Flying in Place (3 page)

“Come on,” Mom said, grasping the sheets as if they were alive and dangerous. “I’ll show you how to clean these. You have to rinse them out in cold water before you put them in the wash, because hot water will bake in the blood and then the stains will never come out. I’ll give you some pads; they’re easier to use than tampons at first.”

I followed her back into the bathroom and watched the pink water run down the drain as she rinsed out the sheets. “It’s important to bathe carefully while you’re menstruating,” Mom said over the running water, “so you won’t smell.” She said it like she was explaining the difference between a verb and a noun, but on the word
smell
her nose wrinkled, and I knew she thought I already did. “And make sure you eat a good breakfast, because you may be more tired than usual. You’ll need more iron.”

“I know,” I said. I’d learned all this in health class, along with the obligatory odds and ends about birth control and VD. Having Babies. Not Having Babies. Fifteen Fun Things To Do With A Transparent Plastic Pelvis. Nobody told you what to do about breathing at dawn, or what it meant if you started imagining ghosts.

“You’d better mark it on your calendar,” my mother said, wringing out the wet sheets. “It’s good to get in the habit, even though you probably won’t get it every month at first.”

I had a vivid vision of writing “Blood from the breathing and Ginny on the ceiling” in the little square for April 5 on the inside of my closet door, right under the picture of some flowered meadow in the Rockies. Yeah, sure. How would Mom react if she saw
that
when she was hanging up the clothing I left all over my room? Would she die? Would she think I was writing poetry on my calendar? Or would she just think I’d gone crazy?

It didn’t matter. I couldn’t write anything, because he might find it. Downstairs, the front door slammed. Good. He’d left for the hospital, then, and I wouldn’t have to face him over breakfast. “Twenty-eight days,” I said wearily, quoting my health teacher, “But every woman’s different.” I wondered just how different women were, because I had the feeling this was going to be happening more often than once a month.

For the time being,
it was a convenient deception. The pad would soak up blood, like it was supposed to, and I could say I had cramps to explain why I was walking funny, with the added advantage that I had an excuse to get out of gym class. No getting teased about my fat thighs today; no being told how clumsy I was.

The gym teacher was a decent sort, as they went. “Poor Emma,” she said with a laugh when I told her. “Welcome to the club. Here, I’ll write you a pass to the nurse, okay? You can get some Tylenol or something.”

The nurse, Myrna Halloran, was my friend Jane’s mother and our next-door neighbor, I liked her because she was fat too, and still commanded respect from her eight athletic children, but my mother despised the entire family. Myrna’s husband, the foreman of a road construction crew, had helped build the interstate that cut off one corner of the town. My mother hated Tom and the highway for the same reasons: both were large, dirty, and loud. Worse, Tom had earned enough money from building the road to build a rambling addition onto his house, which had been bigger than ours to begin with. The house now came perilously close to the borders of our property; the Hallorans’ many children and pets often strayed over.

As far as my mother was concerned, it was bad enough that Tom and Myrna had been able to buy into the neighborhood at all. Their expansion was nearly intolerable. Mom never quite descended to calling the Hallorans white trash, but she wasn’t above criticizing Myrna for having an ungroomed husband. “She’s supposed to know about antisepsis,” my mother said, “and you can smell that man coming a block away.”

It was true. Six feet four inches and thick everywhere, with greasy hair and a beer gut, Tom always reeked of sweat; whatever he touched grew grubby and crumpled, and he seemed unable to speak in anything softer than a bellow. His hair-trigger temper was legendary, and he’d done his best to pass it along to his children.

Once I’d asked Jane how she’d learned to fight so well. She was thin, but all of it was muscle, and she didn’t seem to be afraid of anything. “Ah, some kids tried to beat me up when I was little,” she said. “Bunch of boys. We were playing marbles, and they took my best one and I tried to get it back, and they started hitting on me. So I ran home to get help from my brothers, right, because they were all older and bigger than I was. But Daddy was there, and when I told him what had happened he gave me a baseball bat and said, ‘If you have this you’ll be big enough all by yourself.’ So I went back outside and chased ’em with the bat, screaming. They ran, oh my, did they
run
! They never bothered me again.”

