Wonderland (46 page)

She would go into the city alone, she would walk there alone. At the back of her mind she imagined herself walking all day, losing herself in the city. Jesse warned her about walking around by herself. Chicago was dangerous, he said. He told her of a woman brought into the emergency ward, raped and then slashed with a knife, her body still heaving with the effort of fighting off an assailant—how she had fought Jesse himself, believing him to be her assailant.
The enemy. Men are the enemy
. Even in this old dress of hers, with her flat-heeled shoes, Helene might attract the attention of men who yearned for women, for the blood of women; why not? It was possible. There were many such men in a city this large. In the world. Helene’s legs looked bare because her stockings were so sheer.…

What, it was still ten-thirty?

Dr. Blazack’s office was in a high, attractive building on the Drive. Helene was grateful for that. She wanted nothing to do with LaSalle or with its harassed interns and residents. Thank God her father had money! Dr. Blazack was one of the obstetrics men whom other doctors
scorned and envied, a rich man, with a practice of rich women. She must go to him because her father had made an appointment for her: there was no way out of it.

Nothing to see in the direction of the lake—the air lifted neutrally from it, very humid.

Helene entered Dr. Blazack’s suite of offices and her eye jumped nervously about the sofas and the tall “modern” lamps. A woman in a maternity dress looked up from a magazine at Helene, as if ready to recognize her, but Helene looked quickly away. She sat. A nurse came out to greet her as if she were an old friend. “Mrs. Vogel …? Please come in here with me.” She had a small, neat office of her own, where she asked Helene questions for the doctor’s records. These questions already marked Helene as a patient of his.… Her heart began to accelerate, anticipating the examination. She hated to be examined. Hated to be touched.

“How long have you been married, Mrs. Vogel?”

“Since July.”

“Oh, only since July?” the nurse said sweetly.

Helene was released and went back to the waiting room. Another nurse appeared and took away the woman in the maternity dress. Helene watched their legs as they walked away: the nurse’s were muscular and gauzy in white stockings, the patient’s legs were trim and fashionable. A young woman, as young as Helene. She glanced involuntarily at her own legs and saw that she was only a woman among women, after all. A woman’s body among women’s bodies.

Jesse had already helped deliver babies at the hospital.

She picked up a magazine but could not read. Could not concentrate on anything. She tried to make her mind go hard and precise; tried to think of the angles of this room, which were more real than the lamps and the sofas and the expensive carpeting. The room was a box that could not be disguised. A third nurse appeared—a girl of about twenty—and called her by name. “Mrs. Vogel?” Helene followed her into a back corridor, where fluorescent lights hummed dimly. An odor of plastic and tile. “Dr. Blazack will be with you in a minute,” the nurse said in a whisper. Helene sat down again numbly. This was the doctor’s own office—he had an extremely large oval desk; there were costly lithographs on two walls and one large window looked out onto the lake. Someone was washing his hands nearby. Water splashed. How
many times a day did he have to wash his hands, this doctor?
Jesse lingered in the shower for ten, fifteen minutes, as if afraid he couldn’t get clean
.… On a table near the big desk were piles of letters and magazines and advertisements. Helene could see the glossy cover of a popular science magazine, a photograph of a cell. A photograph blown up so that the cell was enormous, magnified more fiercely than the cell under Jesse’s microscope. Behind Helene, in the lavatory, faucets were being shut off briskly. The door opened and she looked around.

“Well, Mrs. Vogel! How are you this morning?”

Dr. Blazack was a fairly old man, she saw. Small, wiry, ambitious; when he smiled his teeth were a perfect off-white shade, exactly the color of real teeth. He smelled of soap. Helene recognized him not in himself but in the form of a certain kind of doctor, friends of her father’s, who were successful and kindly and in perpetual joyful motion like her father. His hands were pinkened as if with a fresh surge of blood.

