Lisa went on with her tale. An unusually thorough housekeeper, her mother had stumbled on the pamphlet one day as she was cleaning out the attic. ‘She figured it must have been left there by former tenants and decided it would enable her to teach me about puberty without pronouncing a word. “Here, Lisa. Time you knew.” And that was it.’ I giggled. Mommy hugged me to her, then pressed her lips to my forehead. ‘You’re fine, sweet Rena. You don’t have a fever. See you later!’—and she trotted off to receive her next client.
I loved it when she said ‘sweet Rena’. I loved hearing her call my name from her office or the kitchen, and rushing to her side. Sometimes I’d drag my feet on purpose, just for the pleasure of hearing her call me again—’Rena!’ It was marvellous. I existed. This woman was my mother, and she wanted to see me. No matter what the reason (whether to send me on an errand or to use me as a go-between in one of her quarrels with my father), when her lips formed the word ‘Rena’ it meant that instead of struggling for women in general, she wanted to see one woman in particular, a diminutive woman whom she held infinitely dear. Me. Her daughter.
I was so proud.
Didn’t happen often, Subra remarks drily.
Stupid tears drip into the tiny bathroom sink of the absurd Room 25 in Florence’s Hotel Guelfa, where Rena is feverishly rinsing bloodstains out of her nightgown. Good, good, the biggest one is gone.
Washing out menstrual blood is one of the arts of womanhood. You have to do it as swiftly as possible, preferably before the blood has had time to dry, and using lukewarm water, neither too hot nor too cold. Memories of standing at sinks early in the morning or late at night, over the course of three decades, and scrubbing away at sheets, the corners of sheets, bedspreads, sleeping bags, underwear, skirts, tights, trousers and dresses, in hotel rooms, apartments, lofts, campground bathrooms, hovels, trailers…And Samuel-the-bearded-cantor’s indignation when, after our first clumsy attempt at love-making, he spotted a drop of blood on the sheet, then another on his shrivelled penis. I saw him recoil. He leaped out of bed in horror. ‘Rena!’ ‘What’s the matter?’ ‘You…’ ‘No, no, I wasn’t a virgin, don’t worry.’ ‘You’ve got…you’ve got your…’ ‘Yes, as you can see. It just started this morning.’ ‘You mean…you knew you were impure? You wilfully caused me to transgress…one of the most sacred laws of my religion?’ The question went through a weird crescendo, attaining scream level by the time he reached religion. I still remember Samuel’s wide-open mouth, his teeth and tongue visible in the middle of his beard, screaming the word religion at me.
Now I was genuinely pissed off. ‘What do you expect?’ I said with a shrug. ‘Serves you right for fooling around with a…um…what’s the female of goy, again? A goya? No, sorry — a shikse.’ Though Samuel had deemed me shtuppable because of my Jewish name, I knew he was really attracted by my goyity. My mother was a goy so I was a goy; without admitting it even to himself, he’d wanted to go to bed with a goy. It always annoys me when love-making diminishes me instead of enhancing me — when it reduces me to one dwarfy little aspect of myself instead of multiplying me and turning me into a giant…‘Listen, man, you wanna shtup a shikse, you’ve got to accept the quirks that go along with it. Sorry, but shikses don’t feel impure when they menstruate. Now, whatever shall you do to purify yourself?’ Samuel, who had been dressing hastily as I spoke, stopped and stared at me in wide-eyed disgust. ‘Dip your kosher pickle in virgin donkey milk? Beg papa Abraham for forgiveness?’ The cantor high-tailed it out of there.
That incident took place in my little student’s studio on Maison-neuve Street. A few months later I found myself between the same pair of sheets with my French professor, a Catholic who was keen on shtupping me because I was Jewish. In the heat of the action, even as he groaned and panted, he repeated over and over, ‘You’re really Jewish, aren’t you? How do you like my goy cock, huh? How do you like it? Jesus-Mary-Joseph I can’t believe it, I’m fuckin’ a fuckin’ Jewess, oh, Momma, if you could see me now, oh, if you could only see me, Momma, hey you guys I’m fuckin’ a fuckin’ Jewess, I’m gonna come I’m gonna come I’m gonna come, aaahh good Christ it’s coming, it’s, aaah. Aaaaah. AAAHHH — AH!’ After which, from the bathroom where he was washing his crotch with my facecloth, he made some terrible puns about foreskins and foreplay, and two weeks later I discovered I was pregnant.
Fortunately Mom was able to smuggle my Canon into the hospital. The photos I took there — clandestinely, using an 87C filter and infrared film — turned out to be my first published reportage. They created quite a stir. Curettage with no anaesthesia. Blanched faces of very young girls, grimaces of pain and fear, blood-drenched sheets, sadistic nurses. I quoted one of the latter in the text I wrote to accompany the photos: ‘She had her fun, let her scream a bit. Maybe she’ll think twice before she sins again.’
That’s all well and good, Subra says, but shouldn’t we be looking for tampons?
After slipping six carefully folded Kleenexes into her panties, Rena drags on her tightest pair of black jeans to make sure it won’t even occur to the blood to go slithering down her thighs.
‘So much blood!’ as Lady Macbeth put it. ‘So much blood!’ whispered Alioune, my proud Peulh husband, who was annoyed at all the noise I had made giving birth to our son. I had whined, laughed, moaned, caterwauled, and chatted my way through the afternoon and evening, whereas a Peulh woman — to prove herself worthy of her future role as mother, enduring all sorts of suffering in stoical silence — mustn’t let so much as a sigh escape her during delivery. When, after sixteen hours of labour, Thierno’s head finally burst from between my thighs along with a flood of blood, plunging me into an incomparable state of ecstasy, the plenitude of absolute creation, I saw that Alioune was as white as a sheet. ‘So much blood!’ he said queasily. ‘Stay with me, my love,’ I told him. ‘Don’t look down there, stay up here next to my head. It’s all over, Alioune, stay here, don’t look at the blood…Alioune! Our son has arrived!’
But he had passed out.
Even as a child, Arbus was fascinated by menstruation, pregnancy and delivery. As a grown woman, she took delight in every facet of her femininity, refusing to shave her legs and underarms or even use deodorants. If she had her period while on an assignment for Life or Vogue, she’d boast about it to the whole crew. She insisted on having a home birth for her second child, and later described it as the most grotesque and sublime experience of her life. Few women artists — none, in fact, with the possible exception of Plath and Tsvetaeva — ever embraced maternity as wholeheartedly as she.
A pity, Subra murmurs. A pity that, one sweltering day in July 1971, she decided to add several pints of her own blood to the bathwater in her Manhattan apartment. Yeah, a real pity she wound up killing herself. Hmm, so did Plath, come to think of it. Molto peccato. Hmm, so did Tsvetaeva. What a coincidence.
‘Vorrei una scatoletta di Tampax, per favore…Grazie.’
As she goes back up the hotel staircase, she passes Ingrid and Simon coming down.
‘You guys packed?’
‘Just about, just about. Have you had breakfast already?’
‘No, I’ll grab an espresso on the way to the car rental — I should be there now.’
‘We’ll be all set when you get back.’
Five minutes later, the absorbent cotton duly inserted into her innermost being, she emerges into the blinding light of the Florentine morning.