by Tayari Jones
When the breast video started itself over, I opened my folder. Inside was a handwritten note from Dotty, the nurse-practitioner who handled all my routine care: 6/3: Left message on answering machine, informing patient of “hormonal imbalance.” Now, on the fifth of June, my stomach cramped, wrung like a wet dish towel. The quotation marks around the words “hormonal imbalance” seemed exaggerated, as if Dotty had announced “quote, unquote” before saying the words. It was like the things people say when they want to lie without committing perjury.
Before this, I’d liked Dotty. She was a tall, big-boned white woman who wore her stethoscope over a large flannel shirt and blue jeans. She liked to tell jokes with her hillbilly twang. She was the only health care professional who had ever made me feel at ease while naked and spread in stirrups. When she asked me questions about my sexual past and present, I told her the truth. Why would I lie to Dotty? We were almost friends.
When I’d gone in for my pregnancy test on Monday, I showed her my ring as she pumped the blood pressure cuff on my right arm. My fingers tingled and I was excited, talking way too loud. I giggled, explaining that my morning sickness had just lasted a week. The regular nurses, the ones who weren’t dressed like lumberjacks, glanced up from their paperwork, clearly annoyed.
Dotty handed me a paper cup. “Sounds like you’re a mama.”
“I know.”
I excused myself to the bathroom and returned holding the cup aloft, as if proposing a toast.
She left and I sat on the table wearing my paper robe and waited, swinging my bare legs. Dwayne had offered to come, but I let him off the hook, telling him that meeting my family was enough excitement for one week. I waited for him to insist, but he’d just laughed and accepted the reprieve.
True to her word, Dotty returned after only a few minutes, but her face was deliberately blank, like she’d pulled down a shade.
“Aria, we want to take some blood, okay?”
“Okay,” I said slowly. “But what about my pregnancy test?”
“It was inconclusive. We really need to draw blood before we can know anything for sure.”
“Come on, Dotty,” I said. “What do you think is wrong?”
“It’s inconclusive. I can’t really say.”
“But, Dotty, you can tell me something. You’re a doctor.”
Dotty sat down at the computer and tapped the keys. She didn’t look at me. “Aria, I’m just a nurse-prac. You’re really going to need to see the M.D.”
I recognized her tone. She was setting boundaries of the clear and firm variety. My pregnancy was not a personal matter between the two of us. She didn’t owe me any sort of explanation. Dotty was here to do her job, which she had done. No matter how it may have felt before, we were not friends.
“Dotty,” I said, making myself clear and firm too, “you cannot just send me away like this.”
She pulled a green page from the printer. “Take this to the lab. There’s really nothing to say until we get your blood work.”
That was last week. Two days ago she’d spoken to my answering machine, as though leaving a message for a stranger.
Once again Dwayne had offered to come with me. This time he’d insisted when I said no. “If there is something wrong with our baby,” he said, “I want to be there.”
“What would you do if you were there?”
“Be there for you.”
I shook my head. “I’ll give you a full report when I get back.”
Sitting alone in the waiting room, I regretted my decision to come alone. I surprised myself by not wishing for Dwayne. I wanted Hermione, bad and brassy, ready for anything. I could imagine her sitting beside me, smelling of orange hand cream. This is not a problem, Aria. I longed even for Keisha with her frank experience. Don’t worry, Miss Aria. People get pregnant every day. And I knew that they would be right. But I still could not break free of a premonition of doom. A sick feeling that started in my stomach, traveled up to my chest, and burned there.
A nurse emerged three times, calling names. When she finally called for me, I said, “Not yet.”
“Pardon?”
The robust woman beside me sighed and flipped through the pages of her pregnant-lady magazine.
The nurse weighed me, stuck something in my ear to read my temperature, took my blood pressure, and refused to answer any of my questions. “You’ll have to wait and speak with the doctor,” she said over and over. Finally she indicated that I should walk down the tiled hallway to room seven.
“Can I talk to Dotty?”
“Dotty is not here today. Your appointment is with the gynecologist.” Then she shoved me into the small room.
Room seven was an ordinary examining room. In the center of the space was the examination table; tasseled golf club covers stretched over each stirrup. The walls were decorated with posters that reminded you in a nonthreatening way that unprotected sex is how you get VD. I sat on an uncomfortable chair to wait for the doctor.
From the other side of a door painted purple, a big voice said, “In here.”
It had not come from a big man. Theodore Blackwelder was a little old white gentleman, dressed to the nines in a French-cuffed shirt and yellow and blue bow tie. His desk, an antique rolltop, belonged in a movie where the actresses wore dresses with bustles. Besides the desk, two chairs, and Dr. Blackwelder himself, the room was empty save several boxes of rubber gloves, syringes, and K-Y lubricant.
He walked across to greet me in his stocking feet; empty penny loafers peeked from under the beautiful desk. “Ariadne?” His amethyst cuff links shone under the fluorescent lights as he extended his hand.
“I go by Aria,” I said. “Like in opera.”
