Free Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood by Bill Hayes Page A

roommates, close in age, and both attend Sacajawea junior high, they are opposites. Ellen is most Dad-like in being the bossiest child, an excellent student, and a voracious reader. She also has terrible eyesight, her one apparent vulnerability. When she takes off her thick lenses to wash her face, she can hardly see well enough to find a towel. No-nonsense in every way, she reminds me of Velma, my favorite character from
Scooby-Doo.
Maggie, like Mom, is artistic. Her wrists jangle with jewel-colored bracelets she’s made herself from debristled, melted-down toothbrushes. Her fingernails might as well be painted with nail polish—they’re stained scarlet with Rit fabric dye from her latest project, a batik bedspread. Maggie sidesteps the parental ban on wearing makeup by dabbing Vaseline on her lashes, then crimping them with a torturous-looking eyelash curler. She hides her Bonne Bell lip gloss in her purse, to be applied at school.
    At this point there’s not much room for Shannon, a fourth-grader at Comstock. With great hesitance, as if it’s a tough decision, she selects from her drawer the brush she always uses and starts untangling her long, dark-chocolate-colored hair. Ellen, finished with rubber-banding her braces, steps behind Shannon and plucks the brush from her hand. “One braid or two?” she asks.
    “One,” Shannon says. “I don’t wanna look like Pippi Longstocking again.”
    In toddles Julia, who is just five and, like me, drawn more to the crowd than by any pressing bathroom business. As I rinse and spit, Julia’s eyes follow me, expectant. With deliberate showiness, I take up a clean plastic cup, twirl in some Crest, then blast it under the faucet so that the cup bubbles over with fluoridated froth. Julia beams as I hand her the toothpaste float, and she promptly dips her nose in it. She soon has the bathroom to herself, however, as the older girls fly from the house to the honks of carpools, and Shannon and I scurry down the block to Comstock.
    As much as I loved being around my sisters, as familiar as they were to me, I also found them mysterious at times, particularly the eldest three. Some mornings, for example, they mentioned things in the yellow bathroom I did not understand, lapsing into coded girltalk before shooing me from the room, locking the door behind me. From my bedroom, ear to the adjoining wall, I could never quite make out their muffled chatter. Of course the Hayes girls did in fact share a private language, and one afternoon, when I was ten, the secret decoder ring was placed in my hand.
    Panicky and insistent, Shannon pulled me into the bathroom. She looked as if she’d committed some horrible sin and was expecting to hear at any moment the booming voice of our father. Normally, when either of us got into big trouble, we’d be each other’s first confessor and consoler, so I asked, “Did you do something wrong?”
    “Cramps,” she said. “I started having cramps.”

    The Hayes siblings in 1967, left to right: Julia in Mom’s lap, me, Shannon, Maggie, Ellen with the white gloves, and Colleen
    Had Shannon’s and my entries into puberty coincided, I might have been quicker on the uptake. But I was a fourth-grader who’d yet to sprout a single body hair, have my sex talk with Dad, or see the infamous health education film reserved for fifth-graders.
    Cramps,
though, was not an unfamiliar word. It was how Ellen excused herself early from the dinner table, without even asking permission from Dad. It was Maggie’s password to freedom from attending church, the excuse that was never denied. I, too, had had cramps, with a bellyache or the stomach flu, but boy-cramps were far less contagious than girl-cramps. No sooner did one sister begin to feel better than another was murmuring “Cramps” and disappearing behind the yellow bathroom door.
    As Shannon pulled me down next to her on that cool tiled floor, she appeared far more upset than I’d ever seen any of my other