by Leah Hampton
Iva didn’t answer. Margie stared at her, but Iva kept her eyes on Mrs. Pickering, whose thin blouse, which looked like a daffodil, rippled as the old woman exhaled.
“My husband did,” the old woman said. “Died of lung cancer. Never smoked a day.”
“But he had benefits,” said Margie. “Y’all were better off than if we’d been a coal town.”
Stewie Pifer, Margie’s husband, was the director of planning at Twitchell Chemical, the biggest employer in the county. Margie defended the company even after they got in trouble for all those EPA violations, even after they dumped eighty thousand gallons of corrosive slurry into Jubal Creek and poisoned twenty farms downriver. No one in the county drank from their own wells anymore.
Queensport and Twitchell were not special. Similar plants, and similar spills, abounded in the region, hidden up old logging roads, behind bribes. There was some talk of groundwater testing, a few settlements paid out. A film crew from the university tried to make a documentary. Not much else.
“Oh, my, yes,” said Mrs. Pickering. “Coal is another thing altogether.”
“Tourism’s just as important, though, Margie,” said Iva Jo. “Tourism’s the future.”
“But Twitchell’s the last one standing. We can’t all be kayaking instructors. People have got to have real work.”
“Iva, what exactly is the trouble?” said Mrs. Pickering. “Pastor Rob didn’t tell us.”
“They’re still figuring that out,” said Iva Jo.
“Menopause,” said Margie. “It’s just the menopause, is all she’s got.”
“Ah,” said Mrs. Pickering. “Don’t you fret, now.” She patted Iva’s hand. “The Change is just terrible, but in the end, praise Jesus, you’re free.”
“Why go through it?” said Margie. “Do like me and get the hysterectomy. Best thing I ever did. I’ve been telling her. Be done with the whole mess.”
“I’m going to see Dr. Philip this week,” Iva Jo said.
“Well,” said Mrs. Pickering, “I didn’t go that route. Either way, you ought to find yourself a lady doctor. A female.”
“She’d have to go all the way into Knoxville then,” said Margie.
“Don’t let a man cut you up,” said Mrs. Pickering. She shook her head, squinted again. “They always want to cut. Get yourself somebody who understands a bit better.”
The line had slowly advanced, and someone handed Mrs. Pickering a plate of cookies and offered to find her a seat. She took her leave and squeezed Iva Jo’s wrist. “You hang in there, honey. It’s just like giving birth. Just breathe full and ride it out.”
Margie bit her lip and watched Mrs. Pickering dodder off. She handed Iva a paper cup full of watery coffee and pulled her by the arm into the church hall. “She’s forgetful. That’s all.”
“Oh, I don’t mind.”
Iva knew Margie and her friends talked about her. They counted her miscarriages for years and told each other Iva Jo Hocutt puts on a brave face, that Hank Hocutt was a good man for sticking around. She never told anyone it wasn’t something she mourned. Every time she’d lost a baby, relief had washed over her, warm and keen. Hank had never pushed the subject. Iva felt, at least on that one score, at least sometimes, like the luckiest woman in town.
“I’m so fortunate; I know that.”
“Amen,” said Margie, and held Iva’s fingers in her own.
They sat at a plastic folding table near a narrow window and drank their coffee.
“I should do something for that Russian girl,” she said. “The one who helped me. She was from Blue Sunshine. I should drive out there.”
Iva knew the Russian girl was Russian because on the day of the picnic she’d seen her get off the Blue Sunshine Camp bus and herd a bunch of little ones toward the “Arts 4 KIDZ!” exhibits. The children had bounded toward a face-painting table in a haphazard stream, and the Russian girl and her colleagues had sighed and wiped their foreheads and looked for shady places to be alone.