She’d laughed when she told me that story, great belly laughs like the ones her father let out when he watched Roadrunner cartoons on Saturday mornings. “Cartoons,” my mother had said with a sniff once when I mentioned it. “A bunch of foolish noise. Do you suppose he knows how to read? Myrna seems well enough educated—literate, anyhow. How can she stand being married to that man? Can’t she get him to take showers?”

If Myrna nagged Tom about bathing, I’d never heard it. Instead she joked cheerfully about his dirty fingernails and wiped up the stains he left on whatever he touched. “It’s good you’re not a criminal,” she’d told him once when I was eating dinner there, “because you’d never get away with anything. You leave fingerprints the way a skunk leaves stink, Tom.”

However messy Myrna’s husband may have been, her office was pristine, white and soothing. The scent of honeysuckle, wafting in through an open window, mixed pleasantly with the faint smells of bandaids and antiseptic. Myrna gave me some Tylenol and a hot water bottle and let me lie down on a padded examining table. “You coming over for dinner tonight?” she asked as she covered me with a blanket. I liked being covered, even though it was such a warm day. “I know you girls have a math test tomorrow, so I figured you’d be over to study.”

“Okay,” I said. Studying with Jane was a good excuse not to eat at home, and one I used as often as possible. We’d lived next door to each other for years, and I’d never had the courage to talk to her much because she had so many other friends. But this year we were in the same English class, and for our first creative writing assignment Jane had written a poem about trying to wash her dog Snarky with tomato juice after he’d rolled in a dead skunk. I’d thought it was really funny, and one day after class I’d told her so.

She’d wrinkled her nose. “Your mom didn’t think so. She gave me a C! Said smelly animals weren’t the right things to write poetry about, and anyway I’d messed up the rhymes someplace. Huh! I worked really hard on those rhymes.”

“I know,” I said, feeling miserable. Nobody was ever going to like me, the way my mother acted. “I’ll bet she told you so in iambic pentameter, too, so you’d feel worse about it. You should hear her at home. She thinks nobody’s written good poetry since Tennyson died.”

Jane laughed. “Well, she could talk all she wanted in iam—whatever you said, and I’d never know it. Who’s Tennyson?”

“Some old poet,” I said, feeling more miserable. Now she’d think I was showing off. “He lived in England a long time ago and wrote a bunch of poems about King Arthur and people who died. My mother thinks he’s God. She doesn’t like my poetry, either.”

“Really?” Jane said. She sounded surprised. “She didn’t like that one about the Munsters dressing up as the Brady Bunch for Halloween?”

“She thought it was silly.”

“Who are you supposed to write like? A ninety-five-year-old nun?”

“I’m supposed to write like Tennyson. He never would have written a poem about the Munsters, even if they’d had TV back then.”

“He sounds boring,” said Jane. “I’ll bet he didn’t write about smelly dogs, either. Do you want to come to our house for dinner?”

I’d eaten with the Hallorans that night, and since then I’d gone to their house at least twice a week. I was always surprised at how warmly they welcomed me. Didn’t they know my mother hated them? When Jane gave me the Sierra Club calendar for Christmas, because she knew how much I liked the lake outside town, I was almost too embarrassed to thank her. I hadn’t bought her anything.

“Wait,” I said, “I’ll bring you something,” and I ran home and got a bunch of my old Nancy Drew books, the ones I had two of because Aunt Diane had sent me some for my birthday once. Ever since then, Jane had been talking about how we’d have to have an adventure and solve a mystery. But lately she’d started spending more time with other kids, especially boys, and I was afraid she thought I was boring. What would she have said if she’d known I’d seen a ghost?

