The Girl Zone: Five. Cycle of the Werewolf

Mimou got her first period at the age of eleven. She knew what it was right away, and thanked her maker in the toilet, trying to uncover one of her mother’s towels as quietly as possible, that she had them now, that she wouldn’t be one of those girls she had read about in books about the subject, who had to wait for their breasts to develop and their period to begin until their fifteenth birthday. Mimou wanted to be included, and now, she was. (Little did she know that she would be waiting for her breasts to develop until the cows came home, a feature about herself she eventually learned to love and appreciate, that hers were the breasts of a dancer, those of a woman who, if she took the appropriate care for her delicates, was able to wear the same bras for years until the elasticity finally gave.)

Getting one’s period was a hidden, mysterious rite of passage, something that was not discussed before the event in families, at all. The girls borrowed books about becoming a woman from the bookbus that stopped once a week by the schoolyard, though, and at recess, in their exclusive little cliques that are characteristic for girls, discussed pubic hair and tampons versus towels and necking with a boy in hushed and confessional tones. Of course, none of the girls had actually ever been in a romantic situation with a boy, but nonetheless, not really knowing, but desperately wanting to, they assembled in the last in a chain of cozy arts and crafts rooms, playing romantic ballads in the school’s boombox, naturally with their teacher, Mrs. Underwood’s, consent, and crocheted and knitted away their clumsy first drafts of a lifetime’s worth of socks and scarves and mittens, daydreaming and coming up with all-new lovely aspects of the boys in their school, making themselves swoon over how fabulous and fluffy and beyond romantic falling in love was going to be, what kind of sensation kissing would be, laughingly asking their teacher to show one more time how to exactly negotiate the heel or thumb.

Mimou took her time, getting used to the idea of tampons, preferring the large and somewhat uncomfortable towels instead, maybe because that was what her mother used, maybe because she had been told the notorious urban legend, how a girl once, unable to draw out the tampon, ended up ripping the cord by accident, and the airplane had to make an emergency landing because of her. Mimou would have rather died than had to go admit to the grown-ups she couldn’t get it out by herself, so, towels it was. In fact, she personally knew no one using tampons, until she went to junior high and the rules of the game changed in the large school. She and her classmates still rustled while they walked for a few years, and when she finally managed to insert her first tampon successfully, she became so insanely happy about her own heroism before a formidable ordeal, she immediately dug her most skinny jeans from her closet and wore them triumphantly the entire duration of her first tampon period.

Years later, when she was learning how to use Lunette, the menstrual cup, the game-changing invention of her countrywoman, she laughed out loud and in perfect understanding, when she read in the instruction sheet the supportive advice, that the menstrual cup, under no circumstance, could disappear inside one, and if the first few attempts to fish it out without pouring the liquid all over the place weren’t successful, one simply was to relax and take it easy for a while, then try again. As a young girl, Mimou would have adored the advice, and was now, as an adult, so happy that the creators had remembered what making things disappear into oneself, putting stuff into a cavity where nothing had ever been before, and especially carefully trying to remove them from that strange, lovely place, while silently wording hail marys so that one wouldn’t be the cause of another emergency landing, was like.

Mimou was, with her small breasts and early menstruation, lucky in another aspect of developing into a woman as well. She never in her life suffered from severe menstrual pains, unlike a lot of the girls she knew. She never even had to take a painkiller, but did witness many of her friends get physically ill while menstruating. Nausea, stomach pains, back pains, the works. One woman she knew in her early twenties got so nauseated on the first day she had to retreat to the toilet to retch a number of times, before the gross feeling finally subsided. They were both working at a video rental, and if her friend’s period happened upon a solo shift, she had to lock the front door with a note saying she would be right back, because the only restroom was on the basement floor.

But as Mimou got older, her pre-menstrual syndrome symptoms worsened. The cycle, whether she admitted or not, dictated a lot how she reacted to her environment and to the people around her. It became clear to her that the week or so before she got her period was that of magical thinking, and, no sooner than when the first drops appeared on the soft cotton crotch of her panties, causing a relief substantially grander than what seemed appropriate even to her, was she to have any kind of peace from the demon. Whether it was real or imagined, the week before her period became a monthly torture game, causing permanent ruptures in her relationships with men, making her mind a fuming inferno of panic, rage, and acute sadness, and on the whole, she was in a constant state of emergency.

