It’s too soon to see the doctor again, but here you sit in a suffocating press of pregnant-smelling women, each of them clothed in saccharine colors. It’s like waiting to be launched from a gumball machine. Anyone got a quarter, you want to ask.
“Jeannine?”
You follow the nurse, pee in a cup, step on a scale. It’s cold in the exam room, and you fidget with the hem of your sundress. Someone has plastered the ceiling with images of cute and furry things batting at bright and sunny balls. Kittens, puppies, bunny rabbits. Looking at them makes you vaguely nauseous. On a nearby shelf sits a scale model of the female reproductive system. You pick it up and study the disembodied uterus complete with fallopian tubes and ovaries, everything aggressively magenta. The doctor knocks and you slip it into your purse before she enters, running her finger down your chart. She thanks you for the urine sample but explains it was unnecessary.
“Unless you think you might be pregnant?”
You laugh.
The doctor removes her glasses to reveal eyes of kookaburra blue.
“No,” you clarify. “Not likely. Much to my mother’s disappointment.”
The doctor rebalances her glasses on the end of her nose. “So Jeannine,” she says, “didn’t I see you last month? I know my jokes aren’t that funny.” You wonder if the pregnancy question was meant to be a joke.
“You said to come back if nothing had changed?”
She asks you to remind her of your symptoms, and you try to explain. Intimate nudgings, jostlings, the occasional quick jab. You’ve spent hours bent double on the toilet seat, waiting for something that just won’t come. Chewed antacids and chugged Pepto-Bismol. Experimentally quit eating dairy, sugar, meat, spicy foods. Quit drinking for a month. The physical symptoms continue. And then there’s the not-so-physical thing. You’re not ready to talk about that just yet.
The doctor is asking more questions. “Irregular? Heavy?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Your periods.”
“I’m not having any.” You press your hands over your belly. “But sometimes there’s a fluttering feeling.” You point to a spot on your belly. The doctor makes a check mark.
“Didn’t your mom have a hysterectomy last year?” she asks.
“Yes. Then she moved to the beach.” This is meant to be a joke, but you realize it isn’t funny. Talking about your mother does this to you. When it comes to your mother, you lack a normal frame of reference.
“No complications?”
“It’s hard to say. She’s always been . . .” What? Unpredictable? Unreliable? You pause. The thought of trying to explain your mother to an outsider exhausts you. “She’s worried about the scarring?”
“These days they often do a vaginal. Negligible external incisions.”
“So they take the uterus out—”
“Through the vagina, yes.”
A flutter like butterflies below your navel. Cramps and a sharp pain, deep inside. Holy shit. Ask! “Do they perform it on healthy women? Women who know they don’t want children?”
The doctor stares you down. “No, Jeannine. We don’t. It’s a drastic, irreversible procedure. In a young woman like—well. In a woman your age, there’s almost never an indication for it. Have you discussed this with your mother?”
“I can’t.”
“Really? Why not?”
Because when you mentioned your symptoms to your mother she insisted you get your fibroids removed, even though you’ve explained to her more than once that you don’t have fibroids. Like tiny coconuts, she said. I wanted to keep one but the doctors wouldn’t let me.
The doctor scoots backward on her squeaky-wheeled stool. She’s lost interest in her question, or forgotten it. “Here’s what I can do,” she says, and writes you a prescription for Zoloft. “Be good, Jeannine,” she says, and leaves. No need for the reminder. You are always good.
On your way out you ball up the scrip and toss it into a wastebasket. In the elevator you pull out your phone in its fake elephant-skin case, ignore a string of mango emojis your mother texted during the appointment, and type, how to handle an unruly uterus. To your surprise there’s a match, and it’s only a block away. You should probably steer clear. But instead of taking the elevator to the parking garage, you step out into the street.
