My sister and me. We were born too close together. At least that’s what our mother said. She liked to claim that if there’d been an extra year between us, maybe two, we wouldn’t gang up on her like we did. We thought she was crazy. There were nineteen whole months between us, which to Anna and me seemed like a lot.
As little girls, however, we were awfully close. We slept in the same double bed, our hands joining to make one big tangle of fingers and our knees curled up toward one another, like a peaceful reflection of the sun on the bay. Never mind that we could hear our parents screaming, Daddy’s glossy photography books flying, dishes breaking. Once, when I was six and Anna four, our mother was in a special fit. Before Daddy came home she fed us too many spicy beans and then when his truck pulled up, she instructed us to run to their bedroom—Daddy liked to take off his work clothes before coming out to the living room for his evening Lone Star. So we went in there and got on all fours and tried to fart as best we could, tilting our booties high. Our mother was pooting up a storm so thick you could practically see the hazy rotten egg smell—whenever she was mad or anxious, her stomach produced a wealth of gas. As he walked up the porch stairs to the front door, she ushered us out. Anna and I couldn’t stop giggling. She told us to go in our rooms and say not a word unless we were itching for the belt. Daddy came in the house, groaning as usual, and walked back to the bedroom, closed the door. As soon as he did, Mama stuffed the crack at the bottom of the door with a dishtowel and then pushed a chair up underneath the knob. He started yelling and cussing, trapped in his own family’s shit vapor. He could have opened a window, but it was summer and he was too stubborn to waste the A/C.
The nights our parents fought and my sister and I snuggled, our enormous corn-colored dog would sometimes jump on the bed and sleep on top of our feet. Butters was his name. He lived with us for about two years, until one afternoon he trotted out the front entrance—pawed open the screened door himself—and never came back. “Can you blame him?” Daddy said, when I asked why he’d leave us. “Poor bastard’s gotta be road kill by now.”
Our father left home—and his pension-earning job at the oil refinery—for the first time in December, five days before Christmas. He came back in January, stayed for the rest of winter, but then left Mama for good come May, three days before my 8th birthday. I was convinced we’d never see him again, but something was worked out where we went to our grandparents’ house and met him there once a month, if he was in town. After he left, when it was especially cold—a rarity even though we didn’t have a heater—our mother would ask to join Anna and me in bed.
At first we didn’t think to say no, so we said yes. Anything to pacify her cries. She’d climb over one of us and lie sandwiched in between, like we told her to. She thought this was because we both wanted to sleep next to her, and we let her think that, but really neither of us wanted to be stuck in the middle. We hated it when she slept with us. She’d always hog the covers and cry in her lonesome sleep. She’d clutch onto one of us and hold too tight, jabbing her pointy knees into the backs of our thighs. We couldn’t sleep right like that. Our hands and feet always stayed too frozen-feeling. One night when she was whimpering especially loud, we rolled our mother’s body to the foot of the bed, where Butters used to go. Surprisingly, she didn’t wake. Anna slipped out and yanked the quilt off of Mama’s bed and put it around her, which we thought was considerate. We then joined hands and raised our knees together, sleeping like angels. That night, Mama woke up confused and banged her head on the wrought iron bed frame. Alarmed, we shot our legs straight, which to her was four kicks in the stomach. We assumed she’d never ask to sleep with us again, but come the following night, she was peeling us apart to crawl in between.
As kids, Anna was the girly child, and I was the older, tougher, boyish one. Whenever we reenacted our favorite movie scenes, I’d play the guy. It felt right, for me to be the boy. All I cared about was protecting Anna. The only time the roles bothered me was for Grease. I’d really wanted to play Sandy, especially at the end when she wears the tight leather pants and has her shirt pulled off her shoulders. But rules were rules, so I twisted my hips and greased my hair and pulled the back into a bun. Danny Zuko I was.
I spent the summer before high school babysitting, reading, and swimming in the June-bug-infested community pool. By this time, mother had been caught sleeping with Larry Levens, the married father of the one boy I’d told her I thought was cute: a red-headed, freckle-faced kid named Beau.
It was that summer that my sister pulled me into the bathroom stall at the swimming pool. Barefoot, we tippy-toed across the grimy, mossy tile, stepping over a wad of hair bunched near the center drain of the funneled bathroom floor. Our wet swimsuits dripped, reeking of chlorine.
“Lorrie, I think I started,” Anna whispered.
“Started what?”