“Yes,” he said, straightening his yellow and blue bow tie. “That’s right. Do you like opera? I do, but my wife can’t abide it. So we compromise by going to the symphony.” He opened a folder and took out a couple of pages.
Dr. Blackwelder asked me a few questions about myself: what did I do for a living, where was I from, how did I manage to get rid of my accent, all of that. I knew he wasn’t really interested, that he was just trying to make me comfortable. I kept my answers short and rubbed my sandals against the fraying carpet. After nodding a couple of times at my monosyllables he told me a little bit about himself: he was from Cincinnati, had been in Georgia ten years after he retired from private practice, had a granddaughter my age, etc. Taking a deep breath, he pulled his desk chair from behind the rolltop so that he and I were close enough to touch. He rubbed his shock of white hair. It was time to get down to business.
“You came in a couple of days ago, complaining of amenorrhea?”
“No,” I said. “I came Monday for a pregnancy test.”
“Yes, but you said you had been missing periods? That was one of your symptoms, yes?”
I nodded.
“That’s what amenorrhea is,” he explained. “So we did some blood work to see what the problem was.” Now he handed me the pages he took from the folder. “These are your hormone levels.”
The page was divided into three columns. The first was a list of unfamiliar words. Beside the words were numbers. The last column said “OK” or it said nothing. Almost everything was marked “OK,” except two. I turned my eyes from the sheet and focused my attention on my shoes in an effort to relax myself enough to breathe normally. My lunch rose from my stomach to the back of my throat.
“Is something wrong with the baby? There’s Down syndrome on my father’s side.”
“See the line that says ‘FSH’?” He touched the page.
“Yes,” I said without looking.
Dr. Blackwelder scooted back to his desk and flipped through an orderly stack of papers. “There was a diagram here, but I can’t find it. Never mind. I can just explain it to you. The brain sends out FSH when it wants to tell your ovaries to release an egg. Your brain did just that. But the ovaries didn’t do it. So your brain let out more. Your brain’s yelling at the top of its lungs
. It took out an ad in the Times. You’ve got thrice what’s normal for your age. Understand?”
“No, sir.”
He rubbed his chin. “So next we checked your estrogen. We need to see how much the ovaries are putting out. See it there.”
I said, “Yes,” again even though I wasn’t looking.
“Well, your estrogen is so low that we can’t even count it. Understand?”
“I understand what you just explained, but I don’t think I understand what it means.”
Dr. Blackwelder crossed his arms over his immaculate shirt and said, “In medical school we say this: when you hear the clatter of hooves outside of your window, it could be zebras, but it’s probably horses. Understand?”
“No.”
“That means that there are certain symptoms that almost always point to a certain diagnosis. When we see numbers like these, it generally indicates one thing.”
The quaver in his voice is what scared me; it was just a little hitch, like a damaged record. My throat seized shut and I couldn’t swallow the water that accumulated in my mouth. Female problems could kill you. Even if they didn’t, it implied something nasty. It was the sort of problem that you spoke about only in embarrassed whispers. Whatever was wrong with me was the sort of thing that could make a doctor’s voice crack.
“Premature ovarian failure.”
I shook my head.
“In people your age we call it premature ovarian failure. But most people call it menopause.”
I released the air that swelled my lungs. “That’s it?”
Dr. Blackwelder shook his head. “You don’t understand, do you? This means that you will be unable to bear children.”
His language was so stilted, he seemed to be speaking from the Bible, or maybe from God himelf. It sounded more like prophecy than a medical assessment. Then Dr. Blackwelder startled me by lifting my hand from my lap. “I’m so sorry, Ariadne.”
“No,” I said. “That’s impossible. I’m twenty-five. I had morning sickness.”
Dr. Blackwelder still held my hand. “Morning sickness, or were you just sick in the morning?”
I shook my head.
“Coincidence, most likely. Something you ate. A bug?”
“No.”
“Precocious menopause is very rare. . . .”
His use of my mother’s word is what convinced me. I pulled my hand from his and used it to cover my face while the awful weight of truth pressed over me.
Leaving the doctor’s office, I handed my parking ticket to the attendant, who opened the gate without charging me. I couldn’t believe that I had been in the office less than an hour, that it took only around forty-five minutes for my life to be changed so completely. I took the city streets, feeling too unstable for the quick and cutthroat expressways. Stopping for traffic lights, I thought about myself and how stupid I’d been. A sensible person, Rochelle, for example, would have taken a home pregnancy test first. I hadn’t because I was convinced that I knew my body. Now I couldn’t even take the expression seriously. What did it mean, to know your body? This was a phrase that I’d picked up from women’s magazines and television talk shows. I’d been living in this body twenty-five years and it was a stranger to me. I had gone through the Change and hadn’t even seen the signs. Dr. Blackwelder said that it was easy enough to miss, that my body had been responding to the years of birth control pills I’d swallowed, taking its cues from the synthetic hormones. But still, a person who knew her body should have known that something was seriously wrong. I felt like an idiot, like the wives who are always the last to know.
