At fourteen, I was the last in my small group of friends to get it. The year before I’d been anxious about it, checking in my underwear several times a day, each time hopeful, but after months of disappointment I’d given up and had decided that maybe it would be just fine if it never happened at all. And now, here it was.
There was a bidet next to the toilet. I’d never used one, but I knew what it was, and it wasn’t complicated. After I flushed the toilet I scooted over to the bidet and turned the handles until lukewarm water jetted up, rinsing away the traces of blood. At the sink I rinsed out my underwear and sleep shorts, squeezing the fabric until the water turned from red to pink to clear. I hung the wet things in the shower and wondered what to do next.
Should I wake my mother? It seemed like the kind of thing a daughter would do. But first I needed to find something, like a pad. Mom’s toiletries bag sat on the counter; I unzipped it and found a little pouch that held her tampons. I sat back on the toilet, fully awake now, to figure out what the hell to do with it. It took three tries to get one inside; the first one I didn’t have lined up right, and when I pushed on the applicator the tampon rocketed straight between my legs and into the toilet bowl.
The second one went in kind of sideways and not far enough. I pulled on the string to get it out and wrapped it in toilet paper before throwing it in the trash. The third one went in right, it seemed, but it sort of hurt. I told myself that was probably normal, since I’d never put anything inside my vagina before. And I wondered if I would be able to tell if I had torn my hymen with a tampon, since I was bleeding anyway. And then I wondered if that meant that I wasn’t a virgin anymore, and if when I had sex someday if the guy would think I was a slut if I didn’t bleed the first time.
I wish I could have used a pad, but Mom didn’t have any in her toiletries bag and anyway it was too late now. There was a tampon in my vagina and I’d finally gotten my period and it was the middle of the night in Rome.
I went back into the bedroom. I fumbled through my suitcase for another pair of pajamas. Mom was still asleep. I almost woke her up to tell her, but at the last minute I didn’t. Instead I slipped as quietly as I could back into bed, placed my glasses on the nightstand, and rolled onto my side facing away from her, pulling the covers up to my chin. Was this it, then? Was I a woman now?
Once there was a girl.
No, wait. Once there was a woman.
No. Once there was a female human, older than a girl but younger than a woman.
One day, the female human noticed something on the inside of her left arm. Halfway up, between her armpit and her elbow. It looked like a wound, but it did not hurt. She poked at it and found that her finger could slip painlessly inside.
Concerned, she showed the thing to her mother.
Her mother nodded. “I’ll take you to the doctor,” she said.
And so, they went. The doctor pursed his lips and shook his head. Then he took a needle and thread and sewed it closed and sent them home.
But the next day, it was as if he had never touched it. The stitches had disappeared, and it was just as it had been the day before. Also there was another, exactly like the first, on the back of her right knee. Since going to the doctor had done no good, the girl pulled on long pants and a long-sleeved shirt and went about her day, resolving to ignore the whole problem.
But the next day, and in the days that followed, more and more of the wounds-not-wounds appeared all over her body: on her stomach, in her armpits, across her back. And when the girl began her monthly cycle, blood oozed from all of them, and then she knew what they were.
Still, she hid them as best she could until a day when one appeared on her cheek, and the girl could hide them no longer. People looked at her strangely and talked about her out the sides of their mouths. Older people—men and women both—shook their heads disapprovingly. Male humans, too old to be boys but too young to be men, touched and poked at them, hard sometimes, without asking first if she minded.
The openings became the landscape of her, the definition of her, and they began to overlap and spread, crisscrossing her flesh in every direction, and the girl knew that the day was coming when they would overtake her, swallow her, and she herself would disappear.
We walked from our hotel to the Cornaro Chapel. The streets early in the day weren’t crazy crowded like they’d been when we’d arrived at the hotel the day before; maybe there weren’t a lot of morning people in Italy. Up and down the streets, vendors opened their doors and rolled up the metal grates that had been locked down during the night.
We were so far from Irvine, but the air felt exactly the same. Not humid, but you could tell the day was going to get warm by lunchtime.
Mom didn’t need to look at a map or ask her phone for directions; she knew exactly where she was going, navigating the streets like a native Italian. She nodded her head at people as she walked, answering the occasional “Buongiorno” with a “Buongiorno” of her own, her voice easy and sure.
The Santa Maria della Vittoria looked like what it was—a big old church. Slate-gray rock, worn-down steps, big green wooden doors. Impressive, but by the time we reached it I was completely overwhelmed by all the architecture—all the old stuff, everywhere, that no one else even seemed to notice. There was a woman—a beggar—with a black scarf over her head, leaning on the wall of the church just to the right of the door. In front of her was a New York Giants baseball cap, several Euros and some coins inside it.
Before we went inside, Mom gave me a scarf that she pulled from her bag and told me to wrap it around myself like a skirt, over my shorts. I was preoccupied with trying to tie it at my waist as we walked through the doors, but once we were inside, I was frozen by the place in which I found myself.
Just inside the doors, I was surrounded by a degree of opulence that I had never, ever seen. Nothing in my life had prepared me for this. Every inch of the interior walls was beautiful: mottled marble pillars; gilded golden archways; ornately carved figures; a gruesomely beautiful fresco on the ceiling, filled with angels seated on clouds juxtaposed with tortured, naked people being attacked by bizarre snake creatures and surrounded by an immense gilded frame. Everywhere I looked there was beauty; spooky, awful, glorious beauty.