Girl Unwrapped (9 page)

“Do you understand?”

Toni nods.

“Do you have any questions?”

Toni shakes her head.

It is Lisa’s turn to sigh.

Five weeks later, a baffled Toni finds the toilet paper in her hand stained red. Another unpleasant surprise from her body. Growth spurts, pimples, unwanted hair, and now this, a hidden wound. She wipes herself as thoroughly as she can and hopes whatever has been torn will heal by itself. She feels no pain, so it can’t be too serious.

On her next trip to the bathroom she discovers that not just her underpants but also the crotch of her slacks are soaked through with dark-coloured blood. Something inside has ruptured. Yet, marvellously, she still feels nothing. Maybe this is what death is about: going numb, dribbling away, disappearing. Lately, she’s fantasized often about dying, but in spectacular ways. A girl called Judy at school, who is even more of a bookworm and pariah than herself, has told Toni about spontaneous human combustion. People have exploded into flame for no reason while sitting quietly in an armchair, burning down into nothing but a pile of ash and maybe a lone, singed foot still wearing its shoe. Proven scientific cases, Judy says. Toni likes to imagine erupting thus in front of her classmates when their eyes flick over her in disdain. She envisions them scattering through the hall, clutching their heads in horror.

The drops of blood blossom in the toilet water like strange aquatic plants with long stems and spreading pink faces. She must tell her mother. But how? She can’t think of the words. Her pondering is interrupted by thumps on the bathroom door.

“Have you fallen in? Come out already.”

How can she tell her mother, “I’m bleeding to death. I’m bleeding to death
down there
”? This fact is too hideous and crazy, worse than any of Judy’s wild stories. And despite the gush of blood, Toni feels shamefully healthy. She’d have to pull down her pants to convince her mother something’s wrong. Impossible! She hurries to scrub away every sign of her new affliction, rolls her underpants in a washcloth and hides the bundle in the back of the cabinet under the sink. Then she slips her slacks back over her bare thighs. The crotch is stiff, but the stain isn’t visible. Maybe she can sneak into her bedroom unnoticed.

“Finally!” her mother says, pushing right into the bathroom as soon Toni unlocks the door. Her mother swivels her head in all directions, sniffs the air.

“Ha! I knew it. You have your period.” When Toni stares back blankly, she says: “Come, come. A mother knows. Didn’t I tell you it would happen soon?
Mazel tov
.” She pats Toni’s cheek. “When I got my first period my mother gave me a smart
klatsch
across the face. That was the custom in those days. It didn’t hurt. I felt proud.”

Lisa marches Toni into the master bedroom, shuts the door, opens the closet, and brings out a large brown paper bag. She and Toni sit together on the double bed near the pewter-framed portrait of Grandma Antonia, who is staring fiercely down from the bureau.

Inside the paper bag is a blue cardboard box with a picture of a white rose.

“Deep Downy Soft Impressions” is written in fancy letters across the top. And at the bottom, “Kotex Feminine Napkins.” Her mother pulls out a thick, white cotton wad with tapering tabs at each end—not quite a bandage, not quite a diaper, something in-between—and an elastic belt with metal fasteners.

Back on the toilet, Toni examines the pamphlet that comes with the box.

“
Are you in the know?
” it asks mockingly. She is not.

She reads, “You can always be your own gay self when calendar qualms are off your mind. With our exclusive Kotex safety centre for extra protection, there’s no ceiling to your confidence. And because Kotex comes in three sizes, there’s a Kotex napkin just perfect for you.”

There are diagrams for attaching the napkin to the belt. After much fiddling, Toni succeeds and waddles out to the hall where her mother relentlessly waits.

“
Nu?
Isn’t that better?”

How can it be better to be made so aware of this place of mysterious, oozing wounds? “No one can see a thing,” her mother says cheerfully. “My little girl is becoming a woman. Now, remember what I told you. You don’t use the word ‘period’ in public. You say ‘I’m unwell’ or ‘I’m indisposed.’”

Toni can bear it no longer.

“But Mama, isn’t there a cure?”

Lisa’s mouth drops open and she looks as if she’s not sure whether to laugh or to scream. “
Mutti! Mutti!
” She addresses Grandma’s stern, unsmiling face. “How is it possible?”

