A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That (7 page)

Sometimes I skipped ahead and my mother was gone. I was living alone in her apartment. I was on the couch with a glass of wine, telling some man without a face all about her. He was bored, reaching for his gin and tonic. He scratched his arm. He nodded.
Sorry
, he said, unconvincingly.
A dozen wigs?
he said.
Handmade dresses? No pattern? You're kidding me, right?
He put his drink on the coffee table, a hand on my thigh.
Didn't know cancer could wrap around a person's heart—you making this shit up?
he wanted to know.

In bed I thought about the men who'd passed through me. I thought about the most recent one first, and then tried to remember the others. I tried to see their faces, their skin and teeth, but it was impossible, their features blurring into something vague. They became what they did for a living: artist, pizza man, teacher, baseball player.

Just before sleep, that moment when I wasn't sure what was real and what wasn't, they became their uniforms or props, suspended in the air above my head, twirling around like a baby's mobile: brush and oil paints, a chef's hat, a bat and mitt, an eraser.

Sometimes I imagined my own breasts were lost and I was searching for them. I knew them then for what they were: sneaky, independent, two pale liars.

People told me that when a loved one dies, he or she is never forgotten. Other people said that forgetting what a dead person's face looked like was part of the healing process. Some said that my life would never be the same, while others insisted that eventually, after a thousand cups of coffee and days at work, I would wake up one morning and not feel pulled into the carpet.

It was one A.M. when I got up out of bed and went to her room. I looked at my mother, her nose and lips. Her face was shaped like a perfect heart. I watched her body fall and rise. I listened. I leaned down and touched her skull, the fuzz there like a boy's new chin.

“Is he here again?” she asked, her eyes still closed.

“Who?”

“The man you were with last week.”

“No,” I told her.

“Rex, right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Rex,” she repeated. “Where is he?”

“He's gone.”

“He can stay here,” she mumbled, “if you like him.”

“I like him.”

“Where is he?” she said again.

“He's on a farm now, with a redhead.”

“Farms are dirty,” she told me. “You don't want to be on a farm, honey.” My mother turned on her side then, away from me, so that I no longer saw her face. She pulled the blanket around her body, up and over her head so that I saw none of her, not the smallest piece of flesh.

1999-2000

1.

This was where Ella talked to the girls who came to her, itching and burning and foul. This was where they stood, thirteen and pregnant, twelve and misinformed, thirty and oh so sorry.

She was a hand attached to a clipboard coming at Georgia Carter from inside a tiny window. Ella was nails and cuticles, knuckles and a white gold wedding band. This was where Georgia signed her name on a dotted line, so quickly that the signature could have been anyone's. From behind the glass Ella looked at the girl's messy, flippant cursive and shook her head.

“What?” Georgia said, sliding the clipboard Ella's way. There was a pen connected to it on a chain and a sticky note she'd placed on the paper. “Something wrong?” Georgia wanted to know.

The note said:
Make sure it's you, Ella. You know what I mean.

Ella knew what she meant. She meant she would not answer questions for the others. It meant it better be Ella inquiring, sitting on the stool across from her, or Georgia was out of there.

Ella put the note into the pocket of her white jacket and slid the window closed. She nodded yes to Georgia's request, but still the girl stood there looking at the window and at Ella's face behind it as if she wanted more, as if Ella had something else to give her. Georgia's expression was one of expectation and disappointment, and on the days she visited, Ella couldn't help wondering about the girl's life, about what went on when she was somewhere else. Finally, Georgia was shrugging and turning her back, walking toward the plastic couches and coffee tables, the magazines and mute TVs.

Georgia was famous at the clinic, returning month after month with various problems. Syphilis in February, condyloma in April, and then, in August, the first of three unwanted pregnancies. The first one was immaculate, she explained. “I haven't been with a boy in months,” she said, straight-faced, looking right at Ella.

“Then it's a miracle,” Ella said.

“It
is,”
she said, adamant, her voice rising.

“Hasn't happened since Mary,” Ella continued.

“Mary?”

“The Virgin.”

Georgia shrugged.

“A miracle,” Ella repeated.

“You wouldn't know a miracle if it kicked your ass.”

“You've got that saying wrong.”

“So what?”

“It's ‘
bit you
in the ass,' Georgia. You wouldn't know a miracle if it
bit you
in the ass.”