A quick walk in the chilly drizzle brings you to an office wedged between a nail salon and a window display of architectural wonders in pastel and white. Wedding cakes. A bad omen? The sign you’re looking for reads frederick yost, womb specialist, followed by a series of abbreviations too faded to read. A bell jingles as you push open the door.
It’s warm and dark inside and there’s a heady, almost overpowering smell, as if you’ve stepped into the heart of a gigantic melon. You press your hand over your nose and mouth as you catch sight of a man seated at a table in the back, tapping a pencil against his temple. At his elbow sits a plate piled high with papaya cut into wide smiles, each dripping with pale juice. Your belly clenches and heaves, pitching you off balance.
“One moment,” he says. “I’ve almost got it.” He scribbles madly for a few seconds, wipes his mouth on his sleeve, and looks up. “Crossword.”
You stifle the impulse to ask him for a clue. “Are you a doctor?”
“You could say that. Sit, please.”
You’re hesitating. The place looks like a low-rent thrift shop. The metal chair he’s offering you could have come from a defunct diner. “Frederick Yost,” he says, spreading his arms wide. You sit, staring at his exceptionally large hands. His fingers are damp, probably sticky.
“Jeannine,” you say.
“Welcome, Jeannine. How might I be of assistance?”
“I guess you could say I have a problem with my uterus.”
He offers no response, and so you begin the litany of symptoms: cessation of your periods, inexplicable pains and flutterings. The occasional lurch. When he smiles encouragingly you explain how you sometimes feel that your internal organs have gotten into a twisted jumble, unable to stick to their proper places. That when you lie in bed, unable to sleep, and rest your hands lightly on your belly, you can feel them moving about, back and forth, up and down. It’s as if they desperately want something, though you can’t imagine what. The effect is one of nausea and a severe but futile need to relieve your bowels.
“Not so unusual,” Yost says. Isn’t it? He picks up his pencil. “What else? Any non-sequiturial laughter, singing, crying? Unintentional noises such as those made by the animals of the barnyard? Choking sensations in the throat?”
“I get hiccups a lot,” you say.
He nods and makes a mark on the crossword. “Common in the early stages,” he mutters. He puts down his pencil and offers you tea. “What kind would you like?”
“Anything herbal,” you say, and thank him. Early stages of what, you don’t ask. “There is one more thing,” you begin, but he doesn’t seem to hear.
Yost pours steaming water from an electric kettle into two mismatched cups and hands one of them to you. The smell is bubblegum-sweet, cloying, and your belly leaps again.
“You have not experienced the benefit of marriage?”
You almost spill your tea.
“Not recently, in any case?”
“The benefit of what?” you ask. “What did you say?”
“Indulge me for a moment,” he says, and takes a long sip. “You are a body, and more than a body.”
“I don’t follow.”
He smiles and reaches for your cheek, then seems to change his mind and takes back his hand. “We think of the womb as a mere organ. But she is the mother of mankind! You’ve seen the terrible models they keep in the gynecological offices.” Your mind hops to the specimen in your purse. “Such a model is worse than nothing at all when it comes to understanding the womb. She is sweet, succulent, full of nutrition. If a predator should devour a woman’s body, she is among the first of the delicacies upon which it will feast. And a powerful muscle, too! Yet over the course of a pregnancy she expands to many times her normal size so as to house an entirely separate human.” Yost holds up his hand. “I’m not talking politics. I speak of wonder.”
This guy is worse than the regular doctor. You hold your purse a little tighter, but at the same time, you don’t leave. There’s something calming about the tea, the smells, the sound of his voice. And you’re so tired. You haven’t slept properly in weeks.
“The first step in addressing ourselves to the womb who wanders is to familiarize ourselves with her. So many women carry the womb as if she were an unwanted tenant or a threatening stranger. But this is not so. She shares your breath, your blood. She sees with your eyes, listens with your ears, smells with your nose, tastes with your tongue. She may not be privy to your thoughts or wants and indeed, she may have desires of her own, but she feels what you feel. She shares your life. She is you, but she is not you.”
