“But you do know you’re supposed to have a Pap test every year?” Her weariness colors her voice.
“I kept meaning to, but I kept forgetting. And there’s no cancer in my family, anyway.”
This isn’t true. Her mother’s melanoma started between her toes. Her father had prostate surgery.
“Well, you’ll have to promise me to take the test from now on. You’re much too young to take such a risk when a yearly check-up – with anyone, it doesn’t have to be me – is so easy.” And Fernanda sees now, that despite her fatigue, Dr. Korin enjoys her work. Which makes her obscurely happy. She wants to admire this woman.
“Are you sexually active?”
“I haven’t been until recently.”
It feels fresh and satisfying to be able to say another thing that’s true.
The doctor looks up from the clipboard expectantly.
“I’ve, um, met someone … and we were kind of talking about kids someday, which made me think it might be time to come in for an exam. You know. Just to check and make sure everything’s alright.”
The doctor returns to the clipboard without comment and unthinkingly, worries an earring.
“I see here you got your period when you were almost thirteen. Can you recall if you had unusual cramps when you were a teenager?”
Now there’s a question. Has Fernanda been a teenager?
She answers candidly.
“I don’t really remember.”
“You don’t remember?” The doctor makes a note. “I suppose if you don’t remember, they can’t have been too bad. You’d remember if they were.”
She smiles as she reaches for a pencil from the bristling leather cup on her desk.
“But you’re only – what?” she checks her chart again – twenty-six? That’s young these days. Why are you thinking of getting pregnant?”
“No, no. I have a career I dearly love. In the art world. I’m not talking about right now. We were just kind of playing with the idea. Thinking down the road.”
“I’m glad of that. Your life is all ahead of you. You can certainly wait.”
Fernanda looks down at the carpet.
Dr. Korin stands. “So, okay …” she looks down at the chart, ‘Fernanda,’ let’s get you into an examining room.”
A thickset nurse materializes in the doorway and leads her down an unnervingly quiet hallway to a stark white room that’s even smaller than the office she’s just left: smaller, if that’s possible, than her cubicle at the auction house. On the wall over the examining table there’s a photo of a bright-gold tulip. Handing Fernanda a flowered cotton gown, the nurse instructs her to undress completely and leaves, quietly closing the door. She fingers the gown. Memories of that hair appointment and the Totum Dependeat flare and fade away: she isn’t looking forward to getting undressed and putting on a robe this afternoon. The air in the room feels uncomfortably cold, anyway. She looks toward the window. Air conditioning. Half-heartedly, she unbuttons her cardigan and tugs off her jeans. The lights in here are harsh. She kicks off her heels and, unhooking her bra, feels goose pimples blossom on her arms and on her thighs. Now she steps out of her underpants and, as she does so, she looks down. Is that her belly button sticking out? (It’s such an alien belly button – the old one was an innie.) She deposits her clothes in an anxiously tidy pile on a cold metal chair and clutching the much-laundered gown tight around her, its opening to the back as she’s been instructed, Fernanda perches on the examining table’s edge and faces the door. It’s so cold. And the tissue table-covering makes the tiniest tearing sound as she shifts on it awkwardly, not wanting it to rip. To her right, the stirrups glitter cruelly and wait.
Gynecological Hell yet again.
Two soft raps as the door opens inward.
“Ready?”
“Ready.”
Fernanda inhales.
Dr. Korin, looking vaguely refreshed, as if she’s just rinsed her face, pads into the room and plucks up a pair of latex gloves.
“Lie down, Fernanda. Put your feet in the stirrups.”
Reluctantly, so slowly, she complies.
“Spread your knees. No, wider. Wider. Just try to relax.”
Relax. She’d like to, but the inner muscles of her thighs have tensed, all of a sudden, and they feel like they’ve locked halfway. Struggling to control the shivering, she squints into the high, cruel lights. One of the bulbs blinks on and off. As the doctor pries her knees further apart, Fernanda fights not to slam her thighs together on that all that icy jelly, those uncaring latex gloves. She turns her face to the wall and breathes deep. She feels the instruments she dreads. They’re sliding into her now.
It hurts. It hurts! She tries to pull away.
