Those of us who ascend the ashes of our shattered childhoods are not counted by social scientists or law enforcers or grant givers. This omission is not just a mystery; it’s an unwitting crime that tarnishes our self-esteem and slows our ascension.
BUT LET’S BE HONEST. THERE ARE FAR MORE PERSONAL MYSTERIES surrounding my childlessness, mysteries that contradict, confound, taunt. I never wanted children. Once a month, my hormones wanted them. And now, something deeper, more complicated, another inexplicable turn of the screw. A wild woman lurks inside me—one unfazed by rational thought and untouched by feminine cycles—who truly, madly, deeply desires them. Worse, the desire is acidified with regret. In middle age, when mortality becomes less abstract, in the ebb and flow of my life’s far-flung oceans, I am forced to admit that sorrow tugs at the watery edges. These are dark waters where nary a toe is dipped. The what-ifs are profound, unanswerable, unsafe. They open a door to a different eternity. When I gaze through it, I see a woman who is me but who is also not me, a woman whose reason for living is divided among beloveds she created. And then I wonder, can we exist simultaneously in two different stories?
I HAVE NEVER TAKEN A BIRTH-CONTROL PILL IN MY LIFE.
I wouldn’t know what to do with a rubber other than transform it into a water balloon.
I confuse the rhythm method with the Stanislavski method.
In my early twenties, responsible young woman that I was, I went to a gynecologist for an IUD. With my mom recently deceased but the damage she inflicted alive and bouncing, and as I tried to finish college even as professors ran amok, I figured anything could happen. Better safe than shattered.
When the male gynecologist looked at my chart and saw that I was a single woman seeking birth control, his eyes narrowed and his folksy demeanor hardened to stone. This was his professional persona, I told myself, and nothing more. Frightened but determined and a wee bit plucky, I placed my bare feet in the cold stirrups and thought, Giddy-up.
Within seconds, the man jammed a speculum into me with such force that I screamed. Upon the IUD’s insertion, my uterus convulsed in a wild, prolonged rhumba. As the pain climbed to twenty on a one-to-ten scale, he snapped, “There,” whipped off his latex gloves, and tossed them in the trash. “Get dressed. Go home.”
In the bathroom, while trying to change out of the cotton exam gown, I collapsed and called for help. The nurse cracked open the door, glanced in, told the doctor, “She’s curled up on the floor, groaning like a little pig,” and sauntered away.
Spiraled in a tight nautilus on the cold tile, I looked to the heavens for help. On the wall hung a poster depicting God’s hand reaching down through the clouds to touch a pregnant woman’s naked belly. Perhaps me lying on a disinfected floor below a rendering of the Almighty blessing a woman with child was God’s wrath made manifest. Perhaps my mother’s constant admonition that I was no damned good was simply her way of practicing honesty.
Eventually, my uterus still in revolt, I uncurled, pulled myself up, dressed, and stumbled out. As I passed the front desk, the staff glanced away. Mine was a different walk of shame.
THE IUD CAUSED ME TO BLEED SO PROFUSELY THAT FOR ONE week each month I could not leave my apartment. A different doctor ripped it out six months later, but to this day questions linger.
Is my childlessness luck or tragedy? Voodoo or science? Chaos or rational consequence?
And then the bitter pill: Did that man mark me?
ON THANKSGIVING MORNING 2018, WITH BLOOD SWIRLING in the bowl and staining the toilet paper, I know something is terribly wrong. Scared, I push away my reticence to seek medical help. I call the hospital and, despite my broken Spanish, get an appointment for the following day.
My husband and I spend the next twenty-four hours creating plausible excuses (I never tell him about various other anomalies that for the past two months I have hoped I was imagining): new skin cream upped my estrogen levels; the stationary bike is a bitch on the ol’ cootchy; it’s just one of those things that doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. No worries. I’m gonna live forever.
DOCTORA GARCIA IS TINY—MAYBE EIGHTY POUNDS—HER VOICE the timbre of Minnie Mouse’s, but she dives into the hidden nether regions of my anatomy with the zeal of a WWE wrestler. She discovers a polyp on my cervix and proceeds to excise it on the spot—no anesthesia, no sedative, just—in an impossibly high octave—Hang in there.
