“Imagine.”
Rod Serling has his hands crossed behind his back. He is without cigarette, and looks somehow less at ease for its glaring absence as he waxes on.
“Imagine a time in the future when science has developed the means of giving everyone the face and body he dreams of.” But just before, he posed another absurdity: “What girl could refuse the opportunity to be beautiful?”
The girl’s beauty and the body the man dreams of seem to be the same.
The shift in agency is quiet, unsettling, perhaps merely syntactic — men receive their own transformations in the world of this episode, after all.
But I don’t notice any of this, not yet. I am twelve years old, bleeding on the basement couch, scowling. I am watching a New Year’s Eve marathon of The Twilight Zone, and I am bleeding because I got my first period in November.
I am visited again in the spring.
We are packed into a school bus in May. Sweat and hormones fill the humid air, and my peers hang precariously over the seats nearest them, boy and boy facing girl and girl — as Lutheran decorum dictates — tossing gentle teasing across the aisle and sneaking a chance to touch hands.
But I am oblivious, undisturbed that nobody nearby is trying to flirt with me. The boys in front of us are a year younger and mean, but luckily my friend likes both of them and is holding her own. I have no duty to perform.
And I have my own rite of passage to deal with. The cramps I am learning, with reluctance, to grow familiar with are now intensifying and alarming, filling up to my skull with searing, throbbing fire. Something is wrong.
I feel at once like I am about to throw up or pass out; either would be humiliating, terrifying. I think wildly about crawling to the front, to a teacher, but it seems a fruitless scheme. I begged some ibuprofen off the school nurse before we left, but the furnace inside me has incinerated it.
I’m not sure I could move even if I wanted to, not sure I could do anything but gape or cry if I opened my mouth. My vision, and my classmates, begin to turn a violent, grainy purple, and my eyes shut for the rest of the ride.
I come to as we pull into the parking lot. I have a headache, but it’s over.
I won’t have anything else to compare the pain to until I am sixteen, after the SUV smashes into my side of my mother’s car but my adrenaline doesn’t kick in. And I won’t have a name for the pain until I am eighteen, after it has already chosen me many months and, mysteriously, spared me many others.
“You probably have endometriosis.”
I have just described these incidents to my doctor. There have been many more — on Christmas, in a bathroom at Target, at my brother’s graduation.
She writes me a prescription for a strong painkiller and sends me to a clinic for an ultrasound. Endometriosis manifests a little differently for everyone, she explains, but there are telltale signs, telltale matrilineal histories.
My mother had it. We think my grandma did, too.
There are, of course, these flashes of debilitating pain, these incoherent, random episodes of unholy visitation. And then there were the serenely light periods that seemed like blessings, but gave way to a new disturbance, what my mother called the “old blood.” And sometimes I never saw any red.
I must be ancient, I thought, as I bled black.
Then urination became painful, UTI tests frequent and inconclusive. Pelvic exams revealed pelvic pain and boyfriends grew impatient, and I planned for and resigned myself to these suspicions, these embarrassments, annually.
And with endometriosis, my doctor explains, there are few noninvasive ways of knowing. To understand my pain, we may have to open up another.
And we may not find anything without a laparoscopy — like my mother had to have me — she warns, but as we work our way up to that, we can see how I respond to birth control. For a while, I am the poster child for The Pill.
But there are still missed classes, afternoons caught writhing in public bathrooms, waiting for it to finish with me. My daily pills and my painkillers are my weapons, but using them begins to exhaust me. Still the endometrial episodes creep in slowly, disguising themselves as garden variety cramping, lulling me into reaching for ibuprofen instead, into lowering my defenses.
I read the prescription bottle in horror when I realize my mistake.
I cannot use one if I use the other. I have cut myself with my own blade. And I wish I could disguise myself, take the blade to my hair, and leave town in the cover of the night. It may be slower, weaker, but it always finds me.
I am in sixth grade. I have begun, begrudgingly, to try to be a better girl.
Just a year ago, I could still run and tumble freely in my basketball shorts, my boys’ shoes, my brother’s shirt, and my messy hair. My best friend and I actually dug up worms at recess, and I swapped trading cards with boys.
Then one of them pointed at my chest and told me what would grow there.
And he was right. My mother tells me, too. Every year, my body changes, and my hair grows stranger, darker, and wilder; every year, a new betrayal.
I have many names now: ugly, a dirty gypsy, a tomboy.
I am not doled out any more ridicule than anyone else — we have taunts for everybody at my school. But I don’t fully understand what they mean yet.
My nightmares are still of boys with their fingers pointed at my chest, of the men they could become, of what they might want from me when they do.
So I am shouldering the absurd burden Serling described: the refusal to be beautiful. But I’m not played by a pretty blonde actress, and I hear and nod in agreement with the echoes as I study myself in the mirror one evening.
I don’t really have a choice.
In seventh grade, a boy says he will ask me out if I just comb my hair.
