“It’s about that menstruation thing,” she mumbled, staring at the big toe poking through the canvas of her sneaker.
“Menstruation? Why are you worrying about that on a nice summer day?”
“Because it happened to me, Auntie Rosa! That’s why!”
“Goodness gracious, honey! You’re menstruating? Isn’t that wonderful!”
“No! It’s gross! There’s all this blood, and I feel so sick!” Iris wiggled her toe to make sure it really belonged to her.
Auntie Rosa tilted Iris’s face toward hers, and looked her in the eye. “A young lady’s menarche is a precious milestone in her life, honey. And dysmenorrhea is only to be expected.”
“But what am I supposed to do?” Iris asked, bursting into tears.
“You mean you don’t have any supplies?” Auntie Rosa’s salt-and-pepper eyebrows reached over the frames of her glasses to question her.
“Just some toilet paper.”
“You poor child! You’d think a woman with a house full of girls would take care of certain things. Of course, now that she’s got other things on her mind ...,” she said, shaking her head. “You just sit yourself down in the car. I’ll run up to check on Grandma, then we’ll drive over to the drug store, OK?”
Iris nodded, still far from happy, but overcome with relief that her secret was out, and help was on the way. She pressed her legs together real tight when she sat down in the car, grateful for the clear plastic that covered the seat; she would be mortified if she soiled the powder blue upholstery of the car Auntie Rosa took such good care of. She had always wondered why Auntie Rosa had that plastic on there, even though it made your legs all sweaty, and now realized it must be because she menstruated, too. Funny how you could get up any old day, which might seem like every other day, except out of the blue, something new happened to you, and suddenly it was real easy to understand something you could never figure out before. “Thank you for Auntie Rosa,” she whispered to the Blessed Virgin Mary magnet on the dashboard. Twenty minutes later, Iris was reclined on Auntie Rosa’s sofa, a thick absorbent pad rigged up to a sanitary belt, a hot water bottle on her tummy, and the most delicious cup of sweet tea clutched in her hands. “You just stay put and rest, Lover-dover. You’ll feel better soon.”
Auntie Rosa kissed her on the forehead, and turned to Grandma Capotosti as she headed out the door. “Oggi Iris è diventata signorina!” she said to her. Iris couldn’t understand the words, but she could tell by the funny way Auntie Rosa winked and the expression of pity on both women’s faces as they looked at her, that her shameful secret had been shared.
“Povera bambina.” Grandma Capotosti shook her head and crossed herself, then turned her attention back to the television set and a rerun of her favorite soap opera.
Iris was only a month into her womanhood when things started to look up again that summer. The excitement at Chestnut Crest was palpable as the corridor between the kitchen and garage filled with bags and boxes of canned goods, dry goods, paper goods and sundry housewares. A battery of army green sleeping bags secured with twine to prevent them from unrolling stood guard alongside the boxes.
“Whose guitar is this?” Iris’s father cried, picking up the instrument that rested on the pile of sleeping bags, and waving it in the air as if it were a pagan amulet one of his children had hung on the wall behind the kitchen table in place of the crucifix.
“That’s the guitar Alfred gave one of the kids years ago, Carlo,” Iris’s mother said, her face flustered from the work of selecting and packing the utensils she would need from the kitchen. “I don’t play the guitar,” Jasmine said, striding past in her work jeans and T-shirt, her thick braid swinging as she went out to feed Jiffy. William and Charles did not even look up from their project of crafting fishing poles from tree branches. “It must be Henry’s,” Violet said, lugging a garbage bag out the back door. Iris could tell by her lipstick that Violet must be going to steal a goodbye kiss from Todd, whom Iris had spotted lurking by the side of the house from an upstairs window.
“Henry wouldn’t just leave his guitar there,” Iris said. “That’s the family guitar, Dad. I put it there, so we would remember to take it along.”
“We can’t be bringing house and home with us, Iris.”
