by Bill Hayes
Unique rites also take place within the confines of family, passed on generation to generation. My friend Maurice, who grew up in a small Brooklyn apartment in the 1930s, remembers with a touch of awe the privileges his older sister enjoyed whenever she had her cycle. In this close-knit Jewish household she ordinarily shared a bedroom with Maurice and their brother Jack; on many nights all three even snuggled in one bed. But the room was hers alone when Natalie, nine years older than Maurice, got her period. She secluded herself behind a locked door while he and Jack got booted to the couch. Even more luxurious than being given her own bedroom, Natalie was allowed for the week to smoke cigarettes, an indulgence denied the boys. Maurice still recalls the scent of her Chesterfields wafting through the keyhole, her room, he imagined, filled with pillowy clouds.
This wistful scene plays like a sweet spin on a grim script from Leviticus 15: When a woman has her period, the Old Testament prescribes, “she shall be in her impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean. Everything upon which she lies during her impurity will be unclean.” This idea found its way into our five-bedroom Spokane home through multiple routes. One started at the supermarket. On trips to Rosauer’s grocery, Shannon, like all my sisters, became well acquainted with The Aisle, an isthmus of pastel-colored cartons, a place boys didn’t go. Mom would usually send me off to get some cereal or to spin the comic-book rack while she and Shannon entered that female zone. There, the packaging was pale and the wording vague, as if the products were specifically designed not to be noticed.
Meeting up again at checkout, me hugging a king-sized box of Frosted Flakes, I’d see in our cart the familiar lilac Kotex box and other items of “feminine protection,” a word pairing of indeterminate promise. “Protection” from what? (Not prying eyes, I admit, although my unwrapping one of the mummified wads in the bathroom trash certainly discouraged a second airing.) Were I pressed into listing items of masculine protection, I’d have said a football helmet, catcher’s mitt, sports cup—gear to shield guys from outside injury. But girls had to be protected from themselves, from their own bodies.
This notion may have also been brought home from church with an oft-heard passage from Genesis on the consequences of Original Sin. God, punishing Eve for tempting Adam with the apple, tells her that He will “greatly multiply thy pain.” Though this is a reference to the pain of childbirth, biblical scholars contend that the meaning was deliberately misconstrued by early church fathers to include menstruation. Monthly pain was part of the punishment all women had to bear for Eve’s sin, a notion popularized in a common euphemism. Hence the so-called curse of Eve became simply “the curse.”
Now, at age forty-three, whenever I hear that expression “the curse” I think of Shannon, who was bedeviled by painful and heavy menstrual cycles throughout her teens and, in more recent years, by a series of gynecological health scares. The image that comes to mind is Henry Fuseli’s moody Gothic painting The Nightmare (1782), in which a defenseless, nightgown-clad woman is splayed atop her bed, except that it’s daytime in my version, Shannon’s wide awake, and the demon perched on her abdomen looks as if it is hatching plans: What vex to inflict next? I can see Shannon in that painting at all different ages—as a frightened girl, as a lonely teen, and as a vulnerable young woman.
This whole picture changed two years back when Shannon had a partial hysterectomy, surgery her doctors had recommended due to recurring, unusually large fibroids on her uterus. To celebrate this major life change, she joyously threw decorum to the wind and held a “Uter-Out-of-Me Party” at her Seattle home a week prior to the procedure. I was disappointed not to be able to fly up from San Francisco to attend, though she filled me in on the details by phone later that day. It was all good silly fun, she and ten women friends raising flutes of champagne to Shannon’s uterus and bidding good riddance to tampons, panty liners, diaphragms, and bleeding. A friend who’d had the same surgery a year before brought quiche and deviled eggs in honor of the ovaries Shannon’s surgery would leave intact, and organized party games, including rounds of Operation, for which the board game’s male patient was turned into a she with a felt pen.
Shannon sounded strong, happy, her voice fizzy with high spirits. Still, I, the worried brother, wondered if she was having any last-minute doubts about the surgery.
