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

was temporarily moved to her family’s menstrual hut, a comfortable space where she was cared for by her mother, aunts, and grandmothers. This was hardly the cramped cage Frazer envisioned. The girl was welcomed into womanhood through intimate education on sexuality, health, tribal taboos, and social responsibilities. Though this tradition died out by the late nineteenth century, similar and even more progressive customs are observed today among Native Americans such as the Shoshoni of Nevada. Once a month, women retreat to separate quarters, leaving behind the men to take care of the kids, cooking, laundry, cleaning, and other chores. The men gain appreciation for the women, who in turn enjoy a week’s respite, an arrangement, as social anthropologists note, that helps foster cooperation and healthy relationships within the tribe.
    Unique rites also take place within the confines of family, passed on generation to generation. My friend Maurice, who grew up in a small Brooklyn apartment in the 1930s, remembers with a touch of awe the privileges his older sister enjoyed whenever she had her cycle. In this close-knit Jewish household she ordinarily shared a bedroom with Maurice and their brother Jack; on many nights all three even snuggled in one bed. But the room was hers alone when Natalie, nine years older than Maurice, got her period. She secluded herself behind a locked door while he and Jack got booted to the couch. Even more luxurious than being given her own bedroom, Natalie was allowed for the week to smoke cigarettes, an indulgence denied the boys. Maurice still recalls the scent of her Chesterfields wafting through the keyhole, her room, he imagined, filled with pillowy clouds.
    This wistful scene plays like a sweet spin on a grim script from Leviticus 15: When a woman has her period, the Old Testament prescribes, “she shall be in her impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean. Everything upon which she lies during her impurity will be unclean.” This idea found its way into our five-bedroom Spokane home through multiple routes. One started at the supermarket. On trips to Rosauer’s grocery, Shannon, like all my sisters, became well acquainted with The Aisle, an isthmus of pastel-colored cartons, a place boys didn’t go. Mom would usually send me off to get some cereal or to spin the comic-book rack while she and Shannon entered that female zone. There, the packaging was pale and the wording vague, as if the products were specifically designed
not
to be noticed.
    Meeting up again at checkout, me hugging a king-sized box of Frosted Flakes, I’d see in our cart the familiar lilac Kotex box and other items of “feminine protection,” a word pairing of indeterminate promise. “Protection” from what? (Not prying eyes, I admit, although my unwrapping one of the mummified wads in the bathroom trash certainly discouraged a second airing.) Were I pressed into listing items of masculine protection, I’d have said a football helmet, catcher’s mitt, sports cup—gear to shield guys from outside injury. But girls had to be protected from themselves, from their own bodies.
    This notion may have also been brought home from church with an oft-heard passage from Genesis on the consequences of Original Sin. God, punishing Eve for tempting Adam with the apple, tells her that He will “greatly multiply thy pain.” Though this is a reference to the pain of childbirth, biblical scholars contend that the meaning was deliberately misconstrued by early church fathers to include menstruation. Monthly pain was part of the punishment all women had to bear for Eve’s sin, a notion popularized in a common euphemism. Hence the so-called curse of Eve became simply “the curse.”
     
    Now, at age forty-three, whenever I hear that expression “the curse” I think of Shannon, who was bedeviled by painful and heavy menstrual cycles throughout her teens and, in more recent years, by a series of gynecological