“But I thought maybe if we lit a campfire at night, we could roast marshmallows, and strum the guitar, and sing some songs. Wouldn’t it be fun?” Her father looked at her as if she had suggested that as long as they were vacationing on Conesus Lake, they might like to fly to the moon for an ice cream cone while they were at it.
“One bag each. That’s the rule. The guitar will have to stay behind.”
Even if she were one to insist, which she wasn’t, Iris knew it would be wasted breath. She swallowed her objections, together with her shattered fantasies of sing-alongs and campfires. Disappointment still burning in her throat, Iris opened the kitchen cupboard where the used grocery bags were stashed, ready to be recycled. The thick brown paper was perfect for many uses, such as covering text books, wrapping homemade birthday presents, and soaking up slush from boots left to drip by the door in winter. Most bore the logo of Star Market, which Iris’s mother said offered the best value for the dollar, in addition to little green stamps which could be traded in for prizes, but the gifts were not quite enticing enough to make anyone actually go to the trouble of gluing the stamps in the collector’s book, so they ended up all stuck together in a drawer. Iris flipped through the bags in search of one she could use to pack her clothes in, one that was still nice and stiff, and did not have any blood stains from leaky packages of ground beef or chicken legs. She was sorry not to take her blue valise on her very first real vacation, but had decided it was a bit too elegant for a rustic lakeside cabin, and besides, there was a question of loyalty and fairness involved. She did not wish to flaunt a luxury item that she alone possessed, and if brown paper bags were good enough for her brothers and sisters, they were good enough for her, too.
Iris could hardly believe they were actually going to go away this time. Every summer, her mother talked about how lovely it would be to take a little family trip, and every year, her father asked whether she preferred to send her kids to school with shoes on their feet, or go lolling about in a place where they would have even fewer comforts than in their own home. But this year when he said that, Iris’s mother simply smiled, then showed him her first paycheck, and the brochure of a cabin she had reserved for Labor Day weekend. It may not be a long vacation, but it was a start. And from the pictures Iris had seen, the water in that lake was about as blue as any she had ever dreamed of swimming in. She couldn’t wait.
With a crisp paper bag tucked under her arm, Iris bounded up the stairs to pack, but on step number seven (she still counted them every single time she went up or down), she was halted by a pain stabbing her in the side. She had been experiencing similar pains lately, on and off, and figured it must have something to do with that disgusting menstruation business. As usual, it subsided as quickly as it had struck, and she dashed up the last five stairs and into her room. She managed to locate two pairs of clean underpants before the pain gripped her again; a pair of shorts and three T-shirts later it came again, and by the time a nightie and two books were packed, she was sitting on the edge of the bed, sweating profusely and shaking. This was no time to be getting sick, she decided; whatever it was, it would have to wait. Iris forced herself to her feet, took her bag downstairs, wrote the name “IRIS” in block letters across the front, and placed it in the lineup by the door.
“I’m so excited, I don’t know how I’ll ever get to sleep,” Lily said, as they lay in bed that evening. “It’s almost as bad as Christmas Eve!”
“Same here,” Iris said, hugging her tummy under the sheet. She had decided the best way to get rid of the pains was to ignore them completely. That meant not thinking about them or mentioning them out loud, not even to Lily. The girls chatted about all the fun they would have on the lake, and after a fe
w minutes, Lily said having something real to look forward to and talk about was even better than any fairy story they had ever invented, then promptly fell asleep. Iris counted the cricket chirps for a while, then paced her breathing to fall in sync with Lily’s, and eventually drifted off, too.
What seemed like minutes later, pain and nausea roused Iris from her sleep. She crawled out of bed, and made it to the bathroom just in time. She retched with such violence, she was sure her whole stomach would fly out of her mouth and plop into the toilet together with everything else she had brought up. As soon as she felt steady enough to stand, she went down to call her mother, but hesitated in front of her parents’ bedroom door.
