Tarleton perches on the exam table in a gown, her thighs pasted to the runner of waxy paper like she is her own favorite mayo and banana pregnancy sandwich. Hugging her stomach she wonders if her baby will like the color red, the taste of cherries, and the feel of velvet; or will it be green her baby loves, the emerald world of frogs and grass. I can’t wiggle my toes, she thinks. My feet are swollen bread loaves with grape toes.
Earlier she’d drunk a sugary liquid and now sits waiting for the man-nurse, Wystan, who comes with the butterfly syringe. She was fine sitting there. Now she’s not fine. Someone coughs in the hall. Wystan enters, a cart following him. Tying the tourniquet above her elbow, he finds the crook of her arm and sees how she shakes and has to be calmed before he can slip the thin needle in. She turns away as the vial fills with rubies.
“You’re not the only patient with blood phobia,” Wystan says. “When I walk into an exam room I might as well be a hurricane. I’ve seen women that afraid.” He likes to talk, to speak of tropical storms and earthquakes. The eleventh tropical storm of the season is out there. It has teeth and an appetite. Hurricane Wystan, he calls himself. He’s a winker. The first vial is capped and another to be drawn. When Tarleton glances she sees red cinnabar moths flying into the vial.
When he leaves he closes the door tight. There aren’t any stories in this room. She listens. The hallway has more. There are secrets kept and revealed here, but the examining table and metal surfaces are too silver and shiny for them to stick. Footsteps approach, then fall back. Her eyes wander the ceiling’s low white sky. The baby is a little seahorse, hers alone. She picked the father for his quickness, for his not-too-short or too tallness. She saw him each day. In her mind she called him the boy because he looked younger than her, although not by much. He smiled more with his dark eyes than his strong white teeth.
Her hands hold her stomach, her fingers touching each deep breath her body takes. Her diaphragm is being squashed by her expanding uterus. She imagines herself as a five-year-old in a burgundy dress with velvet sash and a cancan. Her birthday party. She’d blown up a balloon and when it popped pieces flew to the back of her throat. The instant she couldn’t breathe she felt free. A bird escaping the cat’s daggers. How far away the people around the tall strawberry shortcake seemed. Breathlessness made her float as if she would soon dissolve into bits of silk ribbon. She had no mother who wished to hold her to earth. Struggling to breathe, she gulped in air and panted.
•
The door opens and Tarleton turns, her face expectant. But it’s not soft-spoken Doctor Lynette Roby. Instead it’s a thin, blond man with a long nose overlooking his white lab coat and stethoscope who takes her hand. He is shaking it, pressing his cold palm against hers. His hair, combed back from his forehead, is long enough to tuck behind his ears. He tells her he is replacing Doctor Roby. He tells her his name is Doctor Liszt. The name sounds familiar.
He helps her lie back on the examining table. Maybe he thinks she won’t miss Doctor Roby because his eyes are so very blue—the cobalt-blue of her childhood’s glass pig-bank. The one she used to feed dimes, quarters, and twigs. Half dollars were too big for his mouth. Her grandmother owned Laundromats. Her clothes rained quarters. When Lester the pig-bank broke, she gathered up all the blue glass and planted it next to the chinaberry tree. She waited for a tree of slivery blue leaves. Branches jagged like shards of broken Lester. She watered the ground with her tears.
“Any vaginal bleeding?” he asks, seating himself on the wheeled silver stool. He turns a page in her file. A bulldog clip holds her first and second trimesters.
“No.”
“Any irregular contractions?”
“Some.”
He wants to measure her cervix. A mirror, light and speculum opens her. The hidden world. She thinks of the deposit of semen injected high into the cervix with a needle-less syringe. She decided on the boy herself. He was twenty-one. A cashier at her neighborhood Stop N Go; a boy set on saving money to become an herpetologist; a boy who would eventually return to his native Bangladesh.
“How old are you, Tarleton?”
“Almost twenty-five,” she answers.
“We’ll be taking a repeat gonorrhea test.” He pronounces gonorrhea like an entrée in an expensive restaurant.
“Why?”
“It’s routine.”
Her cheeks burn. “There’s no reason. The baby is from a sperm bank.” He pauses to look at her. Is he surprised that this pretty dark-skinned girl chose a donor? This girl with high cheekbones and pale green eyes is likely partnered with another pretty girl. But he can’t see everything, sitting as he is on the metal stool with four wheels. Maybe he loves to roll like she used to roll, up and down, up and down. Then he sits, draping the sheet between her legs. His fingers examine her ankles.
“I’m retaining water,” she says.
“That’s normal. How are you sleeping?”
She thinks of her body and how it took in noises from the street, and the gospel singing of mosquitoes through the thin walls of the apartment. The baby listens to everything. The baby is listening now. She feels the cold of the speculum. “You have extremely pleasing eyes,” he says, looking at her blue cervix. Her leaf-colored eyes aren’t there.
