Morning (15 page)

“No, no, you’re fine,” the nurse said, distracted now, ready to get on with another patient. She led Sara to the changing room and vanished.

Sara dressed with trembling hands, her thoughts racing. It was all so new, so unfamiliar, this reproductive business. She had assumed—now she didn’t know why—Dr. Crochett would be doing everything to her, that he would be her doctor with every procedure. And that would have been all right. She trusted him, she had talked with him,
he had looked at her—he had
seen
her. He was a human being who saw her as another human being with a specific problem he could help solve. He had discussed her problem with understanding and even with enthusiasm.

She couldn’t expect that of everyone, after all. These other doctors didn’t have time to be human, with all the women waiting nervously for all the tests they needed done. As she left her curtained cubicle, she passed one of the other women, an older woman who looked almost in shock, so white was her face, so wide were her eyes with terror. The other woman looked at Sara and then quickly away, and in that brief second of contact Sara saw tears glaze the other woman’s eyes. Oh, there was life-and-death business going on here, there was a necessity for speed; no wonder the doctor had been disgruntled with her body, her healthy body taking up time when it wasn’t ready.

Still. Still, that doctor could have said hello, Sara thought.

She went back through the door from the hallway into the reception room.

Julia was reading an old
People
magazine. As soon as she saw Sara, she rose, dropped the magazine, and in a flash had crossed the room and wrapped her arms around her.

“Are you okay? How do you feel, sweetie? Do you want to sit down? I didn’t want to tell you before you went through with it, but it’s hellish, isn’t it?”

Sara pulled away from Julia. “I didn’t have it done,” she said.

Julia dropped her arms. “Why not?”

Sara explained. “I’ve got to come back tomorrow,” she added.

“Great. You can stay with me,” Julia said. “We’ll play today, and I’ll bring you back here tomorrow, then drive you to the airport.”

Sara saw the receptionist eyeing Julia and smiled to herself. If opulent Julia had been lying on that table, the doctor would have spoken to
her
! She made an appointment for the next day, then left the office and the yellow building.

Julia drove her to her apartment on Marlborough Street, where they talked until Sara could call Steve, at home for lunch, to tell him what had happened. Then, on an impulse, she dialed Fanny Anderson’s number. The dragon lady answered, and said, as Sara had known she would, that the author was not available. She took the number Sara gave her but did not assure her that the writer could call.

Sara sat in Julia’s living room after Julia had gone back to work and thought about the morning at the doctor’s office. She thought about how Julia had rushed to
console her when she saw her, and began to wonder how much this tube-blowing business was going to hurt. She put her hands on her lower abdomen. What if the doctor, careless, uncaring, made a mistake? It could happen. Mistakes happened all the time. And underneath the comfortable pillowy covering of her skin lay all those tiny little functioning parts with their own terribly specific duties: passageways, tubes, arteries, receptacles, infinitesimal in size, immense in importance.

How easy it would be to damage such delicate, microscopic tissue.

One fraction of a centimeter’s slip with a knife—

Or dye or air blown with too much force, blasting a tube into fragments—

Sara jumped up. She had to stop thinking this way. It was foolish, self-defeating.

She dialed Donald James. He was delighted to hear from her and asked her to join him for a drink that evening. He was a confirmed bachelor, too fastidious to be even gay, and absolutely not a person to engage in discussions about sex, babies, and bodies. This would be good for her.

She spent the rest of the afternoon staring at television shows she never watched at home, waiting for Fanny Anderson to call.

Fanny Anderson did not call.

At five she took a cab to the Ritz and met Donald James. It was wonderful being with her old boss again, hearing all the literary gossip, talking about books. And it was a great consolation to know that he wanted her back anytime because he missed her,
her
, Sara, not a woman capable or incapable of reproduction, but a woman who was a good editor and an intelligent friend.

Later, at dinner at the Harvard Club with Julia, she continued to forget her fears and fantasies. The one time she attempted to move their conversation onto the particularly maudlin track she had become so fond of, Julia had quickly gotten them off it.

