When Women Were Dragons(22)
“Ladies, I ask you this: Does a butterfly remember its life as a happy caterpillar, content to stay on the leaves of the tree who loves it? Probably not. Does the frog remember its life as a tadpole, swimming without a care in the quiet corners of the swamp under the tender, masculine protection of the sentinel frogs? I can’t see that it does. They transform willy-nilly and leap into the jaws of the cruel hawks and storks, and truthfully, most of them die. In nature, not much care is given to the life span of the individual organism. Also in nature, metamorphosis exists as an inexorable force—a caterpillar could no more decline to transform than she could decide to swim the English Channel, or run a marathon. She is at the mercy of her biology. Not so with you. The science remains, well, fuzzy at present. But we do believe that the changes to which I refer are both biologic and intentional. The evidence seems to suggest that it is a chosen metamorphosis. And if that is the case—and I cannot stress this enough—I implore you ladies to choose wisely. Wickedness comes in many forms, after all. Some more obvious than others. I don’t think we need to open it up to questions. I know I’ve made myself perfectly clear.”
We had no idea what he was talking about.
Later that day, the boys returned and we did our mathematics lesson. As we stood to go to gym, Mary Frances Lozinsky, the girl in the desk next to mine, stood up and realized with shock and horror that the entire back of her uniform skirt was covered with thick, dark blood. She screamed, the girls sitting next to her screamed, and the boy sitting behind her slumped onto his chair in a deep faint. Sister Saint Stephen the Martyr flew to Mary Frances’s side, wrapped an arm around her shoulder, and whisked her out of class, speaking softly and gently as they went. The next day Mary Frances was walking funny. She avoided our eyes. She said something about a belt, but wouldn’t explain what that was. The day after that, she had six enormous pimples on her face.
Mary Frances changed. We could see that she changed. But she was still Mary Frances and could remember the Mary Frances that she was before. Unlike Dr. Ferguson’s caterpillar, she remembered herself, and remembered her previous life as an unchanged girl. So, the doctor was wrong about that bit. What else was he wrong about? And then, impossibly, Mary Frances continued to change. She started complaining about bra straps. She smelled different. Her face produced more occasional spots, and every few weeks, blue-grey semicircles appeared under her eyes. She started wearing makeup, and getting in trouble for it. She developed a dark, fuzzy shadow on her upper lip. Her body pressed further and further outward, until her uniform blouse stretched nearly to the breaking point and her seams strained to hold everything together. Boys followed her in the hallway like baby ducks scurrying to keep up with their mother.
Every day, she changed a little bit more, becoming less and less of the Mary Frances that we thought we knew, and more and more of the Mary Frances that we would come to know.
And we knew for sure that she didn’t choose any bit of it.
12.
After the shock of Mary Frances’s metamorphosis, each of the girls in my class got our first periods over the next two years, one after another. We learned to anticipate, to steer girls toward the bathroom when the time came, to be quick with a cardigan to tie around someone’s waist when the back of their skirt began to darken. We started carrying purses with us, and learned to keep something extra to help a girl out in her time of need. We carried aspirin, and gum, and maybe even a little clutch of tissues. We looked out for one another. Even when we weren’t particularly good friends. We all learned that this was the sort of thing that superseded friendship—it was deeper, and older, and more important. We knew that each girl—no matter how many had gone before—would spend time in shock when they changed. From the pain of it. From the redness and abundance of the blood. From the inexorable assault, month after month, whether we wanted it or not. We knew that such shock needed care and understanding.
For me, it happened at school at the very end of sixth grade. Two girls whisked me to the bathroom and clucked and preened over me, speaking softly and soothingly as they helped me clean up. These girls were not my friends before this day, and would not be after. I would still never sit with them at lunch, nor would I be invited to their daily game of foursquare. I was unbothered by any of this. This sort of interaction, I knew without being told, was deeper, and older, and more important than friendship. One girl dabbed my face with a cool cloth while the other showed me how to construct a makeshift belt using shoelaces and a sock to hold the sanitary napkin and how to fasten the whole thing with a series of clever knots under my clothes. It was uncomfortable, but it felt secure enough.
“You should probably tell your mother when you get home,” one said—her name was Lydia—as she reapplied her lipstick. We weren’t allowed to wear lipstick at school, so she wore a shade that was so close to the color of her own lips that it didn’t look like she was wearing lipstick at all. I asked her why, and she said, “Practice.”
“I don’t think I’ll be telling my mother,” I said frankly. I explained to them how excellent my mother was at silence.
Lydia considered this. “Do you have any aunties, then?” she asked. “Or big-girl cousins?”
For one brief moment, I found myself thinking, Auntie Marla. Almost instantly, a sharp lump formed in my throat and my eyes burned. I swallowed it down, turning away. I winced. Auntie Marla didn’t exist anymore, I reminded myself. Or, at least, that Auntie Marla as she was didn’t exist anymore. Her broad shoulders, gone. Her tight curls and red lips and wide stance and booming laugh, gone. I remembered how she swept me up onto her hip when I was little. I remembered the delicate and tender touch of her calloused hands. I remembered the way her eyes turned gold in the days before her dragoning. If her body changed and became unrecognizable, I wondered, was Marla still Marla? Did she remember us when she shed her old life and stepped into something else—all scale and sinew and rage and fire? I didn’t know. And, for that matter, would I still be me with my new breasts and other more unpleasant eruptions? Was my body still my body if I couldn’t control what it did?