Towelhead (3 page)

“Nothing.”

“You're not going to wear tampons, if that's what you're thinking.”

“I don't want to wear tampons.”

“When you're married, you can buy all the tampons you want. Right now, you'll wear pads.”

A thin, older saleslady came over to see if we needed any help. “We're fine, thank you,” Daddy said.

I looked at her, and she smiled at me. “These for you?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Well,” she said, reaching for a green box, “this is the kind my daughter likes.”

I took the box from her and started reading the side panel.

“What's wrong with these?” Daddy asked, showing the lady his box.

“They're just a little thicker. Not as comfortable.”

He looked like he didn't believe her.

“Can I get these?” I asked, holding out my box.

Daddy took them from me and said, “How come they're so expensive?”

The lady put on a pair of glasses that were hanging on a chain around her neck. “Well,” she said, looking at the price sticker, “that's probably the comfort issue I was referring to earlier.”

“What a rip-off,” Daddy said.

“You getting cramps?” the lady asked me, and I nodded again. “Here,” she said, handing Daddy a box of Motrin. “Give her these.”

“We have plenty of aspirin at home,” Daddy said, putting the pills back on the shelf, but the woman grabbed them and gave them back.

“I'm telling you,” she said, “she's going to need these. Aspirin won't work.” Then she took the box of thick pads out of Daddy's arms and put that back on the shelf, too.

I could see he was mad at her, only there was nothing he could really do about it. In the car on the way home, though, he told me that from now on, I could pay for my own feminine hygiene. He said he hadn't realized how expensive this stuff was going to be, and anyway, now that I was working for the army, I could afford it. That was how he referred to my job at the Vuosos'. It still bothered him that Mr. Vuoso thought he loved Saddam. If there was anything he didn't appreciate, Daddy said, it was people making assumptions about him.

That night in bed, I fantasized again that Barry would come and save me. I figured he probably wouldn't, but still, thinking about him always made me feel better. He was someone I knew for sure liked me. Even more than he liked my mother. He liked me so much that she had to send me away, since she was jealous. This was my favorite part. The part where no matter what happened, I was better than my mother. Boys liked me better than they liked her.

 

In art class the next day, when I pulled my drawing tablet out of my backpack, a maxi-pad fell out with it. I tried to hide it, but it was too late. The three boys at my worktable had already seen it. They grabbed it and started tossing it around, while I tried to get it back. Then one of them opened the packet, pulled off the adhesive strip, and started wearing it on his forehead. Mrs. Ridgeway told him to take it off, and he did, but then he put red watercolor on it. A rumor started going around that it was real blood, and that I was such a dirtball that I carried around used sanitary napkins.

I didn't have any pads left then, so I went in the bathroom and put a bunch of toilet paper in my underwear. I cried a little, and one of the lady janitors heard me. “You okay in there?” she asked. I told her the problem, and she said for me to wait. A couple of minutes later, she came back and passed a tampon under my door. “I don't think I can wear that,” I said.

“Sure you can,” she said. “It's very small.”

Then she stood outside the stall, asking a million times whether I'd gotten it in yet. “Just relax,” she told me, and finally it slipped inside.

When I came out and she saw it was me, she started talking in Spanish, and I had to tell her that I couldn't understand. “Your parents don't speak Spanish at home?” she asked, and I said no, and she shook her head like it was the saddest thing in the world.

For the rest of the day, I thought a lot about what Daddy had said—that you had to be married to wear tampons. I guessed he meant that when you got married, you had sex, and when you had sex, it made more room for a tampon. Only there was already some room now. The lady janitor had said there would be, and she had been right. I started to wonder what other wrong things he had told me.

After school, Zack asked if I wanted to look at magazines, and I said okay. He sat with his back to me on the edge of the bed, and I sat in the wicker chair. I read all the interviews with the women very closely, hoping they'd talk about something important, like getting your period. But it was more of the same—descriptions of how they liked to have sex with their boyfriends, or how many times a week they liked to do it, or what color hair their boyfriends should have. I didn't realize I was pressing my legs together until Zack turned around and said, “Stop creaking the chair.”

The women also talked about having orgasms, which I didn't understand. I assumed it was the feeling I got when I pressed my legs together, only that didn't seem like such a big deal. As far as I could tell, it was just a nice sensation, like when Barry had shaved me. Not some kind of actual event.

“Look!” Zack said at one point, and he came over to show me a picture of a woman with light brown skin and dark brown nipples. There was a headline above the picture that said
ARABIAN QUEEN
.

“So?” I said.

“She's a towelhead, just like you.”

“Stop saying that,” I said. “It's not nice.”

He took the magazine back. “Maybe you could be in
Playboy
someday. You have big boobs.”

I shook my head, remembering the names of all those men photographers.

“My dad even thinks you're pretty,” he said, heading back to his spot on the bed.

“He does?”

Zack nodded. “He says you're going to have a lot of boyfriends, and your dad's going to lock you up.”

“He is not,” I said, feeling alarmed.

“Wait and see,” Zack warned.