For the rest of the day, I’m trapped in a hailstorm of tests, questions, results. In Mexico, one doesn’t wait for weeks and months for prognostications and surgeries. They are delivered pronto. In this tormenta, this storm, I keep expecting good news because one of my great failings as a human being is my insistence on optimism. Each time a white sheet of paper with my future on it is passed my way, I expect Doctora Garcia to gaze at me with her steady black eyes and say, It’s nothing. Just one of those things. Go home. You’re A-OK, amiga.
But instead, by test number six, my husband and I are close to the unspeakable: cancer. My uterus is twelve times thicker than it should be. Marring the surface of an organ I never used for its intended purpose are islets of atypical cells. The tranquilo, whose job it is to roam the hospital and make conversation with patients and their families to ensure universal calm, spends a lot of time with me. His name is Casanova, and he reminds me of a Mexican Mr. Rogers—kind, peaceful, with a wry sense of humor. Amid aimless chitchat about his children, my dogs, the crazy things gringos do, Yucatán’s mind-boggling heat, I detect concern. My husband detects it, too. That’s why he clamps his arm around my shoulders—to hang on to me, to never let me slip away, to make sure I keep at it: tests, tests, tests. I cannot tell him that what I want more than anything is to float out of the hospital’s white walls and white noise and white glare back to my hammock under the ceiba tree, where disease and heartache do not exist.
IN THE DAYS LEADING UP TO MY SURGERY, I SPEND MANY more hours—worried mornings, frantic afternoons—at the hospital and am soon on a first-name basis with everyone from receptionists to housekeepers to doctors. They call me by my middle name, Anita, because my proper name, Constance, does not roll off their tongues with ease.
I love being addressed as Anita and am grateful, after a lifetime regretting it, that the nurse when I was born wrote down my name incorrectly: Anita instead of Oneida. No one pronounces Oneida (O-need-a) with certainty, and I am not one to readily correct mispronunciations. As with most things, I suffer silently, which might be what got me into this mess: negative thinking amid impotent optimism.
In the hospital’s antiseptic hallways, the incessant whine of jackhammers muffling whispered conversations and ringing phones, I grab random shards: the unexpected joy of being Anita, Casanova teasing that soon he will create a room just for me, the internist declaring me in excellent health other than my uterine turmoil, saying Hello and Good-bye and Nice to see you and Thank you and Have a good day in Spanish to the receptionists; Doctora Garcia bear-hugging me, which is quite a feat given her size, and kissing my cheek as I leave; her ordering me, Don’t worry!
But not worrying is impossible. Every chance I get, I pee and examine, looking for certainty, something that signals without equivocation You are going to live or You are going to die. I find only the hieroglyphics that the human body is so good at emitting, tea leaves composed of blood and urine and sloughed-off cells. If I am going to die, I think, I have to know soon because I have so much left to do. And this: You cannot die yet. You must still solve the riddle of your mad mother’s sadness lest your life be in vain.
I walk into the living room and announce to my husband, who is treating his fear with vodka and mango juice and endless episodes of American Pickers, “I have cancer. I’m dying.”
“You do not have cancer.”
That’s what I’m looking for: a declarative sentence that will solve at least one mystery. I sit down, grab the remote. I do not have cancer.
These games I play are deadly serious. I take no chances, not even with insects. Here,
on this tropical island, tiny heart-shaped flies loll away their brief lives in my bathroom. The reason for their apparent affection for my bathroom is easily solved via an Internet search for “heart-shaped flies.” According to Wikipedia, drain-fly larvae thrive unseen in my sink’s plumbing. Adult drain flies, if left to their own devices, have a life span of approximately twenty days. Once winged, they’re slow movers and, thus, easy pickings. Adjusted lifespan when I’m in the room? A few hours. Murder is a breeze. A paper towel and a firm palm. No guts. No blood. No bone. Only a smudge of black powder, as if the flies barely ever existed, as if time did not pulse between the spaces of that old utterance ashes to ashes.
But during my presurgery days, when I feel my mortality grow from shadow to substance, I allow them to live out their days undisturbed. No more paper towels casting the shadow of death. Kill one more fly and you die.
