Carrie (Page 3)

‘Get up,’ Miss Desjardin said dispassionately. ‘Get up and tend to yourself.’

‘I’m bleeding to death!’ Carrie screamed, and one blind, searching hand came up and clutched Miss Desjardin’s white shorts. It left a bloody handprint.

‘I … you . . .’ The gym teacher’s face contorted into a pucker of disgust, and she suddenly hurled Came, stumbling, to her feet ‘Get over there!’

Carrie stood swaying between the showers and the wall with its dime sanitary-napkin dispenser, slumped over, br**sts pointing at the floor, her arms dangling limply. She looked like an ape. Her eyes were shiny and blank.

‘Now,’ Miss Desjardin said with hissing, deadly emphasis, ‘you take one of those napkins out … no, never mind the coin slot, it’s broken anyway… take one and… damn it, will you do it! You act as if you never had a period before.’

‘Period?’ Carrie said.

Her expression of complete unbelief was too genuine, too full of dumb and hopeless horror, to be ignored or denied. A terrible and black foreknowledge grew in Rita Desjardin’s mind. It was incredible, could not be. She herself had begun menstruation shortly after her eleventh birthday and had gone to the head of the stairs to yell down excitedly: ‘Hey, Mum, I’m on the rag!’

‘Carrie?’ she said now. She advanced toward the girl.

‘Carrie?’

Carrie flinched away. At the same instant, a rack of softball bats in the corner fell over with a large, echoing bang. They rolled every which way, making Desjardin jump.

‘Carrie, is this your first period?’

But now that the thought had been admitted, she hardly had to ask. The blood was dark and flowing with terrible heaviness. Both of Carrie’s legs were smeared and splattered with it, as though she had waded through a river of blood.

‘It hurts,’ Carrie groaned. ‘My stomach …’

‘That passes,’ Miss Desjardin said. Pity and self-shame met in her and mixed uneasily. ‘You have to … uh, stop the flow of blood. You-‘

There was a bright flash overhead, followed by a flashgunlike pop as a lightbulb sizzled and went out. Miss Desjardin cried out with surprise, and it occurred to her (the whole damn place is falling in) that this kind of thing always seemed to happen around Carrie when she was upset, as if bad luck dogged her every step. The thought was gone almost as quickly as it had come. She took one of the sanitary napkins from the broken dispenser and unwrapped it.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘Like this-‘

From The Shadow Exploded (p. 54):

Carrie White’s mother, Margaret White, gave birth to her daughter on September 21, 1963, under circumstances which can only be termed bizarre. In fact, an overview of the Came White case leaves the careful student with one feeling ascendant over all others: that Carrie was the only issue of a family as odd as any that has ever been brought to popular attention.

As noted earlier, Ralph White died in February of 1963 when a steel girder fell out of a carrying sling on a housing-project job in Portland. Mrs White continued to live alone in their suburban Chamberlain bungalow.

Due to the White’s near-fanatical fundamentalist religious beliefs, Mrs White had no friends to see her through her period of bereavement. And when her labour began seven months later, she was alone.

At approximately 1:30 P.M. on September 21, the neighbours on Carlin Street began to hear screams from the White bungalow. The police, however, were not summoned to the scene until after 6:00 P.M. We are left with two unappetizing alternatives to explain this time lag: Either Mrs White’s neighbours on the street did not wish to become involved in a police investigation, or dislike for her had become so strong that they deliberately adopted a wait-and-see attitude. Mrs Georgia McLaughlin, the only one of the three remaining residents who were on the street at that time and who would talk to me, said that she did not call the police because she thought the screams had something to do with ‘holy rollin’.’

When the police did arrive at 6:22 P.M. the screams had become irregular. Mrs White was found in her bed upstairs, and the investigating officer, Thomas G. Mearton. at first thought she had been the victim of an assault. The bed was drenched with blood, and a butcher knife lay on the floor. It was only then that he saw the baby, still partially wrapped in the placental membrane, at Mrs White’s breast. She had apparently cut the umbilical cord herself with the knife.

It staggers both imagination and belief to advance the hypothesis that Mrs Margaret White did not know she was pregnant, or even understand what the word entails, and recent scholars such as J. W. Bankson and George Felding have made a more reasonable case for the hypothesis that the concept, linked irrevocably in her mind with the ‘sin’ of intercourse, had been blocked entirely from her mind. She may simply have refused to believe that such a thing could happen to her.

We have records of at least three letters to a friend in Kenosha, Wisconsin, that seem to prove conclusively that Mrs White believed, from her fifth month on, that she had ‘a cancer of the womanly parts’ and would soon join her husband in heaven …

When Miss Desjardin led Carrie up to the office fifteen minutes later, the halls were mercifully empty. Classes droned onwards behind closed doors.

Carrie’s shrieks had finally ended, but she had continued to weep with steady regularity. Desjardin had finally placed the napkin herself, cleaned the girl up with wet paper towels, and gotten her back into her plain cotton underpants.

She tried twice to explain the commonplace reality of menstruation, but Carrie clapped her hands over her ears and continued to cry.

Mr Morton, the assistant principal, was out of his office in a flash when they entered. Billy deLois and Henry Trennant, two boys waiting for the lecture due them for cutting French I, goggled around from their chairs.

‘Come in,’ Mr Morton said briskly. ‘Come right in.’ He glared over Desjardin’s shoulder at the boys, who were staring at the bloody handprint on her shorts. ‘What are YOU looking at?’