Blue Sunshine Camp employed tons of them, more than most. The girls—mostly Ukrainian, not Russian, but Iva Jo always forgot this—worked on temporary visas as counselors in the camps throughout Sylvan County. The camps’ huts and hiking trails skirted the boundaries of the national park, and every year they brought in Eastern Europeans to work in the woods for room, board, and a pittance. Iva Jo could always pick Russians out from a crowd. They all had the same plump lips, the same severe ponytails, and a pale, quiet fear of being so far from home. Some of them must have come from steppes or other flat places, because they ogled the Blue Ridge with wide eyes. They pointed at each mountain and compared them, making the rough shapes of peaks in the air with their hands.
Every summer they came. Slowly Iva Jo and her neighbors had started to see Russian girls in the winter months, too, after all the tourists left, after leaf season. Immigrants.
“Oh, no,” said Margie, pulling her hand back from Iva’s. “Don’t go getting involved with all that.”
“All what?”
“That girl’s going home in a month or two anyhow.” Margie looked around and lowered her voice. “At least, she better be. Being pregnant and all.”
Iva Jo leaned forward. “What? That tiny little thing who wrapped me up in a paper tablecloth? She barely looked eighteen.”
Margie nodded. “They found out right after she got here. Andrew said the whole camp knows. They’re pretty upset with her. They think she was … you know. Already carrying it when she came over.” Margie’s nephew Andrew ran a laundry service. He delivered to a lot of the camps and knew all the staff gossip.
“So?”
“So,” said Margie. “If she’s too far along at the end of the summer, she can’t fly home.”
Iva Jo shrugged, shook her head a little. And?
“So,” said Margie. “If she can’t fly back to Moscow or wherever, she’ll have to stay. Have the baby here. Then she’s got herself a little citizen. You know.”
Iva didn’t know.
Margie rolled her eyes. “An anchor baby.”
Iva Jo thought about the Russian girl’s wide eyes, those downy eyelashes, and how earnest she’d been about helping her to the bathroom.
“Oh, I don’t think she’d pull a scam.”
“You’d be surprised,” said Margie. “A lot of them do it. Out of wedlock and everything.”
“That’s not a big deal nowadays.”
“Iva.” Margie frowned. “Sunshine is a Christian camp.”
“But Russians,” said Iva Jo. “They go to church, don’t they? None of this sounds too terrible. Sounds to me like she’s just in a little trouble.”
Margie sniffed a concession. “At least she’s not Mexican. I doubt one of them would have helped you.”
Iva Jo didn’t say anything.
“Mexicans don’t even come to the Arts Fair,” said Margie.
“Did you invite any?”
* * *
The following day, Iva Jo drove out to Blue Sunshine. Scam or no scam, she owed the Russian girl her thanks. She waited until five o’clock, though, after all the daytime staff, the locals, the Christians, had gone home for the night.
The camp was a scatter of lodges, cabins, and metal gazebos all hodgepodged around the fork of Pigeon and Jubal Creeks. Iva’s jeep wagon crawled up the dirt road past Blue Sunshine’s stack-stone gate. She gripped the steering wheel with both hands and ducked her head to look at every cabin and shanty she passed, trying to figure out which one might be the Russians’ barracks. A thin-shouldered girl with a foreign look about her walked across the road carrying a toothbrush and a towel. Iva Jo watched the girl disappear into a sad-looking brown lodge behind some trees. Splotches of dark moss dotted its sagging roof.
Iva Jo pulled over and got out. She looked at the brown building, then at the rustling creek. The woods here made a canopy that blocked out sound and sun. Iva knew if she kept walking east from this spot, eventually she’d hit a stand of laurel trees bordering her eldest cous
in’s property. It was the biggest patch of laurel she knew of anywhere, and though it was too late in the summer for them, she still pictured their white blooms snowing the forest floor.
She walked in the direction of the lodge, then stopped in the middle of the dirt road. Iva closed her eyes and tried to imagine being young and in trouble in some foreign place. She tried to imagine sleeping in a camp counselor’s dormitory bed and chasing after other people’s children all day while suffering from morning sickness and tender breasts and the lonesome terror of a first pregnancy. Iva wondered, How did she even see me? What makes a frightened girl hold a strange woman’s hand and cover her with paper?
“Can I help you? Are you a parent?”
