“The Curse of Blood”

“The Curse of Blood” is Fleece’s name for menstruation, but the phrase becomes more than a description of a bodily event: it is a language Norma Jeane Baker refuses, a fear she tries to overcome through Christian Science, and eventually an experience she reinterprets as a blessing. Her first period tests the boundary between belief and physical reality. Rather than seek ordinary help, she treats pain and bleeding as evidence in a private struggle to remain separate from the girls around her.

The phrase and its social setting

Fleece uses the phrase with a grimace, presenting menstruation as an inescapable curse. The words belong to a world in which the older girls’ periods are discussed through jokes, disgust, and spectacle. At school, boys and girls make cruel jokes about girls’ smell; at the orphanage, Fleece’s provocative display of a bloodied finger turns a private bodily change into something exposed for others to see. The phrase thus gathers shame and social scrutiny around an experience Norma Jeane already finds frightening.

The orphanage’s routines make that pressure material. Norma Jeane has seen used sanitary pads in the girls’ bathroom wastebaskets and recognizes their nauseating smell when she empties the bins. She knows that girls who need sanitary products go to the nurse, just as a girl who feels ill can ask for aspirin. But needing these things would mean acknowledging that she belongs to the group whose bodies are subject to the so-called curse. She also delays asking the storeroom keeper for a larger school dress, anticipating a sarcastic remark about her changing body. The words Fleece uses therefore echo a broader fear: that her body will make her visible in ways she cannot control.

The first period as a test of belief

In the second week of September, soon after starting middle school, Norma Jeane feels a dull abdominal pain during gym class while playing volleyball. She is one of the taller and better athletes, though moments of distraction or awkwardness sometimes make her miss the ball and bring accusations from her teammates that she cannot be trusted. That afternoon, a sudden headache and the warmth of liquid soaking her underwear interrupt the game. She drops the ball and decides to ignore whatever is happening, offended by the idea that it could be happening to her.

The conflict is sharpened by what Edith Mittelstadt has taught her. Norma Jeane understands the basic Christian Science claim that God is Mind and matter does not exist, and that healing comes through Christ when a person believes deeply. Yet understanding the doctrine while reading with Edith, including passages from Mary Baker Eddy’s book, does not give her the same clarity when she is alone. Her thoughts feel disordered, and the pain feels insistently physical. On the walk from school to the orphanage, her head throbs so violently that she feels nearly blinded, even as she tries to regard the headache as illusion and weakness.

She longs for an aspirin, which the orphanage nurse would ordinarily provide, but refuses to ask for one. She frames the refusal as a trial of faith, recalling the teaching that God knows human needs before they are voiced. The decision also carries a personal history: she remembers Gladys Mortensen crushing aspirin into fruit juice when she was very young, and giving her what she suspects was vodka passed off as healing water. To Norma Jeane, pills and alcohol belong to a past of poisonous care. Rejecting aspirin now is consequently both a religious test and a repudiation of the medicines she associates with her childhood.

Concealment, exposure, and escape

As the bleeding continues, Norma Jeane tries not to identify it as blood. With bedtime approaching, she hides in the bathroom and stuffs toilet paper into her underwear rather than ask for sanitary pads. The makeshift protection becomes soaked. She will not touch the blood, and the thought of behaving like Fleece—who checks her underwear and displays a bloodied finger to the other girls—repels her. Closing her eyes, she insists inwardly that she is not Fleece and is not one of the other girls. Her distinction depends on endurance: she will not ask for aspirin, sanitary products, sympathy, or recognition of what is happening to her.

The attempt to keep the event private breaks when Debra Mae finds her slumped over her schoolwork and shaking her shoulders. The mathematics notebook falls as Norma Jeane stands, and Debra Mae points out that there is blood on the chair. Norma Jeane tells her to go away. Debra Mae answers by naming the facts Norma Jeane has refused: the blood is real, the cramps are real, and these are her periods. The intervention does not immediately persuade Norma Jeane to accept comfort. Her sight blurred and a stream of blood running down her leg, she leaves the study and hides repeatedly—in the darkness of the stairs, a closet, and behind the bathroom door—before climbing through the bathroom window and crawling to a hiding place on the roof.

There, the physical evidence remains undeniable, but the scene ends in a different register. Under a dark, cloud-edged sky and a pale quarter moon, with the distant RKO neon sign blinking beyond her, Norma Jeane turns to the conviction that Mind is the only truth and God is Love. She experiences the retreat as a source of joy and safety, believing herself protected and capable of resisting pain and fear. Faith offers her a way to endure; it does not erase the blood or the cramps that Debra Mae has identified. The scene’s tension rests on that gap between the bodily reality others can see and the spiritual account Norma Jeane uses to survive it.

Recasting the curse

Later, Norma Jeane gives menstruation a new explanation. Instead of thinking of it primarily as blood leaving the body, she imagines it as the monthly expulsion of poisons. The cycle returns every three or four weeks; headache, nausea, and cramps become signs of weakness that she declares unreal. This account does not simply repeat her first refusal. It incorporates knowledge from Aunt Elsie, who has explained that menstruation is natural, if unpleasant, and affects all girls and women. Norma Jeane still does not call it a curse. Because she sees it as coming from God, she decides it must be a blessing.

The period’s ending also becomes a model for forgetting. After two or three days, the bleeding disappears as mysteriously as it began; Norma Jeane imagines that memories of Gladys Mortensen may vanish in the same way. She now speaks of her mother in a calm, neutral manner and rarely discusses her, generally doing so only with Aunt Elsie. The wish for bodily blood to carry away poison thus connects menstruation with an effort to shed painful memory. Her declaration that there are no more poisons and that she is happy marks a change in interpretation, not proof that the original distress has been resolved.

Narrative significance

The phrase’s force lies in the contrast between what Norma Jeane is taught to call unreal and what her body makes unavoidable. The scene gives the first period concrete circumstances—the volleyball game, the soaked toilet paper, the blood on the chair, the request she will not make—while showing how doctrine turns those circumstances into a private contest of faith. Fleece’s phrase names menstruation as a shared burden; Norma Jeane’s insistence that she is not like the other girls makes the burden lonelier.

When the memory returns in altered form, the body’s cycle offers an image of disappearance: blood, pain, and even maternal memory seem capable of passing out of sight. Yet the return of the phrase and its associated experience preserves what Norma Jeane wants to forget. “The Curse of Blood” therefore marks both a moment of adolescent bodily exposure and a larger pattern of trying to transform pain into proof of spiritual strength, then into a blessing that might make forgetting possible.