“I’m lost, Dr. Yost.”
“Untethered?”
“No, I mean you’ve lost me. My problem isn’t psychological.”
“I didn’t say it was! Come with me.”
Yost stands and opens a door you hadn’t previously noticed. He holds your chair as you stand and ushers you to follow him back. It’s much nicer here than in the doctor’s exam room. No paper-draped table, no computer or wheeled stool.
And a peg on the wall holds a fuzzy pink robe.
“I’m not sure I’m comfortable with this,” you say.
Yost gestures to a recliner upholstered in dusty pink chenille. A crocheted afghan lies draped over one arm. “Just sit,” he says. “I won’t even be in the room, unless you want me to be.”
The chair is quite comfortable. Yost brings in a plate of guava fruits, and they fill the room with their aroma as he slices into them. You are suddenly, staggeringly ravenous. “Thanks, but I don’t care for any,” you say, but he waves you off in a friendly manner. You ask what you’re meant to do, and he instructs you to look inside a rattan sewing basket that sits on a low table beside the chair, next to a white-flowered potted plant. He fluffs it as he leaves, and the smell of jasmine rises to compete with the guava. Dizzy, you lift the lid of the basket and find a gynecologist’s speculum, a mirror, and some other tools you can’t identify. You close the basket and stand to go.
Yost is standing near the front door of the shop. You’ve caught a glimpse of him flipping the open sign to closed. He smiles and flips it back to open. You tell him he might not be the right kind of specialist for you after all.
“A shame.” He is unfazed. “Do come back when you change your mind. If you change your mind, I mean.” As he steps back to let you pass you catch sight of something he’s holding behind his back. A half-eaten pink-skinned fruit, and an unnecessarily large knife.
Is the knife dripping red juice? Yes. Juice. What else could it be?
_____
You’ve just sat down at your workstation with a day-old doughnut from the break room when your phone buzzes with another string of emojis: a jackpot, a four-leafed clover, a martini glass. In a moment of weakness you told your mother you were planning to meet some old roommates in Las Vegas this weekend, but now you’re thinking of begging off. As you slide the phone back into the pocket of your vintage housedress your belly gives another lurch. No, not your belly, your unruly uterus. A flood of nausea follows, and a heaviness against the muscles of your pelvic floor.
You stumble to the unisex bathroom, sit on the toilet, and reach between your thighs. You cover your labia with your hand, and there’s a quick, hard shove against your palm from the inside of your body. And again. You hang your head between your knees and reach into your purse for some baby aspirin. Instead you feel the cool, slick surface of your stolen uterus. You pull it from your bag and look it over. So many appendages sticking out in every direction, some tiny, some larger than a finger, and all of them leading to you, connecting to the very heart of you. How could anyone ever get it out? Impossible. There’s a knock on the door and your boss’s voice saying your mother’s on the office phone again and would you please, please, please tell her to call on your cell, whose mother calls on the office phone for Christ’s sake! You ignore him, turning the uterus over in your hands. It was stupid to steal it. You can’t give it back, and it would be wrong to throw it away. You’re going to be stuck with it forever.
_____
After work it occurs to you there’s another way to handle this. You can’t be the only woman having this problem. But although a quick bit of Googling takes you to a thread of women discussing their unruly wombs in graphic detail, no one has symptoms quite like yours, and no one is barking like a dog or shrieking cock-a-doodle-doo! at dawn every morning, as Dr. Yost suggested. Sure, the women on the thread do their share of laughing and crying for no apparent reason—who doesn’t?—and more than one has experienced strange twitchings and jostlings that have nothing to do with periods or pregnancy, but no one else’s womb seems to be trying to . . . escape. You chew another aspirin and press on, settling into the couch with your laptop and a diet soda, the third of the three you allow yourself each day. A lot of the women on this forum swear by yoni eggs, and this makes you giggle, obviously, but nevertheless you dutifully click through to the shop, which also sells something called a “wand” whose purpose seems to be to stand in for the so-called benefit of marriage. You must select both a size and a material for your yoni egg and, flushed now and impatient, you kick off the throw rug which has wound itself around your ankles and order a beginner’s variety pack, one egg each of quartz, obsidian, and jade in small, medium, and large, respectively. Small, you’ve learned, is for the expert, and you imagine yourself two weeks from now, smiling through a tax briefing at the office while effortlessly and privately working your rose quartz yoni egg, serene as any goddess.
