Earth Angel (2 page)

“Relaxation?” Carol offered.

I shook my head. “That word’s not strong enough. Something bigger, more embracing. Rehabilitation. Rejuvenation. Reorientation.
I don’t know. Try to get our rhythms in sync again before the wedding.”

“You mean some serious screwing.”

“Thank you for the technical term, Dr. Slut.”

“Glad to assist a colleague, Dr. Bitch.”

I walked Carol down the hall, passing the examining rooms where my patients were waiting for me. By now our physician’s assistant,
Helen Sagan, would have taken temperatures, pulses, and blood pressures. Time for me to pop in, look official, and prescribe
some fancy aspirins. We were just a twenty-four-hour walk-in medical care center located in the middle of a sleepy planned
community in Southern California. During my shift I treated mostly men in their forties who wake up in the middle of the
night with chest pains, think they’re having a heart attack, and have their wives race them over here in the Lexus, calling
ahead on the car phone. Usually it’s just gas. The real life-threatening emergencies went directly to the new hospital ten
miles down the road where Tim worked. Emergency Room. The one rotation I’d always hated for myself, what with all the crying
and yelling and life-and-death decisions that had to be made instantly. The whole time I worked ER, I had skin rashes on my
arms and chest and ulcerations in my mouth. Plus, my fingernails stopped growing and I rarely wanted to have sex. But Tim
loved the chaos, the screams, the pressure. He lived for the challenge of a severed limb or severe head trauma. That is, until
two weeks ago when they put him on a two-month forced vacation after he’d slugged a patient and broke his nose.

Carol stopped and pulled me into the coffee room, her face suddenly grim with concern. “You haven’t offered any information,
but I’m invoking my privilege as your maid of honor and asking anyway. How are
you
holding up?”

“Fine. Good.”

She made a face. “Don’t bullshit me, girl. Are you fine?”

She meant the miscarriage. Last month I’d spontaneously aborted Tim’s and my ten-week-old fetus. Carol herself had broken
the clinic regulations and performed the D&C the next day, working between my legs with her clamp, speculum, and curette like
a thief picking a stubborn lock. There had been no specific cause for my miscarriage—one out of five pregnancies just ends.
How many emptied mothers-to-be had I consoled with that unhelpful statistic. Sorry, it just happens. Don’t drive yourself
nuts trying to figure out what you did wrong. It wasn’t your fault. Or as one fossilized doctor in med school had once said:
“A miscarriage is Nature’s way of telling you these cookies are half-baked. You wouldn’t want to eat half-baked cookies, would
you? Heh, heh.” That same afternoon, someone had
let the air out of all four of his tires. For years I’d regretted it hadn’t been me. Then Tim told me he’d done it and I felt
better; at least I’d fallen in love with the kind of person who would do it.

A few months ago Tim and I had decided, what the hell, since we were getting married soon anyway, let’s throw away the sponges
and condoms and just go at it—bareback. Man a babe-o. And bam! Bull’s-eye, first try. A girl. Which we’d discovered at nine
weeks through a chorionic villus sampling. Tim had been so excited about my pregnancy that he’d arranged the CVS with a buddy
of his at the hospital. There I was in the pelvic exam position while the two of them chatted between my legs, their voices
bouncing off the inside skin on my upraised thighs like a canyon. The last time I’d seen this buddy, he’d spilled a beer can
on my sofa. They snipped a piece of the infant’s tissue from the fetal sac and checked the chromosomes for the sex. We’d both
become very excited, even went out and bought cute little outfits and darling baby furniture, looked at wacky wallpaper for
the baby’s room. Tim had begun a diary of things he wanted to teach Emily (yes, we’d made the classic mistake of naming her
too soon). He was always scribbling away in his little notebook: how to double-knot shoelaces, bait a hook, humane ways to
turn a boy down for a date. Then one Sunday we were lying on the living room floor reading the newspaper and watching Ronald
Coleman in
A Tale of Two Cities
. We took turns imitating him: “It’s a faaar, faaar better thing I do now, than I have eveeer done.” Suddenly, the bleeding
started, followed quickly by the miscarriage and a couple days later by Tim returning the cute baby clothes and darling furniture.
Just like that, it was over. As if we’d driven through a guard rail and were soaring over a cliff, listening to the rush of
air beneath us, watching the horizon rise. We still caught ourselves staring at other people’s babies, or stopping to smile
over some nifty baby clothes in the
Baby Gap window at the mall. But I’d pretty much gotten over it and looked forward to trying again next year when the timing
would be better anyway.