The doctor’s mild head appears at the side of one leg.
“I’m sorry, Fernanda.” She seems concerned. “Is it that painful?”
“I’m sorry. No. No. Go ahead.”
But it is.
One gloved hand presses down on her belly above her pubic bone while the other does terrible, terrible things within her. She wants to scream. She feels flayed.
“Just another couple of minutes.” There’s a new urgency and harshness to the doctor’s voice. “This will all be over soon.”
She holds her breath, groans, then holds it again. But it isn’t over. It goes on and on and on as time rewinds, as the fluorescent bulb grows still, as the yellow tulip wilts. As Fernanda moans and clutches at the table’s sides, until, at last – oh God, at last – the doctor is back on her feet and peeling off her gloves. She takes half a step to a stainless-steel bin and tosses them in.
“We need to do a sonogram now, Fernanda. You know what that is, don’t you? It doesn’t hurt.”
Fernanda knows. It doesn’t hurt.
She eases herself off the table and stands up, childishly grateful for this moment’s reprieve, for a walk to any another room.
Where she stretches out to have her sonogram.
Which doesn’t hurt.
“Get dressed now, dear, “Dr. Korin says. “I’ll meet you back at my office.”
Eternally grateful, Fernanda sits up and, gathering the skimpy robe close around her body, snatches up a box of tissues, hurriedly wipes the sticky gel away, and, swinging her legs to the floor, crosses the hall to the examining room. She dresses so much faster than she’d undressed. She’s feeling more and more herself with each piece of clothing she puts on, but even then, she’s anxious – madly anxious – to go home.
The corridor outside disorients her, though. Which way is Dr. Korin’s office? A nurse she hasn’t seen before points her to the door.
Dr. Korin is typing and doesn’t look up.
“Hi, again, Fernanda. Have a seat while I finish this.”
The office feels so much less cozy, somehow. Less warmly lit, too, perhaps. But then, the day is getting on, Fernanda realizes, checking the window. Shadows are rounding the corners of the doctor’s little room. They’re beginning to cloak the undersized desk where she’s finished, at last, and is sitting quite still, absently stroking the length of her ballpoint pen. Fernanda catches the name on the side: Relievia. Right on the button, for sure. Dr. Korin rolls it between her palms and searches her face.
“Are you here alone today?”
“Yes, I am.”
“And where are your parents, Fernanda?”
No one – not in all these months – has asked her that.
“Uh, my parents are gone. About three years ago. An auto accident. They think my dad had a stroke at the wheel.”
Which is perfectly true, except it happened in 1977.
“Oh, I’m so sorry.” She does look sorry, Fernanda thinks, and now that this is all over, she’s glad the appointment was with her. She’s as nice as Courtney said.
“I’d have liked you to have someone with you now, because I have something … difficult … to say.”
“Something difficult? What do you mean?” Fernanda asks. “Is there something wrong?
Have you found something wrong with me? An STD?”
She’s always hated coming here. How could she forget?
The doctor’s eyes grow tired once again. She’s focusing on something in the shadows now, something behind her and beyond. They return to Fernanda reluctantly.
“You’re sure there’s no one who can be with you?”
“No,” she answers flatly. “No one. You’re scaring me, you know.” If her lips didn’t feel full of Novocaine, she’d smile.
The doctor opens a drawer, sets the pen inside gently, closes the drawer and leans forward, her forearms on her desk, hands folded.
“Fernanda, have you been having your period?”
Her period.
That’s peculiar. Yes, she’s had light periods since she’s been Fernanda, lasting a day or two. Or less, maybe. Or more. She isn’t sure. But then, she hadn’t had an actual period in decades, which may be why … So if she’d thought about it at all, she’d chalked it up to the running. Or maybe she’d been menopausal for so long she’s forgotten how it used to be. This is why that box of Tampax has lasted so long, she thinks.
“Not really.”
“Well, now we know why.”
“What do you mean? Why?”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing, my dear, and I don’t even know how to put this to you. But your reproductive organs are … unusual.”
Fernanda feels herself leaving this room, this office, this earth, but she seizes on that word before she’s lost.
“Unusual? How do you mean unusual?”