That afternoon, when Mr. Vuoso came home, I felt more nervous than usual. “Hi, Jasira,” he said, and I said, “Fine, thank you.” Zack thought this was the funniest thing he'd ever heard and wouldn't stop laughing. Even Mr. Vuoso laughed, but it wasn't mean. He just said, “Well, you're getting a little ahead of me there, but good. I'm glad you're fine.” Then he went in the kitchen.

“You can go now,” Zack said.

“I know when I can go,” I told him.

At home, I checked my underwear. There were a few blood spots, so I put a pad on for safety. I didn't want to take the tampon out yet. Not until Daddy came home and I could walk around in front of him while I was wearing it.

“Stop walking everywhere,” he told me later that night.

“Sorry,” I said, and I took a seat in the breakfast nook.

“Don't you have homework?” he asked. He was standing at the kitchen counter, fixing our dinner. Tonight it was weird Middle Eastern food.

“I already did it,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “I'm listening to the radio right now.”

“I'll be quiet.”

After a moment, he said, “How's your period?”

“Fine.”

“Did your cramps go away?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Your mother used to have cramps,” he said. “It was like she was dying or something.”

“Mine weren't that bad,” I said.

“I always thought she was lying about it,” he said. “To get attention.”

I nodded. I had actually seen her like this and thought the same thing.

“I would ignore her, and she would get mad at me and say I was heartless. I'm not heartless. I just know a liar when I see one.”

I thought about my tampon then, and how he didn't really know a liar at all.

“Come and help me chop this salary,” he said, which was what he called both the vegetable and his paycheck, and I said okay.

After dinner, I went and took the tampon out. It was pretty soaked, and a lot of other blood fell into the toilet with it. I had to use extra toilet paper, and when I flushed, the water wouldn't go down. I didn't know what to do, so I yelled, “Daddy! Help!” He ran in, saw what was happening, then ran out again. By the time he came back with the plunger, pink water was overflowing onto the beige carpet.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, starting to plunge. This sent more water and bits of toilet paper onto the rug. Soon, though, the bowl began to drain. At the end, it made a little gurgle, then shot out a teeny bit of clear water. “Go get me a plastic bag,” Daddy said, and I did, and he put the dirty plunger inside it. Then he pointed to the floor and said, “What's that?”

I looked down and saw my tampon. It wasn't as bloody as it had been when I'd taken it out, but it had still clearly been used.

“Pick it up,” Daddy ordered.

I reached down and grasped its cotton body. I didn't really want to touch it with my bare hands, but Daddy was blocking the toilet paper.

“Where did you get that?” he demanded.

“At school,” I said. “Some kids—”

“What did I tell you about tampons?”

“That they're for married ladies.”

“Are you married?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

He looked at me for a second, then said, “Follow me.” In the kitchen, he opened the cupboard under the sink so I could throw the tampon away. “Now take the trash out,” he said, and I did, and when I got back to the house, the door was locked. I went around to the front, but it was the same thing. I rang the doorbell, but no one answered.

It was hard to know what to do then. I checked the car doors, but they were locked, too. I thought about going over and ringing the Vuosos' doorbell, but I worried that somehow, if they knew that my father had locked me out, they would fire me.

In the end, I decided to take a walk to the pool. I remembered that there was a pay phone just outside the locker rooms, and I used it to call my mother collect. She accepted the charges, then asked what the hell was going on down there.

“I'm locked out,” I said, and I started to cry.

“Well,” she said, “your father just called and said you ran away.”

“I didn't run away,” I told her. “He locked me out, and I went to the pay phone to call you.”

“Where's the pay phone?” she asked.

“At the pool.”

“You shouldn't be calling me,” she said. “You should be calling your father. He has no idea where you are.”

“But he locked me out!”

“Listen to me, Jasira. You and I both know your father has problems. He overreacts. That means you have to adjust your behavior to take that into account. If he locks you out, you're just going to have to wait a while until he lets you back in. Do you understand me? I mean, I just can't be getting these phone calls all the time. What's the point of you even living there if I have to fix everything?”

“I don't want to live here. I want to come home.”

“You haven't given it enough of a chance.”

“I have,” I said. “I gave it a big chance.”

“What you need to ask yourself in a situation like this,” she said, “is, Why did Daddy lock me out? Have you asked yourself that?”

“Yes,” I lied.

“Really? Have you really?”

“No,” I said.

“Because if Daddy tells you that you shouldn't be wearing tampons, and then you wear tampons, what do you think is going to happen?”

“What's wrong with wearing tampons?” I said.

“Well,” she said, “that's not really the question, is it? The question is, What's wrong with wearing tampons when Daddy explicitly told you not to? Because there's definitely something wrong with that. Just like there's something wrong with shaving when your mother tells you not to.”

I didn't say anything.

“Or asking someone else to shave you,” she said.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“I don't want to talk about it,” she said.

“All right.”

“Hang up now and call Daddy. He'll come and get you.”

I hung up, but I didn't call Daddy. Instead, I stood there in the passageway between the men's and women's locker rooms, pretending this was my house. The soda machine next to the pay phone hummed like a refrigerator. The smell of chlorine reminded me of the Comet I used to scrub my sink.

On the walk home, I fantasized that something terrible would happen to me. That my body would be found after a long search, and that my parents would feel awful about it for the rest of their lives. But nothing happened. I made it home safely. And though the front door was still locked, the back was now open.