Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood

by Bill Hayes

  As the only boy in an Irish Catholic family, I was deeply conscious of how differently my parents viewed a son as opposed to daughters. The fifth of six kids, from the earliest age I felt genuinely prized, an individual whereas my sisters were often lumped together. We were “Billy and the Girls,” like a pop band in which, long before I could talk, I’d been named lead singer. The Hayes daughters were raised with the expectation that they’d eventually marry and have children. I was led to believe I’d go to West Point, as had Dad, carry on the family name, and one day take over the family business, a Coca-Cola bottling plant. Only-boy-ness also meant having no hand-me-downs, whether clothes or bicycles or books, plus exclusive access to Dad, who took me alone to the drive-through car wash and to “he-man movies” such as True Grit. As the supplier of soda pop to all of Spokane’s sporting events, he received free passes to hockey games, boxing matches, the annual rodeo, and off we’d go. It was as if manliness were a destination to which Dad regularly led me. Father and son, we’d sit in the bleachers most Sunday afternoons, sharing bags of roasted peanuts and time away from “the squaws,” as he called my sisters and mom. We’d make it home just in time for dinner. As it was every night, the dinner table was like a game of musical chairs, the girls constantly popping up to fetch this or that while Dad and I remained seated, never lifting a finger.

  I’d had my own bedroom since the summer after my seventh birthday. Before that, I’d roomed for as long as I could remember with my sister Shannon, who was then unceremoniously moved in with “the baby,” four-year-old Julia. Shannon was two years older than me and the sister to whom I was closest. Togetherness hadn’t ended with our getting separate bedrooms. Her best friend, Mary Kay, was Chris’s sister, so our paths often also crossed at the Porters’, as well as at school and catechism class. Our connectedness as children was one of complements: Her emotions bubbled over, I held mine in. It’s something we still joke and talk about today: Shannon cried enough for the two of us, if not the whole family. And yet, as the fourth daughter, she was always somewhat misplaced, not allied with the eldest three and rarely getting the attention from Mom and Dad both Julia and I received. Though younger than Shannon, I tried to act like her protective big brother.

  To the senior daughters, Colleen, Ellen, and Maggie, I was the baby brother they doted on but who also got in their way every day in the tiny bathroom we all shared. We called it “the yellow bathroom,” for it was tiled the dusty color of lemon drops. We never shared the bathroom to the extent of bathing or using the toilet in front of one another; the locked door guaranteed privacy. But in the final minutes before bolting out of the house for school or church, we all ended up in there at once. In the large mirror above the twin sinks, my sisters and I were a jumble of pressing bodies, a photo booth filled to capacity. From memory, I pluck a typical scene: It is a school morning in 1969. I’m a second-grader at Comstock Elementary. We’ve all got to be out of the house in fifteen minutes.

  I’m in there first, as my bedroom is right next door and I’m already dressed, having laid out my clothes the night before—brown cords, a white shirt, and a belt; not much to it. At either side of the sinks are three drawers labeled with our names on masking tape. Colleen, Ellen, and Maggie have the left side; Shannon, Julia, and I, the right. Based on actual need, I could use the tiny ledge behind the toothbrush holder for the few possessions my bathroom drawer houses. It rattles as I yank it open, the lonesome sound of a comb and a tie clip. By contrast, the girls’ drawers barely close, containing overgrown thickets of hairstyling paraphernalia and such.

  I load Crest onto my toothbrush as Colleen enters, the first sister in. The eldest, she’s always the first at everything. First to be confirmed at St. Augustine’s, to go on a diet, to part her hair in the middle, to enter high school. A freshman at Lewis and Clark, she is twice my age, which, in my reckoning, puts her in roughly the same age bracket as redwoods and our parents. Colleen wants to be a fashion model; she has the most to accomplish here. She starts by tugging from her dirty-blond hair the pink foam rollers she’s slept in, tossing them one by one back into her drawer.

  Ellen and Maggie are next in, and the four of us automatically reconfigure. I now sit on the toilet seat, ostensibly still brushing my teeth, as Colleen takes the middle position, and Ellen and Maggie commandeer the sinks. Though they’re roommates, close in age, and both attend Sacajawea junior high, they are opposites. Ellen is most Dad-like in being the bossiest child, an excellent student, and a voracious reader. She also has terrible eyesight, her one apparent vulnerability. When she takes off her thick lenses to wash her face, she can hardly see well enough to find a towel. No-nonsense in every way, she reminds me of Velma, my favorite character from Scooby-Doo. Maggie, like Mom, is artistic. Her wrists jangle with jewel-colored bracelets she’s made herself from debristled, melted-down toothbrushes. Her fingernails might as well be painted with nail polish—they’re stained scarlet with Rit fabric dye from her latest project, a batik bedspread. Maggie sidesteps the parental ban on wearing makeup by dabbing Vaseline on her lashes, then crimping them with a torturous-looking eyelash curler. She hides her Bonne Bell lip gloss in her purse, to be applied at school.

