To read previous vignettes from this fictional series, visit Bunny’s Vignettes.
Bunny, Crab, Woman – 1972
I had a stomach ache and didn’t feel like walking home with the new girl. But we were going the same direction, and it was starting to rain – a cold November sleet – and she didn’t have an umbrella. Darcy seemed friendly enough and under our shared umbrella, she smelled of peppermint chewing gum.
The problem with new kids is that they ask a lot of questions. ‘If your real name’s Annette, why do you call yourself Bunny?’
I stared at her soft freckled face. ‘Can’t you tell?’
She half smiled. ‘Suppose. It’s just…’ She hesitated, not wanting to hurt me.
I finished the sentence for her in the dry tone I had cultivated when talking about my looks. ‘It’s my teeth. I know.’
‘And your pigtails. They’re kind of like rabbit ears.’
I hadn’t thought of that before. I only wore pigtails to keep my stringy hairs out of my eyes when I played baseball.
‘Bunnies are cute. So, it’s not a bad name.’ She stopped walking for that moment. We were nearly at her home, one of the three-storeys around the corner from my family’s building. ‘But it’s just like you’re telling people it’s okay to make fun of you.’
‘They’re going to make fun of me anyhow. I figure, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,’ I said boldly. These were lines I stole from a sit-com.
Darcy laughed softly and said, ‘Okay, Bunny, see you tomorrow.’ Before I could say, ‘See you later, alligator,’ she was running and splashing in puddles towards her apartment. This was the start of a friendship that lasted for some five years until her parents divorced and the family moved away.
My stomach was all knotted up when I arrived home. I edged out of wet penny loafers, hung up my peacoat and went straight to my bedroom. I hadn’t noticed my mother at the dining table, quietly looking up some figures in an Ephemera as she worked on a client’s astrology chart.
But she noticed me, ‘Hello.’
‘Oh, hello, sorry,’ I spoke across rooms and flopped down on the bed.
‘It sounds like the crab is a bit crabby,’ Mom said standing in the doorway. Whenever she didn’t like my behaviour, she brought up the fact that my star sign was Cancer, the crab.
‘I’ve got a stomach ache, that’s all.’
Mom stepped over to me and touched my forehead with the back of her hand. ‘No fever. Get some rest.’
I just nodded and after she left, I went to the bathroom. It was there and then – at the age of ten – that it started. I didn’t know why or what. I just knew I was ill – the Cancer with cancer! My heart racing, I pulled up my trousers and went into the dining room, where my mother had returned to her astrology work, accompanied by a glazed donut.
‘Mom,’ I managed to push out a single syllable.
She placed her finger on the page of an opened book and looked to me.
‘There’s blood in my panties.’ My voice crackled with fear.
I was ready for her to clutch me in her arms, tell me it was going to be okay and then call for an ambulance. Instead, she appeared annoyed – or disappointed – I couldn’t tell. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘There’s a box of pads under the bathroom sink. Instructions are on the box.’
I knew where babies came from and how they got there, but no one told me about periods. I was to learn about them first from reading a Kotex box, hidden behind toilet paper and bathroom cleaner. My second source of information was school. In a class of girls – the boys had been segregated into another room for the Family Life Hour – I learned the biological nuts and bolts of menstruation and was given a pamphlet with a calendar in it. But that was two weeks after I bloodied the first of many pairs of underwear.
After class, on our way home, Darcy told me that her older sister used tampons. With that, I had to confess that I had started too – but didn’t dare admit my ignorance about tampons.
Darcy’s face went all pale. ‘It doesn’t hurt, does it?’
‘Just stomach aches.’
‘You mean cramps.’
I had more to learn. That evening, I went to Franny, who was in our bedroom studying for a history test while listening to James Taylor.
‘What? I only started three months ago, and I’m two years and two months older than you!’
I didn’t need to be reminded that I was the family freak. The only brunette in a wheatfield of blonds – and now this.
She not only knew all about periods, but she also gave me a handful of tampons from a box hidden in her schoolbag. ‘Don’t tell Mom. She thinks they’re dangerous.’
‘Thanks.’ I wanted to give her sisterly a hug like I had seen on The Waltons and The Brady Bunch. But my family didn’t do that.
‘Welcome to the blood club,’ she said before sitting back on the bed, from where she gazed at me, emitting a slight chuckle.
‘What? What’s funny?’
‘You, Bunny. I was just getting used to the idea of you being a girl – I mean, and not a boy or a rabbit – and now you’re a woman.’
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