“I thought Doctor Roby would be with me,” Tarleton trembles. Her skin is clammy, her skin doesn’t like the wax paper sheet, doesn’t like him looking.
“Won’t your partner be with you in the delivery room?” he asks.
“I don’t have a partner. The baby and I will be everything to each other.”
“Maybe you can ask your mother to be with you.”
“Who?” Silence swallows the room. Her grandmother said Tarleton’s mother had an aneurism during her delivery. Should she share that fact with his face or the ceiling’s perforated holes pricked by a million butterfly needles? He unsnaps his rubber glove so forcefully. Like he is angry at her. Angry that she is the cause of him having to put it on. “A berry aneurism?” His eyes turn opaque. Blue plaster. “What was the outcome?” She shrugs as if she doesn’t know. But she does. Her mother died. Her mother became stillness. There was a lawsuit that became a handsome trust fund. She wonders if the baby inside her, a girl-child, could be her mother returning. “Cheer up.” he says, closing her folder and patting her shoulder. “You’re young,” he repeats, already most of the way out of the room. “Stay active. Keep exercising.” Tarleton sighs not loud enough for the light switch to hear or the glove that touched the inside of her body withering in the wastebasket.
She thinks of the boy’s dark eyes so intelligent behind his glasses. How quickly he gave change. He already knew the total before the electronic sensor touched the bar code. He knew things about her. That she didn’t require a plastic bag. That she refused to add to the reefs of plastic in the ocean that choked dolphins. That she preferred paying in cash. Sometimes, handfuls of quarters. It was this knowing that led to him telling her he had a discovered a frog in the Chittagong district of his home country that had not yet been classified. There was an article in a newspaper on-line. She asked many questions of him. What his favorite time of day was? First light. Did he sleep well at night? Always. Did he like the color orange? Yes, when the sun dropped into Bay of Bengal at dusk, orange swallowed the world. Then the day came and she asked him to be a donor. Hers. He would be paid. She bought ice cold water, a coconut ice cream bar.
•
In the waiting room the TV is turned to pregnancy yoga. A big woman in black shorts on her hands and knees curls her toes and raises her hips. Her legs are great marbled cuts of beef. Wystan coming down the hall gives her a thumbs up. Doctor Roby shouldn’t have left without telling Tarleton goodbye. Clutching her cell phone she starts down the uneven sidewalk that passes the nursing college and Herman Hospital. Cathedrals, blue-white in the sun. Cars pass. Traffic is a blur. Buildings are sharp-edged, like scalpels. She hopes the little seahorse doesn’t mind. It’s good for both of them to walk, so said the blond, thin-nosed doctor. Before the lawsuit she lived with her grandmother in a three-story yellow house with wraparound porch and bamboo shades that broke the sun into slanting pieces that the ceiling fan stirred.
The heat in this city is always spoken of. The most air-conditioned city in the world. It was flat out heat like this, the day she and the boy walked together to the clinic. He wore a long-sleeved shirt and his dark hair was freshly washed. Sun glinted from the black centers of his eyes. He said things to her. He would like to know her better. She could teach him. Did she know how to play marbles with sea shells? Had she ever seen a swamp deer? The male antlers have twelve points. He was nervous. Like a swamp deer. He felt the great honor. Thank you, he told her. Thank you, he repeated.
Her dress liquefies and the nylon material sweats flat against her body. She feels as if she is walking naked. Doctor Roby didn’t tell her goodbye, and neither had she told the boy goodbye. Is my conscience clean? Will I be a good mother if my conscience needs washing? Twice a day for months she’d talked with him; he spoke good but not perfect English; yes, frog hunting in brackish ponds near the ancient temples he’d taught himself English; old science journal articles were sometimes written in German and so he learned German, that’s how smart he was. The day he accompanied her to the clinic; she gave him a check for more money than he could believe. For doing such a thing.
She keeps walking through the heat and as soon as she thinks she is almost home another block unrolls itself. There are smells of warm dirt and leaves. Along the sidewalks she notices beige gravel like broken teeth. Yucca plants, fleshy daggers poke into the sun. Her head sweats like her skin, perspiration trickling into her eyes, perspiration running from her chin, from her ears like water diamonds. Walking she rocks, knowing the baby likes the motion of going. We will be everything to each other. Why, the boy asked, don’t you want to make a baby in the ordinary way? Are you afraid?
She turns onto West Dallas Street. The cars go faster and not a hint of a breeze. Someone in a passing truck honks. “Mamasita!” Squat brick apartments with oxidized lilacs. A man in overalls at the corner holds long pruning shears. The giant tongs click at the bush’s pointed yellow tips. She goes on between lawns stamped brown by the scorching sun. She needs no one but the life inside her. Behind the blue cervix is the hidden word.