“Mom?” she whispered, the door creaking as she finally eased it open a crack. The room was enshrouded in a velvety darkness that trembled with the vibrato snoring of her father. She held little hope that her whisper would be heard over the rumble. “Mom!” she repeated, in a louder whisper. She peered into the dark room, hoping to see her mother stir, but the moment her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, the first thing they settled upon was the sight of her father’s naked rear end. When the twin beds had appeared in their parents’ room, soon after her mother started her job, Iris thought it a leap in status that they now preferred the same sleeping arrangements as all the married couples on television. Iris was as close as she was willing to get to her father’s bare butt, and wouldn’t budge from the door, or raise her voice to a more audible level. Her mother finally heard her whispering for help, and came to the door.
“What is it, Iris?” she asked. Her mother never yawned or looked sleepy. She was either awake, or asleep.
“I don’t feel good, Mom,” Iris said. “My side hurts, my head hurts, and I keep throwing up.”
Iris’s mother placed the back of her hand on her forehead. The gesture seemed to make Iris feel a little better already. “You do feel hot, honey,” her mother said. “You must be running a fever. Come with me.” She led Iris to the bathroom and slid open the door to the medicine cabinet over the left sink (the one over the right sink was off limits to the rest of the family; it held their father’s shaving cream, straight-edge razor, electric razor, Hai Karate cologne, hair comb, Grecian Formula, nail clippers, and some little brown bottles with typewritten labels).
Rummaging through the left cabinet was allowed, but not usually very interesting. You could generally find a couple of tubes of lipstick, a handful of toothbrushes with splayed bristles, a flattened tube of toothpaste waiting for someone to decide whether to squeeze it once more or throw it away, a handful of hairpins that when outfitted with a bonnet of toilet paper were used to remove ear wax. A few medical supplies could be found up on the top shelf, out of reach of the smaller kids: a bottle of red cough syrup that tasted awful; a grape-flavored medicine that wasn’t so bad; a blue jar of mentholated goop that you could stick up your nose to help you breathe when you had a cold; a big bottle of aspirin, and a tin of Band-Aids.
Iris’s mother unscrewed the cap of the aspirin bottle, shook out a tablet and handed it to Iris. She ran the tap, perfunctorily rinsed out the plastic bathroom glass that always had a film of black crud around the bottom and filled it with cool water, then passed that to her, too. “Here, this should help,” she said. “You just lie down on the couch now, where you can call me if you need me. It’s probably just a bug. You should be fine in the morning.”
“But what if I’m not?” Iris asked. In her current state, the thought of traveling in a crowded car was unbearable, but the thought of being left behind was even worse. Plus, there was no one to be left behind with, unless she was sent off to Auntie Rosa’s, and as much as she enjoyed going there, it was nothing like swimming in that blue lake.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” her mother replied, patting her on the head.
Iris curled up on the sofa, where her mother tucked an afghan crocheted by Grandma Capotosti around her shivering body. She looked up at her mother’s face, its skin as white as the moon glow that filtered through the living room window. There were no wrinkles to spoil the perfection of its translucent surface, no creases tugging at the corners of her clear aquamarine eyes. Iris searched the eyes for signs of reassurance, but all she saw was calm. Though it wasn’t quite the same thing, calm was good, too, Iris thought; if her mother were really worried, she would have called her father, and they would have sat with her and held her hand, and taken her temperature, and put ice cubes wrapped in a washcloth on her forehead. Even after her mother returned to her room, the serene look on her face kept Iris company throughout the night, convincing her as she knelt over the toilet bowl vomiting up a foul green liquid, that she must not be as ill as she felt, and that she would certainly be better in the morning.
Even from her spot curled up on the couch, where she had finally fallen into a fitful sleep, Iris could see this was no ordinary Saturday morning. The house was abuzz with preparations for departure; breakfast was eaten quickly, last-minute checks performed, personal belongings gathered up. Iris witnessed the flurry of activity around her, while fat, hot tears rolled down her feverish cheeks. Lily offered to help, and prodded her to get up from the couch, but her efforts were useless. Try as she may, Iris could not uncurl her knees from her chest, let alone stand erect.