She tries to picture “unusual” internal organs
“Well …” the doctor’s eyes fix on her desk blotter and Fernanda follows her eyes. Who uses a blotter anymore?
Dr. Korin gathers herself. “Not your vagina, Fernanda, but your womb. Your womb and your internal organs are those of a post-menopausal woman. I don’t know how, but somehow – despite your actual age – your womb and fallopian tubes are the organs of a woman in her sixties. Or even older. A woman well-past her child-bearing years.”
Within Fernanda, worlds spin, they wheel, they dissolve.
“I’ll have to check the literature, because this is such an anomaly. I’ve never even read about such a thing. A type of localized progeria, maybe? In any case, I can scarcely believe this, even though I’ve seen it just now.”
The doctor picks up Fernanda’s clipboard and scans it once again.
“I’m sorry to tell you this, my dear,” she says quietly, “but I’m afraid you’ll never be able to have children.”
CHAPTER 18
Afterwards, in her apartment, Fernanda finds a box cutter and, yanking her dresses and skirts from her closets two at a time, she hacks each thing to shreds. Her high-heeled shoes ricochet off the freshly lacquered walls and polished floors, leaving angry, long, black streaks wherever they touch. Wrenching open the cabinet doors in the kitchen, she grabs handfuls of dishes and cups and hurls them at the many-too-many mirrors in this misbegotten penthouse. Panting, coughing, and out of breath at last, she rushes into the bathroom, gathers up every jar and bottle she can find and slings them all into the marble tub, where, in heaps, they shatter and spew and stink. Coldly, then, she walks to her beautiful living room and turns the face of each Mother and Child to the wall.
At noon, next day, making her second mindless circuit of the Conservatory Water, Fernanda collides with two baby strollers in a row. The mothers are huffy. Justifiably so, and she’s genuinely contrite. But it’s more than she can bear just now. She doesn’t want to see babies. Anybody’s babies. She just wants to run away.
There’s a mean wind in the park now, too, an unseasonable wind. And she hasn’t bothered with a scarf or hat, but she really doesn’t care. With one cold, bare hand she flicks away her streaming hair and blinks watery, puffy eyes. She needs a baby-free piece of path.
Fernanda didn’t sleep the night before. Disgusting scents seeped from behind the bathroom door: creams, perfumes, her own mutinous, liquid bowels. She lay sprawled across her messy bed until dawn, touching her belly, now and then. Her breasts. Shiny Fernanda Turner, she thought to herself – perfect in every respect. She felt her flat stomach again and yet again. Nothing there to feel, really. She pressed it once more. It stayed taut and smooth and perfect and healthy and young. Except for her reproductive organs. If you count those.
She was thirsty all night too. She kept stumbling out of bed in the dark to gulp glass after glass of tepid water from the tap. No turning on the bathroom light. She didn’t need to see the destruction in the tub or, more particularly, the face in the spectacularly splintered glass of the medicine chest. Burrowing down under the covers as the sun began to rise, she turned her face to the pillow and let the suffering come.
And yet, out here in the park, she’s stone. She wishes for last night’s tears, because she needs release. A purgative cleanse.
But all that emerges is fury. An unbearable fury that scours her eyes and strangles sobs. But she can vomit up her rage, she finds. Which is why, down on her knees in the wintry park, Fernanda chokes and gasps and retches while the hot tears of suffering bite her dry and thirsty eyes. No one’s around to see her here on her knees. Only the distant mothers now. Mothers, she thinks enviously. Girls, really. She sucks deeply at the air, but finds she can’t catch her breath. Are her lungs old, too? Her liver? Her heart?
Her heart. Oh, yes indeed. That’s old.
She needs water. Last night’s thirst has returned.
Stumbling and slipping down the asphalt path, she finds a working fountain and drinks. Her mouth is all cottony and swallowing is hard. Tipping her head back to help it go down, she tries to lose herself in a tarnished, dismal sky. Her breathing and anger ease up, a bit, and Fernanda pivots to the emptied pond, just a muddied mat of leaves looking nothing at all like its sweet, midsummer self. This skeletal pond in this vast and barren park.
Noticing a wooden bench nearby, she drops upon it and gathers her coat around her legs – gathers up the pain.
