Durable Goods_ A Novel - Elizabeth Berg [18]
So much can happen now.
I know exactly what to do. I go to the linen closet and take a pad from the blue box. But I don’t have a belt. I knock softly on Diane’s door. No answer. I open it a little.
I can smell her sleep. Her shade is down, her room quite dark, but I can make out her shape beneath the covers. “Diane?” I whisper.
“What?”
“Could you … I have to tell you something.”
She pulls the covers from over her head, squints at the light coming into her room from the hallway. “What happened?”
“I started.” The word takes up all the space in my mouth.
“Started what?”
I look down at my feet. “You know.”
“You started your period?”
“Shhh!” I’m not ready for him yet.
She sits up, laughs. “Well, congratulations. That’s just when I started, right at twelve.” She nods her head, thinking. “Mom said it was a gift, can you imagine? She was such a sap, sometimes.”
I don’t know. I think it’s a gift, too. It occurs to me that I am standing in my sister’s room on a Friday morning, able to have a baby. These are the same pajamas I went to bed in last night.
“Do you have what you need?” Diane asks.
“I need a belt, that’s all.”
Diane gets up and takes a belt out of her underwear drawer. “Here. You should get your own, but you can borrow one of mine. Do you know where to get them?”
“Yes.” Of course I know where to get them. Next to magazines and makeup, they are what I have looked at most. And now one will be mine, tossed carelessly in with my lady underwear.
Diane gets back into bed, yawns. “You might not have it again for a while, you know. It can skip a few months before it starts coming regularly.”
Well. All the more reason to pay attention. I walk carefully back into my room, on new feet. I get dressed, start to carry my pajama bottoms to the laundry hamper. But then I put them in my closet in an empty shoe box, and go over to tell Cherylanne.
Cherylanne covers her mouth, squeals high. “You did it!” she says, and then her face collapses into pity. “Are you cramping real bad?”
“What do you mean?”
“Does it hurt? You know, in your stomach?”
I put my hand on myself. “No.”
“Oh.” Her voice is sorry for me and pleased mixed together.
“Why should I hurt?”
“Well, it’s…. You know, generally, women have some pain. Not all women, of course. It’s your more feminine types that suffer most. I take Midol.”
I send my mind down to my stomach to check around. Nothing. But I say, “Well, I mean, I thought you meant like hammer-on-the-head pain. I have pain! But it’s … not real bad.”
Cherylanne moves her face close to mine. “Like somebody pushing down on you a little?”
“Yes, like that.”
She straightens. “Well, that’s it.”
I have passed. Cherylanne tells me that a woman must treat herself in special ways on special days. I can’t go swimming or horseback riding, I know that, right? I should nap when possible, and drink weak tea. And always check to be sure you don’t need a girlfriend to walk close behind you when you come out of the classroom. “There was this girl once,” Cherylanne tells me in her delicious confiding tone, “and she was wearing a white skirt.” I lie on her bed, hold one of her stuffed animals close to me, listening, until we have to leave for school.
He has a date. That night when he comes home he calls Diane up from the laundry room, me down from my bedroom. “I’ll be going out with a lady this evening,” he says, “and I’m bringing her here first. I want you to behave.”
I don’t know what to say. He might as well not be speaking English. I might as well be saying, “Excuse me, excuse me, I don’t understand” real slow, my face working to convey what my words can’t.
Diane leans up against the wall. It is sadness pushing her, I know. “Who is this you’re going out with?” she asks.
“Pardon me?” he says. The summer storm. The sudden sound of the thunder, the rolling of the black