You click purchase! and notice, too late, that the eggs will not arrive for a month.
Shit. What now?
You skim over suggestions to eat high-fiber foods and drink plenty of water and see another thread suggesting that Kegel exercises are never a bad idea, and so you dutifully perform another search. There doesn’t seem to be much to the Kegel, frankly, and you try one right away, squeezing and lifting the muscles of your perineum until you feel nauseous and near fainting. You release, count to five, and hold again, this time for even longer. On your third try there’s a sudden lurch in your abdomen and you do faint, just for a second. After you come to you wait a moment, breathing shallowly, but the lurching sensation does not return. You drain the soda and push the lid of your laptop closed.
_____
It’s too late to cancel your room at the Bellagio without a penalty you can’t afford to pay. Maybe it will be fun? Vegas is probably a good place to look for the benefit of marriage, if nothing else. All of the benefits and none of the drawbacks! Plus Barbara called you begging, and it’s been a long time since anyone begged you to do anything.
All through the short flight you press your knees together like a schoolgirl with her first period. On the jetway a mad jumble of bells, lights, whistles, and sirens jostles for your attention. You check your phone to find out where you’re meant to meet the other bridesmaids. More emojis from your mother: cocktails, clovers, and something that looks like a pale, skinny eggplant . . . no. You’ve made her promise not to text or call unless you’ve called her first, but emojis, technically, are not against the rules. You put the phone away.
The bar Barbara chose is done up like a medical office with male “doctors” in scrubs and stethoscopes pouring candy-colored drinks from quart-sized beakers. Some girls you once considered friends wave you over and slide you a shot, hibiscus-hued and trailing a wisp of white smoke. It smells wonderful, heavy and sweet, and it tastes even better. Your belly quivers. The other women lean in, throw their heads back as they drink, and laugh performatively. You toss yours down and float up to the ceiling. The next shot is the color of a well-fertilized lawn, swirling with vitality. You let your hands rest on your belly, so warm and contented it almost purrs.
Before long you get up to find the ladies’ room and wander into another part of the club. Here the servers are women, and the dancers are too. The air is heavy with perfumed sweat. A man stands to offer you his seat, and you accept; your feet have gotten sore from the spiky heels you’re wearing. Another drink appears in front of you, this one sky blue with perfect round ice cubes soft as clouds. You hold it in your hand, too engrossed by the dancers to do anything more. Another man appears, or perhaps the same one who gave you this seat, and asks if you’re thirsty, despite the fact that you are plainly holding a full drink. He looks like he might be interested in the benefit of marriage. Not now! You’re watching the dancers’ bodies, which clearly hold some kind of secret, their undulations punctuated by spinal snaps, their long hair lifting like flags in an artificial wind, and you can’t help writhing along with them. You look down, and your glass is empty.
A woman sits beside you. She nods hello then turns to watch the show, and you see she’s pregnant, enormously so. Her hair falls down her back in waves like something out of a shampoo commercial. Her figure, all ship-shape curves, is magnificent. She’s everything you’re not. But instead of depressing you, the sight of her opens a door.
You shout. “I love your body! Your belly! How did you get it so big?”
The woman flips her hair back like the dancers and laughs, a clear flute tripping over the thumping bass of the dance music. “You, my girl, are drunk,” she says. “Can I buy you another?”
You break your three-cocktail rule, and you break it again. The drinks are delicious, fluffy and sweet like kittens and bunnies, and they feel so good. You love these drinks.
