Mohair
The blood was still pouring out of me—more blood than I’d imagined, times I’d imagined some version of this event. More blood was coming out of me now than a person could soak up with a wad of toilet paper.
Then I remembered something.
I rode back to Wonderland, my golden first-place trophy in my bike basket, my whole body shaking. The tears were coming so hard I could barely see the road.
Back at the house, the only one around was Prudence. She was occupied making appetizers for the big party that night—a Martha Stewart cookbook open on the counter. She paid no attention as I raced upstairs to my room.
Alone at last, I stepped out of the stained tennis skirt and briefly examined the blood-soaked pot holder.
Naked from the waist down, I took the familiar but untouched blue box out of the drawer.
Squatting on the toilet, I peeled off the wrapper and unfolded the thin paper sheet bearing the instructions for inserting a tampon.
I pored over the instructions—the tidy drawing of an elegant female hand, fingers grasping the tampon inserter, accomplishing her task as if this were a pencil placed into a pencil sharpener.
I must have spent half an hour trying to figure out how to put the cardboard tube into my body. I couldn’t get the tampon inside. Over and over I tried. No.
I was an idiot. I should have bought pads instead for my first time.
In the end, I pulled the small white fluffy tampon out of its tube. I wrapped it in toilet paper to make it more substantial and stuck the whole thing inside a fresh pair of underpants to soak up the blood.
I could have washed the white skirt. With cold water, the bloodstain might have come out.
But I couldn’t bear to deal with it. I wrapped the bloody evidence in a bunch of ripped-out pages from one of Regina’s magazines and some granola bar wrappers.
I stuffed the ruined skirt in the trash along with Regina’s gift of the mohair pot holder that had evidently taken her all summer to finish—red now and heavy with my own blood.
I changed into my jeans.
Downstairs I found Jilly—just back from the club herself—showing off her second prize medal for her Marshmallow Surprise Rice Krispies Treats to Prudence and modeling her Pocahontas costume.
Hayward leaned against the counter, still wearing his hoodie and sweatpants from the morning.
When I passed through the kitchen, he gave me a look.
I pretended to act like a person who had no clue he’d been the artist behind the Joy of Sex collage.
“Where’s the skirt you had on before?” he asked.
“What’s it to you?” I said.
The regatta wasn’t due to start for several hours.
In the meantime, the children grabbed a bowl of Doritos and settled themselves in front of the television—Jilly in her faux-leather skirt and fringed vest, a string of beads around her neck, Hayward’s feather headdress untouched on the seat beside him, along with a plastic tomahawk and his faux-leather loincloth.
Someone, probably Prudence, had applied warpaint to Hayward’s face.
The fact that he’d allowed this surprised me, but Prudence—and Prudence alone—seemed to inspire respect from Hayward.
Jilly had lipstick on. It didn’t matter what the costume was, Jilly found any excuse to apply lipstick.
Off in the corner, Regina sat at her desk, typing furiously—more pages of instructions for the tasks each of us was to undertake, no doubt, pertaining to the upcoming festivities.
Not even my father, bent over his typewriter at midnight, working on his novel, displayed greater concentration. Regina did not look up.
When he’d first mentioned the regatta plan, Forrest had spoken optimistically about the two of them—himself and Regina—leading the parade in their costumes, pirate and wench, with the children following behind in the canoe, like a couple of Disney characters.
Watching Regina now, seated at her typewriter, preparing some new document or other for us all, I had a hard time imagining that she’d be putting on the wench costume Forrest had picked up for her anytime soon, if ever.
Even for the new and strangely more sociable Regina, this seemed unlikely.
Following his unsuccessful attempt at completing the triathlon and his brief stop at the tennis club for a shower and a shave—a part of his story that day I’d witnessed firsthand—Forrest had not shown up back at the house.
He was making a trip to the liquor store, Prudence told me, and to the party store to pick up decorations—flags, balloons, party hats.
Down at the dock, the Chris-Craft and the birchbark canoe were already festooned for the big event.
I figured I’d head back up to my room to replenish the blood-soaked toilet paper stuffed in my underwear and finish packing—all thoughts of my recent victory on the tennis court evaporated.
I had cramps, but the awful feeling in my stomach was about more than having gotten my period.
All around me, I could feel endings. As much as I had wanted to get my period and be done with my childhood, now that it had taken place, I felt an unexpected sense of loss.
Six hours into this experience, I already hated being a woman.