“No, I’m ready. I’m so ready,” she said. “Every year, every Pap smear, it’s been something. And these fibroids have caused havoc. I’ve had nonstop bleeding for weeks.” Then a pause. “At the same time, though, there’s a sense of loss.”
“Well, that’s understandable,” I said. “It is part of your body. I mean, I get sentimental about losing my hair”—at which point Shannon snickered. “I practically weep whenever I look at the top of my head.”
“Well, when you put it that way, I guess it’s okay to feel sad about losing my uterus.”
The inspiration for throwing the party had come, in small part, she admitted, as a reaction to something our mother had said. “Mom being Mom, when I first told her I was having the hysterectomy, she said right away, ‘Now, Shannon, don’t make a big deal of it.’ ”
We laughed. If the root of our family’s dysfunction could be boiled down to one sentence, it would be: Don’t make a big deal of it. How many times had our parents, now in their late seventies, given Shannon or me that admonishment? How many times had we done the opposite?
Shannon, according to family lore, entered the world creating drama. After Mom went into labor, my sister squirmed about and turned herself upside down, as if reluctant to leave the womb. An emergency Cesarean resulted, sparing mother and daughter a dangerous breech delivery. Henceforth Shannon was dubbed the child born backward, a characterization that endured and, unfortunately, sank in. Throughout childhood, she never felt good enough, smart enough, coordinated enough. Unlike Maggie, who possessed the grace of a natural athlete, or Colleen, who could be as poised as a beauty pageant contestant, Shannon was perpetually at odds with her body. This disharmony was never more apparent than when she had her period.
One episode burned into memory took place in the family car with me, Mom, and Shannon, who was thirteen. We’d been to the mall, though the purpose of the excursion and my reason for being there are forgotten. What remains is the tension in the station wagon as we drove home, the shopping trip scrapped because Shannon got hysterical. Mom had barely stepped foot into JCPenney when Shannon started sobbing and could barely walk because of cramps. My mother, who had precious little free time to shop, couldn’t very well drag her bawling daughter through the mall or just leave her in the car, balled up in the fetal position. Mom’s face as she gripped the wheel was a scramble of emotions—exasperation, concern, anger, and, I think, embarrassment. That Shannon’s behavior occurred in public made it more egregious. I’ll never forget how, back home, my mother, trying to be discreet, explained to Dad why shopping had been cut short: “She’s in her way,” Mom said, as if Shannon were a self-inflicted impediment.
To a degree, I think, Mom was dead on. Shannon did get in her own way. My parents took her several times to see Dr. Porter, who could find nothing wrong. The biological process that my mom and other sisters quietly managed remained a dramatic monthly struggle for Shannon. It was as though she had never moved beyond the frightful experience of her first period. My sympathy over the preceding year had settled into bewilderment. By this point in my boyhood, I well understood the notion of calluses. Why couldn’t my sister toughen up?
If Shannon’s tears didn’t announce her time of the month, her wardrobe did. Immediately after getting home from school, she’d bag her body in the same oversized, pale yellow “granny dress,” which she wore like a flag of defeat. In an odd coincidence, girls of the Spokane Indian tribe had historically worn their oldest dresses during menses, though the similarities probably ended there. Shannon retreated to her bed with a heating pad and bottle of aspirin, propping against pillows and taking up her embroidery. She was a Victorian spins
ter, prim and pitiful. I suspect her discomfort was symptomatic, too, of deeper anxieties about self-image and sexuality, which surfaced with the menstrual bloating and swollen breasts. She was a pretty girl, just over five feet tall, with flawless skin and a beautiful smile, but even on good days she carried herself as if boxed in by her body, hunched over, head down, arms strapping her bosom. I’m sure it didn’t help that the older sisters teased Shannon about her plumpness, nicknaming her Circle. In a house with so many women, she felt isolated, and for the week of her period she withdrew from the family. I was scared for her but also a little scared of her.