Afterward, friends kept asking me how I was doing and I’d be embarrassed to tell them I was fine and meant it. They seemed
either to admire me for bravely lying or else be disappointed in me for not suffering more. I had to admit I hadn’t been the
best pregnant woman ever. One morning I woke up and found Tim sitting on the edge of the bed smiling sweetly at me. “You’re
glowing,” he said. “I hate to be so clichéd, but you really are glowing.” Suddenly, I bolted out of bed and puked up in the
bathroom. I lifted my head from the toilet bowl rim and said, “Want to clean up the afterglow?”

It was Tim who really took the miscarriage hard. Losing Emily, combined with the usual pressures of the ER, had started to
fray him a bit. That affected me more than anything else that had happened. The miscarriage was at least natural, but Tim’s
depression was not. Tim was the kind of person born under a lucky star. Everything he did was successful, from high-school
football star to the top five percent of his med school class. He saved lives in ER that everyone else thought were hopeless.
How many times had we been out at a restaurant or movie and someone would come up and thank Tim for saving his or her life.
Tim was brilliant, decisive, and confident, knew what to do and did it without hesitation. I think that’s why he liked ER
so much. He was a bona fide miracle worker. He raised the dead. He used to joke that he turned water into whine (watery eyes
from despair into whining voices about the bill). Emily was the first thing he’d ever failed at, at least in his own eyes.
And he hadn’t felt lucky ever since. Then, when that realtor jerk in the ER started yelling that he wanted his sprained wrist
looked at immediately, yanking on Tim’s arm while Tim was rushing down the hall to
work on a woman in cardiac arrest, Tim just nailed the man in the nose, breaking it in an explosion of blood. The lawsuit
was inevitable; so was Tim’s suspension. Even gods are accountable to insurance companies.

Carol and I walked out into the waiting room. Three Asian men in business suits sat huddled together over the magazine table.
The magazines had all been removed and neatly stacked on the floor. One of them was drawing something on the back of one of
our four-color brochures detailing our services. The other two watched silently with intent expressions.

“What do you think he does with it?” Carol asked.

“Who?” I thought maybe she meant the man drawing on the brochure.

“The guy. The guy who bought Napoleon’s penis. What’s he do with it? Keep it on display in his living room and stare at it?
Make it into a paperweight? Take out his own and compare? I mean, it’s got to be old and shriveled by now. When did Napoleon
die?”

“How should I know?”

Carol snorted. “You shouldn’t. But you do.”

“Napoleon Bonaparte: seventeen sixty-nine to eighteen twenty-one.”

“His dick’s over a hundred and seventy years old. Yikes.”

“Almost as old as your bleach job.”

She yawned. “I owe you for that, harelip.”

I touched the tiny scar on the side of my lip, a white check mark from falling against a glass coffee table when I was six.

Carol batted away my hand. “Oh, come on. I’m not going to play if you’re going to get self-conscious on me.” She grabbed her
abdomen. “Yeow, my bladder suddenly feels like a water balloon. I’d better go to the bathroom now. See you tomorrow. Say hi
to Tim.” Carol spun and trotted off to the staff bathroom.

“Bye,” I called after her. But she was already gone. The three Asian men looked up at me for a moment, smiled, then returned
to their drawing. Were they waiting for someone or did one of them want to be treated?

I went through the door back into the medical area to ask Darlene. She was typing up an insurance form for a patient who was
leaving. Darlene’s uniform was too tight, binding her rolls of fat into wrapped layers like a coiled firehose. She’d already
lost twenty pounds on her diet, but she always got excited and bought clothes too small as incentive. She still had another
twenty pounds to lose to fit into that uniform. Over at the file cabinet was Lolita, five months pregnant but skinny as a
drinking straw everywhere but her middle, which barely bulged, as if she were a shoplifter smuggling a sweater out. She was
nineteen and had been married two years, and I just knew she would have an uncomplicated pregnancy and easy delivery and I
tried not to hate her for that. She had a sign on her desk that she’d made with red magic marker: N
AME DU JOUR
. Under that was a blue Post-it note that said
Evan
. Yesterday was a pink Post-it note that said
Sheryl
. We were expected to check in with our opinion on the possible names for her baby, the sex of which she didn’t want to know
until after it was born. She said knowing ahead would take the fun out of being pregnant.

