Bloody Mary

I filled a new Lisa Frank notebook with blank templates of MASH. Mansion, apartment, shack, house; ten kids, twenty, zero, one. I asked my mother to get me a case of Mountain Dew to share. I’d finally been invited to a sleepover with the older girls. I braced myself for something far different from the sleepovers I’d had thus far with my best friend, Courtney. Our usual sleepovers involved laughing at our Bratz Dolls making out with each other. A part of me wondered if I’d be too nervous to speak in Megan’s house, if I’d miss Courtney, if I’d yearn for the sound of Roger Rabbit congratulating us on how to spell canoe. I told myself I was ready to leave that behind.

I arrived, limping through the front door with my heavy case of pop. Before I could sit down Megan’s cousin Brittany announced a game of Bloody Mary. I wasn’t familiar with the game but couldn’t disappoint the older girls. I offered to go first, pretending to know what I was volunteering for before I even cracked open my Mountain Dew.   

In the bathroom mirror was my reflection. The group of older girls argued in the living room outside of the bathroom. The Mary in question had died at the hands of her lover; no, she’d died in childbirth. In each retelling, the tale got bloodier. They couldn’t agree on who Mary was when she was alive, but that didn’t seem to matter. She’d suffered. She’d been dead longer than she’d been alive. She preferred death. The braver girls pretended to see Mary as a hero. One or two dismissed the concept as “against their religion” which freed them from the game entirely. At the door of the bathroom, Megan explained how the game worked.

I remember Brittany as a bully, a tall girl who always made me feel silly for meticulously pinning my hairclips and tying my Etnies laces. I hated how badly I wanted to impress her. The sleepover was my chance. I felt determined to see Mary. I wanted to surprise Brittany, even scare her. 

Looking back, I wonder if Brittany thrust this game on me as an initiation. I hadn’t had my first period yet, but I’m sure the older girls menstruated. The older girls’ existences took place far away from my own. I was a ten-year-old playing a bloody game with girls familiar with how to wear a pad without wincing when they sat.

In the bathroom, in the dark, I focused. I pictured a skinny woman with long, black hair somehow still growing from her dead skull. She wore a white dress ripped to shreds. One of her skeletal shoulders was ripped open, exposing bone. Her cheekbones stuck out of her sunken face. Instead of a stomach she had a hole of gore. Her legs were so skinny I wondered how she could possibly stand.

She appeared to me then as horrific and repulsive, far from the womanhood I thought I’d achieve. But the fright didn’t last. As I exited childhood, the memory of her receded into the folds of my brain. I learned how to do my makeup, how to insert a tampon, how to hold a man, and how to appease one, too. 

Two times I’ve been near a substantial amount of blood. 

The first, I imagine, is familiar. By seventh grade, Courtney was no longer my friend. I knew the blood was coming. I’d sat through that painful seminar, too embarrassed to ask for clarification on whether the blood would constantly flow or only fall out when you were peeing. 

The day I bled I wore grey LEI underwear with a glittery hibiscus flower on the front. Alivia, the friend who had replaced Courtney, and I walked to the bathroom together before lunch. The gray underwear had morphed into a dark reddish brown. 

I sat on the toilet, incredulous. I didn’t cry. I tried sopping up what I could with toilet paper, but my inner thighs were tinted red. And the blood wasn’t stopping. I trusted Alivia, loved her. I told her what I guessed was happening, and she went to the guidance counselor’s office. She came back with a pad. The ultimate humiliation would have been bleeding through my pants so that the boys could see. That did not happen to me as it happened to other girls in my class. I was saved from that, but not from the acne, not from the embarrassing tits sprouting from my chest at different rates. I wasn’t saved from the bloody mess and disbelief that the blood was my own. Nor was I saved from the realization that this painful scene smelling of iron would be something I’d have to contend with forever. At twelve years old, I was forced to bear witness to my body’s self-sacrifice. My body’s violence, enacted without my approval, endured.