But I hadn’t really seen a ghost, had I? Ghosts didn’t exist. Then again, you weren’t supposed to bleed until you got your period, either, and that was happening. So maybe Ginny was a real ghost, and I was having an adventure instead of going crazy. But how could I tell?

“We’re having apple pie for dessert tonight,” Myrna Halloran said, snapping me back into the world of hot water bottles and math tests. “And I’ve got some vanilla ice cream.”

“Great,” I said. “That will be nice.”

“Do your parents mind that you eat at our house so often?”

I tensed, even lying there with the hot water bottle which was supposed to relax me. What was she really asking? Did she actually want to know what my parents thought, or was she dropping a hint that it was high time I asked Jane to have dinner at our house? Nearly everybody thought I was a snob because my father was a hot-shot doctor and my mother used fancy words; did the Hallorans think so too?

I wanted to have Jane over for dinner, but I couldn’t. It was bad enough that I ate at the Hallorans’ so often. Jane, if neater than her father, still stood for everything that was unacceptable about her parents. If Jane came over and my father wasn’t at home, Mom would talk about poetry in a way calculated to make Jane feel stupid.

And if he was home it would be even worse, because Jane was prettier than I was. She had thick red hair and long legs, and even though she was skinny she already had bigger breasts than I did. I’d seen him watching her through the window once, and he’d smiled and said, “Your little friend’s going to be a heartbreaker in a few years. Why don’t you ever bring her over, Emma?”

I didn’t bring her over because she was my friend, and I couldn’t let her get stared at like that. And even if he didn’t stare at her, I couldn’t let her see him staring at me, much less let her hear the conversations they had about me: the famous doctor discussing surgical procedures for obesity, making amiable jokes about wiring my mouth shut or stapling my stomach, Mom taking my part and chiding him, only to turn around and tell me how I might look a little like lovely Jane Burden, William Morris’ wife, if only I’d slim down. “Ginny was light as a bird,” she’d say, and heap my plate with food.

“Emma?” said Myrna Halloran. “Are you all right?”

No. I’m not all right. “Yeah,” I said. “Just cramps.”

“Breathe,” Myrna said, frowning. “Breathe into the pain, hon. Your breathing’s shallow, and that’s not helping.”

She coached me on breathing for a few minutes, the way I’d heard women got coached when they had babies. “Better?” Myrna said, and I nodded, amazed. I’d always thought women breathed like that to remind themselves that there were scarier things than having kids. I hadn’t believed that there were ways to breathe that made things hurt less, instead of more.

“If it’s really bad your dad can prescribe something for you. It may get easier once your body’s used to what’s going on.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. When Myrna’s frown deepened, I realized that I should have kept my mouth shut.

“No? Why not, hon?”

I swallowed. “Don’t know. Just don’t think so.”

She was watching me very carefully now, too carefully, as carefully as he ever did over dinner. “Emma, you don’t look too good. You didn’t look good when you came in here. What happened?”

“Huh? Nothing. I got my period, is all.”

“You’ve got a bruise coming out,” Myrna said matter-of-factly. “On your arm. How’d you get that?”

Blood and bruises. He hadn’t been elegant at all, had he? I moved my arm under the blanket, trying to make it look casual, and said, “I don’t know. Something in gym, I guess. Maybe I got hit by a softball.”

“Softball was last week,” Myrna said gently. “You’ve been doing calisthenics since Monday, and it’s a new bruise.”

“Look,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady, “I probably just walked into furniture or something. I don’t remember.” I shivered then, realizing that I sounded like Ginny. “It doesn’t matter. It’s only a bruise.”

“All right,” Myrna said, but she didn’t sound as if she believed me, and I hated lying to someone I liked. “Do you feel well enough to stay in school today? You can go home if you want to.”

“
No
.” He probably wouldn’t be home anytime during the day, but you could never tell. “I don’t want to go home, I can’t miss the review sessions for that math test tomorrow.”

“All right, Emma. But come back if you change your mind. Do you think you’ll still be at our house for dinner tonight?”