“
Evan’s
good,” I said to her. “Strong, yet intelligent. A leader.”

“You think?” she said happily. “John thinks he’ll get beat up over it, but he thinks that about every name except
Gregory
. I like
Evan
better than
Gregory. Greg. Greggy. Gre-gor-y
. Sounds scary, like those things on old buildings, those monsters—”

“Gargoyles.”

“Right. I hate them. And it reminds me of that music, those chants. What do I want to say?”

“Gregorian chants.” Named after Pope Gregory, 540–604
C.E.
, who was credited with creating the list of Seven Deadly Sins.

“Those things are spooky.”

I was wondering if she meant the sins or the gargoyles when Helen suddenly appeared at my side, startling me. Helen was the
best physician’s assistant I’d ever seen. Very efficient, very dry sense of humor. Sometimes she affected an Irish brogue,
even though she was two generations removed from her immigrant ancestors. “What’s that smell?” she asked.

“Obsession,”
I said.

“Smells like cat piss.” She hurried off, talking to me without turning around. “X rays are in on that sprain. No fractures.
I’d send him home with a lecture about skateboarding after dark. The cold’s a cold, nothing more. Wants an excuse not to go
to work tomorrow. Grown man looking for permission to play hooky. The woman’s your problem.” She disappeared around a corner.

I looked through the folders, glancing at medical histories. Two of the patients had been here before. The woman seeking amphetamines
was new. Thing was, Helen was usually right. All she needed was a few more years of schooling and she could have my job. She
did it as well as I did already. Anyway, this wasn’t where I wanted to be. Another year here and I’d have saved up enough
to open my pediatrics practice. By then Tim would be back working his miracles in the emergency room and we could try again
to start our own family. We had a proper schedule now.

The man with the cold sat on the examining table thumbing through an old
People
magazine. When I walked in he closed the magazine and slid it back into the plastic wall pocket. He was about thirty, my
age, with curly black hair and heavy five o‘clock shadow. “Hi,” he sniffled.

“Hello, Mr. Grieshum. Have a bad cold?”

“No, thanks, I already have one.” He chuckled, which turned into coughing. But it was a shallow, dull cough, nothing rattling
inside. “Sorry,” he said, holding up a hand and coughing again.

I checked him out, but there was nothing much going on but a cold. He talked a lot during the examination, filling me in on
the details of his life. Divorced. Systems analyst. A Jeep. First-baseman on a softball league. As I moved around him, he
kept giving me the once-over, which I pretended not to notice. Occupational hazard. I’m fairly young, moderately attractive,
and a medical doctor. In most guys’ fantasies that classifies me with waitresses and nurses as a “woman who would know how
to take care of her man.” Basically a service position. Tim and I had been together for eight years, but there was an eight-month
period right after med school when we had split up, during which I’d dated my fair share of guys who thought my being a doctor
meant I gave good massages—or enemas. I finished up with Mr. Grieshum and sent him out to see Darlene to pay his bill.

“Should I stay home, you think?” he asked as he walked backward down the hall. “I mean, so as not to infect others at work
and such.”

“Sure,” I said. Absolution didn’t cost me anything. “Might be a good idea.”

He nodded and hurried away.

I ducked into the X ray room, examined the X rays. No breaks, no fissures.

“What’s wrong with Tim?” Helen asked, scaring me again.

“Jesus, Helen, wear a bell or something.”

“What’s wrong with Tim?” she repeated. She looked concerned and annoyed.

“Nothing. He’s just a little cranky about being suspended.” Carol was the only one at work who knew about
my miscarriage but, since it was in the papers, everyone knew about Tim’s suspension.

“No, I mean what’s
wrong
with him. He’s out in the waiting room. Looks like hell. He sick?”

“He’s here? Did he say he wanted to see me?”

“He said he was waiting for your break.”