We Were the Mulvaneys. Joyce Carol Oates

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      Love you in that cheerleader’s costume. Last Friday. You didn’t see me I guess. But I was there.

      Corinne was so amusing! Like a mom on TV. She’d tell stories on herself, to the family, or relatives, or friends, or people she hardly knew but had just met, how she’d have loved to be a housewife, a normal American housewife, crazy about her kids, in her heart she loved housewifely chores like ironing, “calming and steadying on the nerves—isn’t it?” yet in the midst of ironing she’d get distracted by a telephone call, or a dog or cat wanting attention, or one of the kids, or something going on outside, she’d drift off from the ironing board only to be rudely recalled by the terrible smell of scorch. “It’s my daughter who’s the real homemaker: Button loves to iron.”

      That wasn’t exactly true, though almost. She’d taken pride as a young girl of ten or eleven, ironing Dad’s handkerchiefs at first, and then his sports shirts, which didn’t require too much skill, and finally his white cotton shirts, which did. And her own white cotton blouses of course. Like sewing, ironing can be a meditation: a time of inwardness, thoughtfulness, prayer.

      Not that she’d tell her girlfriends this, they’d laugh at her. Tenderly, affectionately—Oh, Button! Even Trisha, who was such a good girl herself.

      He’d said there was no one in Mt. Ephraim to talk with, about serious things. Except her.

       Whether God exists? Whether God gives a damn about us, if we live or die?

      She couldn’t remember when he’d said this, asked this. If it was before leaving the party at the Krausses’, or after, at the Paxtons’. Before or after the “orange-juice” cocktails. The tart stinging delicious taste coating the inside of her mouth.

      Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, y’know?—and I’m so scared, almost I want to yell something weird, crazy—Why’d you screw me up so, God? What’s the point?

      His earnest moist heavy-lidded eyes. Some girls thought them beautiful eyes but Marianne shied from looking at them, into them, too obviously. There was his quickened breath, the sweet-liquor smell. The heat of his skin that was rather pallid, sallow. A shrill girlish giggle escaped her, didn’t sound like her but like an anonymous faceless girl somewhere in the night, between houses, in a boy’s car or staggering drunkenly between cars in high-heeled pumps and unbuttoned coat in blurred swaying rays of headlights.

       Oh Zachary what a way to speak to God!

      She shut the closet door, hard.

      

      The cat was pushing himself against her ankles in an ecstasy of yearning. He seemed to sense, or even to know. How long she’d been away, and how far. How hazardous, her return. Temporary.

      She knelt, hugging him. Such a big, husky cat! A sibling of Big Tom, yet heavier, softer. Head round as a cabbage. Long white whiskers radiated outward from his muzzle stiff as the bristles of a brush, and quivering. His purr was guttural, crackling like static electricity. As a kitten he’d slept on Marianne’s lap while she did her homework at her desk, or lay across her bed talking on the phone, or read, or, downstairs, watched TV. He’d followed her everywhere, calling her with his faint, anxious mew?—trotting behind her like a puppy.

      Marianne petted him, and scratched his ears, and stared into his eyes. Loving unjudging eyes they were. Unknowing. Those curious almost eerie black slats of pupil.

      “Muffin, I’m fine! Go back to sleep.”

      She went to use the bathroom, she’d been using the bathroom every half hour or so, her bladder pinching and burning. Yet there was the numbness like a cloud. She locked the door, used the toilet, the old stained bowl, aged ceramic-white, the plumbing at High Point Farm needed “remodernization” as Corinne called it, the bathrooms especially. But Dad had laid down some handsome vinyl tile of the simulated texture of brick, a rich red-brown, and the sink cabinet was reasonably new, muted yellow with “brass” from Sears. And on the walls, as in most of the rooms at High Point Farm, framed photos of family—on horseback, on bicycles, with dogs, cats, friends and relatives, husky Mikey-Junior clowning for the camera in his high school graduation gown twirling his cap on a forefinger, skinny Patrick, a ninth grader at the time, diving from the high board at Wolf’s Head Lake, arrested at the apogee of what looked to have been a backward somersault, maybe a double somersault. Button was there, Button smiling for the camera that loved her, how many times Button smiled for the camera that loved her, but Marianne, wincing as she drew down her jeans, her panties, and lowered her numbed body to the toilet seat, did not search her out.

      “Oh!—oh.”

      As sometimes, not frequently but sometimes, she’d whimper aloud with the strain of a painful bowel movement, a sudden flash of sensation almost too raw to be borne, now the sound forced itself from her, through her clenched teeth—“Oh God! Oh Jesus!” She seemed fearful of releasing her weight entirely; her legs quivered. The pain was sharp and swift as the blade of an upright knife thrust into her.

      You’re not hurt, you wanted it. Stop crying.

       Don’t play games with me, O.K.?

      I’m not the kind of guy you’re gonna play games with.

      At first when she tried to urinate, she couldn’t. She tried again, and finally a trickle was released, thin but scalding, smarting between her legs. She dared not glance down at herself out of fear of seeing something she would not wish to see. Already seen, in vague blurred glimpses, at the LaPortes’, in the hot rushing water of a tub.

      The pain was subsiding, numbness returning like a cloud.

      Flushing the toilet, she saw thin wormlike trails of blood.

      

      That was all it was, then!—her period.

      Of course, her period.

      That was how Mom first spoke of it, warm and maternal and determined not to be embarrassed: your period.

      It was all routine, and she was one who responded well to routine. Like most of the Mulvaneys, and the dogs, cats, horses, livestock. What you’ve done once you can do again, more than once for sure you can do again, again. No need to think about it, much.

      Still, Marianne’s hands shook, at the first sighting of menstrual blood she’d feel faint, mildly panicked, recalling her first period, the summer of her thirteenth birthday, how frightened she’d been despite Corinne’s kindness, solicitude.

      I’m fine. I’ll take care of myself. In her bureau drawer a supply of “thin maxi-absorbent sanitary pads” and snug-fitting nylon panties with elastic bands. She realized she’d been feeling cramps for hours. That tight clotted sensation in the pit of the belly she’d try to ignore until she couldn’t any longer. And a headache coming on—ringing clanging pain as if pincers were squeezing her temples.

      It was all routine. You can deal with routine. Ask to be excused from active gym class tomorrow, which was a swim class, fifth hour. After school she’d attend cheerleading drill but might not participate, depending upon the cramps, headache. Always in gym class or at cheerleading drill there was someone, sometimes there were several girls, who were excused for the session, explaining with an embarrassed shrug they were having their periods.

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