“You’re going to be a wonderful mother,” you tell the pregnant woman.
“You too, someday,” she says.
“Nope,” you say. “Not me.”
The pregnant woman takes your hand. “Why not?”
You wiggle your free fingers. “My mother never figured out how to be a mother. And I’d be worse.”
“How about your father?”
“He died.” The question has caught you off guard. “And I missed his funeral.” But that isn’t what happened, is it? What happened is that when his heart unexpectedly failed him one December, your mother waited more than a week to tell you—so you could focus on exams, she said—except she did call the morning of your last final, saying something terrible had happened and she was sorry but she couldn’t keep it to herself any longer. By then the funeral was over and you couldn’t think of a good reason to go home. Instead you sat in an exam room for two and a half hours, tapping a pencil against your teeth and watching the minutes tick by. Three weeks later you were in the counselor’s office, letting him pat your hand and tell you the engineering program just asks too much of some students, and there was plenty of time to settle on a more agreeable major.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart.” The pregnant woman gives you a breathy kiss on the cheek and the imprint of her lips lingers. You imagine a smear of bright watermelon and reach out to cup the pregnant woman’s cheek in the exact same spot where she kissed yours. You ask her name. “I don’t . . .” the pregnant woman’s voice trails off as she gently but firmly removes your hand from her face. Her perfume is divine. You apologize, and again she says it’s fine, but it isn’t. You try to move your chair closer to explain, but in the technicolor blur you stumble and pitch into the table holding all your wonderful drinks, and you watch helplessly as they spill and tumble to the floor. The one glass you were holding has splashed midnight violets across the front of your new friend’s dress. You find a napkin and go after it despite her protestations. A pair of men standing nearby—one tall and skinny, one short and fat, like a nightclub act—grab handfuls of napkins and join in. “This is my mess!” you shout, elbowing them aside and digging into the crevice at the pregnant woman’s neckline. This is when she finally shoves you away and you stagger back crying, “But what is your name!” with the helpless whine of a child deprived of its rightful slice of birthday cake and the men are laughing now, saying “what’s your name, sweetheart,” and by the time you’ve righted yourself the breathtaking pregnant woman is gone. The tall man and the short man offer you another drink but you shake your head no, you do not need another drink, and you scan the crowd helplessly trying to catch a glimpse of your new friend, this woman who knows the secrets, holds the key. Where is she? The men insist that they must buy you a drink even though you have told them quite clearly, or as clearly as you can, that you do not want one, now they are offering you a hundred dollars if you will just let them buy you one more drink, and your toes are, you realize, sticky with the residue of previous undrunk drinks, and half-on-purpose-half-not you shove the skinny one into the fat one so that they both go down in a tumble like puppies and bunny rabbits except not so cute and you run, tripping over the pumps you’ve forgotten you’re wearing dammit but it’s your lucky day because there she is, paused in the doorway for just a heartbeat, her statuesque silhouette blocking the exit light, shining engine-red in her hair. “Wait!” you cry, kicking off the shoes and rushing straight for her, but by the time you reach the exit she’s disappeared like a mirage in the Nevada desert, like she was never there at all.
_____
You blink. Someone is trying to get your attention, addressing you as ma’am. You can’t remember the last time anyone addressed you this way. You aren’t certain where you are, what you’re doing, what time it is or, hang on, even who you are. There are two ma’amers, actually, one on each of side of you, each holding an elbow, and they’re guiding you down a long, carpeted hallway. A hotel. Thank goodness, because you are shit-tired of walking in these stupid heels, no wait, the heels are gone, long gone, and now these nice men must be taking you to your room. It will be quite a dose of marriage benefit! You frown, unsure if you like this idea or not, trying to remember whose idea it was. Yours? But now you’re just standing and waiting, slumped between the two ma’amers, at the elevator, and when the three of you enter, one of them punches the button that says L. No benefit of marriage after all. At least not for now.