A stripe of what looked like red clay shined on the paper she tossed in the toilet after wiping between her legs, and for a split-second I thought all her organs were about to fall out and she was going to die, right there in the handicap stall.
“You know. My period. What do I do?”
That next moment slowed down in an awful way. I felt small and distant, like a lost balloon. The truth was, I had no idea what Anna should do. In the past year, Anna had grown taller than me, though she was only twelve. She had long, shapely legs and undeniable signs of what the school nurse called “breast buds.” Me, I was stick straight, besides a little baby fat around my middle, and short as a fifth grader. Though I wore a training bra and complained about the tightness of the straps, it was strictly for show. It goes without saying that I hadn’t started my period, hadn’t quite realized I should’ve by now. I think the worst part of it all was realizing that Anna could so casually assume that I’d keep a secret from her. That meant she kept secrets from me.
I couldn’t admit to her that she’d surpassed me, that her body now had a power that mine did not, even if it made me technically a liar. I improvised as best as I could.
“Just stay in the water. No one will know.”
“Are you sure?” she asked. “My stomach really hurts.”
“We can leave now then. Wrap a towel around your waist. We’ll stop at Bi Rite and get you some supplies. Mama has Advil at the house.”
“Can’t I just borrow some of yours?”
“I’m out.”
“What if someone sees us at the store?”
“So what? You think you’re the first girl in the world to buy a tampon?”
It wasn’t too long after that that I convinced Mama to clear out the third bedroom so I could have my own. We were still in the same house we’d always been in, at least since I was two. When Mama and Daddy first got married, Daddy’s parents had been furious. He’d turned down a partial scholarship to Tulane University to study architecture. Though no one in his family had ever been to college, his parents raised him to believe that he would sure as hell be the first. They refused to accept my teen parents’ choices, to even attend their courthouse wedding, but once Mama got pregnant again, and I guess by then there was me, they came forward and helped with a down payment on a little box house on Magnolia Avenue. The first time Daddy disappeared, my mother barely had enough to pay the mortgage. My parents weren’t ones for saving. Once he left for good and they got officially divorced, our mother received full custody of us—what Daddy wanted, not necessarily Mama—but he agreed to pay some money each month to help keep us in the house.
It wasn’t just period-starting that Anna did before me. She kissed a boy, snuck out, had sex, while I had nothing. At a certain point, she stopped talking to me about boys. The unsaid truth was too uncomfortable. She now lived in a world beyond me, even though I’d been her teacher for all things coming before. I like to think that maybe she passed me because I’d made her feel safe growing up. Though maybe it’s strictly because her tits came in first. I don’t know.
The only person I could think to talk to was my Aunt Alexadrine, my daddy’s baby sister. She’d spent a summer watching us when I was seven, and since then we sometimes wrote letters to each other. When I was fifteen and still hadn’t started, I called her up, asking if I could visit her for my spring break. I took a bus from Houston to Austin, where she lived. She was about the only female I knew who had left Anahuac and stayed gone. I tried to wait until we got to the restaurant she promised had the best queso but I burst at the sight of her: Where are my breasts? Where the hell’s my period?
Honey I don’t know, she said, her eyebrows raised.
What’s wrong with me?
Nothing’s wrong. It’ll come. There’s no rush – trust me.
When?
Look, all I can tell you is that you were born on the early side. You spent the first two months of your life in an incubator, your skin as delicate as wet paper. Doctors wouldn’t let anyone touch you, for fear you might fall apart. But you survived. Maybe since you went so fast at first, now your body’s giving you time. But you’ll get there. We all do.
What? This was something I’d never before heard.
Your mother was young, you have to understand, and little. The pregnancy was hard, unexpected. Her body did the best it could.
A year later my period did come. I shot up two inches. I stayed small but looked more like something resembling a woman than child. Boys, and men, sometimes looked at me, and Mama noticed this—that males didn’t just see her when we walked side by side. I ran track, kissed a long-distance runner after practice once. Coach said I had the perfect build. Anna danced on the drill-team and played basketball. I tried not to imagine the person I could have been, truly smart and beautiful and able, had my mother’s body wanted me inside of it.
Shannon Perri is an MFA candidate at Texas State University and holds a Master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Texas. Her stories have appeared in literary journals such as Joyland, Buffalo Almanack, and Fiddleblack. She is currently at work on a novel set in Big Bend National Park. This story is an excerpt from the novel.
–Art by Ashley Holloway