Despite everything, I taught my late class that afternoon. I considered taking the rest of the day off; the thought crossed my mind as I waited at a light on MLK. I could take a sick day, go home, and cry. But the idea of sitting alone in the house or sitting on the porch watching the crackheads made me even more unhappy, so I went on to LARC. At least there would be people there.
When I pulled into the driveway, I was relieved enough to weep. This was one of the benefits of teaching literacy, of do-gooding in general. It takes your mind off your own troubles. How could I worry that my eggs are all gone, that I have to tell my fiancé that we’re not pregnant and never will be? How can I worry what my mother will say when I spend my days with young girls who could as easily go to jail as go shopping? How can I, a college-educated person with an above-average vocabulary, a person who eats every day and enjoys full health benefits including eye and dental, feel sorry for myself when talking to a teenager who can’t even read? I work six-hour days, four days a week, and she works eight hours, six days, assembling submarine sandwiches. So how can I be sad? How dare I weep about my ruined ovaries?
The GED was in less than a month, so class attendance was fairly high and consistent. A couple of dropouts had quietly resurfaced. Early in the session we had spent our time reading poetry and talking about feelings, but during the final month I taught for the test and they learned for the test. It was boring, reading passages culled from instruction manuals for electronic devices; passages explaining the migratory patterns of certain South American butterflies. But this was the sort of thing that would be on the test, and this is what they were going to need if they were going to get their certificates.
I dimmed the light and clicked on the overhead projector. In the dark, with the door closed and the shades down, I was aware of the room’s narrow dimensions. It was silly, really, to think that an old house could be converted into a school just because Lawrence decided to use it that way. Idealistic and silly. This room was not a classroom. Where was the chalkboard and the pull-down map of the world? This was a bedroom and a small one at that. We were eleven people crammed into metal desk chairs, which were then all crammed into a guest bedroom. What did we really think we were accomplishing here? To teach students this far behind you needed computers, current hip textbooks. Hell, you needed a real teacher. Not just me and Rochelle, people hired for our “energy.”
I heard myself asking for a volunteer to read a passage beamed onto the white bedsheet used as a projection screen.
Keisha raised her hand and read carefully in her strong voice. She read slowly, considering each word, reading the way people read when they can’t really read. “The” became thee and “a” was pronounced ay. Thee butterflies nest in ay tree. “Calling words” is how teachers described this. Not reading, just calling words. No inflection whatsoever.
The noise of her voice irritated me. I gritted my teeth with every syllable, her accent so slow it was almost bovine. I looked at the ceiling at each thee and ay. Keisha was somebody’s mother. All of the girls in this classroom either had children or had the potential to do so. Some of them were pretty with shiny eyes and glossy hair. A few were ugly with their bad skin and discolored lips. No matter, though, no matter what they looked like, no matter what they had done, their bodies were young and fertile, teeming with eggs, soggy with estrogen.
I asked Keisha to stop her reading. Told the class to write the main ideas in their own words. “Please,” I added.
Then I was bothered by the noise of their movements. All of them seemed to be wearing silver bracelets or multiple pairs of gold earrings. Their acrylic nails ticked together as they guided their pens across lined paper. The din was like every religious noise I have ever experienced or heard of. Like rosary beads clicking, the clanging of finger cymbals, the drone of church bells.
I turned away from them and wondered how a person knew if she was having a nervous breakdown.
Was I the only one in the world to ever notice that illiterate teenage girls under the supervision of the court smelled like candy? That they seemed to have a penchant for aromatic bubble gum? Did the smell of them make everyone nauseated, or was it just me?
I went to the window and jerked the green shade, sending it snapping onto its spool. I pushed up on the painted wood of the window frame, straining, using the heels of my hands, but the window stayed put.
“The win
dows are nailed shut, Miss Aria,” Keisha said. Like on the first day of class, she spoke for the group.
“But that’s a fire hazard,” I said. “It’s against the law.”
The ten girls shrugged in what seemed to be a unified motion.
I willed myself to turn around and face them, to smile and do my job. I thought of my mother, back at the Institute just two days after the funeral. “The blind children need my help,” she’d said. “Did you think they’ve all learned to see?”
I released the window, rubbing my sore hands together. With closed eyes I breathed in the fruit punch and sour-apple air, swallowing hard against the vomit rising in my throat.
“Let’s turn on the light,” I said. “Open the door and get some air.”
With the lights on they scribbled in their workbooks. I usually walked among them, pointing out errors or offering little pats of encouragement. But today I sat in my metal chair with my arms crossed over my chest and my legs folded hard at the knee. I stared into the four-bulb fixture wondering if I was blinding myself, then wondering if it mattered.
There are certain concepts that you shouldn’t think about when things go wrong. Fairness is one of them. You can’t think about what you do and don’t deserve. Hermione told me this years ago. “That’s how you go crazy. Look at Mama. And anyway, who told you life was going to be fair?” I know that question is supposed to be rhetorical, but everyone tells you that the world is fair, or at least they let you know that it is supposed to be. All the work we did here at LARC and even my mother’s work at the Institute. All that talk about leveling playing fields. That was about fairness. But what Hermione meant was that only a fool believes that she will get what’s coming to her. That she will get only what she deserves.