A Training Bra, a Box of Tampons, a Journal
It had occurred to me on the drive up from New Jersey that my breasts might develop enough over the course of the summer—finally—that I’d need a bra, an item I’d be unlikely to procure without the embarrassment of asking for a ride to town.
Weighing on me even more heavily was the question of how I’d deal with it if I got my long-overdue period that summer.
Regina Emerson was not the type of person you’d ask to drive you someplace, and though Forrest would have taken me to the store, no problem, that would mean sitting next to him on the way home, in the front seat, with the bag containing tampons on my lap.
Now, thanks to the gift of the bike, I had my own transportation.
That first morning, before setting off for the club, Forrest had reached into his wallet and peeled off a bunch of bills—a hundred dollars’ worth, it turned out, when I counted them later. “Anytime you need more, just let me know,” he said.
Now I stuffed a few dollar bills into the pocket of my shorts and jumped on Buttercup, heading downtown to pick up supplies.
Along the way I passed the houses of the Emersons’ neighbors—vast family mansions along the lakefront and then, as I made my way from the water, more modest homes, though still way nicer than where I’d come from.
There was a plant nursery, a dog grooming establishment, a beauty salon, an ice cream parlor.
At the top of the hill sat a wonderful old stone building, the Lake Catherine Library.
All told, the ride to town took no more than fifteen minutes. With my hands placed squarely on Buttercup’s handlebars, I was in no rush. I tried out all the gears, threw my head back to feel the wind rushing past.
MacDougall’s stocked pretty much everything.
I spent fifteen minutes walking the aisles, getting up my courage to make my purchase, and when I did, I added toothpaste and bobby pins and Kleenex to my basket to make the presence of that box of tampons less obvious.
While I was at it, I picked up a training bra.
Back at the house, up in my little attic room under the eaves, I placed the box of tampons in one of the drawers, concealed under my three T-shirts. I put on my training bra and stuffed toilet paper down the front, one clumped-up piece on each side. I almost looked like a regular teenager.
The family was in the sunroom—Regina with a book, the children playing Chinese checkers, though only Jilly seemed invested in the game.
Hayward looked up when I walked in. Maybe I was imagining things, as I did so often, but it seemed as though he was staring at my chest again.
A smile came over his face. Not the good kind.
“It’s Forrest’s poker night,” Regina said. Slowly, like a person in a dream, she rose from the sofa and drifted over to the table, where Prudence had set out the meal. “So it’s just the four of us tonight.”
I hoped I’d concealed my disappointment. Without Forrest around, things were a lot less fun. Standing over the table, she turned to me with that odd look of hers that never seemed focused on anything in particular.
“That new bike will come in handy for taking the children to tennis,” she said.
Jilly, feeding the contents of her taco to her doll, made a face. “Our old babysitter drove us places,” she said.
“It will be fun riding your bikes to the club.” Maybe Regina was trying to invest her words with enthusiasm, but it wasn’t working.
“You’re lucky,” Hayward said to me. “All you have to do is sit around waiting for our lessons to finish up. Our tennis teacher makes us run all over the place.”
This was Hayward’s view of life, it occurred to me.
Getting away with doing as little as possible, unless it involved playing video games.
Over dinner he had talked about becoming a rock star when he grew up, and there was an expensive-looking electric guitar leaned up against the wall of his bedroom, but I saw no evidence that he ever picked it up to play.
“Something looks different about you,” he said to me.
“I probably got a lot of sun today,” I told him. But I knew he’d noticed. It was the bra. The toilet paper stuffed inside. He was onto me.
After dinner I went back to my room. I said I needed to get my things organized, though the truth was I hardly had any things to organize.
I had just hung up my one blouse and a pair of too-short pants when I heard the knock. I opened the door. Regina stood there. She was holding a package wrapped in silver paper with one of those stick-on bows that appeared to have been salvaged from some other gift.
