Page 13 of The Change
She locked herself in her bedroom that evening, ignoring her mother’s demands to open the door, and read the scene that told her what it all meant. Sixteen-year-old Carrie, kept innocent by her freakish mother, is convinced that she’s dying when she gets her first period. Jo reread the chapter twice, her entire body burning with shame. She knew what had happened. Brownnosing Ellen Goodwin had sold her out for a few glorious days in the spotlight.
It wasn’t until years later that Jo read the rest ofCarrie. Shewondered what would have happened if she hadn’t put the book down back in high school. She suspected things might have turned out differently for her—andverydifferently for Ellen Goodwin.
Ellen had been sitting in front of her two days earlier when Jo felt the first trickle halfway through algebra class. She instantly knew what it was. Her mother had kept her out of the health classes the other kids attended—not to leave Jo innocent of the ways of the world, but so she could explain it all to her daughter in her own flowery words.
Jo still cringed when she recalled her mother leaning forward and clutching Jo’s hands as if imparting a secret. “Soon you’ll be getting your period,” she’d announced in a hushed, honeyed tone. “It’s a very special day in every girl’s life. It’s the day you become a woman.”
Jo recoiled in horror. She had no interest whatsoever in joining any club to which her mother belonged. When she saw her mom’s lipstick-slathered smile start to flicker, she did her best to hide her feelings. It wasn’t easy. Because there was more. So much more. Over the course of an hour, the woman who had trained Jo to sit up straight, cross her legs daintily at the ankle, and comport herself like a lady informed her (in much more elegant terms) that blood would gush from her vagina once a month and would continue to do so until Jo married a man she “loved very much,” at which point he would use his penis to fill her vagina with his “seed.” Then, for nine months, she would grow into a ravenous, monstrous, “glowing” version of herself until a “gorgeous little baby” popped out of her and the gushing commenced once more. Even more terrifying, Jo’s mother made it clear that the whole process might be set into action if Jo were ever to let down her guard. “Boys who can’t help themselves” would do their best to get past her defenses, and girlswho weren’t careful ended up with babies they couldn’t feed, diseases that couldn’t be cured, and lives that were wrecked beyond repair.
At the end of the talk, Jo promptly burst into tears.
“Oh my goodness, Josephine, what’s the matter?” Her mother had read several advice books and couldn’t understand how it had gone so wrong. “These are things all of us go through.”
“No,” Jo insisted, her fists clenched in her lap. “Not me.” None of her secret escape plans had involved tending to leaking privates five days every month. And never in her worst nightmares had she imagined a life spent defending a hole she barely knew existed against wanton boys, oozing pustules, and squalling infants.
“Yes, you,” her mother informed her. “There’s no way to avoid it. It’s just part of being a woman.”
“We’ll see about that,” Jo said.
The three years that followed were filled with dread as Jo waited for her mother’s prophesy to come to pass. Though she never joined in, she eavesdropped on other girls talking, and by the beginning of ninth grade, she knew most of them had been visited by the curse, as they called it. Jo prayed the curse would just pass her by—the way her aunt Aimee had never grown molars. Instead, it waited just long enough for her guard to come down. Then it struck when she least expected it—right in the middle of algebra class—forever ruining her best pair of Forenza jeans.
She remained in her chair after the other kids filed out of the classroom—until she and Ellen Goodwin were the only two left. Jo was only vaguely aware of Ellen hovering over Ms. Abram’s desk. Her brain could no longer process the barrage of stimuli. She felt feverish and light-headed. Her entire nervous system was buzzing, overloaded by fear.
Later, Jo recalled the concerned look on Ms. Abram’s face when the teacher was suddenly standing over her chair—and the crimsonsmear left behind on the wood when the teacher and Ellen coaxed Jo out of her chair. Then the scene changed, as if in a time lapse, and she found herself crying in the principal’s office with Ms. Abram’s shawl wrapped around her waist. The men who passed by did their best to ignore her. The ladies at the front desk smiled and attempted to lift her spirits.
“It happens to all of us at one time or another,” one of the school secretaries whispered. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Then why are you whispering?” Jo hissed back. The secretary had despised her from that moment forward.
Back at home, Jo sat in the bathroom with the kit her mother had prepared for her, a white wooden basket with a pink satin bow that had been hidden under the sink behind the toilet paper packages, waiting for that very moment. Inside were six bulky sanitary napkins, a frilly bag in which to stuff them, and a little bottle of Midol. Jo dumped it all out on the floor and sobbed. She’d never felt so betrayed. And over the two weeks that everyone called her Carrie, she didn’t blame Ellen Goodwin or her mother or even God. Instead, she focused her wrath on the body she hadn’t been able to train or control.
The war that began in ninth grade lasted for thirty-three years. Throughout those decades, Jo lived under constant siege. She kept a secret calendar designed to help her anticipate her period’s monthly arrival, only to be ambushed several days in advance. She devised ingenious methods for smuggling bulky pads to the school bathroom—and disguising the lumps beneath her clothes. She crafted cunning excuses for keeping her shorts on at the beach and took to wearing sweaters around her waist. Later, she scouted for hiding places for the Tampax her mother refused to buy—and hoarded quarters to procure the tampons from public restrooms.
The hardest part, though, was keeping her private war secret. No one could know what was happening. Certainly not her father or brothers—or, God forbid, the boys at school. But even females couldn’t be welcomed as allies. Other women showed no signs of struggling. It seemed inconceivable that all of them—all the teachers and waitresses and teenagers and store clerks and cleaning ladies whose paths she crossed every day—were suffering the same way she was. There was clearly something fucked up about Jo.