Shannon’s impending hysterectomy last fall revived family discussion of her history. “Why do you think it was always such an ordeal for Shannon?” I asked my older sister Maggie, whose own twelve-year-old daughter had just sailed through her first period, excited by this grown-up development. “She fought it,” Maggie said simply. “She always fought it.”
Shannon had a different answer. “It was that house. I internalized the tensions in the house,” she told me. And added, as if in evidence, “They got better once I left for college.” She also admitted to having been relentlessly naÏve in adolescence. Though connected only by phone line, it was as if she and I were back in the yellow bathroom, her hand in mine. She repeated the same thoughts that had spun through her mind thirty years earlier: “It’s supposed to be so natural, but you think, Why is blood coming out of me every month? Something inside must be injured or wounded. I mean, two tampons and a pad? Isn’t it dangerous to lose all that blood?”
Another theory surfaced after her successful surgery. The surgeon informed Shannon that her uterus had been tilted at an unusual angle, and this pressure on her spinal nerves, added to a growing body and menstrual swelling, could explain what had exacerbated her monthly pain. “Now they tell me!” she exclaimed, laughing. “What timing! God, if only I’d known thirty years ago . . .”
I later wondered, would it have made a difference? Rather than consolation, the news might have simply added to her feelings of defectiveness, that yet another part of her was out of whack. But I’m glad not to have to recast the past for, buried beneath her childhood insecurities and extra weight, something truly remarkable was blooming: faith. Shannon, who had long been in open conflict with her physical body, began quietly and confidently embracing her spirituality. She was the only one of my sisters who attended Mass as frequently as Dad and me.
I had become an altar boy in third grade and served for five years. Every other month I was assigned to serve for a week at St. Augustine’s 6 A.M. daily Mass, in addition to regular Sundays. Dad would drive Shannon and me to church, for he usually served as the lector. None of us ever got up early enough to eat breakfast and then fast the requisite hour before receiving Holy Communion, so we’d make the trip in a hungry, numbed silence. Morning after morning, we’d roll through the dark, empty neighborhoods and down the hill to church, as if in a recurring dream, one that I can still easily conjure.
I am twelve years old and walk three steps behind Dad as we enter St. Augustine’s dim sacristy, dipping our fingers into the font of holy water. I hang up my coat and pull the blousy black-and-white cassock on over my clothes. Dad scans the Bible readings and speaks with Father Austen, who responds to his polite, whispered chitchat in a gravelly roar. I light the altar candles and pour water and wine into glass cruets, which I’ll later have to carry—don’t spill, don’t clink, don’t trip, don’t drop—in the processional, a three-man parade (Father, Dad, and Boy) from the sacristy, into the foyer, down the side aisle to the front of the church, then up the main aisle to the altar. It is all quite showy considering that there are no more than two dozen of the devoted looking on—a huddle of nuns, a sprinkling of old people, and there, in the third pew, Shannon.
I am here for one reason: because Dad says so. Though not yet a disbeliever, I am skeptical. I’ve glimpsed too many of the goings-on behind the velvet curtain. Shannon, by contrast, attends Mass out of fascination. This difference in perspective is never clearer than during the hushed moment at the heart of the Mass when bread and wine become Christ’s flesh and blood, the miracle of transubstantiation. From my vantage point, kneeling at Father Austen’s feet on the right side of the altar, I can easily see Shannon’s face. Her look is always the same, an expression of awe. When Father Austen holds aloft the Communion wafer in the consecration of the host, she is wholly enrapt in this retelling of the Last Supper, as if hearing it for the first time. I, on the other hand, can’t help thinking of the cellophane bag in which a hundred hosts came packed, like potato chips. On autopilot, I ring the altar bell three times. Next, when Father Austen raises the chalice of amber wine, I see only the gallon jug from which it had been poured, stored under the sacristy sink, and can already smell the sourness that will later be on his breath. Again, the altar bell. In the quiet that follows, I watch Shannon, whose head is dipped, fingers pressed in prayer. She looks like she’s captured a firefly in her hands and peeks to see its light.