“Do you know,” Sara had confided, ever-so-slightly drunk on two vodka tonics and half a bottle of wine, “Dr. Crochett told me that the trip all those little sperm have to make to get from the vagina into the Fallopian tube to get to the egg is equal to a trip that a man would have to make if he
jogged
all the way from Boston to Detroit?”

“My God,” Julia said, seeming properly impressed. “Just think of that. All that effort, and then to end up in Detroit.”

Of course Sara had to laugh at that, and Julia, seizing her opportunity, began to
regale Sara with every dirty joke she had heard in the last six months. It was incongruous, sitting in the dignified serenity of the Harvard Club dining room with the pianist playing Mozart to the genteel accompaniment of silver against china, to hear the vulgar jokes Julia had to tell. But it took Sara’s mind off her worries, and before she knew it she was back in Julia’s apartment, passing out on the foldout sofa bed.

And then it was morning.

Her appointment was for nine-thirty. Sara drank two cups of coffee and three glasses of water—all the alcohol of the evening before had helped her fall asleep, but had also dehydrated her. She put on the clothes she had worn the previous day, and Julia, dressed in supple black Ultrasuede and pearls, drove her back to the yellow-stoned clinic.

“Shall I tell you some more dirty jokes?” Julia asked as they waited in the reception room.

“My God, can you possibly know any more?” Sara asked, laughing. But her heart was pounding. Today she was more nervous than yesterday. When the nurse called her name and led her into the changing room, she began to tremble. She had had too much time to think about it. Today she knew too much—and too little.

A different nurse, an older woman, led her into the narrow room where the table and equipment sat coldly waiting. Sara licked her lips. Like a good child, she hoisted herself up onto the table and lay down, her legs spread apart, her bottom scooted down to the end of the table so that she knew she made, from a certain angle, a giant M, with the crevice of her crotch, leading into the cave of her body, centered at the fork of the M.

That place, that delicate spot, which so few had ever touched, which Steve touched only with gentleness and reverence and lust and love … now it was exposed to bright light and a stranger’s judgment, all hairy and homely, like a shy night creature that, trapped in the light of day, becomes paralyzed.

She was still new enough to marriage with Steve to base much of her love there, in that low space between her legs, beneath her skin. She loved lying with Steve against her, his penis in that moist iridescent shell-pink passageway, and all the most profound pleasures of her life pulsing there. That was the true heart of her body and her life.

But now she knew that furled passageway led to more secrets, secrets she could only imagine, something more serious than the pleasures of sex, something even homelier and more regal: the beet-red womb rooted deep within, life’s home.

And what else? She was so ignorant. Her ovaries, her tubes, those mute accessories that she had carried with her all her life, uncaring. They were up inside her, too, under her dumb friendly tummy. Were they at fault? Was something wrong? Could they be cured? Or were they simply on a slower schedule than Sara’s—was she rushing them? Would this intrusion damage them, offend them, cause them to withdraw deeper into their wordless dark world?

The door opened. A man came in. It was not the doctor of the previous day. This one was taller, and younger. He was wearing a blue smock, gray flannels.

As his colleague had done the day before, he passed down the length of the table without looking at Sara’s face, without speaking to her, and he pulled up the stool, positioning himself between Sara’s naked spread legs. He grunted orders to the nurse.

“I’m nervous,” Sara said. “I hope this doesn’t hurt.”

No one answered. Sara couldn’t believe it. No one replied. She glared at the nurse, who smiled briefly at Sara.

“I’m going to blow dye into your tubes to see if they’re open,” the doctor said suddenly, and without warning began to insert items into Sara’s vagina. “It won’t take long and it will tell us if your Fallopian tubes are open for the eggs to get down into the uterus.” He seemed to be reciting the words wearily, by rote, an automaton who had done this procedure so often he had become mechanical in its performance. “Okay, let’s go,” he said to the nurse.

The nurse approached Sara and said, “We’re going to take an X ray now. Hold your breath. Don’t breathe again till I tell you.”

Dutifully Sara held her breath. She felt the mute blunt movement of hard metal inside her and then a hot cramp of pain shot through her lower abdomen.

