The semester is blazing away-my last semester at Oglala Lakota College-such a mixture of sadness and the scent of freedom. Since we are making plans to return to our Homestead MN project-building a bit of straw bale summer home, planting a garden, simplifying our lives-I decided to return to a batch of stories that I wrote from a collection called “Leaving Lake Country”. I pretend that it is fiction, but it is pretty close to the bone–all about coming of age in the north woods. This piece is one of the early ones. I grew up in Northern Minnesota on the Iron Range. When I was a young teen we returned to my parents’ home town in Cass Lake, Minnesota. It was not an easy time for me. Not many would recognize the shy girl in me today, but she is still with me.
Happy Spring!
Jamie
On Becoming a Woman . . .
It is policy for swimming. That’s all. Jackie and the other sixth grade girls enter the locker room and are issued up one red cotton-knit swimsuit (one size fits all) and a limp white towel. They change near their lockers in quick hurried movements shoving clothes, shoes, and socks into cold, unfeeling metal lockers. They line up by the pool door. Their legs look white and skinny and the required bathing caps suck up all stray hairs and individual personality traits and make them all bald and desolate.
The red suits hang soggy and long in the crotch and tiny nipples poke and pucker beneath unlined and unforgiving fabric that displays the exact size and shape of each sixth grade set of breasts. Miss Hammer, the gym teacher, is in charge of the pool and gym areas. She is a lean, mannish woman with short hair and sharp eyes. She wears white shorts, white socks, white shoes, and a white jersey sweat jacket every day from fall to spring. A silver whistle dangles between her breasts. “You girls have got to work harder!” she yells each day, emphasizing the word girls in a way that makes it sound like boys teasing one another on the playground. “What are you-a girl?”
Jackie has a particular fondness for water and swims the ten laps required warm-up by Miss Hammer. And sometimes, she feels as if she should have been a fish, maybe a dolphin, skimming and slipping through the water for a lifetime or two-and then maybe, just maybe it would be alright. But it is the legs and what is between the legs and no fins that make it all very difficult to deal with, and she is certain that dolphins didn’t have to worry about blushing with shame and fear and exposure every time they go into the water. Of course, none of this ever enters her mind consciously.
Not consciously. Rather it twists around her thoughts and through her middle in tight little knots like cramps and has been doing so ever since her mother carried home that frightful thing, that white strapped cupped thing, and told her to put it on because she was becoming a woman now. Breasts. And bleeding.
Or maybe it all came from earlier who-knows-what times when Jackie worried nighttime thoughts about Catholic Gods and pink pajama bottoms and sin-or when the boys in fifth grade starting teasing her and snapping her bra straps.
And the way the health teacher shuffled the boys into one room to show them a movie and the girls into another room to show them the same movie like it was something they should all be ashamed of. The girls got happy little books called, “On Becoming a Woman” and the boys got nothing but the giggles. The book said it was some kind of celebration, but it Jackie didn’t feel like celebrating.
But it is getting out of the pool that is hard.
After class the girls shiver and cover themselves and line up waiting for Miss Hammer’s whistle to give them permission to head for the warm showers.
Jackie stays in the shower under the warm stream as long as possible until she is all alone and the giggling girls can be heard from the locker area dressing and combing their hair. The hair dryers are running. She hates the wire baskets beside the shower opening where they are required by Miss Hammer to drop suit and towel and run naked to the locker areas. And the way Miss Hammer stands there like a man watching er and fingering her whistle and smiling that makes the short distance over cold, slippery tile floors nearly impossible for her to cross. The locker area might as well be a glacier with her nude and freezing to death and unable to make it across to the fire and warmth of her clothes. Miss Hammer screams at her, “Get a move on it!” and Jackie chants to herself, “hammerhead, hammerhead, hammerhead shark.” She hates the bulges on her chest.
When her period begins she is spared the naked spectacle but is then forced to declare her development in other, more painful ways by staying fully clothed and sitting on the hard tile benches beside the pool with a bulky, chunky, cotton thing between her legs, a foreign and hated intrusion.
Later, in seventh grade, Miss Hammer makes the girls who are having periods go to a study hall on a special pass. It isn’t a choice. After the first time Jackie faces that room full of snickering boys who know exactly what is happening between her legs, she devises elaborate illness and ways to avoid that study hall. She even takes one of her sister’s tampons and stands with one foot up on the toilet seat poking and prodding but never can get the thing tamped in.
On becoming a woman.
Hadn’t she tried to bypass the whole works by pretending to be one of the boys in the neighborhood-by running, jumping, climbing, and skating faster than any of them? Well, hadn’t she?
But none of this goes through her mind in any orderly fashion because her brain is too full of how to get to the lockers without being seen, how to buy a Kotex pad for a nickel in the bathroom without being seen, how to get out of God’s line of vision without being seen, how to get past Miss Hammer’s eyes without being seen, because that is what it boiled down to-not being seen.