Between trips to load the station wagon, her father ran through her checklist of symptoms, nodding, shaking his head, and mortifying her by asking whether she had already started menstruating. When he asked her that, his eyelids dropped halfway shut, and they made a fluttering movement as he spoke, like they did whenever he was faced with a difficult or embarrassing situation.
Amid the amicable shouts and boisterous laughter of the Capotosti household, a phone call was made to Auntie Rosa, and the departure was delayed long enough for Iris to be seated next to her father in the front seat of the loaded car, and dropped off at Auntie Rosa’s. More phone calls were made, surgeons were distracted from Saturday morning rounds of golf until Auntie Rosa located one she trusted, a hospital was driven to, an emergency room was waited in, an examining table was lain upon, flesh was palpated, arms were pricked with needles, blood was drawn, a cup was peed into, opinions were expressed, a diagnosis made, intimate parts shaved with a razor, surgery performed.
Had it not been for the freezing cold ice baths that kept her awake when all she wanted to do was sleep, had it not been for the drainage tube and fetid odors coming from her gut, had it not been for the priest who for some reason always brought Holy Communion at the exact same moment she was on the bedpan, had it not been for the pangs of regret she felt when she thought of the crystal clear lake where Lily and the others were swimming and floating on inner tubes by day, eating hot dogs and hamburgers around bonfires by night, Iris might even have enjoyed her two weeks in the hospital.
She did have the entire ward almost to herself, she did have juice and Jell-O served to her on a tray, she did have nice nurses to talk to, and a handsome young intern that smiled at her and asked her all kinds of questions, and actually listened to the answers. She did get crisp new sheets on her bed each day, she did get to read the entire series of Nancy Drew detective stories that she found on a shelf, she did get to watch Perry Mason every afternoon on TV. Auntie Rosa did come to see her every single day, and after the family vacation was over and he returned to work, so did her father. He timed his visits during lunch hour, which worked out well, because then he got to eat Iris’s hospital lunch which would have just gone to waste anyway.
All the doctors and nurses, and Auntie Rosa, and her father, and even the priest said Iris was one heckuva lucky girl (except the priest said “blessed”), because peritonitis had killed lots of people, including cousin Dolores’s own father. In the end, Iris was convinced of her miraculous good fortune, but no matter what anyone said, she wished her luck could have waited until after she had swum at least once in that crystal blue lake.
18. Lily
“Show your mother what you learned today at
the dance studio, Iris. I’m quite sure she would be very interested to see how graceful you are.”
Their mother was extracting a set of coffee cups and saucers from the cupboard, shuttling them two at a time to the massive kitchen table, stopping to turn off the flame from under the whistling tea kettle as she passed.
“Is the coffee ready yet?” their father called from the garage.
She poured the boiling water into the top compartment of the coffee pot. “It’s coming, Carlo!” Lily watched with anticipation as she opened the package of black and white sandwich cookies that Auntie Rosa had bought from the Chili Superette, and poured them out onto a melamine plate that once bore what may have been a colorful floral pattern, which had become faded from countless attacks by hungry forks and rigorous trips through the dishwasher. She placed the dish in the center of the table, and Lily counted the cookies. Luckily, it was Saturday night and most of the older kids were out. If she stayed put and waited until the coffee was poured, she was a shoe-in to get at least one.
“Betty - Betty... ” said Auntie Rosa, beckoning their mother to pay attention. “Watch - watch this.” Turning to Iris she said, “Go ahead, sunshine, show Mother what you learned today at dance.”
Iris struck a pose, and with an intent look on her face she straightened her tall body, brought the insides of her long legs together, feet flat, the toes of each foot pointed in opposite directions, with the outside heel of her right foot touching the toes of her left. She held her arms down in front of her body, elbows slightly bent, fingertips touching.
“That’s position five, right, Lover-dover?”
“This is lower fifth position,” said Iris.
Elevating herself up onto her toes and raising her arms up over her head, she said. “And this is upper fifth position.”
The Complete Series Page 28