Time passes in a loose blur. There’s a pleasant stretch in the back of a car zooming through the streets of a city, a nice clean car, and you try hard not to throw up in it, letting the motion of the streets slide you back and forth, back and forth across the wide black seat. There’s a persistent sound of wailing, and for a moment you think it’s you, and then you realize no, because weren’t you asleep just now, and wasn’t it the wailing sound that woke you up? You close your eyes, exhausted with these efforts at understanding.
When you open your eyes again, things have taken a turn for the worse. You seem to be in some kind of jail, seated cross-legged on a hard metal bench with one of the ma’amers sitting in front of you, trying to conduct a conversation for which you are in no mood at all.
“She won’t press charges, understand? But you gotta leave her alone.” You’re trying to understand but your eyes won’t focus. “My friend is pregnant,” you manage, then lie back on the bench a little too quickly. Ouch.
“Your friend, right. You gotta leave her alone. Understand?”
“Did she tell you her name? I need to . . .” You trail off, head swimming in blues, greens, purple, an underwater extravaganza.
“Listen, I don’t want to see you here again. Why not leave town? Think you can manage that?”
You manage a whisper. “Can I call a lawyer?”
“Cut it out, lady. We’re not holding you. You’re free to go.”
You let your head fall to the right and observe the other inhabitants of this, your holding cell. All are female, and several are sleeping flat on their backs on the floor, snoring loudly. The ladies who are not asleep stare at you like a meal they’d like to get to work on. This clears your head a little.
“What time is it,” you ask, remembering your early morning flight. You have a bag, somewhere, that needs packing. Bills that need paying. Lots of bills, probably.
The cop looks at his watch. “Two forty-five am. Shit, I need to get home.”
“Shit,” you agree.
_____
You’re lying on the cold tiles of an airport bathroom, half in and half out of one of the stalls. Your head is pounding, and women keep tripping over your feet, but no one offers to help. This makes you very sad, and this sadness is how you know you’re still a little drunk. You lean over the toilet bowl and puke forth a rainbow. It’s a relief. You’re glad to be here, checked in and past security, your carry-on bag wedged under one thigh. You can’t imagine how you managed all this. Maybe one of the ma’amers helped.
You soak a tee shirt at the sink and press it against the back of your neck, then crunch down an entire packet of Tums and two or three or four baby aspirin. Somehow you board your flight, but once you’re strapped in you can’t sit still for more than a breath or two. Your lower back spasms and aches. In your purse, tangled around your stolen uterus, you find a cherry-red silk scarf, an unusually appropriate birthday gift from your mother. For a moment you allow yourself to imagine a mother more like the mothers of your friends in high school and college, a mother you could count on at a time like this, a mother capable of providing something like useful advice, a mother who would have gone with you, just once, to visit your father’s grave instead of saying she simply couldn’t miss another hair appointment, and then you shake these thoughts from your head. You spread the scarf over your lap and reach underneath, under your skirt, past your underthings. There. Warm and pulsing, a smooth surface that gives to the touch. Something is crowning. Something that wants out. To be honest, you can’t blame it.
_____
You call Yost from the airport, but when you arrive, his office is locked and dark. You knock on the door. He opens it immediately, a solemn expression on his face. He offers you tea and you accept, but you ask if he would mind tossing out the old fruit piled on the table in back.
He shakes his head. “The womb loves the sweet smells, the strong smells, the smells of life. She moves toward them, you’ll see. I invite you once more into the examination room.”
“Is that necessary?” you ask. “I really just want to know if there’s anything you can do to stop it.”
“Stop it?” Yost presses his hands against the sides of his mug. “Oh no. You haven’t come here to stop it.” He chuckles and holds open the door. “I’ll be just outside.”