She turned, and a clean-cut teenage boy addressed her again. “Are you lost?”
“I’m looking for—” Iva’s tongue stopped behind her teeth. She didn’t know the Russian girl’s name. She thought she had brown hair, but it might have been blond. She couldn’t be sure, and asking identifying questions would mean embarrassing both herself and her savior.
“Never mind,” Iva said to the boy. “I’ll find it.”
She walked back to the jeep, climbed in, and drove home.
* * *
“Now, Iva,” said Dr. Philip. “I don’t want you to worry.”
“Over what?” Iva Jo was sitting on the exam table. Her short hair was all mussed up at the back; she could tell when she touched it. The curls felt soft and twizzled, like they did after a day at the beach.
“Over what happened,” he said.
“What did happen?” Iva was dressed. Her exam was over, and the smock she’d been wearing sat in a heap beside her. “I still don’t understand why I bled like that. Out of nowhere.”
“That’s what we’re trying to determine,” said Dr. Philip. “You don’t have a polyp. In the meantime, we’ll start you on hormone replacements to help with your symptoms. It can take a while to get your dosage right.”
The lights in the exam room glowed on his buzz cut. His hair was silver, the skin under it pale and bumpy. Your head could be the moon, thought Iva.
He wrote something on her chart. “You’ll need to come back and see me in two months.”
“So this is normal?” As she spoke, she swung her feet like a little girl.
Dr. Philip rubbed the back of his neck.
“Hard to calibrate. You’re the right age for menopause.” He flipped up a stack of papers in her file, a worn manila folder with feathery, gray edges. “And you’ve never carried a child to term, so this is all”—he bobbed his head back and forth—“sort of normal.”
“I don’t want a hysterectomy.” She shifted her legs, rustling the table’s paper cover.
Dr. Philip frowned. “You might not need one,” he said. “But they work like a charm for a lot of patients. We do them all the time.”
“I don’t want one.”
“We’ll just see what’s best, Iva.” He clicked his pen. “By the way, when was your last mammogram?”
“You told me I didn’t need one until I turned fifty.”
Dr. Philip clicked his pen again. “Oh. Well, let’s get the jump on that for sure. Every woman”—he smiled—“is different.”
* * *
Iva Jo drove home from Dr. Philip’s office with a purse full of scrips. She drove past the CVS, past Kmart, and two other places where she could have got them filled. She drove past the gated entrance to the Twitchell plant and didn’t look at it. She didn’t look at its long, familiar drive or its white smokestacks that loomed above town and glowed at night. She drove right past it all, through the whole body of Queensport, without stopping.
Hank got home around six o’clock and ambled into the living room. Iva was leaned back in her squat blue recliner reading a pamphlet called Perimenopause: Your FAQs.
“He says I need tests. Wants to try me on some pills.”
“Tests?” said Hank.
“Well, a mammogram. And some blood work.”
“You want me to come with?”
Iva laughed. “Oh, I don’t think they’d let you. All those boobies everywhere.”
Hank smirked, leaned against the bookshelf opposite her, and began to say something. His shoulder brushed the ugly bowl Margie had given her the week before. It wobbled on its base, tipped forward, and crashed to the hardwood floor.
“Oh,” said Iva Jo, reaching out. She fumbled out of her chair toward the shelves.
Hank put his hands to his face, round eyed and sorry looking.
“Oh, Hank!”
“Careful, don’t cut yourself. Stay back.”
“I’ll never live it down,” she said. “That was her best piece.”
Hank crouched down as Iva Jo slumped in the wreckage. She picked up a large, jagged hunk of glazed crockery, and a tendril of crude rage began to hum and tingle inside her.
“I’ll glue it back together,” he said.
“No,” said Iva Jo. Hank reached toward the hunk of bowl. She slapped his hand away. “Get off. Get the fuck off.”
He reared back. Iva swept her hands across the floor to gather the bits together.
“The hell? You didn’t even like the damn thing,” he said. “Hell, half the time you don’t even like Margie.”
“That’s not the point,” she moaned, and ran her hands again into the breakage.