“No need to look so tense, my dear. It’s a lovely day and no one is going to hurt you,” he said gently. “First, I want to ask you about your father, if you don’t mind. How is he? It’s been ten years—at least ten years!—since I’ve seen Benjamin face to face—”

And so she spoke dutifully of her father. Dr. Blazack smiled brightly, nodded at her recitation, sighed as if in envy of Benjamin Cady’s life; it was the courtesy of a wealthy obstetrician for a man of pure science. In his turn he talked of her father as if they had been very close friends. Helene doubted this. Her father had had no close friends. Helene pretended to agree but her mind wandered nervously. The magazine with its slick black-and-white cover seemed to shimmer. Protoplasm that was about to come to life—like jelly, like a balloon. Helene had examined thousands of cells under slides. Smears of cells. Jesse, in the pathology labs in which he’d worked, had gotten practice at examining cells of all kinds. The universe might open up into a snowstorm of cells.… Living units. Dead units. And yet the dead units were perhaps not really dead. Nothing dies.
Nothing dies permanently
—was that a law of physics? Life in each cell, like grit, like a grain of sand in the eye that can’t be annihilated. The cell shrivels down to this pinprick of life … or perhaps it goes mad and starts dividing, multiplying, blowing itself up into a balloon-sized tumor.…

“I think I’m pregnant,” Helene said finally.

“Ah!”

Dr. Blazack smiled as if he had never heard such a statement before. Now he opened a folder, picked up a pen, prepared to take notes. The nurse had given him Helene’s folder. Already she was a patient of his, in his records. “When was your period due, Helene?” he asked.

Helene was staring at his hands. Women fell in love with their obstetricians, she knew. Nine months of love. Their doctors became the true fathers of their babies. Their doctors became
their
true fathers, for nine months.

“I don’t remember.…” she whispered.

“You don’t remember?” he asked in surprise.

“I think … I think it was two weeks ago, two or three weeks ago.…”

She was silent.

He must have thought this was strange; he smiled sternly at her. Then, looking at a calendar on his desk, he said cheerfully, “Ah, yes, that would have been the fifteenth …? If it was two weeks ago?”

“Yes, yes.…”

“Or was it three weeks ago?”

She stared in silence at his hands.

After an awkward pause Dr. Blazack said, “I’ll examine you and then arrange for you to take the test. How does that sound?”

“All right.”

“No need to look so nervous, Helene! You know better than that. There is never any point in worrying about anything, in assuming anything.… Wait until we see the results of the test.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Any hospital will run the test for you. Did you say your husband was at LaSalle?”

She had not told him this; he must have learned it from her father. But she nodded anyway.

“There’s really no need to look so worried!”

Helene tried to smile.

One of the nurses rapped softly on the opened door. “Dr. Blazack, Dr. Brant is on the telephone. Can you talk to him?” Dr. Blazack made a gesture of helplessness, sighed, gave in and picked up the telephone. “Hello …? I can’t hear you. Oh, yes. When? Tomorrow? But I didn’t think he would be willing to sell so soon … what about the highway commission? What happened?… Well, then tomorrow? At two?”

Tomorrow at two everything will be changed, Helene thought.

She could still leave. She could get out of here, run out onto the street, out loose in the streets of Chicago. She could lose herself in the crowds, walking freely in the crowds. No one would know her. Her heels hard on the pavement. Inside her, that warm little core would not be dislodged … she would walk fast and rap her heels on the sidewalks … she would feel the warmth spreading up through her, a radiance that could not be dislodged.

Dr. Blazack stood and closed the manila folder.

Now the examination.

The young nurse reappeared and escorted Helene into the examination room. Helene’s heart was pounding. The room smelled of new fresh leather. At the sight of the table Helene felt something move inside her, in her loins. Was it the start of a flow? The beginning of blood? “I think … I think maybe.…” she stammered.

The nurse smiled at her. “Yes, Mrs. Vogel?”

But nothing. Of course not.

“Nothing.”

The nurse’s face was bright with efficiency. What was this room, Helene thought dizzily, why was she here?
A young man had called out her father’s name
.… And here was the examination table with its stirrups. All women are equal on that table, their heels caught in those stirrups. All women are the same woman. The nurse was opening drawers deftly—she was arranging instruments on a tray. She drew a length of clean white paper up over the examination table.

“Would you like to get ready for the examination?” the nurse said.

Helene came numbly to life. She sensed the nurse’s bewilderment. Why was she so stiff, so frightened? It was not normal. All of Dr. Blazack’s patients were beaming with life, grateful to be pregnant and to be his patients. Normal women. And so Helene stepped forward, feeling a kind of power in herself. A bitter dark power. She would be examined on that table, she would feel pain, and this pain was necessary. She deserved it. Her body deserved it, after what Jesse had done to it. She had lain in that man’s arms, obedient to his demands, though she had feared pregnancy and had feared Jesse himself. She had allowed him to make love to her. She had violated herself. Now she would lie down again, on her back, for another man.