“Whatever,” she said.

This was the stool where Georgia sat and squirmed, where she smacked her minty gum, where she sighed and swore and rolled her eyes. This was the cubicle where Ella leaned in and asked Georgia questions about boys, about precaution, about recklessness and sandals, about movies, instinct, and regret. This was where Ella leaned back and took notes. This was where she tapped her pen on her knee and stared right back at the girl.

And here in the front of the clinic was where Ella's husband of six months waited for her to finish up. These were the afternoons when Jack's research for the day was complete, when his boss sent him away from the laboratory. “Go,” his boss said, “you've just gotten married.”

Jack was a scientist who studied bats: the Fruit, Long-tongued, and Ghost-faced. He spent mornings just inches from their hairy faces, pinning their leathery wings to corkboards. He attached tiny clips to their eyes to keep them open. “That's gruesome,” Ella told him. “They're dead,” he reminded her.

Ella believed that while Jack sat on the couch in the clinic waiting room, flipping through the magazines he settled for—
People
and
Glamour
,
Modern Teen
and
Bride
—the bats were still on his mind.

This was Ella's coworker, Sarah, who was good with numbers, who was tall and lean and busty, who walked with a swish. This was where she stood at closing: behind the counter, just feet from Ella's husband. This was the adding machine on a low table in front of her, perfectly level with her crotch. And this was Sarah punching those numbers with manicured nails, tallying those numbers, while Ella, a matriculating English major with a disdain for math, stood in the back of the clinic, her designated space, in yellow gloves and ridiculous rubber jacket, dunking the day's speculums into the hottest water, water so hot that the steam lifting from it had, on more than one occasion, melted her mascara—her eyes stuck shut then.

Sometimes, at closing, Sarah wore her white jacket, but more often than not the jacket hung on a chair beside her. Then, with her cocky posture and attitude, her full, high breasts would make themselves known in a sweater or T-shirt or low-cut blouse. Often the little radio to her right was turned down low, blues or jazz coming from it. Sometimes, she ate peanuts from a glass dish. Sometimes, a candy bar, still in its wrapper, half eaten, sat by her side. Maybe a can of soda.

Ella wanted to believe that her husband, at least those first few afternoons, deliberately avoided the view; she saw him in her mind's eye holding the magazine in front of his face for protection. She told herself that from across the room he couldn't hear the music and that the smell of peanuts wafting from Sarah's space must have turned him off. Unfortunately, this vision of a reluctant, loyal Jack was most likely optimism on Ella's part. More likely the blues or jazz crooning from the little radio and the sight of Sarah working and lifting things to her mouth was immediately too much for him, and the clinic filled with tension and innuendo. Most likely Jack peered over the pages of that magazine, rapt.

Ella imagined that every so often Sarah looked up at her husband from the day's business and smiled. She imagined that Jack returned the smile and did a little something with his eyes. She understood that a man and a woman smiling like that through September and October and November were probably making mutual plans, plans that ripened with every grin.

This was the clinic hallway. This was the dirty floor, which would later be mopped with the harshest cleanser. To the left was the locked cabinet full of blood. Vials lined up like spices, needles and cotton balls, ointment and swabs. On the wall hung a stethoscope, a clipboard, and a bad picture of a sunflower. On the counter a roll of condoms and a rubber breast. It was one of Ella's many jobs to teach the girls to find the cancer. It's like a little stone, a tiny rock, it's like a pea made out of lead. “Here, right here,” she said, letting the pads of her fingertips point out what one day might threaten them both.

This was where Ella took off the yellow gloves and let them drop into a bin before moving, hip first, through the double doors. This was the first Monday in December, the day she found peanuts on the floor, the radio full of static, the day she found Jack and Sarah kissing. Sarah, her coworker, who was supposed to be punching numbers, placing her hand inside her husband's black jeans and counting, Ella was sure, his balls. And this was Sarah becoming the number-two woman in Jack's life and inching her way toward number one, and even Ella understood that simple subtraction.

2.

“We're young,” Jack said later. They were sitting in his car outside the clinic, and Ella was crying into her hands. It was ninety degrees outside, and though they were standing still, going nowhere, Jack had the engine running and the air-conditioning on. “Turn it off,” Ella said, rolling down the window.

“I'm hot,” he said weakly.

