“Is it Vicky?”
The mention of our daughter encourages me to get it together. I can’t have a breakdown. I have a baby to care for. I inhale and exhale. Breathe. I need to breathe.
“Is it being cooped up all day in the house without anyone to talk to? You feel lonely.” He rubs my back as though I’ve been ill. He’s the sick one. How can he comfort me after trying to destroy me with his selfishness? He strokes my hair. “You know, a lot of women go through this after birth. Moodiness. Depression. Anger. You were on those drugs before we conceived. Everything is probably out of whack.”
His audacity is a blast of hot air, evaporating my distress. He thinks he’s so slick that I can’t have any upsetting suspicions. I’m irrationally angry because he came home late. It’s the crazy hormones. He continues watching me, expression sincere as a begging puppy. I have an urge to poke my fingers through his sockets and scratch out his eyes. It would be a public service—keep them from tricking anyone else.
“You should talk to someone. We have free sessions with a psychiatrist through the health insurance. I can give you numbers.”
Without my tears, I feel brittle and empty. All I can do is gawp and blink. Why do I love this man?
“What do you think?”
Do I even know him?
“You want the number?”
I don’t need a shrink; I need not to be married to a lying scumbag. The insult freezes on my tongue. Any argument will end with me shouting and him storming out. He’ll call me nuts, claim he never left the office. I’m delusional, he’ll say. I imagined it. New York City has eight million people. He’s sure to have a doppelg?nger somewhere.
“Should I make an appointment?”
I should have confronted him at the restaurant. Better to have embarrassed myself than to have my accusations dismissed as postpartum hallucinations.
“I don’t know.” My voice creaks like a broken hinge.
“Tomorrow.” Again, he brushes my hair behind my ear. Fingers rub my head. He’s petting me. “I’ll book tomorrow.” He yawns, a jaw-dropping expression that he covers with his hand. “I have to get to bed. Early morning.”
He stands and stares at me, waiting for me to follow. My hands are barbells in my lap. My stomach glistens from fallen tears. One drop has settled around my still distended belly button.
He kisses the side of my head. “I’ll give you a minute.”
I grit my teeth. A minute? You’d promised me a lifetime.
LIZA
The gynecologist chair is a modernized medieval torture device, coated with vinyl and topped with wax paper. Every time I’m in it, bare butt falling off the edge of the seat, legs spread in metal stirrups, I believe medicine has not come much further than the days of leeches. I’m wrong, of course. Researchers grow entire human organs from a smattering of microscopic stem cells. Babies are conceived in glass cylinders and installed in willing hosts. Yet none of these advances are aiding me.
My doctor, Angela Frankel, enters with her practiced empathetic expression. Brows flat, mouth set in a line, eyes swimming with sympathy. I’ve watched her with other people, seen a smile light her face as she calls in couple after couple who will leave twenty minutes later twittering about genders and genetics. Her mouth has never curled when inviting me into her office.
She takes the chart from a clear bin affixed to the door and asks after David. I excuse his absence as work related, refusing to admit the looming truth. David is done. He can’t deal with the specialists, hospitals, and clinics anymore. He’s finished with slathering scar solution on laparoscopy incisions in my belly and hearing me belch carbon dioxide. Done with ejaculating into sterile plastic containers destined for petri dishes.
My doctor grabs a rolling stool from beneath a desk supporting a model uterus. The sculpture is propped on a metal stem like a carnivorous slipper orchid. It stands beside a tower of urine collection cups. In my mind, the other rooms have better knickknacks: model wombs split like walnut shells to reveal developing babies and gestational growth charts comparing average fetal sizes to common fruits. I’m always seen in room B.
The snap of latex gloves focuses my attention back on my physician. Casters rumble across the tile floor, coming to rest somewhere between my legs. A gloved hand grabs for a long wand attached to a small monitor. The device is about the size of an electric toothbrush, only thicker, with a bulbous tip. I hear the embarrassing squirt of lubricant before the internal ultrasound disappears below my paper dress. Pressure fills my pelvis.
“How are you feeling?”
This question is one of those standard doctor diagnostic tools. She doesn’t expect a real answer unless I’m in serious trouble. I am to complain only if it’s time for the epidural.
“All right. Thanks for asking.” I force a smile, unintentionally tensing my body in the process and worsening my discomfort. “How are you?”
I pull myself up on my elbows to see her response. Between my legs is a wild mass of corkscrew curls, cut short to keep strands out of her eyes. She’s not looking at my face. “Okay. Just relax,” she says.
I slurp air through clenched teeth. How am I supposed to relax with someone puttering around my womb, poised to certify my female handicap? No fertile ground here. I miss my last shrink. If only she could appear like the insurance agent in a State Farm commercial. It would be nice to have someone sympathize with the torture of wanting something so much that your cells ache. I haven’t seen Dr. Sally in nearly a year. Fertility treatments aren’t covered by insurance, and good psychiatrists also expect cash up front. My last book advance didn’t cover two out-of-pocket specialists.
My fertility doctor stares at the monitor as she moves the wand around. I shut my eyes, unable to bare the familiar black void on the screen without clenching every muscle. “Well, the good news is there are fewer fibroids this time around, so the progesterone is helping.” A sharp pain radiates in my hips as the device probes further. “And the ovaries have multiple ripe follicles.”
Before I knew better, the mention of “ripe” in connection with my female parts got me excited. The adjective brought to mind plump apple trees, limbs bending from the weight of swollen fruit ready to fall from the branches and accept a worm. I soon learned that in hard fertility cases, like mine, the follicles are rarely the problem. God, it turns out, is a pessimist. Instead of giving women five hundred or so follicles—one for each month of the forty-some-odd years that the average female is fertile—he starts us all off at puberty with more than four hundred thousand. Each follicle is capable of producing an ovum, so nearly all women have enough eggs for a hen house. Thanks to the drugs, I have half a dozen ready for market in any given month. If all my fertile eggs managed to hang on to the walls of my scarred uterus, I’d birth a litter.
All at once, the pressure releases. I remove my feet from the stirrups and scoot back into a more modest position on the examination chair. “If the fibroids continue to decrease, do you think in vitro could be an option? Maybe we could remove some of the eggs, fertilize them, and force them to implant?” My voice squeaks. Despair is awful, but hope can hurt worse. At least with despair, the cycle of destruction is complete. Hope is the Novocain shot before the surgery.
Dr. Frankel takes a short breath. “We aren’t there yet.”
I wipe the napkin sleeve of my gown against my lids before the tears can fall. My OB-GYN must be so sick of seeing me cry. God knows I’m disgusted with doing it.