She was both curious and scared to death of becoming pregnant, and alternated between two extremes, that of considering herself whole as she was and not really feeling the need to procreate in order to feel like she had fulfilled her true purpose, and thinking if perhaps she was missing out on some big secret the rest of the world seemed privy to. When a woman she knew only in passing, drunk and beside herself, confessed to having terminated her own pregnancy by eating two whole bunches of parsley, an herb with such powers according to folk wisdom, Mimou was both horrified and profoundly sickened, and deeply doubtful, thinking it was all bullshit anyway, and the rush of blood on the sheets the next night, as described in graphic detail by the woman, sipping her umpteenth beer in the bar, was just her period starting, that’s all. Still, it was a story Mimou remembered the rest of her life, and the mental image of the woman, sitting in the kitchen with nothing but two large pots of parsley in front of her, munching away in the dead of night, she found surprisingly and continuously disturbing.

To ease the emotional pain of her PMS, Mimou started creating lists of the various pains, giving them funny names and thus trying to exorcise them away with a little comedy. The bloated feeling became Mr. Bojangles, just because of the alliteration. The rage and panic attacks became Mr. Hyde, or just The Demon. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was her fatigue and lack of energy, but also sleeping too much and too heavily, and a case of the zeldafitzgeralds meant mood swings. The desire to withdraw into her room and into her bed was called pulling a Camus ever since Mimou read The Stranger for school. And Marquerite Duras, well, that name was given to the heightened sexual impulses she experienced just before, or on the first day, of the cycle. She never told any of the code names to anyone, but simply began using them in her journal, becoming so accustomed to them over the years that she sometimes forgot others weren’t in on them at all, even if from some of the names it was easy enough to induce the meaning.

The only pretty knitwear Mimou managed during those leisurely two-hour knitting and crocheting sessions inside the homey handicraft rooms of the small elementary school on a small hill, surrounded by the woods and a dirt road, was a pair of midnight blue knee-length wool socks with some white patterns on the legs. Mimou hated crafts with fiery passion in elementary, even with the benevolent queen of all teachers, the endlessly patient, understanding, and nerves-of-steel Mrs. Underwood as the crafts teacher. With all these warm and lovely qualities, Mrs. Underwood was also a right-handed woman, and no power on this earth was able to make the rules and how-to’s comprehensible to poor left-handed Mimou. She was in fact so traumatized by her lack of understanding what to all others seemed to flow so simply, as if all the other girls had had the ability to crochet and knit since birth, that she refused to add crafts in her syllabus in junior high, a class commonly very popular among the students precisely because it was considered the course with the easy A.

It wasn’t until years later, when she, on her own accord and with considerable support and help from her mother, broke her silly handicap and finally learnt how to knit. It seemed to make the world of difference that when in trouble, she would call mother on the phone, hence getting the advice only in hearing and not at all by showing, and she had to figure out herself what the hell mother was babbling about when she told her to slip a stitch purlwise. While the knee-length socks of her childhood crafts class had taken the whole year to finish, Mimou eventually became a fluent knitter. Not as good as her mother, who was able to easily discuss any given matter over her needles, and watch the Bold and the Beautiful on TV simultaneously, but good enough to pride herself in her crafty and colorful socks and scarves and mittens. She knew her limits, though, and never took on anything bigger than a bread box. And the midnight blue socks, those were held in the highest esteem, and kept and conserved in Mimou’s childhood home, in her old room.

As Mimou got older, her period went through a bunch of changes. The Niagara Falls gave way to an almost non-existent dribble while she was, ill-advised, on the pill for a few years. She went through some years of never being able to predict exactly when, to winding her watches according to it.

The Demon got stronger over time, too. For a while she was able to knit the worst away, usually she wrote. Sometimes she tried lying down, per advice given by a friend. She had told Mimou about a program by one of those growingly popular life-coaches on YouTube, and about an exercise described there, how, when sensing a tempestuous feeling coming, one might try to just lie down for a while, and picture herself as the sky, where emotions were the clouds, and keep in mind that one was not the cloud, but the sky, no matter how strongly the emotion suggested otherwise. Eventually, everything passed, and what was left was you. Mimou liked the philosophy behind the exercise, but seldom succeeded in trying to tame her own monster that way. The torture was sometimes harder than others, but The Demon always came. At her bleaker moments, she felt that she, too, was Charlotte Light and Dark.

The physical pain remained gone, though, always. And as for the crocheting, that proved too much for her, even as an adult, and, after a baffling and very unsuccessful attempt or two, she happily enough accepted her fate as a mediocre craftswoman. So she would never be able to make her own washable towels, big deal. She was a Lunette girl through and through, after all.

(Cycle of the Werewolf is the title of Stephen King’s short horror novel from 1983.)