The Child (16 page)

“Who?”

“Why can’t you guess?”

Marty pointed the clicker like a gun. “How am I supposed to know?”

“Either you’re helpless or you’re not. Which is it?” She hated herself the minute she said it. She knew it was wrong. “Oh, Marty, I’m sorry. Please.”

Brigid wanted to get down on her knees in front of him, beg him for forgiveness. Rub her face into his crotch, bend over on the carpet before his desire. Stew was gone now, so he could fuck her in the living room. He could make her asshole bleed. She wanted him to fuck her in the ear, so that her brain would come out the other side. She hated her own mind. She couldn’t stand it. She’d cut her tongue out if he would smash her brain with his penis. She wished she could rub her face in it, that he would beat her with it until she was black and blue. She wanted his dick to be enormous, a two-byfour, filled with nails to gouge her heart out. Why couldn’t he just beat the shit out of her? Fuck her and stab her a few times? Hit her over the head with a hammer? Then everything would be all right. He’d feel better and she could relax.

“You. You got the job.”

“No,” she said. “It was Louise from purchasing. She wants to cut lunch from one hour to forty-five minutes. I told her that’s why it’s called a lunch hour, not a lunch forty-five minutes.”

Marty raised the volume on the TV. He was channel surfing with the volume up. It was like he was fucking her in the mouth and her head was banging against the wall. A battering of partial sound. No sense, so relief, no control. Then he stopped.

“Look at that man ride a horse.”

“What is it?”

“
Red River
.”

“Is that John Wayne?”

“You know damn well it is. Please give me a break, Brigid. I can’t go five minutes without you telling me what the hell is wrong with me. I can’t live with that, do you understand? I’m doing the best I can. I don’t want to hear what’s wrong with me. This is it. I’m not getting better. I don’t want cops and shrinks and wives telling me what’s wrong with me. I can’t do anything about it.”

“You’ve only got one wife as far as I know.”

Brigid went into the kitchen and got some more supper. She came back to the living room resolved to try a softer tone.

“Kathleen at work is pregnant. Don’t tell anybody.”

“Where is Stew? I don’t like this. Why is he running away?”

“He must be guilty.”

“I know he’s guilty. Our kid is sick.” Marty stared at the TV. “Now he’s gonna get it.”

There were clean magazines and up-to-date newsletters in Dr. Kumar’s waiting room. Everything was so crisp it was disconcerting. Efficiency overkill.

“You’re the youngest person here,” Mary said, and Eva found that comforting. They were having the same observations, even with new and upsetting experiences. They were still sharing assumptions. Eva felt reassured that if worse came to worst, Mary would let her have the mastectomy, all the chemo and other toxic medications. She wouldn’t ask her to go to an Icelandic faith healer and eat quinoa. Eva had the kind of personality that was only compatible with official medicine. New Age worked for holistic people, but partial people needed radiation.

“I wonder if all these cancer waiting rooms are the same,” Eva said. “Average age, fifty-five. I haven’t been the youngest in years. I feel so strange.”

“About having breast cancer?”

“I don’t have breast cancer.” She looked around the room. How many women were wearing prostheses? “No, about going through this and no one in my family having any idea.”

“So tell them.” Mary started reading a strategically placed list of support groups. She seemed hurt.

“Mary, honey, we talked about this five times, and we decided together that there was no point in getting them involved.”

Of course Eva was whispering. It was a murmuring kind of environment, and these very lesbian conversations were habitually
muffled. Nobody wants to hear two female lovers talk about anything real, and no one wants to hear them struggle with each other. It was instinctual knowledge, fear masquerading as privacy.

“They don’t love you and they’re not going to help you. They don’t know you and they don’t respect your feelings. For God’s sake, they wouldn’t even invite you to the baby shower. How are they going to help you when you’re dying of breast cancer?”

Five other patients looked up at this point, and Eva realized that breast cancer was something that had happened to some of them a long time ago. Those were their good old days.

“I don’t have breast cancer. I have a minuscule mass.” This line was starting to feel ridiculous to say.

“But what if you do have it?”

“I don’t know. You mean what would I do tomorrow morning? Have breakfast. Be freaked out. Go to work. Help you.”