I worry, though, about the flies getting out of hand. Perhaps drain flies carry disease. Perhaps I’ll die not from cancer but from drain fly–itis. Because my husband’s mortality remains a gauzy spiral of smoke in the far-distant future, I ask him to do the deed. I know, karma-wise, that asking for a surrogate killer is iffy, but I’m desperate.
Okay, he responds, without asking why. But he never lifts a finger. Not a single fly dies by his hand. And I don’t ask again. Perhaps he, too, is taking no chances. As a result, my bathroom becomes a twenty-day-cycle flytopia.
One afternoon after yet another hospital visit, on our way to lunch, we pass the small Catholic cathedral in Centro. I shoot inside—not a priest in sight—and in the shadows and heat, lacking a to-go cup, I douse myself with copious handfuls of holy water. I step back into the bright Cozumelean sunlight looking like a deranged contestant in an over-fifty wet-T-shirt contest.
“What are you doing?” my husband asks, fear and bemusement etching his southern Indiana drawl.
“Insurance,” I mutter, wading into a herd of tourists so pitiful they wear balloon hats shaped like wiener dogs and pirate ships. Why they embarrass themselves so willingly is another mystery I’ll never solve.
TRUTH: ALL THREE OF MY MOTHER’S CHILDREN BEAR WOUNDS of her violence, scars of her psychological war games. Our bodies, spirits, behaviors occasionally betray the secrets we keep for her as we try in vain to become children she approves of, children she loves. We are, deep into adulthood, children who will do anything to protect her, even in the face of death, from a reckoning. Our goal our entire lives has been to make sure she never pays for her sins.
Maybe that’s why I’m childless. I cannot risk the possibility that the reckoning—the paying for sins not our own—might fall to them.
ONE OF MY EARLIEST MEMORIES IS OF MY MOTHER TELLING ME my brother had been dishonorably discharged from the army, that he was a coward who so feared military service that he pretended, while in basic training, to be a homosexual. She repeated this story until the day she died, trotting it out at Thanksgiving and Christmas and when neighbors stopped by for coffee cake and a smoke.
THERE WILL COME A TIME, A FUTURE POINT, POSTSURGERY, when I am aflame with multiple infections; when I am adrift in an obstinate, pelagic swath of unfathomable bad luck; when I will pray for healing to a god I’m not sure exists. This is when I will get a phone call informing me my brother is dead. My doctors will insist I am too ill to fly to Houston for his funeral. Multiple layers of grief and guilt will assail me.
I will hopscotch from my sickbed to the hospital and back again, and in the midst of my journeys my sister will phone, her voice cracking under the weight of heaving tears that buckle, crack, bellow. Our niece, she will explain, contacted Veterans Affairs to see whether they could help cover the cost of burying her father, who always bragged about his military service while my sister, mother, and I winced at his lies. My heart, amid my fevers, will seize. Oh, my God, she knows the truth. Her father the coward! How can we make this right? How can we soften the blow?
The VA, my sister will warble between sobs, told my niece it was obliged to offer various means of support, including funds to help bury her father, our brother, who served his country honorably, with distinction, for four years. He will receive a military funeral at the National Cemetery in Houston.
I, too, will cry, although tears will do little to help my brain comprehend cruelty and its echo. What mother spreads lies, especially such a despicable one, about her son? Why did she instill in us shame about our brother over a cowardice that, I will learn too late, never existed?
My sister and I will wonder if our brother knew about the lie. Did she spit it out in one of her rages? Did it curl back toward him through the grapevine? Did he believe the lie despite the truth because she insisted? Did he just keep going, a wounded wild animal determined to chase the light, hoping it would bleach the pain?
For my sister and me—the only two left standing—our pain will be the color of a cardinal’s wing, slicing open old wounds, thick scars, stashed memories, causing us to once again recoil from shadows, belts, hairbrushes, bruises, open palms, closed fists, lakes, sunlight at a certain angle, orange trees, cockroaches, sewing machines, voices accusatory and violent and dripping with lies—all those things from our pasts that we will never be able to set on a shelf, look at dispassionately, and muse, You know, it wasn’t so bad.
Because here’s the God’s honest truth: it was far worse than we ever owned up to.
