Une Femme

Madame Krumins was holding forth on passé-composé and imparfait when the red blotch leaked through her tight white pants. 

We did not care for Madame Krumins. She was Latvian, and we thought she was crazy. Maybe she was a mail order bride. Or a KGB agent, forced undercover as an eighth-grade French teacher. We didn’t care to find out.  

We did not care for her outfits—outdated pastel pantsuits, polyester animal prints. We did not like her brittle, humorless authority, tottering on kitten heels. Her orange lipstick seeped onto her coarse, pale skin (which had not fared well in the California sun) and contrasted with her blue eyes and yellow hair, scraped along her head and twisted into a braid down her back. She was the opposite of sexy. She lacked all the subtle sophistication that made us want to take French in the first place.  

We suspected her French was not that great.  

As awareness of the dark red stain in our teacher’s crotch spread among us, I was rigid, unable to look away. I had gotten my first period the previous summer, staying with my dad and stepmom and preschool siblings, who were barely out of diapers. I told no one. I stole from the au pair’s supply of tampons and taught myself how to deploy the slick pink plastic applicator by reading the instructions on the box.  

When I got my second period, on vacation on Cape Cod, without the au pair, I used wads of toilet paper and plugged up the toilet, which my stepmom blamed on an eccentric guest my dad had befriended at the flea market and invited for dinner. 

Back home at the end of the summer, I confided in my mother about my period but not that I’d handled it on my own. At first, the period was the secret. Then the not-telling became the secret. 

If the not-telling came out, my father would feel hurt I didn’t trust him. If my mother found out, his untrustworthiness would be confirmed. No matter what, I felt ashamed that my body was messy and uncontrollable. No matter what, I felt ashamed of my own shame. 

For long minutes, none of us spoke up. The boys in the front row—Andy L. and Matt M.—flushed dark red and averted their eyes. The rest of us muttered and rattled our desk-chairs.  

In the back row, one of us gasped, and another tittered. We could practically smell blood.  

Madame sensed something was amiss. She concluded that Andy and Matt were méchants. They were up to something. She demanded they confess. She berated them, cocking her hip belligerently, standing in front of them. They stared fixedly at their desks. 

Madame widened her condemnation—we were all a bunch of miscreants and ignoramuses.  

Madame was a grown-up, a teacher, une femme. Didn’t she know anything about keeping the secrets of the body secret? Didn’t she care? Someone would have to tell her, to clean this mess up. In my memory, she would stand up there for decades, ignorant and imperious, while we wriggled, trapped in this impossible moment. 

Despite years of study, my French never achieved full liftoff, has now gone rusty. Shame—that mother tongue, that body language, so easily acquired—I have tried to unlearn through friends, sex, a medical degree, therapy (from both sides of the couch), motherhood, maturity. But sometimes, malgré tout, it seeps through. 

Shala Erlich grew up in Berkeley, California, and practices psychiatry in Bellingham, Washington. Her essays and stories appear in The Iowa Review, Fourth Genre, The Missouri Review, The Ghost Story (Fall 2023 Supernatural Fiction Award), Southern Humanities Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and others. She is at work on a novel-in-stories following a trio of medical students through the Vietnam-War, pre-Roe era and beyond. Follow her on Bluesky @shala-24.bsky.social.

This essay is a Short Reads original.