“Help me what?”

Something was going wrong all of a sudden.

“Tomorrow’s your meeting with Ilene,” Eva said quietly. “I want it to go well.”

“It’s the beginning of our new life.”

“I’m so glad.” Eva held her hand. “I hope this isn’t the beginning of my new life. I don’t want to be afraid.”

“Of what?”

“The fear, the pain, the details.”

“What kind of details? You mean what if I’m not good enough?”

“I know you love me,” Eva said truthfully. “And that’s what no one else can do.”

“When my father died, it was horrible. I’m just not that experienced with doctors. I don’t know how to make those decisions.”

Listen. Listen
, Eva told herself.
She’s telling you how she feels. Believe her.

“You’re right, we need to keep my family out of it.”

“I want to tell you something,” Mary said, feeling heard, putting her forehead on Eva’s forehead. “I am your family. I will take care of you. Don’t ever speak to them again.”

Eva looked into those soft blue eyes. Yes, that was the truth. Mary is her family. Someone in this world cared about what happened to Eva. Someone was accountable. Mary.

The receptionist called out
Eva Krasner
. Eva stepped behind the divider and into the expensive presence of Dr. Gita Kumar.

She had planned this conversation for a while now, and yet was unable to carry it out in an orderly and expected fashion. So after only a few minutes of one-to-one contact with Dr. Kumar, Eva, again in an examination gown, opened her big fat mouth.

“Excuse me, there is something I want to tell you about Dr. Pollack, the doctor at the clinic.”

“There does seem to be a tiny presence here on the film,” Dr. Kumar mused, with her back to Eva, in the light of the fluorescent mammogram. “It looks like some microscopic mass inside of a milk duct.”

Eva felt nauseous. But why? She was a grown woman, so was Dr. Kumar. This kind of thing, being molested by Dr. Pollack, shouldn’t throw either of them. Everyone knows it happens regularly. So it had happened to her. Other people had spoken out about it, and now she was going to do her duty.

“You see, he gave another patient a bad result on the phone in
the middle of my breast exam. I mean, right in the middle.”

She had decided to start with this fact, the most outrageous and believable, before getting to the prick part. Eva had concluded that almost anyone in their right mind would agree that this part of the story was wrong. Morally wrong. Then she could tread into the murkier waters of innuendo, where it would come down to
Lesbian Accuses Religious Father/Doctor
. That would take more than luck to pull off. There would have to be no God.

Dr. Kumar turned her head but not her body, and posed like a supermodel on the cover of a Karachi fashion magazine. She smiled a dazzling smile. She was wearing nail polish. Deep red.

“I’m sure it was nothing.”

“I think it was something.”

Kumar stopped still and stared at her. She was slightly cockeyed. She wasn’t glamorous. Actually, she looked exhausted. Sloppily, Eva told the story of the phone call, the never-ending breast exam.

“That’s crass,” she said, plucking film off the light wall and coming closer to Eva’s barefoot, infantilized, fearful body. “But he’s a nice guy. Stop looking for justice and take care of your health. We can do a surgical biopsy, or we can just watch it. Your chart says your mother had breast cancer at forty-nine. You’re forty. It could be at the microscopic mass-in-a-milk-duct stage.”

“Wait and watch? That feels right. I’m not a good fighter.”

“Well, better learn. You don’t want your first real fight to be for your life. Think it over.”

Kumar was done. She’d recited her Miranda rights.

“Do you think I should have the biopsy?”

“It’s very early.” She was patient. “If we do a biopsy and find cancer, it would be easily treatable. It most likely is nothing. You
can save yourself the surgery and just wait and see if it grows. I can’t make that decision for you.”

“I can’t wait and watch anything,” Eva said, sweating. “Surgery is my only option, emotionally.”

Back in the waiting room, Mary was sleeping. Eva was so happy to see her. She could accept Mary’s limitations—of course she was exhausted by all of this. What was the good side? Despite hating doctors, feeling inadequate, and having a generally difficult time giving herself and others a break, Mary had still come to this waiting room and done her best. Mary was there when Eva needed her, and that made this whole nightmare so much easier, even though it was still hard. Eva felt reassured as she reached for her checkbook. The receptionist was madly answering the phones. Everyone in New York seemed to have cancer.