I did comb it, I almost snap back, but I stop. In the bathtub, I rub it into dry snarls for weeks. Finally, my mother has to cut the knots out in chunks.
But by then, the coast is clear; the boy is gone. None of them want anything from me again for many years. My mother helps me pick out a conditioner and makes a ritual of gently braiding my wet hair before bed each night.
And someday, I am twenty-three, and I do not feel ugly anymore.
I am washing my hands after a quick shower and I feel a familiar ache in my lower back, the fire catching and spreading, my belly heaving and my knees buckling. I have changed cities, clinics, and birth control methods; in the upheaval, I missed the end of my injection window by a day.
I did not think of my shot as a kind of magic, as a potion that had weakened, offering the bloodhound assailant my scent and a path to find me again. I had forgotten that its passover was secured only in careful deception.
I wake up on the floor of the bathroom; it’s over. I step right back into the shower, my hair still damp, and repeat the ritual as if nothing happened.
After, I write the telephone number for a cab company and for the nearest hospital on an index card, and tape it to the wall above the light switch.
I live alone now. My mother is not here to help me with these episodes. It was familiar, but only a fraction of the pain from before. I am very lucky.
“The Transformation is the most wonderful thing that could happen to a person.” The Transformed Twilight Zone mother beams in endorsement.
I dream that I am an invisible woman with a sword. In tarot, I begin to draw the Two of Swords often. Agnes Martin, I read, claimed to have been born a tiny figure holding a blade in her hand; the thought made her very happy.
One night, I am with friends and we are followed off the train by an older man. I mourn for the child in the old pictures my family keeps in shoe boxes, for a dream of invisibility, for my mother’s hands working in my hair.
It’s nearly July, and I am wandering through a Forever 21 after work. I flick through the small summery garments, searching for the manifestations of wishes I cannot find. It’s bad timing, the wrong season, or some other coincidence of inventory — I know this. But for the moment, I am that difficult child again, straining against the inevitability of Womanhood.
It’s already happened, of course, though I’ve often been reminded of the inadequacy others find in my own Transformation. When I am seventeen, a supervisor sneers, visibly disappointed, that I look only fourteen. Later that year, a woman in a church parking lot leans against my car to block me.
“Eighteen years old and you look like a little girl,” she says, lips curling.
The boy I am dating then shakes it off, as do I, but when I am mistaken for his little sister a few months later, he’ll never really recover from it.
“Why do you insist on hiding yourself?” I hear, from more, other voices, and the message becomes quite clear: you don’t look Woman enough, and you’re not doing enough to change that. I have barely five feet to boast, a body easily swallowed by clothing, and a head of difficult, snarling hair.
But this is not a disguise I choose to wear. It’s the fixed, physical reality of who I am. And the truth is that there is no way to hide, even if we tried to.
“You should celebrate being a woman,” we hear. But the advice is not sagely offered to us for our bodies when we embrace feminism, when we practice loving and caring for ourselves — but when our bodies and our agency over them clash against the fleeting wants and false notions of patriarchy.
“You should celebrate being a woman,” we are reminded, and urged against suppressing our period or our pain. We are shamed for the pelvic discomfort of our endometriosis, for any infertility we have or may have. We are pushed toward probe and scalpel for these, but the pain — the pain is our lot in life.
We are asked to celebrate, to submit with uniform conformation, our bodies. But to grow into a body seen as a woman’s is no one particular experience; it is the collision of all the things we are taught about ourselves, the series of impacts made as we each confront everything we are expected to be.
In general, the list of these expectations includes being white, able, straight, thin yet curved to please outwardly, desirable when desired, and to fall on the spectrums of sexuality and gender where others are comfortable.
But this list does not match up against the realities of being human.
So when we are asked, by others, to celebrate our bodies when we thought we were, for ourselves, or to stop hiding ourselves when we did not think we were, we are only guilty of not performing the kind of outward celebration that is expected of us. And when we do, we are just as quickly scorned for celebrating the wrong way, or for celebrating without permission.
This celebration is defined only by grinning and bearing the expectation of the utility of our bodies to others when asked — in birthing or in pleasing.
This is not a true celebration. This celebration is not for me, I think.
Some time has passed. I have settled in, sorted my prescriptions and habits. I no longer remember the date of my last period, and I grin.
There is peace, in my body, in my quiet apartment. I am very lucky.
I am approaching a new kind of anniversary: a year in my own apartment, a year at least with no period. I think I will buy a cake, blow out candles even.
In the coming year, my goals include completing my master’s degree, more writing, more running, calling my parents every week, finding a full time job, maybe a new apartment — and all depot shots scheduled on time.
Someday, I want a dog, a house of my own, but not to liberate my body of this medicine, not to return to my natural, unpredictable, and terrifying rhythms. My peace is my body’s liberation. I want it for as long as I can.
This list, and so much more, is my celebration. It measures a little differently against other lists, as we all do against each other. That’s the beauty of it.
And that’s the real celebration.