My mother warned me against getting a white comforter for my dorm room, but I ignored her. She was concerned with me eating or doing homework in bed, all of the sauces and pen stains the comforter would inevitably accumulate. Jack, my high school boyfriend, promised me a white comforter if my mother wouldn’t buy me one. He owed me something after our last big fight and was hungry to relieve his guilt. Jack stuck around until the end of my second year in college. We would break up often, and his fits of violence were commonplace. I was accustomed to him smashing his iPhone into concrete or punching dents into the side of his truck. When we argued, he’d get overwhelmed, his voice low and then high. Then he’d get completely quiet before punching himself in the face.

The first time this happened was before my brother’s senior night basketball game. Jack and I had been dating for about a year and were in the midst of yet another argument about our college decisions. In my parents’ kitchen, after they had already left for the game, Jack called me a bitch. He brought his fist crashing into his cheek, his forehead, his chin, his nose. 

I grew accustomed to these episodes. I learned to put my own body in the way of his hands; if that didn’t work I would run away, threatening to get help. Sometimes I would grab car keys or pens, dragging their sharp edges across my forearms. There were times I wished the abuse was more concrete, physical. I bartered violence with him- one black eye for you, one scratch for me. I thought my love could heal him. 

Jack drove to my college town for a house party. We’d been planning it for weeks, coveting the weekend of drinking and partying to which we were still unaccustomed. I remember feeling light, joyous. I danced drunkenly with my two best friends while my boyfriend made friends with strangers. I remember how much effort it took for me to let go of the fear that something would happen. But I got drunk, did my hair, and danced. 

Suddenly, Jack started screaming. I don’t remember most of what was said. I know he fled the party, flicking off strangers. I know I ran to catch him. I know one of my male friends stopped me with a look of pity in his eyes. 

Outside, Jack punched the asphalt in the middle of the street. A crowd surrounded him. I was horrifically embarrassed. No one wanted to call the police station. The cops were eager to bust parties in our rural town. Jack had bloodied his hands and wasn’t stopping. When he eventually stood, he picked me up, my navel on his shoulder. My head lolled back at the crowd of strangers I so desperately wanted to impress. He ran with me like that through our small campus, screaming. I can still see that street full of faces, their features blurred, as my body bounced against someone I desperately wanted to love. Jack carried me like that for the ten minutes back to my dorm. I don’t remember saying a word. I don’t remember crying. A part of me expected him to throw me. A part of me wanted that. When we returned to my dorm room, I told him to wash his hands in the men’s bathroom down the hall. Instead, he punched his face.

He hit himself until his nose bled. It bled so much I thought it was broken. It bled so much we went through the box of Kleenex on my desk and the roll of paper towels my roommate kept in her closet. I knew to stay awake in case his brain stopped working in the middle of the night. I used my two shower towels and robe to give the punches extra padding. I covered his bloodied face in my white comforter, and he bled through that, too. 

After I discarded my bloodied belongings, after I cried until the sun rose over the quad, after I replaced the white comforter with something darker, after I moved to Tennessee with him for his shot at a professional baseball career, after he hit himself eleven more times, after he threw my belongings into the grass outside of the apartment we rented, after he told me, when I reached for a pair of scissors to get him to stop hitting his face, “cut vertically this time if you mean it,” after he finally, finally put his hands around my throat, threw my head against a wall, after I returned to campus, single and raw and afraid, a friend asked, “Shit, you’re that girl whose boyfriend beat himself bloody outside of the house party at Connor’s, right? The girl who was always crying in the dorm basement?”

That fateful sleepover at Megan’s, I saw Bloody Mary. Blood soaked through her torn dress, blood flowed like tears down her face, blood circled around her feet in an infinite puddle. As much as I wanted to see her, I still felt shocked. Did the other girls see the same thing? How would I know for sure they were telling the truth? That was the norm at slumber parties. Was someone intentionally pushing the Ouija board’s triangle or was a spirit communicating with us? 

