she knew something was happening. Her body, which had long held her back, had finally freed her. Over the next three years, she grew stronger than she’d ever thought possible. Jo sensed the power building within her, but she had no idea what she could do with it. Until Lourdes.
Three years to the day after Jo was made manager, the young woman showed up in her office shortly before eleven a.m., her uniform disheveled and her face drained of color. She was new—only three days on the job. Jo had hesitated to hire her. She’d felt terrible about it, but Lourdes was too pretty, with a figure that—even in a uniform—was certain to draw unwanted attention. Jo had gone through the short interview fully expecting to turn her down. Then the young woman had asked if she could work mornings. In the evenings, she went to school.
“What are you studying?” Jo had asked casually.
“Hotel management,” Lourdes said. “Someday, I’d like to have a job like yours.”
Jo hired her on the spot. The limits of her own influence were becoming clear. She’d need an army of women to change things in the industry. “Come in at eight,” she’d said. “You can spend your first two hours of every shift helping me. If that works out, I’ll find the money to employ you in my office full-time.”
Now the same young woman was standing before her, looking like her soul had spilled out. All that were left of the top three buttons of her uniform were a few dangling threads. She clutched the rest of her shirt together in her fist.
“Lourdes.” Jo ran to her and searched for injuries. “What happened?”
Lourdes opened her mouth but couldn’t speak.
“Where’s the rest of your team?”
The young woman shook her head. Somehow, she’d ended up on her own.
“Call 911,” Jo ordered the executive trainee who’d been embedded in her office. “Tell them we’ve had a sexual assault. Have them send an ambulance and the police.”
“What room was she in?” the trainee asked. Handpicked by the C-suite, he considered himself Jo’s superior in everything but title. “Was it a VIP suite?” The corporation had guidelines to follow in such situations, and Jo had tossed them out the window.
“Just do it,” she ordered.
She found Lourdes’s cart on the thirty-ninth floor, outside the hotel’s second-best suite. She used her pass to let herself in. A man in his fifties, naked beneath an open hotel robe, greeted her in the suite’s living room. His limp red penis protruded from a tuft of salt-and-pepper hair.
He looked her up and down. “Where’s the coffee?” he demanded in an international accent that rang of cash.
“I’m not room service,” she informed him. “I’m the hotel manager, and I’ve called the police.”
“Oh really?” He seemed intrigued and amused. “For what?” He closed his robe and tightened its belt, then sat down on the edge of the bed, and crossed his legs.
Jo’s pulse was accelerating, and she could feel the heat beginning to build. She wanted to murder him, and she was worried she would. “You attacked the woman who came to clean your room.”
“The girl’s a hysteric.” He dismissed the charge with an almost dainty wave of his hand. “I didn’t leave a mark on her.”
“You had your penis out when I got here.”
“I wasn’t expecting you!” The man laughed. “Ask your boss,” he added, as if that would clear everything up. “He knows I am a very pious man who would never do such things. And it is not very hospitable of you to burst into my room and accuse me.”
The tenor of his voice changed as he switched from defense to offense. The guest was someone important, Jo remembered. She’d taken the reservation from the CEO’s office herself. She couldn’t recall who he was. Mafioso, dictator, mogul, or Nobel Prize winner. It made no difference. He was a VIP. And the rules were different where VIPs were concerned.
“Your face,” the man said, adopting a tone of concern. “It is very red. I’m afraid that you are not well. Perhaps you realize that you have made a mistake?”
The heat that had begun in Jo’s chest had crept up her neck and laid claim to her head. Beads of sweat formed along her hairline. She desperately wanted to rip off her suit jacket, but she knew doing so would expose the sweat stains spreading under the arms of her silk shirt.
There was a knock at the door. The police, she assumed, before she realized that the NYPD couldn’t have made it to the hotel so quickly. The door opened before she could make a move toward it. Hotel security had arrived, led by the trainee. The relief she felt lasted less than a second.
“Jo, can you come with us for a moment?” the trainee inquired.
Something was up. “Where’s Lourdes?” Jo demanded.
