A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That (23 page)

Georgia sat back down. There was one less egg on the couch now, a noticeably blank space, some forty inches of beige couch where Pammy's ass had been. Georgia turned to me with a sympathetic smile. “You're not old,” she said. We both looked at Pammy, who was moving her fat ass away from us, clutching that paper gown, hiding the ass. She was huffing and puffing, taking heavy steps in her blue booties. Before stepping inside, Pammy turned to me. “You better not be here when I get back, old lady,” she said.

2.

I was at that dingy clinic, in that sort of trouble, because I lied, like I said. Four days early and the embryo was too tiny to reach. Last Saturday at Ella's clinic I woke up from what I thought would be my first and only abortion, and the doctor, a gray-haired man with a long white beard that actually touched my pillow as he spoke to me, said, “The procedure was unsuccessful.”

“Who are you?”

“Dr. Wheeler.”

“What are you saying?”

“It was empty—you're empty,” he said.

“Tell me something I don't know,” I said.

“Seriously, uh, uh—” he began, looking at my chart, searching for my name. “You're Rachel, right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I couldn't find anything. In your uterus, I mean.”

“You're joking. Is this a joke?” I was drugged, slurring my words, trying hard not to.

“No, not at all, I'm terribly serious,” he was speaking loudly now, enunciating each word.

“I have cramps, though. Here,
here.”
I touched myself under the sheet, pointed out the places that hurt most.

“How about some codeine, Rachel? Want some codeine?”

“I
want
an abortion,” I said, my voice cracking.

He patted my arm, that beard getting closer and closer to my cheek. He motioned to my student, Ella, who was standing across the room, half of her face obscured by the open metal cabinet. “Get her something for the pain, would you?” he said.

“Right away,” Ella said.

“I
want
an abortion,” I said again, starting to cry.

“I tried,” the doctor said. “I worked and worked at it. There was nothing inside. Like I said before, I couldn't find a thing.”

Ella walked up to my bedside, holding a Dixie cup of water, two white pills in her open palm.

“Give me those,” I said.

Dr. Wheeler thought that the embryo was in a fallopian tube, stuck there in between, which I figured was fitting—my embryo lost, inches from potential nourishment, indecisive, unable to commit. He mentioned the threat of rupture, bleeding, death, and was sending me to a clinic on Third Street, a fertility specialist. From my grimace and sigh, Dr. Wheeler and Ella could probably tell that I didn't appreciate the irony. “It's the only place in town with an ultrasound machine available on a Saturday morning,” Ella explained.

“Wonderful,” I said.

“Dr. Baker is waiting for you. I've already called her.”

“Lovely.”

“She's opening the office just for you. It's a Saturday,” Dr. Wheeler said, stating the obvious.

“I know what day it is,” I said.

“It'll all work out,” Ella said, sweetly.

“I wanted it to
work out
today,” I said. “What's wrong with this place?” I wanted to know.

Ella shook her head. “You'll be okay,” she said.

 

A half hour later, I was sitting with Angela at the fertility clinic on yet another couch. I was bent over in pain, on codeine, and trying hard not to throw up again. Angela held the plastic bag Ella had given her at the clinic in her lap. “If you want to throw up again, just do it,” she said. “I've got this bag, and it's just waiting.”

“I see the damn bag,” I snapped.

“Okay.”

“I saw my student give it to you. I was standing right there,” I continued. “I'm drugged, medicated—not stupid,” I said.

“I know, Rachel,” she said, rubbing my back. “You're going to be fine,” she said.

Against my wishes, Angela had called my mother, and now my mom was bursting through the door, her face scrunched up with worry. She limped toward me, a hand on her sore hip. “Oh, dear,” she said.

“Why did you call her?” I asked Angela. “Do you think she needs this right now?”

Angela picked up a magazine from the coffee table and tried to ignore me.

“You've got enough going on,” I said to my mother.

“Look at you,” she said. It wasn't just that I was past thirty, unmarried, but where was my boyfriend? What about precaution? Didn't I know better at my age? All the things she wanted to say to me earlier, but didn't. She motioned for Angela to make room for her and then sat down right next to me. “What about condoms?” my mother said.

I said nothing.

Angela looked at me. “You used a condom, didn't you?” she said.