Why hadn’t she expected it? Stanley’s death ought to have warned her.
She slides to one end of the bench and jams her numbed hands deep into her coat pockets. Finding a red Lifesaver there, she slips it absently into her mouth. It doesn’t kill the taste of gall.
She needs to talk to Randi.
And first thing this morning, she did try to find her. But there are at least two thousand beauty parlors in Manhattan, and none of them are called The Hair House.
But wait.
Wasn’t Randi supposed to have worked with Victoria’s Secret models? Maybe.… ?
Fernanda swallows the Life Saver whole.
She adjusts her coat, buttons it up to the neck and pulls the collar tight. And now that she’s still, the cold feels even more fierce.
Call some modeling agencies and ask? But what kind of business would give that information to a stranger on the phone? And then, too, she thinks, feeling shrewd, maybe the Victoria’s Secret models have made their own deals with Randi. How else could they look like they do?
Like I do.
Restlessly, Fernanda gets to her feet and goes to find a warmer spot.
She could try casinos.
But gambling isn’t legal here.
A loathsome thought takes her by surprise: Did Arlene make her own deal? In exchange for Fernanda, perhaps?
“Fuck you, Randi”, Fernanda screams at the empty park in a voice so shrill it echoes off the bowl of the pond and trembles in the air. She looks around, but the park’s as deserted as it was before. The mothers have gone. There aren’t even the usual dog walkers.
She unbuttons her coat and hollers furiously at the sky, “Goddamn you, Randi. Goddamn you!”
Tinny music. Someone singing Gilbert and Sullivan. Or rap, maybe. Then a pungent, pleasant, smell. Pine Sol. Marijuana.
And then a ravishing Randi is nonchalantly making herself comfortable right beside her on the lonely bench. She smirks and casually flips her lu
xuriant mane. A brazen mirror of Fernanda’s own, it cascades over and down behind her on the slatted green back. Luxuriously, Randi inhales a joint, blowing neat little smoke rings up toward the sky.
“Want a puff?” She holds the roach out to Fernanda.
Who is suddenly unable to speak again, but she forces the words through her teeth.
“I don’t want anything from you.”
Involuntarily, however, she’s somehow on her feet and spewing words. She’s choking on hundreds of vile and loathsome words, until, finally, she pukes some of them up. Words. Violent and fierce and inadequate.
“Murderer! Fiend! Cunt! Bitch! You’re obscene. A sadistic, contemptible cheat. First you kill my husband, then you kill my … you kill my … Me!”
Randi’s candy-apple lips glisten in the pewtery light: they curl and turn up at the corners, ever so slightly, and blue smoke trails from her nostrils. She doesn’t speak.
“Why didn’t I expect it? I know, I know.” Fernanda screams. “Because you’re an animal. And I’m your prey. And gullible. You counted on that …”
Randi interrupts her mid-scream,
“And what? You’re surprised?”
With a glossy black fingernail she flicks some pigeon droppings from the sleeve of her black Chanel suit, then licks her finger off. The suit jacket is trimmed at the collar and cuffs with perfectly matched, perfectly graduated, human molars.
“No. I’m not surprised anymore.” Fernanda says, struggling for calm, “Yesterday, okay. Yesterday I was shocked. Frantic. Although I shouldn’t have been, I suppose. You’d said you were a ‘gatekeeper,’ a servile seducer of souls. But everything seemed to be going so well, I let myself forget.”
“So stupid. I see that now. Amazingly stupid and slow. But there’s something I really need to know, Randi. My medical condition. Is that in our contract somewhere? Did I miss the fine print?
“Ah, dear Fernanda. Or is it Frannie? I have to apologize. I was told to give you a little case of chlamydia. You know – just to kid around? But something fluky in your immune system …” She examines the tip of the joint, which doesn’t burn and doesn’t create an ash, before she looks up at her, wide-eyed. “Well, it was a kind of an accident. Mrs. A. has accidents now and then. Not many, but a few. Richard III was one. Richard Pryor. Richard Nixon. She probably has a thing about Richards. But she never actually intended to spoil your big important baby thing.” Randi looks a little uncertain. “I think.”
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