You have to turn sideways to squeeze into the room, which seems intended for no more than one person at a time. It’s hard to focus on anything but the smells. The little room is a riot of flowers, none of them quite fresh, each of them pumping its wild fragrance into the air so that it’s difficult to breathe. You sink into the recliner, soft and warm as a grandmother’s lap. Everywhere you look is jasmine, tiny white blossoms shouting their assertive scent. Both walls are lined with bookcases crammed not with books but with flowers, some potted, some in vases, some scattered around as if they’ve tried to make a run for it and failed. Framed prints hang here and there in a haphazard collage. Many are still lifes, and all involve fruit in one way or another. In the portraits, subject and artist alike have focused their attention on a magnificent piece of produce: a sensuous mango held aloft, for example, like Hamlet with his skull. A crowd scene, examined closely, reveals that the head of each passerby is an apple, or a melon, or a peach. Your lower back spasms in another contraction and you gaze up to the ceiling, painted a soft rose.
Yost is murmuring about ancient Greeks from the other side of the open door. “They spoke of the womb as an ‘animal within the animal.’ Or so it is usually translated. As such, she has a capricious tendency to wander into places where she doesn’t belong, causing all sorts of trouble for the woman’s health, intellectual capacities, and emotional well-being.”
“What kind of trouble?” The last word trails off into another contraction.
“The Greeks weren’t entirely wrong,” Yost says. “In certain circumstances, such as a difficult childbirth or too much heavy lifting, the womb can lose her footing.”
The smell of jasmine and the rot of papaya and mango from the next room have become nearly intolerable, but with every breath your belly trembles like a gymnast ready to leap.
“And also,” he continues, peeking around the door jamb, “though this next part is controversial in our modern world, she can misbehave when a woman goes too long without the benefit of marriage.”
“I was working on that.” You wait for another contraction to pass.
“At such times as this I have found it is best to let her come,” Yost says. “Rather than trying to intervene. And when she arrives, well, we will enjoy her together.” He nods toward the sewing basket. “Go ahead. Introduce yourself.” You open the basket and dig around until you find a mirror of polished silver with a handle in the shape of a snake. Yost giggles. “Like Eve with the serpent, yes? A little joke.”
“I’m not altogether comfortable with this,” you say.
“Take your time.” Yost leaves you with a cup of tea. There’s a metallic clattering from the next room, and a soft curse. You pick up the mirror and try to position it so that you can investigate the goings-on between your legs, but you can’t get the angle right. A cold sweat is gathering at the base of your neck. Another clatter. You draw your knees up to your chest so that you are performing a sort of a reclined squat in front of the heavy mirror, but still you can’t see a thing. You drop the mirror and reach both hands between your legs. Something swells to your touch like a cat.
A new sound from the outer office. Metal scraping against metal? You reach back into the sewing basket and pick up the speculum and forceps, which gleam back at you like an uncle making an inappropriate joke. You imagine them appearing in a hand, Yost’s hand, making their way toward your tenderest parts, which are throbbing now, aching for release. You badly want to stand, but you know that if you do stand things may begin to spill out, things that must remain inside. You place your feet carefully on the floor and push up on the chenille-covered arm of the chair, its fabric soft and bumpy against your palms, and there it is, a great shifting in your lower abdomen and a new weight against the soft tissues of your pelvic floor. But you know Kegels now, don’t you, and you tighten those muscles, you squeeze and fight the weight, holding it back. Outside, a distinct sound of cutlery rattling against china. Another soft curse, tinged with excitement. Supporting yourself on the back of the chair, the doorknob, you step into the doorway and peer into the outer office, where Yost is waiting.
“You should have drunk your tea,” he says.
You realize you’ve left your shoes and bag in the examination room. “It was a mistake coming here.”
Yost licks his lips and frowns. “You’re in no condition to leave this office. After she arrives, you can go.”
