The movie continued and Ruth watched the tadpole find the egg, which gobbled it up. A big-eyed frog began to grow. At the end of the movie, a nurse with a starched white cap handed a googly baby to a beautiful woman in a pink satin jacket, as her manly husband declared, "It's a miracle, the miracle of life."
When the lights came on, Wendy raised her hand and asked the teacher how the miracle got started in the first place, and the girls who knew the answer snorted and giggled. Ruth laughed as well. The teacher gave them a scolding look and said, "You have to get married first."
Ruth knew that wasn't entirely true. She had seen a Rock Hudson and Doris Day movie. All it took was the right chemistry, which included love, and sometimes the wrong chemistry, which included booze and falling asleep. Ruth was not quite sure how everything occurred, but she was pretty certain those were the main things that activated a scientific change: it was similar to how Alka-Seltzer turned plain water into bubbly. Plop, plop. Fizz, fizz. That wrong chemistry was why some women had babies born out of wedlock, babies that were illegitimate, one of the b-words.
Before the class ended, the teacher passed out white elastic belts with clips, and boxes containing thick white pads. She explained that the girls were due to have their first periods soon, and they should not be surprised or frightened if they saw a red stain on their panties. The stain was a sign that they had become women, and it was also an assurance that they were "good girls." A lot of the girls tittered. Ruth thought the teacher was saying her period was due in the same way as homework, meaning it was due tomorrow, the day after, or next week.
While she and Ruth walked home from school, Wendy explained what the teacher had left out. Wendy knew things, because she hung out with her brother's pals and their girlfriends, the hard girls who wore makeup and stockings with nail polish dabbed over the runs. Wendy had a big blond bubble hairdo that she teased and sprayed during recess, while chewing gum she saved between classes in a wad of tinfoil. She was the first girl to wear white go-go boots, and before and after school she rolled up her skirt so that it was two inches above her knees. She had been in detention three times, once for coming to school late and twice for saying the other b-words, "bitch" and "boner," to the gym teacher. On the way home, she bragged to Ruth that she had let a boy kiss her during a basement make-out party. "He had just eaten a neopolitan ice cream sandwich and his breath tasted like barf, so I told him to kiss my neck but not to go below. Below the neck and you're a goner." She peeled open her collar and Ruth gasped, seeing what looked like a huge bruise.
"What's that?"
"A hickey, you dummy. Course they didn't show that in that crummy movie. Hickeys, hard-ons, home runs, it. Speaking of it, there was an older girl at this party puking her guts out in the bathroom. A tenth-grader. She thought she was preggers from this boy who's in juvenile hall."
"Does she love him?"
"She called him a creep."
"Then she doesn't have to worry," Ruth said knowingly.
"What are you talking about?"
"It's the chemistry that gets you pregnant. Love is one of the ingredients," Ruth declared as scientifically as possible.
Wendy stopped walking. Her mouth hung open. Then she whispered: "Don't you know anything?" And she explained what Ruth's mother, the lady in the movie, and the teacher had not talked about: that the ingredient came from a boy's penis. And to ensure everything was now perfectly clear to Ruth, Wendy spelled it out: "The boy pees inside the girl."
"That's not true!" Ruth hated Wendy for telling her this, for laughing hysterically. She was relieved when they reached the block where she and Wendy went in opposite directions.
The last two blocks home, the truth of Wendy's words bounced in Ruth's head like pinballs. It made terrible sense, the part about the pee. That was why boys and girls had separate bathrooms. That's why boys were supposed to lift the seat, but they didn't, just to be bad. And that was why her mother always told her never to sit on the toilet seat in someone else's bathroom. What her mother had said about germs was really a warning about sperms. Why couldn't her mother learn to speak English right?
And then panic grabbed her. For now she remembered that three nights before she had sat on pee from the man she loved.
Ruth checked her underwear a dozen times a day. By the fourth day after the movie, her period had not come. Now look what's happened, she cried to herself. She walked around the bungalow, staring blankly. She had ruined herself and there was no changing this. Love, pee, booze, she counted the ingredients on her fingers over and over. She remembered how brave she had felt, falling asleep without wiping off the pee.
"Why you act so crazy?" her mother often asked. Of course, she could not tell her mother she was pregnant. Experience had taught her that her mother worried too much even when she had no reason to worry. If there was something really wrong, her mother would scream and pound her chest like a gorilla. She would do this in front of Lance and Dottie. She would dig out her eyes and yell for the ghosts to come take her away. And then she would really kill herself. This time for sure. She would make Ruth watch, to punish her even more.
Now whenever Ruth saw Lance, she breathed so hard and fast her lungs seized up and she nearly fainted from lack of air. She had a constant stomachache. Sometimes her stomach went into spasm and she stood over the toilet heaving, but nothing came out. When she ate, she imagined the food falling into the baby frog's mouth, and then her stomach felt like a gunky swamp and she had to run to the bathroom and make herself retch, hoping the frog would leap into the toilet and her troubles could be flushed away.
I want to die, she moaned to herself. Die, die, die. First she cried a lot in the bathroom, then sliced her wrist with a dinner knife. It left a row of plowed-up skin, no blood, and it hurt too much to cut any deeper. Later, in the backyard, she found a rusty tack in the dirt, poked her fingertip, and waited for blood poisoning to rise up her arm like liquid in a thermometer. That evening, still alive and miserable, she filled the tub and sat in it. As she sank under and was about to open her mouth wide, she remem bered the water was now dirty with nasty stuff from her feet, her bottom, and the place between her legs. Still determined, she got out of the tub, dried off, and filled the sink, then lowered her face until it touched the water. She opened her mouth. How easy it was, drowning. It didn't hurt at all. It was like drinking water, which, after a while, she realized was what she was doing. So she pushed her face lower into the water and opened her mouth again. She took a deep breath, welcoming death at last. Her whole body backfired in stinging protest. She began coughing in such a loud and hacking way that her mother rushed in without knocking and pounded her back, put her hand on her forehead, and murmured in Chinese that she was sick and should go to bed right away. Having her mother comfort her so lovingly only made Ruth feel worse.