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

sisters. She sat against the toilet, which seemed prudent. She looked like she was going to upchuck.
    “So, are you sick?”
    She took a long time to answer “No,” which left me certain the answer was yes. “I got my period,” Shannon sputtered.
    As I later learned, Mom had anticipated this day. A few months earlier she had given Shannon a well-worn booklet with a daisy on the cover, titled
Now You’re a Woman,
and had sent her into the yellow bathroom to read it behind the locked door. Once she’d finished, Shannon handed it back to Mom, who had joined her in the bathroom. Mom must’ve thought the booklet adequately addressed the essentials of womanhood; they did not further discuss what being a woman now meant, but how to conceal it. She showed Shannon how to put together a menstrual belt; gave her a can of FDS feminine deodorant spray; and instructed her to deposit spotted underwear or bedsheets directly into the washing machine, never to leave them in the bathroom hamper.
    They should’ve made a daisy-covered booklet for boys, one with just enough answers to help a brother help a scared sister. As Shannon opened up to me, I felt as if I were scrambling to assemble a jigsaw puzzle without having the cover to the box. It was clear that Shannon was bleeding, that she would keep bleeding for an entire week, and that there was no way to stop it. No wonder she looked so fearful. I, too, was frightened. I was also sworn to secrecy. Had I gone to Mom or Dad, I’d have gotten Shannon into trouble. Our mother had given her two last instructions: “Don’t tell Dad. And don’t tell Bill.”
     
    On some level I must’ve trusted that my mother knew what she was doing with Shannon, but at the time she just seemed mean. If told then what I know now, I’d have been far more rattled. From an anthropological point of view, my mom’s exacting this final vow from Shannon was simply a modern instance of an age-old custom: secluding menstruating women and girls. In practice, secrecy is seclusion through silence, a wall built around a girl at menarche, her first period, that remains standing today, to some degree, in homes throughout the world. In a broader context, however, 1971 Spokane was a pinnacle of enlightenment compared with almost anywhere, say, a hundred years prior.
    In the late nineteenth century, British social anthropologist James Frazer recorded various shocking instances of ritualized physical and social seclusion. In his book
The Golden Bough
(1890) he described, for example, the young women of the Kolosh Indian tribe in Alaska who, at menarche, were confined to an individual hut with but a tiny opening for fresh air and food. The secluded girl could drink only from the “wing-bone of a white-headed eagle,” which at first sounds like a privilege—the kind of vessel, say, reserved for a tribal chief—but wasn’t. So unclean was she rendered by her menses that the entire water supply had to be protected from her lips. She was kept in this hut for a whole year, Frazer explained, without sunlight, exercise, or a fire’s warmth, attended to solely by her mother. The length of the seclusion spoke to the depth of her community’s fears. With her first period, the most potent, a girl became a destructive influence that needed to be neutralized. As she was inseparable from the blood, both had to be separated from society. Her power was phenomenal. With a glance, she could spoil the hunt or strike men dead.
    On an island in the Bismarck Archipelago in the southwest Pacific Ocean, girls were confined for up to five years in hanging cages to shield the ground from their polluting touch, according to Frazer. Upon getting her first period, a young woman of a tribe in southern Brazil was stitched into a hammock, leaving only a button-sized airhole, as if she were a butterfly shoved back into its cocoon. Keeping her in darkness was essential; she could poison the sun with a look. Similarly, the Native peoples of both