WHICH LEADS TO ANOTHER MYSTERY: HOW DAMAGED ARE we? What will it take—one more truth from the past revealed—for either of us to turn that butter knife into a razor blade, our food into secret trash-can detritus, that fine day into a lightless cave?
I cannot escape what she did to me or the hollow despair I feel if I think too long about my solitude, how being childless ensures various forms of exile. Which was maybe what she was after all along: if she was mean enough, we would flee.
I HOLD A GLASS OF WATER IN ONE HAND, A PILL IN THE OTHER that will cause my uterus to dilate and cramp. The surgery is one day away. “I think we should make up fantasy children so that when people ask, we can lie.”
“Why?” My husband doesn’t take his eyes off his laptop.
“Because it’s the first thing people want to know. Both Mexicans and gringos. And answering always makes me feel bad.”
“How many do you want?” My husband glances up, unaware I have it all worked out, even details so fine they are like flagella on my brain.
“Two. A boy and a girl. They’re twins. Lydia is a research scientist working on cures for childhood diseases. Jack is a champion surfer living in Hawaii.”
“Really?”
I nod. “Yep.” I sip my water, set it and the pill on the side table. “The kids don’t visit often because they’re so busy. But that doesn’t mean we’re not a close family. We Skype every Sunday morning. Rain or shine.”
GINORMOUS, I BARELY FIT IN THIS ICEBERG OF A BRIGHTLY LIT operating room.
My medical team scurries and giggles and pushes Jurassic-sized pieces of equipment from the walls to my cadaver table, a table I am far too big for. The nurses, the techs, everyone: they are so tiny, tinier even than Doctora Garcia. Somehow—on the wings of some strange sedative, perhaps—I find myself no longer on a Caribbean island but in Jonathan Swift’s Lilliput, a giant at the mercy of diminutive, green-scrub-attired Lilliputians.
Fear is the only thing that comes close to matching my monstrous size. Maybe the sedative is producing a paradoxical effect and before long I will howl for release, as if I am a hysterical Gulliver staked to the ground by tight lengths of crisscrossed rope.
The anesthesiologist, wielding a syringe the size of my Hindenburg thigh, explains that he needs to give me a spinal block, that it’s going to hurt, that I have to curl into a ball so he can safely inject the needle, whose tip grazes the ceiling. He’s going to paralyze me. I will never walk again. Or breathe on my own again. I do as I’m told.
“No, no. I need you in a tight ball. Tight! Tight! When I say don’t move, that’s it, not a mus
cle.”
I don’t know what to do with these directions. How can I roll into the proper position if I’m not allowed to move? Lucky for me, half the village of Lilliput rushes to my aid. I weigh a thousand tons, and my bum the size of Jupiter eclipses most of the room, but none of the Lilliputians seem deterred. Though they don’t say it, I hear them. One, two, three, push! Over I go. The redwood log that is me is now perched on the edge of the cadaver table. I eye the descent. It is a long, long way down.
Despite the Lilliputians’ success in moving the redwood log to the precipice, the anesthesiologist is grumbly and furtive and about to lose whatever patience he was born with. Evidently, in my inflated state, I’m incapable of turning my body into a ball.
I’m about to cry, “I can’t do this. Please, let me go home!” when someone caresses my forehead and then my cheek with hands that are kind, gentle, assured, and nearly as big as Gulliver’s. “Like this, dear, make like you are a shrimp.” And the man to whom the hands belong softly laughs as he cradles me.
“He is your surgeon, Anita,” Doctora Garcia squeaks.
“You are going to be fine,” the surgeon says in a voice that inspires confidence in all of Lilliput, which eases my mind a tad because I could tell they were beginning to lose faith in me. “Come on, Anita, curl up like a little shrimp in the sea.”
With a few expert gestures, as if I am human origami, he folds my body in on itself. My muscles and ligaments and skeleton respond fluidly and without my permission. Given the circumstances, I’m okay with that.
“What a good little shrimp!” He laughs again—this guy personifies gusto—and holds me tight, keeping steady my shrimp pose while the anesthesiologist injects the skyscraper-sized needle into either side of my endless Swiss cheese spine so many times I lose count.
Private Investigations Page 6