“Please, I'm in pain,” I said.

“A condom can break anyway,” Angela said. “I knew a girl who used a condom and the guy was so big—which isn't always a bad thing, of course—but he broke right through it and—”

“Never mind,” my mother said, interrupting her. “None of this matters. Where does it hurt?” she asked, and for a moment we were mother and daughter, just that, and she was going to make it better.

“Everywhere,” I said.

“We should have talked more about this,” my mother said.

“I'm an adult,” I said, starting to cry again.

“That's fine, that's fine …” She patted my knee. “You're a grown-up, that's right. I forget sometimes.”

“You do,” I said.

“You've got to stop worrying about me, though, acting out.”

“What?”

“You know, it's always on television. The talk shows are always talking about
acting out.”

“They're talking about teenagers,” I said.

“It's about behavior, as I see it,” she said. “It's not limited to one age group.”

“Is that so?” I said, sarcastically.

“As a matter of fact, yes,” she said. “You can't worry about me all the time, that's what I'm saying.”

“Fine.”

“A little bit of cancer is nothing. A couple zaps of radiation and I'll be okay. You know me,” she said, looking at Angela to back her up.

“Absolutely,” Angela said, looking up from the magazine. She was nodding, trying to look hopeful.

“Where's Dr. Baker?” I said.

 

Dr. Baker, a short, stocky woman with red hair and freckles, helped me onto a table—the same table, I imagined, that other women wanted nothing more than to hop onto pregnant. I thought of those women, their loving men crouched beside them, holding their hands, waiting for heartbeats, dying to count fingers and toes, looking for little penises or tiny vaginas. Dr. Baker moved the sonogram thing, which was cold and metallic, across my stomach, the way someone else might have ironed a shirt. “Let's see,” she said. “Let's take a look.”

“I live with my mom in her apartment and she's sick …” I began.

“Eureka,” Dr. Baker said. “Right here. In your uterus, where it's supposed to be.”

“How'd Dr. Wheeler miss it?”

“Who?”

“The doctor from the Family Center.”

“That's right—he sent you here.” She was staring at the screen. “He or she is in the corner,” she continued, “clinging to your uterine wall.”

“Clinging, huh?”

“Do you want to see?”

“No,” I said.

“I'm sorry,” the doctor said. “I shouldn't have asked you that.”

“I'm not like the rest of your patients, I guess. I've got different problems.”

“Yes, well, I should be sensitive. My husband is always telling me that I'm not sensitive enough.”

I nodded.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

“It's okay” I said.

“What was that you said about your mother?”

“Nothing,” I said.

 

Last week, driving down Atherton, a familiar one-way street I used all the time, several times a week, I found myself going the wrong way. My first clue was going through an intersection and realizing that the cars opposite me were stopped. My traffic light was turned around, backwards, which I thought strange, but still it didn't register. Within seconds I saw the cars coming toward me, screeching to a halt. Smoking, the cars, with their drivers hanging out windows, cussing at me. “What the fuck's your problem?” one man hollered. “Stupid fucking bitch,” a woman shouted. I was turning my car around, trying not to see or hear them. Later, just before sleep, I kept seeing the image, all those cars, an SUV, a Caddy, a Jeep, that cursing man, his shoulder, one arm hanging out the window, and that cursing woman too, coming toward me. I listened to my mother breathing in the next room. I played and replayed my drive down Atherton, thinking,
Cancer is just like that.

3.

I was turning between stiff sheets, coming to, with a terribly sweet taste in my dry mouth, when I saw Pammy's ass. They had us lined up on cots, and her ass could have been any ass at all, but it was hers, I knew it. The ass was white, wide, and flat, with dimples, and there was something very sad about an ass like that, and a girl, an obnoxious girl, but a girl nonetheless, alone, leaning over, vomiting into a plastic bowl. The barrettes were still there, but they had moved considerably toward the back of her head. She was holding the white bow in her hand, using it to wipe her mouth. She moaned, threw those big legs out of the sheet, and crawled from the cot. “I have to pee,” she said. “Someone, help me,” she said, and she was crying now.

I looked around the room for a nurse, someone, anyone, but it was only us, the egg girls from waiting room number 4. Georgia was to the right of me, eyes closed, snoring lightly. “Hey,” I said, turning to the left, not wanting to wake her. “Someone here needs help,” I called, but my voice was small, tiny in the room.