“How much do I owe you?”

The phones are wildly waving.

“Three hundred and fifty dollars.”

“Do you take HIP Choice Plus?”

“No HMOs.”

“How much is this surgical biopsy going to cost? I know this is an expensive business.”

“Dr. Kumar’s fee will be three thousand dollars. Hold on … Dr. Kumar’s office. Hold on, please … Dr. Kumar’s office. Hold on, please…. The facility charges four thousand dollars, plus you have to have a wire placed in the breast on the day of surgery at another facility. That will cost about fifteen hundred plus lab fees.”

“How much is the lab?”

“I don’t know. Hold on. Dr. Kumar’s office.”

“What insurance do I need?”

“We don’t recommend insurance. Hold on. Hello?”

Eva looked at Mary. She was stretching.

“Wait, do you take Oxford?”

“What? We bill to Oxford. Dr. Kumar’s office, please hold.”

“Okay, I’ll go get Oxford.” She kissed Mary on the hair. “Honey, wake up. Everything is going to be fine.”

“I knew it,” Mary said and smiled.

“Everything is taken care of now.” Eva kissed her. “I just need to get one more small thing, and then it will all be over.”

Stew ran–he did not make a decision. He was not in charge of his actions anymore. As he felt his body turning, he knew this was the wrong thing to do. That it was irreversible, the flight. That, irreversibly, it would lead him to more disaster of such supreme dimension that he was compelled to run toward it. He fled out the door and into his dark, unavoidable fate. His parents’ actions had sealed his future. He gave in and he ran.

Stew ran until he was out of breath. Then he walked down to the park, panting and sweating. There, some boys he did not know were playing basketball. He sat down and stared at them. Their light, dancing ease and their tense insecurities. Both attributes naïve. He was not naïve; he saw everything now. Their stupid competition and dull put-downs. They sped up before him and lost some of their dimension. Slowly their faces and personalities merged, and instead he was taken over by the swirling sneakers and their competing brand names, the white skin like beige clouds. There was no time anymore, just a sea of short swooshes moving through the air. Punctuating sweatbands.

Then it was dark, and suddenly he was alone on the bleachers. He had hypnotized himself, but the trance wore off, so he started walking back toward his house. It was a blind plunge into the darkness. It wasn’t too cold out, and he could hear the crickets chirping, the buzz of electrical devices, TV sets, and a couple of cars gliding around corners, the sound of garage doors opening automatically. No sighs or moans of pleasure.

He climbed into his father’s garage and breathed in the smell of oil and gasoline. He felt like puking. Then he lay down in a corner with his head against the cold concrete floor. Did he sleep? What does that mean?

In the morning Stew got up and went to school like an automaton. It was weird. He was dirty and had no books, but no one seemed to notice. He hadn’t handed in any homework in a few weeks anyway, and had become one those kids the teachers expected very little from. But he did get some lunch. It was delicious grilled cheese and French fries and milk. He washed his face in the boys’ room and slept through sophomore English. After school he just went back to the park and watched basketball again.

This was the kind of life his parents wanted him to have. Repeated nothing day in and day out. This is what they had done, slept through school and watched the game. He had the ability to do that forever. It was how he was raised, but he didn’t want to. Now it was evening again, and Stew was freezing this time and starving. He slowly climbed of the bleachers and headed home.

Stew was afraid to make a decision—he didn’t know how. Everything was topsy-turvy, and any move would have been a bad one, but he couldn’t just stand still. He tried it, standing very still on the corner of his subdivision, under a streetlight. The electronic buzz became deafening, he thought he was going insane. He couldn’t go home. He had no money. He was hungry, having long before consumed the squashed, pocketed egg.

Did Stew have a friend? He wasn’t sure. David was his friend. There was a girl in his chemistry class whom he admired. She was smart and loud. She deflected the attention, which made him feel safer. But she was black, and he didn’t know where she lived. She
was the only black girl in his class. Who was her father? Some black guy somewhere. He just wanted to go online. It was the only way he knew how to relax.