I don’t remember what we did the rest of the night. I only remember that the next morning in my own house, the ordinariness of objects subsided, creating a wave of awareness I can only equate to a psychedelic trip or dream. The trampoline in my front yard imbued me with poignant play. I took notice of sunrays filtering through tree branches. I wanted to tell my brother about Mary. And maybe I did. But mostly I just remember us jumping on the trampoline. I remember wanting to play, to sprint down my driveway at full speed, to get splinters in my fingers, and to pick cattails out of the woods. The initiation of adulthood had been stalled. 

I regularly search for Courtney, Brittany, Alivia, and Megan on Facebook. I study their wildly different versions of womanhood resulting from our shared girlhoods. 

I write towards something past the precipice of my late twenties. A friend recently explained over lunch that the next few years, if we’re lucky, will be our “easy years.” Our lives are no longer defined by college courses or college hookups. We make some money, but don’t yet have to use it on children or mortgages. She talked about her boyfriend, the trips they planned for summer, their loose plans for marriage. It’s easy right now so why isn’t it easy?

Jack doesn’t live in my thoughts anymore. When I write about him, I have to call him forth, asking my brain to play along. The geographical distance between us frames him differently, frames the me of then differently, too. Facebook tells me he’s engaged to someone else with blonde hair. I wonder if she scratches her wrists for him. If she bleeds. Does she wish he’d just hit her, just do that final thing to make her leave? Did I want to be hit because I believed that was the only demonstrable excuse to never return to him, to never forgive him? Or was the thought born of something darker? Did it rise from the admittance that I was too desperate, too giving, too womanly? I’d heard myself whisper, you deserve it.  

For twelve years I took the same birth control pill. And for twelve years I bled blood that wasn’t real. When taking hormonal birth control pills, a woman’s hormonal levels do not change; thus, the uterine lining does not thicken and no longer needs to be shed. While on hormonal birth control, placebo pills are taken during the final week of the monthly cycle. These placebos soften the uterine lining enough to cause some bleeding similar in appearance to a normal period. A quick Google search tells me that withdrawal bleeding, or the bleeding that occurs while on birth control, is totally unnecessary, medically useless. The makers of oral contraceptives purposefully included withdrawal bleeding in an effort to mimic the natural menstrual cycle.

How many “natural” cycles did I have before withdrawal bleeding took over? While on the pill my acne cleared. I stopped feeling the excruciating pulse of eggs dropping from my fallopian tubes. In middle school, Alivia and I would make the scissor symbol with our pointer and middle fingers, a code to let the other know we were experiencing that horrific pain. We called it “cutting.” Another quick Google search tells me this phenomenon is called Mittelschmerz, a title that fails to catalogue the pain of your body contorting around a pregnancy that is not to be.

I think withdrawal blood looks the same as regular menstrual blood, but how should I know? I haven’t allowed my body to bleed the way it wants since I was twelve. Recently, I abandoned the pill for an IUD. Now there is no blood, not even the phantom withdrawal bleeding. I haven’t bloodied my underwear, sheets, driver’s side seat, or inner thighs for a year. Things, allegedly, are normal. Things are working as planned. When my doctor warned me of the pain of an IUD insertion, I laughed; when she inserted the device, I buckled. My body contorted in a way that did not belong to me. Congratulations, my doctor told me afterward, you just had your first contraction!  Now there’s no pill to take; “cutting” is back, but I can’t gesture to Alivia anymore. I feel that egg born somewhere inside of me every month and then I feel it die. It doesn’t bleed and neither do I.