  At this point there’s not much room for Shannon, a fourth-grader at Comstock. With great hesitance, as if it’s a tough decision, she selects from her drawer the brush she always uses and starts untangling her long, dark-chocolate-colored hair. Ellen, finished with rubber-banding her braces, steps behind Shannon and plucks the brush from her hand. “One braid or two?” she asks.

  “One,” Shannon says. “I don’t wanna look like Pippi Longstocking again.”

  In toddles Julia, who is just five and, like me, drawn more to the crowd than by any pressing bathroom business. As I rinse and spit, Julia’s eyes follow me, expectant. With deliberate showiness, I take up a clean plastic cup, twirl in some Crest, then blast it under the faucet so that the cup bubbles over with fluoridated froth. Julia beams as I hand her the toothpaste float, and she promptly dips her nose in it. She soon has the bathroom to herself, however, as the older girls fly from the house to the honks of carpools, and Shannon and I scurry down the block to Comstock.

  As much as I loved being around my sisters, as familiar as they were to me, I also found them mysterious at times, particularly the eldest three. Some mornings, for example, they mentioned things in the yellow bathroom I did not understand, lapsing into coded girltalk before shooing me from the room, locking the door behind me. From my bedroom, ear to the adjoining wall, I could never quite make out their muffled chatter. Of course the Hayes girls did in fact share a private language, and one afternoon, when I was ten, the secret decoder ring was placed in my hand.

  Panicky and insistent, Shannon pulled me into the bathroom. She looked as if she’d committed some horrible sin and was expecting to hear at any moment the booming voice of our father. Normally, when either of us got into big trouble, we’d be each other’s first confessor and consoler, so I asked, “Did you do something wrong?”

  “Cramps,” she said. “I started having cramps.”

  The Hayes siblings in 1967, left to right: Julia in Mom’s lap, me, Shannon, Maggie, Ellen with the white gloves, and Colleen

  Had Shannon’s and my entries into puberty coincided, I might have been quicker on the uptake. But I was a fourth-grader who’d yet to sprout a single body hair, have my sex talk with Dad, or see the infamous health education film reserved for fifth-graders.

  Cramps, though, was not an unfamiliar word. It was how Ellen excused herself early from the dinner table, without even asking permission from Dad. It was Maggie’s password to freedom from attending church, the excuse that was never denied. I, too, had had cramps, with a bellyache or the stomach flu, but boy-cramps were far less contagious than girl-cramps. No sooner did one sister begin to feel better than another was murmuring “Cramps” and disappearing behind the yellow bathroom door.

  As Shannon pulled me down next to her on that cool tiled floor
, she appeared far more upset than I’d ever seen any of my other sisters. She sat against the toilet, which seemed prudent. She looked like she was going to upchuck.

  “So, are you sick?”

  She took a long time to answer “No,” which left me certain the answer was yes. “I got my period,” Shannon sputtered.

  As I later learned, Mom had anticipated this day. A few months earlier she had given Shannon a well-worn booklet with a daisy on the cover, titled Now You’re a Woman, and had sent her into the yellow bathroom to read it behind the locked door. Once she’d finished, Shannon handed it back to Mom, who had joined her in the bathroom. Mom must’ve thought the booklet adequately addressed the essentials of womanhood; they did not further discuss what being a woman now meant, but how to conceal it. She showed Shannon how to put together a menstrual belt; gave her a can of FDS feminine deodorant spray; and instructed her to deposit spotted underwear or bedsheets directly into the washing machine, never to leave them in the bathroom hamper.

  They should’ve made a daisy-covered booklet for boys, one with just enough answers to help a brother help a scared sister. As Shannon opened up to me, I felt as if I were scrambling to assemble a jigsaw puzzle without having the cover to the box. It was clear that Shannon was bleeding, that she would keep bleeding for an entire week, and that there was no way to stop it. No wonder she looked so fearful. I, too, was frightened. I was also sworn to secrecy. Had I gone to Mom or Dad, I’d have gotten Shannon into trouble. Our mother had given her two last instructions: “Don’t tell Dad. And don’t tell Bill.”

  On some level I must’ve trusted that my mother knew what she was doing with Shannon, but at the time she just seemed mean. If told then what I know now, I’d have been far more rattled. From an anthropological point of view, my mom’s exacting this final vow from Shannon was simply a modern instance of an age-old custom: secluding menstruating women and girls. In practice, secrecy is seclusion through silence, a wall built around a girl at menarche, her first period, that remains standing today, to some degree, in homes throughout the world. In a broader context, however, 1971 Spokane was a pinnacle of enlightenment compared with almost anywhere, say, a hundred years prior.