“I brought you something,” she said, extending her long, thin arm, those spidery fingers placing the package in my hands. “To welcome you to Wonderland.”
Inside was a notebook. The cover had been hand-tooled, with a pattern of birds and trees.
“It’s a journal,” she said. “Every girl your age should have one.”
“I never kept a journal before,” I told her.
“There’s so much going on for you right now,” Regina said. “One day you’ll be glad you keep a record of what you experience. If I remember, you’re interested in writing.”
She wasn’t wrong about that. The odd part was, I’d never told her. Now I ran my finger over the leather cover of the book, the thick, creamy pages inside—paper so expensive-looking I wondered whether anything I came up with would be important enough to write on it.
Regina seemed to know my thoughts. “Don’t hold off using this just because you think you don’t have that much to say,” she said.
“I’m always thinking up stories,” I told her. I wouldn’t have thought I’d confide in Regina about this. It just came out. “But I don’t usually write them down.” I did not add that the ideas I had were way too secret and embarrassing, even for the pages of a journal.
“One thing about a journal,” she said, “it’s just for you.
Nobody else needs to know what you write in it.
You don’t ever have to wonder if what you’re putting in it would upset anybody, or shock them, or make them think you were stupid or strange.
You get to say whatever you feel like writing down. ”
I fingered the leather cover of my gift. The idea of actually committing my secret thoughts to its pages was scary but also thrilling.
“I wish I’d kept a journal when I was your age,” Regina said.
“Sometimes, as you grow older, you can lose track of who you used to be. It gets harder, finding that person. Getting back there and rediscovering what used to matter to you. Your dreams. The people you cared about. Remembering the person you used to be.”
A look came over her. But fleetingly.
“Of course you can leave it blank if you want,” she said. Her voice returned to its customary flatness. She was already turning to go. “You can do anything you want.” This was the second time that day that someone had told me this. The second time in my life.
After Regina left, I stood there, holding the gift of the leatherbound journal.
This wasn’t one of those diaries that gave you a page for every day of your life, with just enough room to record what you ate for breakfast and how annoying your parents were, or the initials of some boy you had a crush on.
The pages of this journal contained no preprinted months or dates to limit the length of my entries.
In a journal like this one, a person might write as many words as she felt like putting down.
You only had to discover what they were.
That night, propped on the pillows of my small, cozy bed, I opened my journal to the first page. I sat there for a long time, trying to come up with something.
There was so little of interest to say about my life, and what there was to say seemed to concern everything that was missing, everything that was wrong. I hate my clothes. I hate my stomach. I hate my parents. What if I never get my period?
And blah blah blah.
I considered writing about the ride up to Maine from New Jersey with Forrest, the moment Forrest placed the “Live Free or Die” cap on my head, the glow of happiness I’d felt passing through my body when we pulled into the diner where we sampled the homemade pies.
“I shouldn’t eat this,” I’d told Forrest, when our waitress set the plate of lemon meringue in front of us, right after we’d polished off the pecan. “I’m trying to slim down.”
“You’re perfect the way you are,” he told me. “Don’t change one thing about yourself.”
What I really wanted to say on the first page of my journal was that I wished I could stay in this place forever.
I could be a whole different girl here. Have a whole different life.
But even in these pages, those words felt too dangerous to commit to paper.
Each thing you wished for presented a new possibility for disappointment, if you didn’t get it.
Every good thing you got brought with it the prospect of loss.
That was the perspective I’d been raised with, and it had kept me from pursuing large dreams, the same way it had for my parents.
As boxed in as I’d been in our sad, dark apartment with the hum of the fan that never managed to cool things off and the dark cloud of my father and mother’s unhappiness hanging over us like the smell of cigarettes and last night’s dinner, in my imaginary life I knew no limits.
I held the pen over the page, considering. I began to write, and because, for me, the world had suddenly opened up, I let my thoughts take me wherever I wanted.