     | september 8, 2010
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| september 8, 2010
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Red China Catherine Price -- 08/30/2004  “You’ll never guess what I have for you to try,” said my friend Kristy, who was sitting with me in her bedroom as I waited for my parents to pick me up from a playdate. At eleven years old, I had already spent my childhood around my grandmother’s cigarettes and my parents’ glasses of wine. My friend Laura had shown me her dad’s stash of porn and, when I was four years old, I’d ended our Thanksgiving dinner by handing out my parents’ condoms to my great aunts as “after dinner mints.” What else could there possibly be? Kristy glanced into the hallway to make sure that no adults were approaching, then pulled open a drawer, pushed aside her socks, and gently removed a clear plastic bag from its hiding place. She took out two of her treasures and dangled them temptingly before me, their pink and white paper wrappers crinkling at her touch. Tampons. “They’re my mother’s,” she explained, handing one to me. “She doesn’t know that I took them.” I held it in my palm, admired the feminine script labeling it as “Super Absorbency,” and wondered how I was so lucky. Kristy had just given me womanhood in a paper wrapper. Who cared that I hadn’t actually started my period? Much like a training bra, the tampon’s functionality wasn’t important; it was the symbolism that mattered. “Thank you,” I said to Kristy, stuffing the tampon into my L.L. Bean backpack as my mother rang the doorbell. “Thank you very much.” As soon as I got home, I locked myself in the bathroom with my tampon, sat down on the edge of the tub and unwrapped the tampon, ready to let Playtex make me a woman. Using my mother’s makeup mirror to match up my own equipment with the diagrams I’d seen in my science textbook, I inserted the tampon in the right place, but left half of it hanging out to make sure that it wouldn’t get lost. “What’ve you been doing in there?” asked my mother, who was standing at the sink hulling strawberries when I waddled into the kitchen. I said nothing, trying to walk normally while keeping my thighs clamped together. “And why are you walking like that?” I ignored her and made a break for the dining room, my heart racing like a guilt-racked protagonist of an Edgar Allen Poe story. I was terrified that my parents would instinctively know I’d been experimenting with sanitary products or, worse yet, that my tell-tale tampon might squeeze out, tumble down my pants, and emerge triumphant onto the floor in front of my father. I decided to stage a distraction by setting the table, even though it was three in the afternoon. “Um, could you move your stuff?” I said to my father, who was sitting at the table reading The Financial Times, surrounded by newspapers. He looked surprised to find me standing in front of him with my legs crossed, holding a plate. “What are you doing?” “What do you mean?” “Why are you setting the table at three PM? “Why wouldn’t I?” I said, slamming the plate down on top of a discarded Financial Times and hop-stepping back toward the bathroom. “Can’t I just set the stupid table without having to explain myself? Can’t I, for once, just be helpful?” end of page 1 [ 1 ] read more ... [ 2 ][ 3 ][ 4 ][ 5 ] |