And so Toni is marched back to the bedroom to hear again the lecture about eggs, blood, and babies from beginning to end. An undeniable fact becomes clear. The wound isn’t temporary but will open month after month, be a part of Toni’s life for as far as she can see into the future. She’s not dying or suffering or special. In fact, she’s a bit late in experiencing what must be routine by now for most of the other girls in her class. Which she would know if she ever dared talk to any of them other than wacky Judy, encyclopedia of bizarre but useless information. Dimly she recalls her old buddy Arnold’s crazy tale about girls peeing blood when they grew up. He knew a kernel of truth, more than she did, anyway.

After reviewing the basic biology lesson, Lisa zeroes in on hygiene and discretion. This is women’s business with which men—her father, in particular—are to be spared any contact because men have lofty minds and delicate stomachs. Hide the Kotex box in a brown paper bag. Bring your fresh napkin to the bathroom hidden under an article of clothing. Wrap the soiled napkin in newspaper and throw it into the garbage pail on the landing outside when her father is out of the way.

There are more lessons, vague but disturbing, which her mother delivers uneasily, alternating between stern looks and troubled sighs. Boys take what they can, they are unable to help themselves, so the girl is responsible and has to watch herself. Bad girls get into trouble; does Toni understand? But Toni is still thinking about foul blood and soiled napkins. Napkin is the word for what you use to wipe your mouth. How awful!

A few days later, Lisa hands Toni a slim paperback.

“Here! Read! You prefer to read than to listen to your mother. Maybe something will sink in.”

The book is called the
Facts of Life and Love for Teen-agers: What
Every Teen-ager Should Know
. After closing her bedroom door, Toni hunches up on her bed and reads for the rest of the afternoon. She reads about breasts and brassieres, hips and girdles, skin troubles, grownup hair, menstruation. Everything is perfectly normal, nothing to worry about, even growth spurts before a girl’s first period when she “may become as tall as her mother.” (But what about the girl who’s as tall as her father?) Normal too is the “filling out period.” The mounds on Toni’s chest haven’t risen much lately. They’re neither one thing nor another. Her long, angular body isn’t right, but curves would seem stranger still.

She reads, “The length of time spent in the process of growing up varies widely among girls, yet eventually almost all emerge as grown women ready to fall in love, marry, and have families of their own.”

“Almost all
.
” Therein lies cause for hope and dread.

“Above all, be glad that you are a girl, and don’t start feeling sorry for yourself. You’d be a lot sorrier if you never did menstruate, but remained an ‘It’ (whatever that would be!) without any of the normal manifestations of being a growing-up and grownup woman.”

She skims quickly through the chapter on “Where Babies Come From,” the tedious details about the egg in the womb, pregnancy, and birth, hearing her mother’s lecture again, seeing her mother moving her hands around her own belly with such a self-satisfied smile. The paragraph about birth defects is mildly thrilling—some babies have six toes—but too brief, and she learns that what mostly occurs is “the miracle of normality.” Finishing the chapter, she realizes she missed something and goes back to the discussion of eggs, cells, sperm, tubes.

“
Sperms are deposited in the vagina during coitus … the penis is
inserted into the vagina …
” So it’s not quite as Arnold once said. In his version, a man and woman rubbed their naked bellies together while grunting like pigs. This “coitus” stuff seems quieter, more businesslike: a key inserted into a lock, money deposited in a bank. She tries to imagine the sperm with his little suitcase of genes, the egg with hers, spilling their belongings together to make a person. A split-second later or earlier, a different sperm would be first in line, and a different person would be formed. Would she have been herself, or would she not have been born? Would it have been some entirely other baby? At what point does the “me” happen? She feels strange, at the verge of some great discovery, but then dizzy, weary. She flops backward onto her pillow, reads on through less mysterious, more depressing chapters.

Behold the great ladder of love: the infant’s self-love, then love of parents, friends, crushes, mature love for a partner of the opposite sex, and finally, near the top of the ladder—just one rung below Love of Mankind—love of babies. Toni drops the book. She has never been drawn to babies; she finds them too helpless, frightening, demanding, blubbery. When her mother sees a neighbour’s new baby in a pram, she exclaims in rapture, “
Dass süsses Würmchen!
” The sweet little worm. The phrase sounds nice in German, but in truth, there is something grub-like and wormy about babies.

