Imperfection

WARNING: CONTAINS DESCRIPTIONS OF MENSTRUATION



She knows what sex is.

The doctor told her. He gave her pamphlets and diagrams and explained it to her carefully. She knows that her breasts are formed from little glands under her nipples, her hips are widening to allow a baby to pass though, that a foetus is made of a man’s spermatozoa and a woman’s egg, and that it anchors itself to the walls of the womb and fees off the nutrients in its mother’s blood like a parasite. She knows exactly what men and women do to make babies, she read the pamphlets, she listened to what the doctor said and she knows that it can all be blamed on hormones, really, a messy and inexact process if ever there was one. She knows that the blood that comes oozing out between her legs is the spent and discarded lining of her uterus, and that pain in her belly and her groin is from that empty and frustrated organ.

She knows that the wild mood swings are part of it all, hormones again, it’s the fault of all those hormones she feels like crying sometimes, when she is sitting at her desk, reading reports and looking at photographs of people with their insides outside. She smells blood, she thinks that she’s imagining it but then she remembers and she presses her legs together to stop the smell, to stop the warm stickiness from coming out and it does no good. And she would like nothing but to leave the office, take off her immaculately starched blouse and skirt and put on something soft and ugly and watch television or read or just stare out the window as her guts melt and run out of her body but she is not a baby, she is not a silly girl, it is a normal process and she knows that because the doctor explained it to her and she listened to him carefully. So, she puts a paper napkin in her underwear, and even though she tries not to squirm the napkin always twists out of shape and her underwear is always stained by the end of the day. At night she finds herself standing in the bathroom, wearing nothing but a bathrobe, washing her knickers with hand soap and drying them with her hairdryer because even though it is a normal process and she has nothing to be embarrassed about, she is. The soiled napkins she burns as soon as she is done with them. There is always a fire burning in her sitting room no matter the weather, and the room always smells vaguely foul even when it’s been airing all day, but that smell she doesn’t mind at all.

In the few days before she menstruates she always feels her libido strengthening, she finds herself looking at people and wondering what they look like naked and what they do when they are alone with their wives and their husbands. Sometimes she wonders what she herself would look like naked because she has ever seen herself naked. She dresses hurriedly and never in front of a mirror. She sleeps and dreams of faceless, featureless humans beside her, on her, under her, all around her and touching her, and she wakes, afraid that it is true and she always thanks God that she is alone. She wonders what an orgasm is like. She thinks about sex. She knows it’s all about hormones, and the things you have to do to make a baby. Babies are the whole point. She is working on disciplining herself; in her office, she will not think about sex. Outside of her office she will not think about sex. She will not think about sex unless she is in her bed and she is alone and she hasn’t seen any photographs of inside-out people that day. She hasn’t quite succeeded yet because no matter what she is doing at least sometime during the task in hand she will suddenly have an image in her mind that wasn’t there before and certainly doesn’t belong. And then she has the sudden, irrational feeling that whoever she is with and talking to at the time knows exactly what she is thinking and sometimes she thinks she would like them to. But she knows that whatever she imagines, they don’t know and she could be thinking of anything she wants to and they wouldn’t know unless she told them. She knows that thinking about sex is normal because the doctor explained it to her and she read the pamphlets he gave her, and the books that Grandfather hid in the library that she isn’t supposed to know about. She knows.

She knows about menstruation; she knows about sex; she knows about hormones and hair and why her blouse is tight across her chest when it used to fit perfectly. She knows that it is normal, and she shouldn’t feel ashamed, and that to want to go and hide in her room every time her belly aches and the blood comes is only something that a silly little girl who doesn’t know anything would do. But she does know, because the doctor explained it, all about hormones and sex and making love and rooting and shagging and fucking and all the words that the soldiers say when they don’t realise she can hear them. She does know so she stays in her office, looking at pictures of people with dead eyes and their insides outside, trying not to think about sex, trying not to squirm and scrunch the paper napkin between her legs, and trying not to look Walter in the eye when he asks her if anything is wrong, and definitely not looking in the mirror.