She expected to claim one small victory once she left Mattauk and her mother behind for college. Tampons, at least, would no longer be contraband. Ads told Jo that a carefree life of horseback riding and snowy-white hot pants awaited her. Then Jo lost her virginity and a new front in the war opened up. The stakes only grew higher. The fear of humiliation had kept her on her toes in high school. Now there were STDs and pregnancy to avoid. She’d wake up, heart pounding, from dreams in which she was forced to confess her sins to her mother. The nightmares didn’t prevent her from having sex, but they certainly made the afterglow less delightful. She now spent the first five days of her cycle battling her period—and the last five praying for it to come.
Then she was with Art and in the working world—no longer at risk of teenage motherhood and able to choose and pay for her own birth control. Yet her body refused to cede control. Her first boss paid more attention to her ass than he did to her work. Her second boss asked if she’d sit on his face—and called her a humorless cunt when she reported him to HR. Guests at the hotels where she worked grabbed, groped, and fondled her. She watched men kiss their mistresses in the lobby, only to return the next week with their wives. On more than one occasion, while wearing a suit and button-down shirt, she was mistaken for an escort. No matter what Jo accomplished, her body—and those of the women around her—made her question what was truly valued.
That all ended when she got pregnant. The moment she began to show, the spotlight shut off and Jo disappeared. She’d dreaded pregnancy her entire life, only to find it was the respite she’d been waiting for. While her body was preoccupied and men turned their attention elsewhere, she managed a feat that her colleagues had long thought impossible.
A month before she announced her pregnancy, she was made staff manager at the hotel where she’d been working for two years. The promotion came as a surprise to Jo. Though she knew her performance had been exemplary, she’d struggled to catch senior management’s eye. Six hours after her new title was made public, a colleague informed her that it was considered as a dead-end position within the hospitality company that owned the hotel. Jo had convinced herself that was just jealous gossip when she received a phone call from a reporter at theNew York Times. Was she aware, the reporter asked, that turnover among the hotel’s female workers was three times that of its male employees? Jo said she had seen nothing to suggest that was true and referred the reporter to the chief communications officer of the organization. The company’s C-suite knew all about the problem, the reporter informed her, and the problem was hardly unique to the New York location. Staff managers seemed to make convenient scapegoats whenever stockholders or the media took notice. Where did she imagine her predecessor had gone? If Jo cared to discuss the issue in the future, the reporter said, she would gladly make herself available.
That night, Jo went through the HR files and realized it was true. Fifteen women had quit in the previous year alone. Thirteen had signed NDAs and were sent home with several months’ pay in their pockets. Two had filed suit against the hotel for failing to protect them from known sexual predators. The blunt reports of harassment and assault turned Jo’s stomach. A room-service waitress had been held hostage in a bathroom for hours. A member ofthe cleaning staff had barely escaped being raped by a guest. Jo made careful copies of all the files. She wanted it to stop, and if it didn’t, she’d use them. The previous managers valued the guests and considered employees expendable. The women Jo worked with were worth something to her.
The next day, Jo introduced a handful of new policies. Going forward, the cleaning staff would work in teams of three. No woman would ever enter a guest’s room on her own. Room service to male guests would be delivered by men. Female employees would see to the women guests. Guests who harassed waitresses in the hotel’s restaurants and bars would be flagged and served by male staff—the buffer, the better. Those who managed to do it twice would be banned.
It seemed so obvious, and too easy. Surely, Jo thought, similar policies had failed in the past. But in the six months after Jo put her plan into motion, no female staff members resigned. No hush money was paid and no new lawsuits were filed. When she first found out she was pregnant, she’d worried about being laid off following maternity leave. It happened, she’d noticed, more often than not. Instead, she was welcomed back with a promotion. The policies she’d introduced in New York had saved the corporation so much money that they were being instituted around the world. Within two years, Jo was general manager of the Manhattan hotel.
Jo’s body did not welcome this development. After a yearlong truce, it returned to battle with a vengeance. The periods that had long been unpredictable trickles of blood were now torrents. For three days in a row, Jo would pass multiple clots the size of plums, each filled with enough blood to overwhelm an ultra-size tampon and a mattress-thick pad. Her gynecologist assured her she wasn’t dying. It was a common problem—a common problem, Jo noted out loud, for which no gynecologists had bothered to find a solution. She wondered how other women managed to survive in workplaceswithout hundreds of toilets. At least once a month, Jo found herself slipping into an empty guest room with just seconds to spare before her body released a horror movie’s worth of gore. She knew the day would come when she wouldn’t make it on time, so she kept a change of clothes tucked behind some files in her bottom desk drawer. When anemia drained her will to live every month, she swallowed iron supplements and devoured chopped liver to get through the day. She learned the location of every public bathroom between work and home. She discovered it was possible—though uncomfortable—to wear two tampons at once. She looked forward to cold weather, when a winter coat would hide anything that might leak through her pants.
She thought she was a champ for managing to hold it together. Then the hot flashes began. That was when Jo finally started to crack. She was thirty-nine—far too young for menopause. When her gynecologist told her no one really knew what caused them, she almost exploded. Her blood pressure skyrocketed. She lost liters of pit sweat every day.
“I can’t live like this anymore,” she said.
“Try exercise,” she was told.
Those two flippant words from a doctor who was staring straight at her vagina when he uttered them were the only advice that ever made a real difference.