“You can breathe,” the nurse called from somewhere in the room. She disappeared, came back. “Here,” she said to the doctor.

“Mmmm,” the doctor grumbled to the nurse. To Sara he said, “The dye has gone through your right side but not your left. We’re going to do it again.”

What does that mean?
Sara wondered. Would they have to use more force? It had hurt only briefly the first time—would it hurt longer this time? And why was only one tube open, was something wrong with her? She began to shake. “I really am getting nervous,” she said. “I have a friend out there, do you suppose she could come in and hold my hand?”

“Won’t be necessary, we’ll be through in a minute,” the doctor said.

“I’m feeling a little dizzy,” Sara said. “And—it’s strange, my hands feel all tingling. My head’s tingling, too.”

“Oh, Christ, she’s hyperventilating,” the doctor said to the nurse. “Give her some smelling salts.”

“Smelling salts?” Sara asked aloud. She felt like Alice in Wonderland, with everything getting curiouser and curiouser. She thought only old ladies with “the vapors” used smelling salts; she didn’t know they were even in use anymore. “What will smelling salts do?” she asked.

“They’ll just shock you a little,” the nurse said.

Sara jumped at that.
Shock
. She thought of electric shock. She did not want to be
shocked
.

“I don’t want smelling salts,” Sara said firmly.

“You’ll have them whether you want them or not,” the doctor said brusquely.

Sara nearly rose off the table. Only the knowledge that her lower body was filled with metal tools and God knew what else—she didn’t!—kept her from getting up and walking out. How dare he speak to her that way! What was his problem? What kind of doctor would speak that way to a patient? By coming here, by lying down on his table, she had given him the power to perform a certain procedure on her—she had not thought she was also giving him the power to tyrannize her.

In her rage, she burst into tears.

The nurse approached Sara and said quietly, “I’m just going to wave these over you quickly, you’ll just get a little smell of ammonia, it will just be a little shock, nothing that will hurt you, just enough to clear your head.”

The nurse waved the salts at such a distance from Sara’s face that the sharp and not unpleasant odor was more tantalizing than shocking. Sara took a deep breath.

“I’m all right now,” she said, but she was still trembling with anger.

“Let’s get this over with,” the doctor said.

Sara glared at him, but of course he could not see her glare; his head was bent between her legs.

“We’re going to do another X ray,” the nurse said. “Hold your breath. Don’t breathe until I tell you.”

Sara held her breath. Once again a sharp pain bit into her abdomen, more
forcefully this time, so that she felt her body naturally, automatically recoiling, contracting at the pain. But it didn’t last long, it really was no worse than a menstrual cramp—she had had much worse cramps than this.

“You can breathe now,” the nurse said. She disappeared from Sara’s side, reappeared holding some slides for the doctor to see.

The doctor removed his equipment from Sara’s body and rose. “Your left tube is blocked,” he said and walked past her to the door.

“Wait!” Sara called. She twisted on the table to look at the man.

“Can’t you—can’t you do the procedure again to open the tube up? I thought that was why I was here, so that you can open up my tubes if they’re blocked. I want to get pregnant,” she admitted.

“You can get pregnant. You’ve got one working tube. You can talk to your doctor about it,” the doctor said, and left the room.

“Are you all right?” the nurse said, hurrying to Sara as she pulled herself into a sitting position and swung her legs around to the side of the table. “Don’t try to walk just yet, not till you’re sure you’re not dizzy.”

“I’m not dizzy, I’m confused,” Sara said. “Why couldn’t he—he was in and out of here so fast. He didn’t explain—I didn’t have time to understand. I don’t understand. If I’ve got one tube blocked, why that means that I’ve only got six months a year when I can get pregnant. Right? Don’t the ovaries alternate in producing eggs?”

“Well, that’s what we used to think,” the nurse said. “But now I guess the theory is that we don’t know. Sometimes the right ovary can produce the eggs for months at a time, sometimes the left. They don’t automatically alternate every month.”

“Then—then that means that my left ovary might be producing the egg but it can’t ever get down because that tube’s blocked,” Sara said. “Oh, can’t the doctor come back and open up my left tube?”