*YOU’RE GONNA GET IT*
Because nothing makes sense at the moment, I decided to write about menstruation.
When I was little, the basement was a pretty decent basement. It was where the TV lived, and so it was where I lived, where I ate every meal and drank every glass of Coke, and where I jumped rope like a fiend and practiced cartwheels and cried watching “Donahue” on TV and “The Land Before Time” on VHS and World War II documentaries on PBS that little kids really shouldn’t watch.
I’m near-sighted, so I always sat on the floor about two feet from the TV screen. Yes, there were sticky, red, leather couches lining the walls but I wouldn’t sit on them. I do recall that either I and/or my baby brother regularly hit my/his/our head(s) on the hard wooden bases of those couches. But the truth is that there is/was no way to know—ever!—what brain damage may have been caused by what, whom, or when.
The basement had one window, a tiny, high Hopper window that looked out at the dirt in the front yard. We never looked out there, of course. There was something embarrassing about looking out the windows onto the avenue. Because there was always some lady walking by, trying to exercise. Either you should feel embarrassed for looking at her trying to jog or walk with little weights in her fists, or you should be embarrassed because you were just standing there looking out your window like a lazy person. In the winter, the window filled with snow.
There were floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lining the walls of the basement on one side. The shelves were full of old National Geographics, dieting books, and VHS movies that my mother collected.
Bettina Orange was one of my father's best violin students. She was a real prodigy, and that gave her some special privileges in our household, such as that she could wander around the house and go into any room she pleased before or after her private lessons with my father in the sun room. She could look at our stuff, make comments, eat whatever food she wanted in the kitchen; she could really take it easy. She deserved to take it easy because it's hard work being a prodigy. Nobody could deny her a snack or a snooze or whatnot.
I know that it was November because what Bettina Orange was about to say to me about menstruation would immediately get conflated and confused with the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Bettina asked me if I had ever done such a thing before.
“Done what?” I asked her. You’d be confused too, right?
Because I was still far too young to have gotten my period.