Babies are born to become grownups who fall in love and get married and have babies in turn. On and on, as in the long, dreary list of “begats” of the Bible. Grandchildren for her mother, great-grandchildren for Grandma Antonia. She imagines the two of them holding hands and beaming the same ecstatic smile over a crib full of squirming, pink descendants. Suppose she were to die tomorrow and there were fewer “begats” in the world? What would it matter? Besides, she is not, as the book assumes, obsessed with boys. She’s seen girls in her class giggle and swoon over Manny Mendelsohn, who’s in grade eleven, student president, and considered a dreamboat because of that indefinable smirking something called “cute.” She wouldn’t mind being able to enter a room with Manny’s confident swagger and be gazed at by adoring female eyes. But she doesn’t care about the cycle of life. She’s nowhere on the ladder of love.

Which means she must be an “it.” Whatever that may be.

Huddled on her bed, one ear buried in the pillow, the other plastered to the transistor radio, Toni rocks back and forth to the Top Forty.
Twist and shout
, the Beatles urge. She imagines herself as Ringo, on an elevated chair at the back of the band, facing a set of drums and cymbals that she thwacks and pounds.

“And coming up very soon, for all you dedicated rock and rollers, the pick of the charts. Stay tuned. Don’t touch that dial.”

Toni wouldn’t dream of it. She’s addicted to the thump and whine, the swinging rhythms, the DJ’s frantic shouts. But now the bedroom door opens and here comes her mother wearing a sour-puss face. Startled, Toni drops her transistor onto the floor. Her mother bends down, clicks off the twanging guitar, and tugs the roller blind so that it flies upward, letting in a relentless flood of winter sunshine.

“I did knock. You didn’t hear. Mooning and wallowing. Are you sick? No? So what are you doing in bed on a beautiful Saturday afternoon?”

Toni surprises herself by sitting bolt upright and blurting out, “I wish I was dead.”

Silence follows this declaration, then a hand swoops through the air, a slap rings out across the room. Toni’s head is knocked sideways. It takes her a moment to connect the hand and the tingling in her cheeks with her mother, who stands quivering with outrage.

“You do not say such a thing! You do not think it! You have everything— a beautiful room, a lovely home, family, school, opportunities. We have struggled to give you all that you could possibly want, and this is your answer? Let me tell you a story.” Lisa’s chin juts out and her voice crouches low in her throat. “I think you know your father had a younger sister, Ida. She was not quite right. Never mind what was wrong—this we don’t need to talk about—the point is, because she was unwell, the parents could not easily leave Vienna and they were among the first to be taken away. She was just thirteen, your age, when they tore her from her home. A pretty child, frail, sweet, gentle. Your Papa told me of her in the days after the war when we were still looking, hoping. How that child must have suffered is impossible to imagine, and your father, though he never says a word, suffers every day thinking of her, especially now, seeing you with your long face, mooning about, instead of being a picture of youthful joy to distract him.”

These accusations and more rain down on Toni’s head. A flood of stories is unleashed, fragments of stories that have no beginning or end or clarity and are all the more horrible for this confusion.

Her mother and other refugees cower in a cave. Armies approach. Germans? Americans? It isn’t clear from her mother’s blast of words. The refugees are on the wrong side of a battle line, in any case, and catastrophe lurks beyond this hole in the hills. They have nothing but mouldy bread and a little water. The stink of diarrhoea. The overpowering heat. How will death arrive? So many ways. And her father? It’s no picnic for him, either. To be in that prison in Bolzano, for example. He hears screams. He escapes from the prison, but never, never from those screams.

“But do we ask death to take us? No! Not even in our darkest moments! To die is to give Hitler victory.”

Panting from her exertions, satisfied that she’s finally made an impression, Lisa stomps away. Toni sits on the edge of the bed in a daze, unable to run after her mother and tell her the blow was unjustified. Her mother has all the ammunition. Be grateful, her mother says. What Toni is grateful for, what she likes best about her so-called beautiful room, is the door that shuts her parents out (if only it had a lock), the roller blind, the bed covers into which she can tunnel. She never really cared for the pale pink of the walls, the ivory-coloured furniture, the flounced curtains, none of which were of her own choosing. Sometimes she imagines herself a space alien, kidnapped by earthlings and wrenched from her small, one-person planet (they are reading
Le
Petit Prince
in French class) to be imprisoned in an atmosphere where she can’t properly breathe.