  In the late nineteenth century, British social anthropologist James Frazer recorded various shocking instances of ritualized physical and social seclusion. In his book The Golden Bough (1890) he described, for example, the young women of the Kolosh Indian tribe in Alaska who, at menarche, were confined to an individual hut with but a tiny opening for fresh air and food. The secluded girl could drink only from the “wing-bone of a white-headed eagle,” which at first sounds like a privilege—the kind of vessel, say, reserved for a tribal chief—but wasn’t. So unclean was she rendered by her menses that the entire water supply had to be protected from her lips. She was kept in this hut for a whole year, Frazer explained, without sunlight, exercise, or a fire’s warmth, attended to solely by her mother. The length of the seclusion spoke to the depth of her community’s fears. With her first period, the most potent, a girl became a destructive influence that needed to be neutralized. As she was inseparable from the blood, both had to be separated from society. Her power was phenomenal. With a glance, she could spoil the hunt or strike men dead.

  On an island in the Bismarck Archipelago in the southwest Pacific Ocean, girls were confined for up to five years in hanging cages to shield the ground from their polluting touch, according to Frazer. Upon getting her first period, a young woman of a tribe in southern Brazil was stitched into a hammock, leaving only a button-sized airhole, as if she were a butterfly shoved back into its cocoon. Keeping her in darkness was essential; she could poison the sun with a look. Similarly, the Native peoples of both southeastern Bolivia and British Guiana (now called Guyana) shrouded pubescent girls in pods hung from the rafters of darkened huts. Here they remained for months, “suspended between heaven and earth,” Frazer lyrically observed.

  It all seems too awful to be entirely true. And indeed, one must question whether Frazer was embroidering or maybe just misinformed. After all, the occasional curious little girl surely disproved tribal beliefs by harmlessly peeking at the sky, say, or at a kid brother. Sure enough, as historian George W. Stocking Jr. suggests in his introduction to the current edition of The Golden Bough, a degree of skepticism is merited. Frazer, a man whose aspirations were more literary than scientific, was an armchair anthropologist who received his field reports secondhand, if not third or fourth. Knowing this helps explain why, despite Frazer’s liberal use of labels such as “savages” and “barbarians,” his accounts have such an engaging fable-like quality; even the book’s title sounds drawn from the Brothers Grimm. The stories of caged and suspended girls call to mind tales such as that of Rapunzel, kept for years in an impenetrable tower beginning at the pubescent age of twelve.

  In contrast to Frazer’s method of observing life at a remove, the French historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874) rolled up his sleeves, conducting studies of menstruation that were nearly as invasive as gynecological exams. Michelet, renowned to this day for his panoramic Histoire de France, kept a private diary (published posthumously) in which he recorded in graphic detail the menstrual cycles of his wife, Athenais, who was thirty years younger than him. Entries included subtle observations of her daily flow—color, volume, density, odor—as well as an analysis of his own feelings, not hers, about her bleeding. Despite this particular fascination, his view of women in general was no more enlightened than was typical for his time. He reiterated in his essay “L’Amour” (1859) the belief that menstruation was a mark of women’s natural “débilité mentale et physique,” which sounds no less insulting in French.

  His opinion was an echo of Aristotle, who, writing more than two millennia earlier, declared menstruation as proof of women’s inferiority. Aristotle also saw in bleeding an almost supernatural component. A menstruating woman’s reflection could stain any mirror with a bloody cloud, he stated in De Insomniis. Such superstitions can be found, tenfold, in the writings of the first-century Roman author Pliny the Elder. In his Natural History, a thirty-seven-volume encyclopedia that remained a credible scientific resource up through the Middle Ages, Pliny warned that the touch of a menstruating woman turned wine sour, made crops wither, dulled razors, rusted iron, killed bees, and caused a horrible smell to fill the air. “The Dead Sea, thick with salt, cannot be drawn asunder except by a thread soaked in the poisonous fluid of the menstruous blood,” Pliny wrote. “A thread from an infected dress is sufficient.” He was also certain that menstrual fluid could make a potent impact on natural events. If held up to flashes of lightning, for instance, it could halt a hailstorm or a whirlwind. But not a volcano, sad to say. Pliny died at Pompeii in A.D. 79 while studying the eruptions of Mount Vesuvius.

  It’s easier for me to understand viewing the Earth as the flat center of the universe than to fathom how such mistaken ideas of menstruating women endured. I have to wonder if Pliny, who lived well into his fifties, ever spent extensive time at home with a wife and daughters. Did the women in his life concur with his notions? More recent accounts, some written from an instantly more credible perspective—female—place menstruation in a broader social context. Among the customs of the Pacific Northwest’s Spokane Indians, the original inhabitants of the region where I was raised, a girl at puberty was temporarily moved to her family’s menstrual hut, a comfortable space where she was cared for by her mother, aunts, and grandmothers. This was hardly the cramped cage Frazer envisioned. The girl was welcomed into womanhood through intimate education on sexuality, health, tribal taboos, and social responsibilities. Though this tradition died out by the late nineteenth century, similar and even more progressive customs are observed today among Native Americans such as the Shoshoni of Nevada. Once a month, women retreat to separate quarters, leaving behind the men to take care of the kids, cooking, laundry, cleaning, and other chores. The men gain appreciation for the women, who in turn enjoy a week’s respite, an arrangement, as
social anthropologists note, that helps foster cooperation and healthy relationships within the tribe.