All the Horrible Girliness

Doctor's Visit

I pop mints into my mouth, one after another until my tongue goes numb, in Dr. Shirley's waiting room. The waiting room is full of purple and green chairs with ornate wooden arms, and a beautiful stereo system switched off. There is an arrangement of big yellow flowers. Outside is green and blue, green and blue. This doesn't look like a waiting room at a doctor's office, it looks like a casting call. The women come in two sizes: XXXL and Size Zero. The thinner ones drag husbands and Baby-Gap dressed children in by their wrists. Women in suits tap away at PDAs and bend their heads to their shoulders, cell phones pressed in between. An elegant older lady in a denim dress does not read the magazines (all updated) of Parenting and Good Housekeeping and Time. She sits with her hands folded in her lap, looking quietly at everyone. One woman in a leather coat streamlined down her tailored suit pants talks to a bulging preggers woman about an auction, one of the pieces being a set of boxing gloves signed by Oscar de la Hoya, another being tickets to an episode of Friends, including a shot at being extras on the show. "So that will be big," she says.

"Huge," agrees the preggers.

Outside, Catalina island is three shades of dark blue against a lighter blue sky and towering over an even lighter four shades of blue ocean. Just outside, it's only green: palm trees, grass, hedges, in January. An enormous woman sneezes and no one blesses her, not even me. Another enormous woman who may or may not be preggers (who could tell?) wears a tent of a red shirt and sneers with beady black eyes at a book. There is a painting of orchids over her head, and a potted green leafy something that could be real, could be fake, who could tell? The thing about Newport Beach, California, is that you can never quite tell.

***

It's 10:40. I've been here for an hour. My appointment was for 10:00. But that's how it goes in Newport. You make your appointment a year in advance.

The receptionists behind the counter gossip. Atkins. The Zone. Weight Watchers. Jenny Craig. It's January, after all, never mind the temperature. I remember these girls' names from a year ago, when I was calling every day and all they could tell me was, "It's normal to be sick the first trimester; we'll see you in a month." But I showed them; I got sick enough to warrant a trip to Hoag's emergency room, and met Dr. Shirley there. He looked at me, twenty-four and in the pink of health, he himself appearing to never miss the gym, a busy, Give-It-To-You-Straight guy, salt and pepper hair. He said, "A hundred things have to go right your first trimester," then the next day sucked some grams of dead tissue and fetus from me, then had to be reminded who I was during my thirty-day follow-up exam. I think it must be soul-killing to suck stuff out of a woman's uterus and not call the next morning.

Every Size Zero in high heels comes out throwing their $500 purses over their shoulders and I know they're squishy with KY, squirming around the so recent penetration of cotton and metal.

I pass Dr. Shirley on my way to the exam room and he's on the phone and he says, "Is there someone there who can rupture her? I need her ruptured immediately."

***

My lips crack and peel and I pick at them with my stubs of fingernails, pull away pieces of skin and stare longingly at my purse on the comfy padded chair. There is chapstick in that purse, chapstick made with aloe, chamomile, avocado, jojoba and shea butter. It sounds like a meal. Like things you might rub on a cold raw chicken before baking. I tear skin away and my lips bleed.

The magazines in the examination room are not so current, the covers bent, the articles about children's fall fashion and it is January, and I have no kids, and plus I have one hand clawing at my mouth and the other clasped behind my back, holding my soft gown together. I have been to clinics where the gown was paper and opened to the front. The hospital gowns in Newport are cotton and have small blue flowers printed on them. They haven't fit in either place. I am not XXXL, and not Size Zero; I am something in between, something indiscernible, something you don't see on the runways and don't see in Lane Bryant catalogues, either. I cannot stand with either group, cannot pick at salads during girlfriend lunches and cannot claim to be a Real Woman either. My back, my favorite feature, perhaps because I rarely see it, is covered completely but the crack of my ass would be visible if I didn't hold my gown together. I look at my watch. 10:59.

Dr. Shirley comes in at once businesslike and concerned and distracted. He looks more like a game show host than a gynecologist. I am nervous around him, but I like his sense of humor. When he first met me I hadn't showered in a few days, because I couldn't stand up long enough, and although I'd wet-toweled myself off in the hospital bathroom there was no way to wash my hair. I had braided it back the best I could, attached it at the end with a too-big barrette. The radiologist had just broken the news: no heartbeat, future miscarriage. I had just called and informed my husband. I was staring at my folded hands. When Dr. Shirley came, I offered him water from my plastic pitcher and he refused, kindly. He said, "I've just met you, and you're already giving me trouble." He smiled with only half his mouth and I smiled the wide smile I know is unattractive but can't help.

Today he says, "What are you using for birth control?" And I say, "Hope." The cleverness gets me barely by, in Newport. Dr. Shirley sort of chuckles. He wants to know when I'm going to have a baby. I say before I'm thirty, and he says that leaves me plenty of time. Five more years. He makes me breathe while pressing the cold stethoscope into my back and I think how ridiculous it is to be worried about him seeing the crack of my ass when he has seen all of me, pulled apart and drugged, and much of what was inside me, when he will very soon go rooting around inside me again. I breathe on command. The stethoscope moves to the front and I try not to wonder what he thinks of my small breasts. If he judges. He feels up my thyroid and breasts and tsk tsks me for not doing my own regular breast exams. When his hands leave me, I feel beat up.

The nurse comes in as if on cue, though Dr. Shirley made no indication for her to enter, as he moves between my legs. This is supposedly for my safety, though I have a feeling she's there for his. A paper sheet is balanced over my lap, I lean back, and there is only rubber and metal and an uncomfortable prying apart. Then he says he must feel my vagina. He does this by pushing a finger, I believe, far up inside me and pushing my vagina down with the other hand, from outside. I feel manipulated.

He leaves in a whirlwind of well wishes and nurse and clipboard and lunch plans. I look at my watch and it is 11:05. I leave the table slick with KY, redress, leave the room and make an appointment for next year. Outside, the sun is too bright; there is too much green and blue. Over the hill, beyond the expensive houses, is the ocean, wide and flat and motionless. I have to weave between a BMW 740iL and a Porsche Boxster and one of those bumpy new Jaguars, the bodies of which my husband has compared mine to. I pass it and resist the temptation to run my palm over its smooth, hard curves.

posted by Samus @ 2:19 PM