Love Invents Us - Amy Bloom [12]
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My mother left me alone in the bathroom for about an hour. Finally, I figured out that you had to take the cardboard off before you used the tampon, and after that, my period was boring. I didn’t bleed much, and I didn’t smell too bad. I actually liked the smell of iron and salt. I didn’t keep a little calendar like some girls, so I ruined about twenty pairs of panties that year and took to carrying extras in my schoolbag, along with six tampons, Maybelline Frosted Peach lipstick, Lush Lash mascara, Midnight Pearl eyeshadow, and a Cornsilk compact. I looked in that little mirror constantly and covertly. I stroked my thighs and breasts, shaved my legs every other day. I examined every inch of my face and front, and stole my mother’s pink European gels and aqua creams, sometimes exfoliating, hydrating, and pore-minimizing all in one Saturday night. I used a loofah on all my rough spots and slept on a stolen satin pillowcase to combat premature wrinkling. I bleached the tops of my toes so that when I appeared on the Riviera, Sean Connery would not be disgusted by the sight of my darkly hairy feet. I languished seductively in the bathroom mirror, using the steam and my towel-turban to create movie star cheekbones and attitude. I would not say it to anyone (who would I say it to, even if I’d been willing?), but I thought I had potential.
In ninth grade, no one cared about what anybody’d done in elementary school. When Frannie Grant, the most popular freshman girl, was browsing with her group just one aisle away from me in Woolworth’s she smiled at me, her famous triangular smile, and I picked up a bouquet of mascaras, black and mink and teal blue, one for each of her friends, and a tray of eleven coordinated eyeshadows, the nearest expensive thing I could grab, and walked out of the store. I put it all into her cupped hands.
“I have more stuff than I need,” I said. “Knock yourselves out.”
Boys looked at me carefully, smashed into me in the halls, but didn’t speak. Rachel Schwartz lent me lunch money and taught me to say “Fuck you” in Hebrew, Arabic, and Swahili. Rachel was the only person worth talking to. When we were in fifth grade and she was the new girl from New York City, she invited me over for three weeks in a row. We played Lawrence of Arabia and terrorized her mother’s elderly dachshund, Schatzie, who had to wear a chiffon scarf around his neck and be the sheik. We played Sailor, and I put on one of her brother’s blue baseball shirts and walked bowlegged around her canopied bed until the big moment, when I undid her bra and laid my head on her soft, custardy breast, making sure my nose and lips didn’t touch her raspberry-pink nipple. Because of her big breasts, Rachel got to be the Lady. A few times, dressed in her father’s black silk kimono, Rachel made me tie her to the metal pipe in their semi-finished basement and light matchbook fires in a circle around her. She swooned neatly, slipping out of the kimono, and I untied her and dragged her over the cork floor to the safety of the laundry room, reviving her with tender pinches and sips of soda. Her head lay back on my arm, and as the Sailor and the Lady we French-kissed, and she tasted like Fresca and the smell of doused matches was in her hair. We read to each other from the Playboy Adviser, whose mascot was a Bunny Tinkerbell with fascinating, garterless black hose pressing into her thighs. Our last Saturday, we pulled her mother’s stockings over our faces and pretended we were robbing a big