Pammy fell to the floor then, weeping, on her big knees. I sat up, pulled the sheets down, and stepped off the cot. I lost a bootie in the process, and the tile was cold on my one bare foot. I made my way to Pammy and stuck my hand under her arm. I tried to lift her, but she was heavy and wouldn't or couldn't budge. “Someone help us,” I said.
“Please”
But no one was there; no one was coming. “Come on, try to stand,” I said.

“I can't,” she said.

“I'll get you to the bathroom if you stand up.”

Pammy took a deep breath. She sighed, then made an effort. Halfway up, knees bent, Pammy's eyes were level with my own. She looked into my face, squinting. “Which one are you?” she said.

“Don't worry about it,” I said.

“I can't see without my contacts. Which one
are
you?” she repeated.

“It's me, the old lady,” I said.

“Oh, you,” she said, straightening up, holding her arm across her lower stomach, which I imagined, like mine, was pretty sore. My right arm reached around her thick waist, while my left hand cupped her elbow. She was a tower, a building, and I was helping her to the bathroom.

Halfway there, we stopped in the hall a moment to breathe, rest. “You lost a bootie,” Pammy said.

“I know.”

“Isn't your foot cold?”

“Yeah”

“Want to turn around and get it?”

I shook my head no. “It's okay,” I said. “I don't need it,” I told her.

Pammy took a deep breath. She exhaled. “I'm ready now,” she said. And we continued down the hall, one foot in front of the other, taking little steps, baby steps.

Georgia Carter was sixteen that summer and working at the frozen yogurt shop in the mall. Frozen yogurt had made a comeback, was big again, and the cones she made for the boy who worked at the shoe store across the way were big, too, and he was big as well when finally his zipper was down and her hand was around him.

It was noon, too early for the act itself and the boy's spicy cologne, too early for the leather and canvas and suede she smelled on the boy's fingers moments earlier when he tried to touch her face with them.

She didn't know the make of his car, but noticed before climbing into it that it was wide and old, rusting in spots. On the passenger's side back door she saw a dent as round and perfect as her mother's favorite salad bowl. It was probably a bitch to park. She was with him in the front seat of that car for the first of many lunch breaks, where she'd skip food and juice, her own nourishment, and think only of the boy's satiation.

She pulled her long hair to one side and it hung down in a pale rope across her chest. She was balanced on one elbow, palm to cheek, staring at her own moving hand, and at him too, the girth and length of him. With the window open she felt the sun's heat on one shoulder, her right cheek, where in just seconds the boy would try to land a kiss, and she would bend backwards, away from him.

The other boys were bossy, with aggressive hands and mouths, and she acquiesced, leaned back on a couch or football field, passive and inactive, hardly even there. There had been abortions and a recent bout with condyloma, so for this one, it was she who would make the rules.

Funny, she didn't say it out loud, rule number 1, but her body twisted away from him, went rigid at his touch, and the boy caught on quickly.

Perhaps he was smarter than the rest, she was thinking. She knew he was older, a boy who was really a man—the faint lines on his forehead, the lines framing his mouth like a set of parentheses, and the way he didn't flinch or cower when she used multisyllabic words. She'd said
clandestine.
She'd said
surreptitious.
She'd said, “I don't want you to
reciprocate.”

“You read books?” he said once.

“I read books,” she said.

“Georgia, let me do you now.”

“NO.”

“Come on,” he persisted, his hand reaching for the buttons on her blouse.

She pushed his hand away. “Don't,” she said.

“Your tits then. Let me kiss your tits, at least. What would happen if I just kissed your tits?”

She shook her head.

“It's your turn,” he said, almost pleading.

“We're not playing Scrabble,” she said.

 

Georgia's bout with condyloma had been persistent, too, treated once and a month later returned. It made her itch and squirm, and when she sat on the floor with her back against the side of her bed, her legs open and a make-up magnifying mirror between them, and looked inside, the warts were heads of cauliflower. Ella, her counselor at the clinic, called the condyloma insidious and threatened Georgia with cervical cancer. It didn't seem possible to get cancer from a wart, and she wasn't sure she believed Ella, thought she was exaggerating to slow Georgia down. And what was that dramatic smack of her medical folder? And that look on Ella's face, like Georgia had cancer already?

