Eleanor smiles restlessly. She says she knows we’re both doomed at FVCC. She wants to pack it all in and travel for a year. She has saved money. She’s thinking of Italy.
“Do it,” I say. I tell her I’m planning a trip to the Caribbean with Georgianne. I realize, after I’ve said it, that it sounds tacky and meager, not the same as Italy at all.
For dessert Eleanor serves cherries jubilee flambé. I watch the blue flame dance around the ice cream, quick and berserk. When it’s out and the ice cream’s melting, I dig in.
Eleanor watches me and smiles. She holds up one sticky cherry between two fingers. “No matter how many you eat, Benna,” she says, “you’ll never get it back.”
I wash dishes, she dries.
I need an annual check-up. I decide to go to a new gynecologist Eleanor has recommended. Eleanor is a woman who faints at the sight of a Q-Tip; she wouldn’t steer me wrong. “Don’t go to the clinic, whatever you do,” she said. “Last time I was there they told me I had a crook in my vagina and when I said, ‘Well, get him out, for godsakes,’ they didn’t even laugh.”
In the waiting room I read Good Housekeeping along with two other women. Occasionally we all glance up furtively from our magazines, smile, then look back down. An elderly woman comes into the waiting room and sits on the sofa next to me. “Is that you on the cover?”
“Excuse me?” I say. She is leaning over onto her lap, looking at me and then at my magazine.
“Is that you on the cover?” She smiles hopefully.
I turn my magazine over. A pretty brunette woman is beaming and holding triplets. “Oh my goodness, no,” I laugh politely.
“Oh,” says the older woman and pinches in her mouth. She smooths her skirt and looks straight ahead.
I resume flipping pages.
“Have you ever seen it rain on only one side of the street?”
I turn my head and stare. Her lipstick is on crooked. It’s a bluish pink and bleeds out beyond the lines of her mouth. “No, I don’t think so,” I say.
“I have.” She nods, very pleased. I, too, bob my head and together we bob our heads.
In the examination room Hazel Doyle the doctor presses my abdomen. “Some water retention,” she says, smiles, keeps pressing.
“I’ll do anything for retention,” I say. Now she starts to poke and prod a birthmark below my left breast. It’s a mark that I myself have never paid much attention to. I want to ask her about having a baby at the age of thirty-four, at the age of forty, about infertility, about artificial insemination, about test tubes.
“I think it’s a third breast,” she says. “Hmmmm, this is interesting.” She glances at me to note my reaction, which is not good. “You see, it’s in perfect line with the nipple above it.” She’s excited by this. She calls in two of her assistants who also bend over me to look at it. Everyone smiles and ooohs and aahhhs. It’s only a flat little beige thing I never much thought about. But now I’m upset. I don’t know why Eleanor has recommended this doctor to me. I pull my shift back on rather rudely and hop off the examination table. “Excuse me,” I say. “I’m due at the circus in three minutes.”
I drive home near tears, and when I tell the story to Gerard, he smiles and puts his arm around me. I tell Eleanor her doctor’s the hound of hell and she says “My word!” and I don’t breathe a note of it to Darrel.
My mother died when I was nineteen. She had some sort of strange disease where her organs began, mysteriously, to dry out. When the doctors caught it, she was gangrenous throughout her intestines. She was the one who told me about it first, sitting up in the hospital bed, strong, rigid, tall (she was a head taller than my dad), trying to fight the grogginess of painkillers, and using all the exact names for things. None of the names she told me registered. I sat down on her bed and cried into my knees. Then she lifted me up and we both cried together. When she brushed my bangs off my forehead I could smell garlic still on her fingers, in the grain of them, like a kitchen cutting board, that’s how fast she’d been rushed off. From the discovery of her illness until the funeral service was only six days. My father drank the whole time. Afterward Louis and I got him a dog — half-beagle, half-collie — to keep him company. I went back off to college and fell immediately and tearfully into the arms of my boyfriend. Ten days after my mother died I made love for the first time. Perhaps I’d been waiting for her to die, this woman whose slips I’d worn for childhood dress-up games, the bodice hollow and droopy like old breasts, this woman who in the name of perfect posture allowed her children no pillows. Perhaps I’d been waiting for all that terminology, that correctness, to die so that at last I could relax, with my sloppy carriage and careless parlance, my thrice-kissed shoulders, and my one pair of black nylon tricot underwear — of which she’d never have approved. Though she might have smiled and shaken her head about the underwear, standing there at the laundromat, holding them up. She might have said, “And whose fancy underlinens are these?” She might have done that.
Saturday morning and I have to call my father. I have to find out what’s he doing for Thanksgiving. He still lives alone in the trailer in Tomaston. He’s named the dog Elizabeth (for five years she was just “Dog”), and she is now so old she does little but sit in the family room and breathe, her whole body moving in and out, her eyes looking up at you, a glassy black.
The last time I spoke to my father he was talking about finally getting circumcised and about having all his moles removed. For health reasons.
“Dad? Hi, guess who this is?”
“Now let me see. Is this my favorite daughter?”
We always do this. “This is your only daughter. How’s it going?”
“Just fine. How are things in Fitchville?”
“Okay. I’m calling to find out what your plans are for Thanksgiving, if you’d like to come down here for dinner. I’m planning a big turkey with chestnut dressing.”
There is a pause, then some muffled noises. “I’ve got some news, Benna,” he says. “I’ve got a girl friend.”
There is a dictionary on top of the phone book, and I flip through it nervously, as if looking for something to say: My father has a girl friend, my father has a girl friend. In the dictionary, after sild, a type of sardine, comes silence.
“Oh, my goodness,” I manage. “Congratulations.” That is, I’m certain, what my mom would say. She would say it in a hearty voice and thrust out her hand. Quid pro quo comes just before quiescence. “I hope, gee, that doesn’t mean the two of you won’t be coming here for Thanksgiving?” There’s some scuffling and some clicking noises.
“Hello, Donna, dear.” There’s now an older woman’s voice on the other end of the phone. She sounds like the woman in Dr. Doyle’s office who thought it was me on the magazine.
“Hi, who is this?”
“It’s Benna, Miriam,” coaches my dad in a loud whisper. “Benna,” he says, “this is my girl friend, Miriam. Miriam-Benna, Benna-Miriam.” Being introduced on the phone like this, what is one supposed to say? “Delighted I’m sure”? I never really knew what that meant. Delighted, I’m sure, what? “Nice to meet you”? I can hear my father say, “Here, Miriam, now you speak.” They must be passing the receiver back and forth, two old people who have pulled up card-table chairs by the phone. I can see them leaning forward, heads cocked, faces sparkling with holiday.
“Hello, Benna, dear,” she tries again. “This is Miriam.”
“Hi, Miriam.”
“My, you do have a sweet voice. Your father’s told me all about you.”