Los Angeles feels like home. Here, I started a book club with twenty other women. We meet at parks to snack on pastries, fruit salad, and cheese. We talk about the book we’ve chosen to read, ask one another how the writing is going, and smile. At our third meeting, during our discussion of Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, we talked of our personal positions on the concept of motherhood. It felt, in many ways, like swinging with Courtney on the playground in elementary school. This was a safe space in which we could call upon our womanhood to repel invaders, protecting our spoken experiences and emotions. Some of us were unsure about becoming mothers, some planned on becoming a mother soon, some were sure we never wanted to be a mother. I loved that circle for its fruit salad mixed with mint, for its friendship, and for its gift of honesty.          

Heti wrote that women have only ten years of actual living. The first twenty, she explains, are sacrificed to school calendars, parents’ schedules, and heartbreak. After age thirty, the “biological clock” starts ticking. Ten years. Ten years to meditate in Bali. Ten years to finish this fucking book. Ten years to drop off the grid for a week at a time because I feel the urge to be missed. I’m twenty-eight. In the book club circle, each of us sat in the space of those ten years, wondering. 

For the first time, a close friend is pregnant. For the first time a friend I have chosen rather than accepted out of proximity is pregnant. She’ll give birth soon, and there will be a body inside of the small shoes I find myself touching every time I’m at her house. When my friend struggled through her first trimester, I found myself ashamed of what little comfort I could give. I talked too much about her pregnancy instead of her. 

The first time I saw this friend as my proper friend, we got too high, ate her husband’s unopened box of Cheez-Its, and watched episodes of Adventure Time. She got married in Germany a few months later. I stayed in her parents’ home for a week. It was the quietest week I had had in years. Entire afternoons were wasted on naps under apple trees. At night we walked through the town, making a game of bowling apples down the crooked streets. 

On the beach where I sometimes play hooky from work, children dig in the sand. They leave the beach exhausted. I envy the feeling of completion that comes from surrendering to sleep after a day of play. That exhaustion is a stranger to me now, obsolete in the face of anxious exhaustion, depressive exhaustion, lazy exhaustion. Sometimes, on the beach, I allow myself to skip for a few paces. Once I even sat in the sand, a few spots away from a little girl, and tried to mimic her play. My toes curled in the sand. I let myself dig.

I hope my friend is invited back into that brilliant realm of play through motherhood. Perhaps she’ll only be a chaperone. Maybe that’s the closest we can get.

I spent my childhood in fear of Bloody Mary, but I was really afraid of womanhood. I didn’t fear the womanhood of lipstick and perfume. But I feared real womanhood, made of blood and pain and violent men. I wonder if the older girls of the world thrust Bloody Mary upon the younger ones not only as a forewarning but also as a punishment. It was payback for what the older girls had lost, what the younger girls still had. As teenagers we were too embarrassed to admit what we missed, what we envied: bloodless nights when one in the morning felt far away, and we smelled like grass. 

Once, I sat in my dorm room, unable to imagine a different womanhood than one tainted with violence. But now, I roll down hillsides with my fiancé. I stain my jeans and grow sweaty under my arms. I read my friends’ publications, hug them when we meet up for writing dates. I watch Rachael’s stomach contort around her daughter’s unborn foot, and I know with a forceful, shocking clarity that this is the womanhood I crave: the one that bleeds but also sustains. Painful, but lush. Flowered.

-Erika Gallion

Erika Gallion is a Los Angeles-based writer originally from Canton, Ohio. Erika writes mainly personal nonfiction (although she dabbles with fiction) and is currently working on a memoir about her family history. Her past publications include: Ujjayi, nonfiction, published in Entropy, 2018 https://entropymag.org/ujjayi-ocean-breath-vs-anxiety/ ; Extraterrestrial, fiction, published in Angel City Review, 2019 http://angelcityreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Angel-City-Review-Issue-8-.pdf ; Grace, or Something Like It, nonfiction, published in Entropy, 2019 https://entropymag.org/woven-grace/ ; Birthday in Quarantine, nonfiction, published in The Racket, 2020 https://theracketsf.com/home/2020/5/4/quarantinejournal5 ; and more.