 

She lived alone with her father, a former high school math teacher, who was just forty-four years old but losing his mind and forgetting things like a very old man. There were things he still remembered, like Georgia's curfew and chores, like her mother who went out one night three winters ago with friends from work, met a rich man named Rich, and never came back to them, not even to pick up her clothing, but even those things would be lost to him within the year. “That's a woman who's willing to forget us completely,” Georgia's father said, stating the obvious. “That's a woman without a conscience.”

Through weekly phone calls and the occasional letter, Georgia learned that Rich bought her mother everything: a new wardrobe, a house on a hill two states away, and a baby girl from China they named Sam. On the front porch her mother sat on a wicker couch, feet up, talking to Georgia on the phone, describing things in theatrical detail. “The front lawn is landscaped” she said. “Gardenias, Casablanca lilies, and narcissus on one side, waxflowers and eucharis on the other. Waxflowers and eucharis smell like lemons,” she told Georgia, and Georgia imagined flowers smelling like fruit, looking like one thing and smelling like something else entirely. Like a mother who asked you about school, who wanted to know if you liked the two new pairs of jeans she left on your bed, a mother who begged you to eat and tucked you in at night, while at the same time plotting her escape.

“There's a circular staircase that leads up to the porch,” her mother said. “Very modern. You will love those stairs, Georgie,” she promised.

“When
will I love them?” Georgia asked, and her mother always said the same thing: when things settle down and we can plan a visit.

Her brother, Kevin, was off at college in San Francisco and her father didn't work anymore, just puttered around the house in mismatched clothing, talking to himself and rarely making sense. Sometimes, in a voice that was normal, not at all frantic, he called out her mother's name, as if the woman were still there, as if she hadn't left the state and were only a room away. Sometimes he talked about work, the students he left behind, and the subjects themselves, algebra and geometry.

“A circle's circumference is pi times double the radius,” he said last week to no one. He was sitting at the round table in the backyard, drinking lemonade, and Georgia was watching him from the open kitchen window, waiting for her Aunt Alma to arrive so she could leave for work. “Double the radius,” he said. “Double,” he repeated emphatically, and he stood up then and stared down at the table itself, as if the circle of it were something to argue with, as if it were morphing into a square or disagreeing.

“The whole world is unreliable,” he used to say, “but math is certain, fixed, it's made up its mind.”

And Georgia, too, had made up her mind, had made it up from the first moment she saw the boy, down on one knee, slipping a sandal on a woman's foot. Georgia was on a break, sipping a Coke and standing at the store window, staring at a display of boots. She decided to start saving money for one pair in particular—dark brown and laceless. She'd need a shoehorn for those, she was thinking, and it was then that she looked up and saw the foot in its dark stocking pointing at the boy's chest. She saw an ankle, too, and a calf. She saw a bony knee and part of a thigh. A pillar obscured the rest of the woman's body, but Georgia wasn't looking for her then, but for him. His hand disappeared inside a shoebox a second and then came up with the sandal. It was orange—an awful color for a sandal, really—and there was a plastic daisy where the straps met. With one hand he clutched the shoe, with the other he held the back of the woman's ankle. That was it for Georgia—a boy on one knee steering a woman's suspended foot into a silly sandal; it was a smooth and deliberate gesture that decided things.

She took in his face and the dark bangs that fell in front of it. She took in his fingers pushing the bangs away. She took in his jaw and lips and chin, and after he returned the sandal to the box and stood up, she took in the whole boy. He talked to the woman behind the pillar, holding the box under one arm. He was nodding, smiling, obviously making a sale. And then he was looking over at the window—perhaps he caught Georgia staring—and she took in his eyes for the briefest second before turning away and heading back to Yates' Yogurt.

It was later at the food court that she saw him again, this time part of his face obscured by the ridiculously big pretzel in front of it. He was sitting at a table with four chairs. Georgia thought about walking over and introducing herself, but instead remained where she was: on a bench about ten feet away from the boy, behind a potted plant, her own face hidden behind the plastic leaves. She pushed two leaves apart with her fingers and watched him brush salt off the pretzel. She watched him sip his soda. She watched him until the pretzel was gone, until his whole handsome face was revealed.