You’re too winded to argue. You squat down toward the floor and reach for the strap of your purse as you press your other hand against the swelling on the other side of your cervix. You stand back up and abandon your shoes as you make your way into the outer office. On the lopsided table in the outer room Yost has laid a place setting for one. One silver knife, one silver fork, one china plate. A red linen napkin has been starched, pressed, and folded into the shape of a flower. On the fluted-edged plate you see a delicate design traced in red on white: the shape of a womb. In his hand Yost is holding a long-handled silver carving knife.
“Call when you need me,” Yost says as you push past him for the door. “And Jeannine.” His breath warms your neck. “Don’t wait too long.”
_____
There’s a strange man standing outside your daughter’s door, leaning on the bell. He seems quite agitated, and he’s gripping a tattered black medical bag so tightly his startling large knuckles are bone-white. At his feet sits an old-fashioned picnic basket.
Could he possibly be a friend of Jeannine’s? Not likely. All her friends are young people in torn tee shirts and pajama pants. You stare him down until he takes a few steps back. He’s talking, talking, saying things you can’t be bothered to understand, ma’am this and ma’am that and what a very serious situation this is, and he’s starting to creep closer again until you brandish your bear spray. “If she wanted you in, sir, you’d be in,” you say, and, blocking his view with your body, punch a few numbers into the pad on the wall beside the door. Her birthday. Typical.
It was lovely to hear from Jeannine again, of course, and especially so soon after your argument about that Vegas trip, when she refused, again, to consider or even to listen to your advice about making and keeping the right kind of friends, but isn’t it just like her to wait until the very last possible moment to involve you in something important, when it’s almost too late for you to contribute or help in any way. You bustle into the kitchen and toss down the bouquet of lilies you brought along, already wilting, of course, nothing of quality to be found in Seattle, nothing at all. You’re going over what you remember of Jeannine’s words, and it’s all very fuzzy, but what you do remember for certain is that she actually wanted you to come for a visit, and she wanted you to come now. It’s about time, honestly. Maybe the two of you can get back on the right foot again.
But something is wrong. And it isn’t just the knock knock knock, bang bang bang on the door from the big fists of the strange man in the hallway. There’s no sign of Jeannine, no sign the apartment has been recently occupied—save for the mess, of course, always a mess—but there is a pervasive and deeply unpleasant smell, coppery rich, a smell that’s making you uneasy. Blood, is what it is. And as you turn to locate the bedroom, or what passes for a bedroom in a substandard dwelling such as this, and as you’re hearing something beneath the noise of the pounding on the door, a faint noise but not so faint you don’t recognize it as the voice of your daughter, calling for you, mom is that you, so weakly you can hardly hear it at all, mom I don’t . . . as all this is happening you step in something slippery and almost twist your ankle. Thank goodness for weekly senior Pilates; you’ve caught yourself. But now you’re on your hands and knees on the floor of your daughter’s kitchen, and you’re face to face with the blood.
And you notice another noise, another layer beneath the feeble pleas of your daughter and the bellowing ma’am ma’am ma’am from the man outside—a squeak, and a chitter. Rats? No, it sounds . . . wetter. You find yourself crawling along a trail of blood, a messy smudge about the width of your outstretched hand, leading across the floor of the obviously unused kitchen to a box of doughnuts, fallen to the floor, half open. How disgusting. But the lid of the box—is it moving, just slightly, as if in a faint breeze? There is no breeze in this apartment. You kneel and open the lid, and there, nestled among the crumbs and bits of crusty pink frosting, there she is, looking like nothing so much as a slick pink pear studded with wobbly appendages. You recognize her immediately, and can’t help but smile. There was never a chance to see yours, thrown out by the time the sedation wore off, and what a terrible waste. Gently you poke her surface, which is pleasingly firm and springy, but surely not as warm as it ought to be. She shrinks a little from your touch, but you take her in your hands, cradle her, nuzzle her with your lips as she chitters and shudders, trembling, molding herself against your cheek. She could use a bath, but you don’t mind. “Hush now,” you whisper to the precious bundle. Was that another squeak in response? You give her a kiss. “From now on, life will be sweet as candy.”
