I awoke in panic from a nightmare of a masked man kicking me in the stomach. I could hardly breathe. My midsection kept pulling me downward, trying to double me over, refusing to relax. Instead it heaved in wave after wave of agonizing constrictions.
Because the last time I could remember waking in the night with a crisis was the night of my parents’ death, all the old terrors washed over me once more. I could actually hear the men grunting again as their swords plunged into my beloved family. Scorching their way through my very bones, I could feel the screams of my mother and brother. I could see the flames rising up to hide the carnage. Worst of all, I could feel every ounce of terror, fear, rage and grief I had felt so long before.
“What is happening? What is happening?” called Mordecai, rushing over with features slack from a deep sleep. I had never seen his eyes so glazed over and inert.
“I don’t know!” I answered, holding my midsection and rocking back and forth with the pain. “It hurts so bad!”
I cried out. Mordecai remained motionless, his eyes as wide as two gold pieces.
“What is it?” I screamed. “I swear, Poppa, I did nothing! I touched nothing! I was fast asleep!”
Mordecai did not even seem to hear me, so great was his paralysis. Yet even through my panic and pain, I could tell from his eyes that he was coming to a realization. One he had not expected. One that remained a complete mystery to me. Finally Mordecai saw the evidence upon the fabric of my night clothing and knew for certain. “I am so sorry,” he said, almost moaning in his remorse. “I didn’t think. I didn’t prepare. . . .”
And then he turned swiftly and hurried for the door.
“I have to go,” he said, his face pale. “I know—it’s terrible to leave now, but Rachel will know what to do. I must go and fetch her.”
He was almost out the door when he stopped abruptly, turned around and said with as much tenderness as he could remember to summon, “By the way, my dearest, there’s nothing wrong with you. Nothing at all. I—I can’t explain now, but Rachel soon will. Just please wait there and do not move, will you?”
Now, I do not relay this episode to convey yet another milestone in my growing-up years or to illustrate Mordecai’s ineptitude or any such thing. I tell you this because “becoming a woman,” as Rachel called it when she eventually arrived, had a profound effect upon me.
To put it simply, puberty caused my stored-up rage to surge and break out of its restraints. And the target this time, I am ashamed to say, was my poor dear lifesaver, Poppa Mordecai.
To his credit, Mordecai tried to atone for his omission in preparing me for that day. He took the necklace given to me by my parents and draped it around my neck.
“You are a woman now,” he said in a low voice. “I remember how your parents wanted you to wear this when you had finally left childhood behind. It is a special symbol of our people, and you should always wear it proudly.”
“I thought it was just a family heirloom,” I countered.
“No. It is far more than that. It is the very symbol once painted on the shields of David’s army. For many of our people, it has become an emblem of sorts, since God’s law forbids us to have graven images.”
“It’s not just a star?”
“It is a star. Some even call it David’s Star. But this sign is much more. Whenever you see it, wherever you see it, you can know that a child of Israel, one of your people, has left his mark.”
A few days after that first menses, after spending a dreadful day curled up in my bed, I took a shaky walk around the yard. It was frightfully hot, yet I was too grateful to be outdoors to even notice. Rachel’s grandson Jesse walked haltingly beside me—actually a few steps behind me, afraid to come too close in case I would snap at him once more.
I was hardly aware of his presence. From the first moment I had stepped out into the daylight, I had become seized by the most ferocious sense of confinement and alienation I had ever felt. Suddenly the expanse of our courtyard became a prison, its walls the ramparts of a dungeon wall inching inward with every passing hour. Mordecai was my jailer, a sadistic depriver of adolescent joys.
So the first thing I did was dispatch Jesse with a mean-spirited diatribe about the peskiness of young men. I am ashamed to say this, especially in light of the near future, but such is the wont of so many adolescent girls.
On his way out, Jesse reentered the house to bid his grandmother good-bye and left from the front door without another word. Several minutes later, Rachel emerged, wiping her hands against her lap. I bristled and turned away, for I was certain she was about to upbraid me for my treatment of her favorite grandson. But instead, she took my arm and awkwardly sat down with me in the shade of the center palm tree. And that is where I finally learned the truth of what had just happened to me.
Somehow Rachel felt the need to veer her object lesson into the provinces of male anatomy and sexuality, a subject that rendered her nearly incoherent. The words stammered out of her in staccato bursts. I had never heard her speak so nervously, her eyes turned away from me and her face grim with determination. When her descriptions brought her to the need to specifically describe parts of the male body, she nearly halted, paralyzed by her struggle to capture the safest nickname or euphemism.
I nearly seized her by the shoulders to shout at her, “Rachel, for heaven’s sake, I’ve caught glimpses of Mordecai and even Jesse; it’s fairly obvious they are different from us. That makes it undeniable! And it’s something they hold in the hand—I have it pretty well figured out!”
But instead I kept my lips tight and still and listened to her elliptical trip through the wonders of all the subjects the adults in my life had never seen fit to teach me.
When Rachel finished, she simply stopped, as though her lurching flow of words had finally exhausted her capacity for speech. A long pause fell between us. I have wondered since if she was waiting for me to ask questions or say something, or whether she truly was finished and simply refused to utter a word more than the occasion required. But before I could find out, without the least warning I felt my lungs start to heave, my shoulders shake and my eyes begin to stream with tears. I had never wept like that in my life. I felt possessed by some foreign being whose only form of communication was deep, even violent sobs.
Rachel reached her arm around my shoulders with a dutiful expression and began to explain that my predicament was nothing to be frightened or sad about. It was a natural thing that happened to every girl. Everyone understood that.
But if anybody did not understand that day, it was Rachel. For you see, I was not weeping about the frightening facts of menstruation or sexuality. For the first time, I was weeping for my dear dead mother. The sensation of being in her arms, hearing her warm voice whisper to me about what a beautiful little girl I was—that feeling had washed over me as fresh and powerful as though she had died only yesterday. And my emotion was not merely grief; it was a profound sadness—that my mother’s “beautiful little girl” had now become a woman, had progressed into her childbearing years without her momma being able to share a moment of it.
I explained none of this to Rachel. In my weeping state, I felt it beneath me to explain the truth to her. I simply went on sobbing loudly with my face in my hands. Finally Rachel shook her head in dismay, no doubt convinced that such a reaction should take only a minute to run its course, then stood and returned to the house. I sat and tried to force my tears to stop. I failed. My body was on a ride of its own making, and it certainly had no plans to consult me about the best time to end.
It has taken me many years to fully understand the layers of emotion I experienced that day.
The first layer was, as I’ve just described, an unexpected wave of delayed grief over the death of my mother. But below that, just below it in fact, was my first taste of adulthood, with all its undertones of yearning and independence. In short, it had finally occurred to me that I was growing up. Time was not standing still anymore. I had now entered my childbearing years, yet I remained a virtual inmate at the hands of my benevolent despot of a father-who-was-not-my-father. I was a woman now, for G-d’s sake. Yes, my little friend, I was in the frame of mind to use His name for my own ends, I’m sorry to say. The fact that I wasn’t even allowed to leave the house filled me with resolve. Something had to change!