 

Georgia's father had been diagnosed with a degenerative brain disease that even she couldn't pronounce, some five threatening syllables she gave up trying to say. She could say the other words, though, like
frontal cortex
and
temporal lobe.
She could say
inoperable, object recognition
, and
obliteration.
It was like Alzheimer's, only faster, speeded up, a disease in a rush, the doctor explained, and Georgia imagined a disease sprinting—a disease with feet, with toes and heels and soles.

Georgia, too, was in a rush, but apparently her noonday boy was not, leaning back on the car seat and taking his time. “Slow down,” he said, and she willed her hand to do just that, which added a heightened awareness to the act itself that embarrassed her. She thought about stopping altogether, getting up and out of the car, but decided instead to finish what she started.

 

She introduced herself to the boy for the first time on a Tuesday afternoon. He was standing under the big clock, looking at the mall directory in front of him. She gathered up her nerve and walked over to the map, feigning interest in mall geography. He had his finger beside the red X, which told the boy where he was: You Are Here.

“You lost too?” she asked him.

“Sort of,” he said, looking around. “I was supposed to meet someone and she didn't show.”

“You look more sad than angry.”

“Yeah, well.” The boy looked at her. He ran his fingers through those bangs. “Do I know you?” he said.

“You work right across the street from me,” she told him. “I mean, across the way from my store—well, not
my
store exactly, Mrs. Yates' store.”

“The yogurt place.”

“It's just part-time,” she said. “I'm going to do other things—with my life, I mean.”

“We all are,” he said, smiling.

“Selling shoes is okay,” she said. “At least you get commission.”

“My name's Jim,” he said.

“Hey, Jim.”

“Hey.”

They stood there a few moments, not saying anything, until finally he asked, “How long have you been working at Yates' Yogurt?”

It had been exactly three months, but she shrugged, pretending not to remember. “I'm Georgia,” she said.

“How old are you, Georgia?”

“I'm eighteen,” she lied.

He lifted his eyebrows.

“In June.”

“You sure about that?”

“Want to see my license?”

“I like yogurt ,” he said.

 

There were things Georgia's father didn't know, never knew, and therefore could not forget. He didn't know, for instance, how often she imagined the gray-and-black image of his brain, and the doctor pointing, saying,
Look at that, would you just look at that.
He didn't know how many times she'd been to the clinic with health problems herself, sitting across from Ella, sometimes lying, sometimes telling the truth. He didn't know what she was looking for, and neither did she. He didn't know that she talked to her mother on the phone once a week and could nearly smell those lemony flowers. He didn't know that she was the kind of girl who would spend her lunch break in a car with a boy who was really a man of twenty-eight. He didn't know that she would lie about her age, that she would lead the boy out of the mall, through the big glass doors, and into the parking lot, that she would ask him which car was his and then steer him toward it like a puppy.

Maybe her father was standing in his closet now, she was thinking, not knowing what a shoe was.
Object recognition. Obliteration.
What exactly do you do with this? he might be wondering, while Georgia, on the other hand, had known exactly what to do only moments ago with what was in front of her—she tossed an empty cup into the boy's backseat and maneuvered her chest over the parking brake, leaning down and making her way to him.

 

One morning last month, before she left for Yates' Yogurt, her father, standing at the sink in his terry cloth robe and running shoes, was wiping his mouth with a piece of white bread as if it were a napkin. Georgia's Aunt Alma went to the sink and took the bread from his hand, replacing it with an actual napkin, saying, “Here, Denny, use this.” Georgia's dad looked down at his palm, at the napkin sitting there, and didn't recognize its function. Georgia was thinking about functions now, what things are used for, their exact purposes, while she blew on the boy's balls, and the boy said, “Oooooh, cooling,” like Georgia was a mint in his mouth, like her function was to freshen him up.

There were things she would not forget: like the boy's thighs and the car she didn't know the name of, like the cinnamon bird hanging from the rearview mirror, like the vinyl seats and his shiny shoes, and against her cheek the belt buckle, which was silver and small, almost dainty, which didn't match the gold watch he wore on his wrist, a wrist that was thick and hairy and unlike the wrists of the other boys she'd known.