Early 1990s, Auckland, New Zealand

By Amy Friedman

I’m in New Zealand with my partner — sheep farmer, historian, father — and his daughter, Gillian, is with us. Gillian is 12 and shy, a nice kid with freckles and a smile for everyone, and she is my first daughter. But I feel too young to have a 12-year-old daughter, and I know she doesn’t want another mother, so we agree, silently, easily, to be just friends. We’ve shared a house in New Zealand for three months, we know each other better still, and we get along.

Her father is staying on in Wellington for a while longer, but she and I must return home to Canada. We both start school in a week, so at Wellington’s airport, we kiss her father goodbye and head off to the airport in Auckland. It’s there we’ll catch our trans-Pacific flight.

We check our bags all the way through to Toronto, and we exit the plane, prepared for a two-hour layover before the flight to Sydney. It’s when I stand that I realize that in the busy-ness of packing and departing, I’ve forgotten Tampax, and now my underwear and jeans are bloodied. Damn. We have a 36-plus hours of travel ahead of us — Sydney, Tahiti, Honolulu. And these clothes we’re wearing are the clothes we have. Period. Pun intended.

I grab Gillian’s hand, race to the ladies room, and there on the cold tile I begin to strip off my clothes.

Gillian gasps. “What’re you doing?” She’s red-faced. She looks left, right, toward the door in horror. “You can’t do that in here.”

I’m in a hurry, so I toss my jeans and underpants into the sink and begin to scrub. “It’s OK,” is all I manage. I can’t worry right now about a young girl’s mortification. I have work to do.

“It’s not OK,” she says. Like a sniper, she eyes the door.

“Gill,” I say, a little more gently now, “this is a ladies room. What else can I do?”

I’m working away at the stains. I’m calm. I’ll wash out my underpants, dry them under the hair dryer. Presto. Everything will be fine. I’ll be clean and fit for flight. I’m 32, and I’m over the shame and embarrassment my period once aroused. But my 12-year-old sidekick who is horrified by her wacky step mom. She can’t breathe.

When Gillian does manage one breath, she gasps, “But you’re naked.” And she begins to cry.

That’s when the door swings open. Gillian ducks her head and squeezes her eyes tight as a tall, slender woman with cocoa-colored skin and bright red lipstick strides into the room. She sees me at the sink and bursts out laughing. “Oh, isn’t it so….”

“What?” Gillian asks, staring hard. “So what?”

“Isn’t it so?” the woman repeats, laughing harder. Her command of English is limited, but she is pointing at the sink, smiling, laughing. At last she says, “I know, I know,” and another woman enters, this one portly and wearing hiking tweeds, and she too bursts out laughing. “Oh,” she gasps.

“What?” Gillian is frantic now.

The portly woman continues. “I remember once I was at a press conference on nuclear reactors — this was Helsinki — and I was the keynote speaker. Two thousand people, and my turn, and in one bloody minute my white suit was … well …”

Laughter overtakes her, and the woman whose English isn’t good nods and nods, and now three more women walk in — women of every shape and age and nationality — and they’re standing in a circle around the sink where I’m scrubbing. They’re telling tales of their own “inconvenient moments,” as one woman calls them — a blind date, a school presentation, a beach day with strangers, a cross country train trek in the middle of the night.

Gillian has been stunned into silence, but after the third or fourth story she begins to breathe again.

“Yes, yes,” says a small-boned Chinese woman who is wearing the highest high heels I have ever seen. “This happen to me in Berlin once when the airline lose my luggage.”

A statuesque blonde from Switzerland, says, raising a pretend toast, “To all of us!”

An elderly woman wearing Chanel tells the story of her work in the mountains of Tibet, of being the only woman there when her period started, and on and on they go, one story after another about all the places they began to menstruate, about mortification, inconvenience, cramps, frustration, tears, temper tantrums, relief, despair.

A bevy of women from around the world — from Australia and America, from China and Japan, from Turkey, France, Germany, England, Bolivia, Guatemala, Russia, Ecuador — join our circle. After a while nobody wants to leave this ladies room, and the sink full of pink water is our campfire.

A woman offers me a bar of raspberry-colored soap studded with tiny flecks of something that looks like chocolate. “Cleans any stain,” she says. Another yanks her extra maximum strength hairdryer from a many-pocketed carry-on and passes it to me.

I’m scrubbing and smiling because I know that this is the best gift I’ll ever give to Gillian. After all, I do remember being 12, and Mrs. Cheek’s English class.

I loved Mrs. Cheek, who was sweet and smart and homely. She taught me to love poetry.

But one day the bell rang, ending class, and as I stood, Laura Rocker tore down the aisle toward me, and like a football tackle thrust her body against mine and hissed, “There’s blood….” My face drained of all blood as I turned to look at the back of my pink skirt (yes, pink). Drenched.

“It’s OK, dear,” Mrs. Cheek said. “Laura, go to Amy’s locker for her raincoat.” I think we all were grateful it had rained that morning, and off Laura ran. Mrs. Cheek smiled and said, “Just sit. When Laura comes back, we’ll send you home.” And I sat, feeling flooded — with blood and shame — but grateful to these saviors.

But just then Mrs. Cheek’s eighth period study hall students began to drift into the room. Taking their seats one by one, they flipped open books and began to chatter. Through the door danced Jimmy Tucker, the boy I secretly, hopelessly loved. Back then I was certain he was the only boy I’d ever love, but I never talked to him; he was too handsome, too cool. And suddenly he was walking toward me, his black hair shimmering under the fluorescent lights, his smile gleaming, aimed right at me.

The muscle behind my eye began to twitch. Jimmy Tucker was going to talk to me. I swallowed, hard as he said approached and said, “Hi.”

“Hi,” I answered softly, flooded now with more than shame and blood.

Then he said, “Um, sorry but you’re in my seat.”

For one moment time truly did stop. Then Mrs. Cheek swept to my side.

“Jimmy,” she said, “could you go to the office for me to pick up….”

I don’t remember what task she invented to keep him busy, but when he balked, I do remember usually timid Mrs. Cheek barked at him, “Now.” He bolted, and after that I loved Mrs. Cheek more than I had ever loved Jimmy Tucker.

And that’s what I remembered in the ladies room in Auckland Airport, the way love and understanding come in these waves, at strange times, in odd places. And as we sat on our plane flying to Canada, Gillian turned to me and said, “I loved those women.”

Amy Friedman’s syndicated newspaper feature, Tell Me a Story, runs in hundreds of newspapers around the world. She has also published two memoirs and other stories and teaches writing at UCLA Extension.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Thursday, August 9th, 2007 | Email This Post

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