“You’ll cut yourself. All the little pieces.”
“Sshh,” said Iva Jo.
“Let me get my trouble light.”
Hank jogged into the hallway and scooted around in the closet. She listened to him rustling, then felt the vibrations of his booted feet pounding back toward her. He pulled the trouble light onto his head, adjusted the straps, and knelt beside her. He reached up and twisted the light on. Its halogen beam blazed across the floor, and each shattered piece glowed.
“Let me do it,” he said, reaching out.
She slapped his hand away again, harder this time.
“Get the brush. And the dustpan.”
Iva had never slapped Hank before. The sensation of hitting him rung deep in her bicep. She couldn’t tell whether she liked doing it; she only knew she felt like hitting him again.
“Goddamn,” said Hank, standing up. “You’re worse than the girls at the office.” He cut off the trouble light’s beam. “Every woman I know is on the rag this week.”
Heat seared up her neck and across her face. She tasted sweat on her lips.
“Shut up,” she said through her teeth. “Even if we were, it wouldn’t matter. But we’re not. None of us.”
“Well,” Hank said, dusting off his hands and backing away. His voice deepened. “Means the same to me either way.”
Stop it, she thought. Stop. Stop.
* * *
“Elena.”
“Hm?”
“Elena,” said Margie. “That’s the girl’s name, the one who helped you. I asked Andrew.”
They were in a grim, dingy medical office on a rank day in August, waiting for her first-ever mammo. Margie had tagged along for support.
“Elena,” said Iva Jo, adding music to the syllables. “That’s nice.”
“Andrew said the daddy works at the same camp. I think he’s Russian, too.” Margie’s hair, normally so blond and carefully spiked, looked wilted. It was early and already humid outside.
“What’s she doing now?” asked Iva.
“Andrew said she went home,” said Margie.
“What, back to Russia? You mean she’s gone?”
“That’s what Andrew said.”
“And the father?”
Margie shrugged.
Iva blinked. “But what will she do? About the baby?”
“Miz Hocutt?”
Both women popped their heads up, and Iva reached for her purse. “Can my friend come with me?”
The mammographer gripped a metal clipboard and smiled. She wore a loose bun, no makeup, medical scrubs, and clogs. “It’s a pretty tight squeeze in there. Your friend
can wait out here and meet you afterward. Why don’t you come on back?”
The exam room was about twelve feet square and filthy. The floor was strewn with thick black wires and boxes of medical and office supplies. In the center was a massive beige machine that looked like those robots in the movies—the ones that can turn into cars. Everything was coated in a thin, gray fur of dust.
The mammographer, who barely met her eyes the whole time, gave Iva Jo a paper vest and a few instructions. She asked some questions about medical history, date of birth, the usual. One of the questions was “Have you ever worked at Twitchell Chemical?”
Iva stammered a little, then said no. The mammographer ticked a box and turned to the door. “Undress from the waist up,” she said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
Iva took off her blouse and reached back to undo her bra. She stared at the metal blinds on the window and hoped nobody could see in. She pulled on the blue paper vest and laid her purse and clothes over a chair in the corner. The mammographer knocked gently and came in.
“I’m big,” said Iva, holding herself under the vest. She nodded at the machine, and the paper scratched against her neck. “I don’t think my girls’ll fit in that thing.”
The mammographer produced a dark glass plate the size of a sheet of paper. “You’ll be fine,” she said.
For the next few minutes, Iva Jo hunched and contorted and gripped the sides of the machine like an awkward dance partner while the technician nudged Iva’s torso and squished her breasts between the glass plates. Friends had told her mammograms were painful, but Iva didn’t feel much. It reminded her of the gropings she’d giggled through with high school lovers. The plates weren’t even cold. Then it was over, and she put her clothes back on, and Margie took her out for a fancy brunch of shrimp grits and mimosas.
* * *
A week later Dr. Philip called while she was folding sheets and said there was a “spot” in her right breast, and she might need a biopsy.
“Might,” said Iva Jo.
“Often it’s nothing. Could just be a bad image.”