Lie down. Lie down
.

She was naked now, wearing only a coarse white smock that was too large for her. It tied loosely in back. She lay down on the cold leather table and the paper rattled beneath her like tin. The nurse, courteous and sweet as a sister, said, “Could you slide down farther, Mrs. Vogel?” Helene fixed her bare heels in the stirrups at the end of the table. She slid down awkwardly. “Just a little farther, please. A little farther.”

The nurse spread her legs. One small palm on each of Helene’s knees, spreading them. Now everything in her was open. The nurse drew a white cloth over her, up to her waist. She might have been covering a corpse.

“That’s fine, Mrs. Vogel. The doctor will be right with you.”

Women lay with their legs apart like this every day.

Helene looked at the window opposite her through her eyelashes. It was rimmed with eerie light—dark light—the sky outside had clouded over. In Chicago light changed rapidly. You could not trust the sun. It was hard for her to remember that she was in Chicago and not somewhere else. In Chicago. She was married now. Her father had arranged for this examination and so she was in good hands.
In good hands
. Time would stop now. The ticking of that relentless little watch would stop. And then, later, when the examination was over, the watch would begin again.… She would rush out of here when the examination was over and disappear into the city. Thousands of women disappeared into the city. She would go to Kresge’s and buy a knitting needle—or did they come only in pairs? She would take a room in a hotel and use that metal knitting needle on herself, the way girls used knitting needles on themselves.…

Dr. Blazack entered the room quietly. He was fatherly and holy. He said, “This won’t hurt. It will only take a few minutes.” That was evidently his style; he made his patients ashamed of feeling pain, so that they would bear pain in silence rather than disappoint him.

“Please relax, Mrs. Vogel.”

And now a quick, peeling sound—flesh against something slippery—he must have been putting on his rubber gloves. The young nurse stood beside him, taller than he. Helene did not dare open her eyes to really look at them. If the pupils of her eyes flashed open she might scream. Between her legs, in that magic space, something flashed. The nurse was dabbing something on her. An odor of chemicals, disinfectant … she was being cleaned and made ready for him.
The sound of instruments on a tray, rattling. Dr. Blazack said something she could not hear.

“This will only take a few minutes, Helene.”

Then he inserted the instrument. It was very cold and sharp. Helene tried not to move, she willed herself to lie still. But something happened and she recoiled.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She forced herself back to the edge of the table.

“It shouldn’t hurt, Helene. You’ve been examined before, haven’t you?”

“But I think I’m pregnant.…”

That answer did not seem to mean anything.

“I think I’m pregnant,” she said.

“If you could slide down again, please, Mrs. Vogel.…” the nurse said.

“I think I’m pregnant, I …” Helene said wildly.

“Do you want the examination to continue?” Dr. Blazack said.

“Yes. Yes.”

She prepared herself again. Clumsily, brutely, she slid back down and let her knees fall apart. Dr. Blazack took hold of her knees firmly and spread them farther. When the instrument was inserted in her this time she kept herself still.

Now he began to open it. Twisting it open.

She forced herself to lie still. Absolutely still. She could not remember this man’s name. A man of late middle age, a stranger, with this thing stuck inside her body. It was metallic and sharp. Now he was opening it, spreading her body wider. It seemed to be turning. Slowly the instrument turned and expanded. It was like a circle of nothing, expanding, opening her and turning her inside out.

I didn’t want … this is a mistake
.…

She began to breathe quickly. Someone might have been pressing a hand up and down on her chest, pumping her lungs. On the edge of the table her hands clenched and unclenched. The leather had become damp; it was slippery against her fingers. How could everything in her be so exposed now? The most secret veins of her body were open to the air of this impersonal room. Her head began to move, slowly at first, from side to side. She could not stop it.
No. No
. She did not want this thing inside her, she did not want a baby, she did not want a husband,
she did not want to be completed.… “What does it mean?” she muttered, not knowing what she said. The clamp was cold and hard inside her, making a rim, a bracelet inside her, exposing her. Her body began to contract. She could not stop it. Her womb wanted to shrink back, hide itself. The secret parts of her body were drawing together in terror. Her knees came together hard—