“She’s totally fine,” the trainee cooed. “It was all a big misunderstanding.”
“The police will decide that,” Jo said.
“We don’t need the police. Like I said, it was all a misunderstanding. Lourdes is with HR right now, figuring out her next steps.”
Three men in their forties and fifties would be pressuring a twenty-two-year-old woman to take a payout in exchange for an NDA. “I want to see her first.”
The trainee had the chutzpah to smile at her. “I’ve already spoken with senior management. That won’t be possible.”
She knew then what she should have known all along. He’d been hired to keep an eye on her. “You fucking traitor,” Jo spat.
“Say what you like, but we need to leave this room. I’m very sorry for the inconvenience, sir,” the trainee told the guest.
“Don’t apologize.” The man stood up from the bed and laid an avuncular hand on the young man’s shoulder. “These poor women—they are at the mercy of their hormones. You and I are lucky to be men. I can only imagine what their suffering must be like.”
Jo later told Art that something inside her had ignited—a powder keg that had been filling for a very long time. The force of the explosion propelled her across the room before she knew what was happening. With one hand, she grabbed hold of the VIP’s throat and slammed him into the wall. Her free arm reared back and sent her fist flying toward the man’s face. In the last millisecond, it veered to the left and hit the wall less than an inch from his ear. When her arm finally came to a stop, it was wrist-deep in the drywall. It was clear that the impact would have killed the man in her grip. Miraculously, Jo felt no pain at all.
When security dragged her backward, her heels fell off. She didn’t fight. She watched as the man slid down the wall to the floor, where a puddle of urine was growing. Around his neck was a second degree burn in the shape of her hand.
Forty-five minutes later, Jo was standing shell-shocked in front of a departures board at Grand Central Terminal, clutching the few personal belongings she’d been allowed to take from her desk. There hadn’t been an opportunity to change her tampon before she left the hotel. She suddenly sensed how heavy it had grown inside her, and all at once, she felt it slip, and knew the dam inside her had given way. As hundreds of commuters and tourists wove around her, Jo felt the warmth overwhelm the backup pad she’d stuck to her underwear that morning and begin to soak through her pants. The closest bathroom was across the main hall and down the stairs to the dining concourse. She knew she wouldn’t make it.
“I give up,” she told the universe. She’d lost the war. It had been inevitable. There was nothing she could have done to avoid this moment.
The epiphany came as the blood flowed freely down her legs. She should never have attempted to fight it.
How many years—how much energy—had she lost trying to control something that could not be controlled? How long had she feared being outed as female? How much frustration had she endured, inhabiting a world that wasn’t designed for her kind? How long had she prayed to be seen and accepted as more than a body? How hard had she tried to fix things that simply refused to be fixed?
So much fury had built up inside Jo. But at last she’d identified the true enemy. She’d been waging war with herself since she was fourteen years old. But the problem wasn’t her body. The problem was the companies that sold shitty sanitary pads. Otherwise reasonable adults who believed tampons stole a girl’s virginity. Doctors who didn’t bother to solve common problems. Birth control that could kill you. Boys who were told that they couldn’t control themselves. A society that couldn’t handle the fact that roughly half of all humans menstruate at some point in their lives.
The real problem was the hotel where women were being assaulted, the corporation that owned it, and the men who ran it. In a filing cabinet in her home office was a folder filled with everything Jo needed to burn the place to the ground. And in her contacts was the phone number of the reporter at the Times who’d called after Jo’s promotion.
Out of courtesy, Jo sat on a plastic bag on the train ride home. She didn’t bother to hide the stain on her pants.
“Ma’am, are you okay?” the female conductor whispered. “Can I get you something?”
“You don’t have to whisper,” Jo told her. “This shit happens to all of us.”
The following morning, Jo sent the hotel’s HR files to the New York Times. Then she went for a run. For the first time in decades, Jo’s body felt like it was finally hers. She not only owned it, she fucking loved it. It carried her all the way across town without getting winded. On the way, she made a point of running past Ellen Goodwin’s house, just as she would at least once a week for the next five years.