She looked at the clinic's awning above them. “We're in the shade, Jack,” she said. “Roll down your window and turn off the car.”

“Okay,” he said.

Two teenagers, a girl and a boy, entered the fast food restaurant to their left, her first, him sheepishly behind. The girl was scowling, throwing up her hands in apparent frustration. “Come on,” the boy said. “Wait up,” he begged.

It seemed to Ella that everyone was fighting.

“We're twenty-five,” Jack said, stating the obvious. “We're young,” he said softly.

“How many times has this happened?” she wanted to know.

“This is the first.”

“Must be exciting.”

“No.”

“Tell the truth, Jack. It's exciting and you know it. You're at the beginning of something—imagine the possibilities.”

“Ella, please.”

“If this isn't exciting, what the hell is? Is marriage exciting? Is sitting and staring at the same woman every single morning for the rest of your life exciting? What were we thinking, getting married like that?”

“About love, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“We were thinking about love, Ella.”

“I should have figured this out,” she said. “Who listens to Billie Holiday while they add up the day's Pap numbers? Who listens to
that
while she's figuring out how much money the day's herpes cases brought in?”

Jack shook his head.

“Her posture and tits—what an idiot I am,” she continued. “You've been picking me up for months now, flipping through magazines you don't give a damn about, waiting when you hate to wait.”

“I wait.”

“You don't wait
well.”

“What's waiting well?”

“Someone who sits or stands patiently. Someone who doesn't have to be occupied or entertained. He doesn't stare at the bitch in the white coat—or without her white coat—that's someone who waits well.”

“Stop it, Ella.”

She picked up her purse from the floor and searched for tissue. She blew her nose, then stuffed the tissue in the tiny ashtray, which she knew would irritate him. It bloomed out like a white flower. “When do you wait, Jack? Huh? Huh? Answer me.” She slapped her thighs with her palms. “When?” she said again.

He stared at the tissue, reached over to stuff it farther inside or pull it out, but seeing her face, changed his mind mid-reach. She stared at his hand, full of indecision, hanging in the air a second before returning to his side. She wondered how much indecision, if any, he'd felt that afternoon before rising from the couch and making his way to Sarah.

“At the movies,” he said. “I wait in lines.”

“You fidget and squirm and cuss under your breath—that's not waiting.”

“At the grocery store,” he continued.

“How long does it take you to decide which line is the shortest? How long do you stand there staring, watching the checkers to see which one works the fastest before you decide which line is the best bet?”

“Okay,” he said.

“You stand and stare, surveying the situation like a grocery store critic or something.”

“Point taken,” he said.

But she wasn't finished. “You don't wait well,” she said, “and you were trying to fuck some goddamn stranger.”

“Ella, no—”

“Let me ask you this,” she said, “who made the first move? Did Sarah ask you to come up to the front to help her with something? Did she act helpless or pretend she couldn't add? Because that's her thing, adding. She never read a book in her life, I'm sure, but she's got that adding thing down.” She looked at him hard. “What I want to know, Jack, is why you got up from that couch. And what those steps were like for you.”

“There was a problem with the calculator and I—”

“What a joke,” she said.

“I helped her—”

“You helped her, that's right.”

“It was a mistake,” he said.

“Why didn't you just stay at the lab with your bats?”

“I wanted to be there when you finished.”

“September, October, and November.” Ella counted the months on her fingers and shook her head.

“I wanted to give you a ride home,” he said.

She looked him up and down, and suddenly he was all evidence. His hair, always short, had grown out, and she noticed the blond curls resting on his collar. The green shirt was new, too, a different look for him, and it matched his green eyes, making them stand out in his face. And the black jeans—he'd lost two inches in his waist, gone from 36s to 34s in the last three months. What was she thinking when she'd asked the salesclerk to ring those up? That he was slimming down for
her?

He tapped his knuckles on the steering wheel. He squirmed in the seat. “Don't stare at me,” he said. “I feel badly enough as it is.”

“Bad,” she said. “You should feel
bad.”
Still, she kept staring. His new goatee did little to cover his weak chin, and she was glad about that. Let him keep that shit on his face forever, she thought.

They sat without saying anything for a good five minutes. “When I was a kid,” he said finally, “I always fought with my dad in the car, my mom too. We'd be taking a road trip or even going to the corner store for milk, and boom, a nasty argument. Now I know why.”