Enchanted Islands Read Online Free PDF

worried it would hurt, that it would start while I was at work and I couldn’t do anything about it. But Rosalie scanned her underwear each day for signs, took every upset stomach as a precursor to cramps. When the pain would go away, she’d burst into tears, so forlorn that nothing I could say would calm her.
    Right after my fifteenth birthday, it finally happened to me, a bright spot of blood when I got home from work. When I whispered to my mother what had happened (I didn’t know the Yiddish or the Polish; I told her I was passing blood), she knocked on my forehead three times. Then she wordlessly showed me how to fasten the bulky pads to the belt around my waist, and I felt like a child with a diaper, the sensation of having liquid seep out of me strange.
    When I told her that weekend, Rosalie began to cry. I was angry that she was so selfish. Couldn’t she celebrate my womanhood with me? But she refused to speak, indeed refused to come out of her room, so I ate dinner with her parents without her, and then went home to spend the night without my books.
    I considered not going to see her the following weekend. I was angry with her and wanted her to know it. But the lure of the books was strong—I wanted to hear what her teacher said in the lecture about the Industrial Revolution, and I wanted to finish
Pride and Prejudice
.
    So I arrived at her house at our typical time, and Rosalie received me like nothing had changed. We ate, then listened to a radio program, though Rosalie was silent. Then she went to bed while I stayed up reading her notebooks.
    I thought she’d gone to sleep but her voice emerged, reed-thin, from between the covers. “Fanny? What’s it like?”
    I closed the notebook. I knew exactly what she was talking about. I tried to explain to her how it drips out over several days, describing the diaper padding to her.
    She nodded at me, sitting up. “But is it different?”
    “Different than what?”
    “I mean…” I heard the sharp intake of her breath. “Are you different?”
    “Is that what you’re worried about?” I asked. “I’m the same me. I’m your friend, always, Rosie.” She hated when I called her that.
    She waved her hand at me like I was a silly fly. “It’s not that. I want to be different. I want to be…” She let the thought trail off.
    “We will be,” I said. “We’ll grow bosoms and get boys and get married and everything.”
    Rosalie smiled sadly, as though she meant the opposite.
    *
    Rosalie was not far behind me in becoming a woman. It may have been the only thing I ever beat her to, and I can’t say that this didn’t give me a small satisfaction, which I took pains to conceal but probably didn’t do a very good job of. When she was finally “visited,” as we used to say, she met me at the door bright-eyed with happiness, and we sang until her mother banged on the door and told us to keep it down. I didn’t understand her elation—so far it had been the curse its name promised to be—but her excitement was infectious.
    The next morning, Rosalie woke early, and I heard voices from downstairs. She, her mother, and her father were having a heated discussion. Occasionally her father’s voice would emerge from the floorboards, loud and angry, but I could not make out the words, and Rosalie’s mother hushed him.
    When I came downstairs, Rosalie was in her Sunday funk, and I understood that I was to leave directly after breakfast.
    “Would you like to come with us?” her mother asked. “Rosalie has to wait for the landlord.”
    “No, thank you, Mrs. Mendler.” Rosalie avoided my gaze.
    She walked me to the door. “Want me to stay and do it?” I asked.
    “No,” she said, her tone so icy that I let it drop. I thought she was sore that her family left her, and I could see how dealing with that man would put anyone in a bad mood, but Rosalie was always so dramatic that I assumed she was exaggerating her displeasure for effect.
    The following Saturday, I