“No,” Jo insisted, her fists clenched in her lap. “Not me.” None of her secret escape plans had involved tending to leaking privates five days every month. And never in her worst nightmares had she imagined a life spent defending a hole she barely knew existed against wanton boys, oozing pustules, and squalling infants.
“Yes, you,” her mother informed her. “There’s no way to avoid it. It’s just part of being a woman.”
“We’ll see about that,” Jo said.
The three years that followed were filled with dread as Jo waited for her mother’s prophesy to come to pass. Though she never joined in, she eavesdropped on other girls talking, and by the beginning of ninth grade, she knew most of them had been visited by the curse, as they called it. Jo prayed the curse would just pass her by—the way her aunt Aimee had never grown molars. Instead, it waited just long enough for her guard to come down. Then it struck when she least expected it—right in the middle of algebra class—forever ruining her best pair of Forenza jeans.
She remained in her chair after the other kids filed out of the classroom—until she and Ellen Goodwin were the only two left. Jo was only vaguely aware of Ellen hovering over Ms. Abram’s desk. Her brain could no longer process the barrage of stimuli. She felt feverish and light-headed. Her entire nervous system was buzzing, overloaded by fear.
Later, Jo recalled the concerned look on Ms. Abram’s face when the teacher was suddenly standing over her chair—and the crimson smear left behind on the wood when the teacher and Ellen coaxed Jo out of her chair. Then the scene changed, as if in a time lapse, and she found herself crying in the principal’s office with Ms. Abram’s shawl wrapped around her waist. The men who passed by did their best to ignore her. The ladies at the front desk smiled and attempted to lift her spirits.
“It happens to all of us at one time or another,” one of the school secretaries whispered. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Then why are you whispering?” Jo hissed back. The secretary had despised her from that moment forward.
Back at home, Jo sat in the bathroom with the kit her mother had prepared for her, a white wooden basket with a pink satin bow that had been hidden under the sink behind the toilet paper packages, waiting for that very moment. Inside were six bulky sanitary napkins, a frilly bag in which to stuff them, and a little bottle of Midol. Jo dumped it all out on the floor and sobbed. She’d never felt so betrayed. And over the two weeks that everyone called her Carrie, she didn’t blame Ellen Goodwin or her mother or even God. Instead, she focused her wrath on the body she hadn’t been able to train or control.
The war that began in ninth grade lasted for thirty-three years. Throughout those decades, Jo lived under constant siege. She kept a secret calendar designed to help her anticipate her period’s monthly arrival, only to be ambushed several days in advance. She devised ingenious methods for smuggling bulky pads to the school bathroom—and disguising the lumps beneath her clothes. She crafted cunning excuses for keeping her shorts on at the beach and took to wearing sweaters around her waist. Later, she scouted for hiding places for the Tampax her mother refused to buy—and hoarded quarters to procure the tampons from public restrooms.
The hardest part, though, was keeping her private war secret. No one could know what was happening. Certainly not her father or brothers—or, God forbid, the boys at school. But even females couldn’t be welcomed as allies. Other women showed no signs of struggling. It seemed inconceivable that all of them—all the teachers and waitresses and teenagers and store clerks and cleaning ladies whose paths she crossed every day—were suffering the same way she was. There was clearly something fucked up about Jo.
She expected to claim one small victory once she left Mattauk and her mother behind for college. Tampons, at least, would no longer be contraband. Ads told Jo that a carefree life of horseback riding and snowy-white hot pants awaited her. Then Jo lost her virginity and a new front in the war opened up. The stakes only grew higher. The fear of humiliation had kept her on her toes in high school. Now there were STDs and pregnancy to avoid. She’d wake up, heart pounding, from dreams in which she was forced to confess her sins to her mother. The nightmares didn’t prevent her from having sex, but they certainly made the afterglow less delightful. She now spent the first five days of her cycle battling her period—and the last five praying for it to come.