The wine will not be offered to parishioners to drink, in part for simplicity’s sake, I suppose, but also because Christ’s blood already exists in the Eucharist, just as blood is present in human flesh. After taking a host himself, Father Austen places one on my tongue, where it is left to melt—never to be chewed—and I follow him to the altar rail. It’s my job to hold both the basket of hosts and the long-handled golden paten under each recipient’s chin, lest a host should fall. But don’t even think it! A host must never touch the ground. Wafer catching involves keeping your eye on parishioners’ tongues—gray-red, stubbled pelts, mostly, shooting out on waves of bad morning breath—a nauseating task on an empty stomach. To me, the sacrament of Communion means that Mass is almost over. To Shannon, second in line behind Pete the usher, it signifies far more. Her tongue slides under the chain-link fencing of her metal braces, and I momentarily meet her gaze.
“This is the body of Christ,” pronounces Father Austen.
“Amen,” she returns. In Shannon’s flushed, avid face, I see gladness, as she is united with the Son of God.
I couldn’t help but smile at her joy, though at the time I didn’t fully understand it. She drew from a depth of feeling that I’d yet to form about anything. In this respect, she was far beyond me. The girl born backward had pulled ahead, and I couldn’t have been happier for her.
In addition to attending daily and Sunday services, Shannon played her guitar and sang at Saturday’s folk Mass. On a bookshelf in her room she kept a collection of nun dolls, each half a foot tall and dressed for a different religious order and historical period. I always found them creepy, with their Kewpie-doll faces and smothering garb, but to Shannon each represented a saint. For example, the doll in the white habit and black mantle, a Dominican nun, was Catherine of Siena. And the female Friar Tuck, dressed in the brown robes of a Carmelite sister, was Thérèse of Lisieux. Shannon also read The Lives of the Saints and developed a profound admiration for Teresa of Avila, the sixteenth-century Spanish nun and mystic. She took Saint Teresa’s name when she was confirmed in eighth grade and also sought out copies of her books, which was unusual in itself. Unlike Ellen or me, Shannon wasn’t much of a reader. In Teresa’s life story, though, Shannon perhaps saw glimpses of herself. “I had one brother almost of my own age. It was he whom I most loved,” Teresa wrote in her autobiography. She continued:
We used to read the lives of the saints together; and, when I read of the martyrdoms suffered by saintly women for God’s sake, I had a keen desire to die as they had done. . . . I used to discuss with this brother of mine how we could become martyrs. We agreed to go off to the country of the Moors, so that they might behead us there. Even at so tender an age, I believe that our Lord had given us sufficient courage for this, but our greatest hindrance seemed to be that we had a father and a mother. . . .
When I saw that it was impossible for me to go to any place where they would put me to death for God’s sake, we decided to becom
e hermits, and we used to build hermitages, as well as we could, in an orchard which we had at home. . . .
By rights, Shannon should’ve replaced me as the family acolyte, but the Catholic Church forbade girls from service. This ban was not reversed until 1983, and even then it was left to individual bishops to decide whether to integrate. The church provided no role for a girl like Shannon, except to sing in the choir. And that was a new privilege in terms of church canon, only first allowed in the early 1900s. In the preceding seven centuries, with rare exceptions, no woman could wear a choir robe. She could sing from the pews but, because the choir sang sacred liturgical texts, only men were permitted. A legacy of Leviticus 15, this and many other anti-woman prohibitions officially entered church law under the Corpus Iuris Canonici (1234 to 1916).
Pope after pope would reiterate that, because women bled and were hence unclean and impure, they threatened the holiness of the church. It goes without saying that, if they couldn’t sing in an official capacity, women couldn’t become ordained, distribute Communion, or serve as lectors. Nor could they touch the chalice, the sacred vestments, or the altar linen upon which the Eucharist was placed, even, I would suppose, to clean them. As for whether a girl or woman in her period could receive Communion, interpretation varied. In its strictest form, she would have to forfeit taking the sacrament, her abstention effectively announcing her menses to the entire congregation.
