I waited for my period through the end of grade school and into the summer before my freshman year. I had plenty of time alone that summer.
My brothers and Leanne’s boyfriend rode bulls and bareback and saddle broncs at rodeos on summer weekends. Leanne went with her boyfriend. Mom and Dad went as audience and worriers, Cris between them in the grandstands. Each time, Mom asked me if I wanted to go. I said no. I didn’t much like rodeos, what they did to the animals. And I liked being alone. The quiet of the house. Long afternoons reading. Books from the library and books from Mom and Dad’s cupboard of sex and romance.
Mom had let Leanne and me read her paperback copy of Valley of the Dolls, with its racy women and sex and drugs, abortions and affairs, suicide and cancer. I didn’t have to hide the reading, but I read the sexy parts alone, again and again. And the opening pages of The Godfather. The scene at the wedding, Sonny and the bridesmaid, sex up against a wall. I explored what my body liked, learned the pleasures I could give myself, imagined what else a boy could do for me.
When my family came home, they found me in front of the TV, or reading a library book. In the same way I never told Mom about my worry about not having my period, I would never tell her about this. The wanting in my body, the yearning and release I could give myself, this woman thing already grown in me, even though I hadn’t yet bled.
At home in the afternoon, a few weeks into high school, I felt an easing of an ache low in my belly and back. I hadn’t known the ache was there until it was gone. A letting go, a warm flow.
I went into the bathroom. The blood in my panties was like a badge, like a star.
I wouldn’t be the last girl in class.
The tampons were in the dresser drawer with the gold knobs. I’d studied the directions on the box while I waited for this day. I knew how to use them. I knew my body from touch.
When I left the bathroom, the tampon felt dry in me. I walked and sat carefully, as though it might come out on its own. I sat with my homework and shifted around in my chair and went to the bathroom to make sure the tampon was working okay. Which I could only do by taking it out and putting a new one in. After several trips to the bathroom, each tampon drier than the last, I started to trust that they were working.
After Mom got home, I waited to tell her. I didn’t want it to be a big deal. But not to tell her would be worse, because someday she might ask if I’d started, and she’d know I never told her.
When we were alone, I took a breath and kept my voice steady. “I started my period,” I said.
She stopped whatever she was doing, sorting the mail, putting away groceries. “Oh,” she said. She turned to me, like there might be something more for us to say about it. Her face was angles of cheekbones and jawline. Whatever excitement I might’ve had stayed hidden under the shame that it had taken me so long to start. As though it was a personal failing, like not studying hard enough.
She asked me if I needed help with anything and I said no. I felt that tampon in me, imagined the blood flowing past it. I left her and went to the bathroom.
At first the light flow of blood surprised me. By the second day the heavy flow surprised me, and then how many days it went on. I made my own secret trips to the bathroom at school, touched my belly so other girls would know I had cramps. I never told any of them. I’d become a secretive girl over the last few years, and I didn’t want to be left behind again.