Morning (16 page)

“No, dear, it would be too uncomfortable for you,” the nurse said. “He did as much as he could today. Now we need to get you moving along. Can you stand?”

Sara was almost in tears again. She was sure the doctor had left her with one tube blocked because she had been such a cowardly patient.

Somehow she knew she had failed. Somehow she failed again, to do what was necessary to get pregnant. If only she had been calmer, braver. She could not bear this kind of judgment, it was a judgment that cast a shadow over her entire life.

“Could I please speak to the doctor?” Sara asked.

“He’s busy,” the nurse said. “Your gynecologist will explain things to you.” Her impassive face made it clear that she didn’t want to discuss anything with Sara. She took Sara by the arm and led her back to the changing room. “You can pay the bill at the desk before you leave,” she said.

Sara changed back into her street clothes and found her own way out to the waiting room. She smiled at Julia, spoke with the receptionist, and calmly left the office. Not until she was seated in Julia’s red convertible did she burst into tears again.

“It was so humiliating,” she cried. “It was so awful.
I
was so awful. Such a coward.”

“What happened, honey?” Julia asked. She started the car so the engine could warm them up as they sat.

Sara explained what had happened.

“Doctors can be such insensitive assholes,” Julia said. “There should be a law: no man can put his head between a woman’s legs without first introducing himself.”

Sara laughed. “True. But I still feel at fault. I don’t know why, but I got spooked. I suddenly got scared, started shaking, got all nervous—”

“I’d love to stick some metal up that guy’s penis and see how calm he’d act,” Julia said.

Sara smiled. “So would I, actually,” she said. She sat a moment, envisioning—the power of it, to be probing into someone’s delicate sexual and reproductive organs. “Julia,” she went on, “do you think I’m not a
natural
woman?”

Julia burst out laughing. “Yeah,” she said. “I think you’re synthetic.”

“No, really,” Sara pressed on. “I haven’t gotten pregnant easily, I can’t even have an examination easily. Maybe I’m secretly frigid. Do you know even Queen Elizabeth gave birth in less than a year after her marriage?”

“What does Queen Elizabeth have to do with this?” Julia asked.

“I mean—she appears so proper, but—”

“Oh, honey, sexual passion and love have nothing to do with reproduction. Women get pregnant when they’re raped by maniacs. The body is just so perverse. Everyone’s is. You’re a natural woman, for heaven’s sake. I’ll tell you what you are, though, that’s hurting you, you’re getting paranoid about all this. You’re putting too much on yourself. Why are you doing all this cha-cha-ing around to the doctors? Why not
just relax and enjoy yourself? You’re young. You’ll get pregnant eventually. Why not go off to some desert island this winter with your yummy husband and fuck your head off? I mean, I’ve heard the harder you try to get pregnant the less it happens.”

“I’ve heard that, too,” Sara said. “Perhaps you’re right. I don’t know. I know I’m not keen to see any other doctor for a while. Although Dr. Crochett’s nice enough.”

“Well, you ought to tell him about your experience at the clinic,” Julia said. “That shithead shouldn’t be allowed to get away with brutalizing women like that.”

“You’re right. I’ll tell Dr. Crochett,” Sara said.

But she knew she wouldn’t be able to do that. What if Dr. Crochett and the laboratory doctor were best friends? Certainly they knew each other, Dr. Crochett had sent her there. What if she complained and Dr. Crochett talked to the lab doc and said that Sara was a recalcitrant patient? What if Dr. Crochett decided there was no use treating her, since she freaked out at the slightest operation?

Sara leaned her head against the car window and closed her eyes. Suddenly she was overcome with exhaustion. It was all so complicated, this trying to get pregnant—all so
unnecessarily
complicated! Her anger made her feel weighted down, the situation made her feel helpless. She wanted to sleep.

“I’ll get you to the airport,” Julia said now. “We’ll have some coffee while we wait for your plane.” Without waiting for a reply, she put the car into gear and pulled away.

Steve met her at the Nantucket airport. During the flight Sara had decided how much—or how little—she would tell Steve about her experience. She wanted so desperately for her getting pregnant to be a joyous occasion, an event of love and delight. She did not want to drag it down with dreary tales. She did not want to appear dreary to her husband—it would be too much for any man to have to bear, to have a wife who was not only infertile but also cowardly and gloomy.

And, at the sight of her husband, her spirits lifted. Oh, she loved him so much! And it was such good luck that they had found each other in this world, such good luck to have every day with each other. Steve crossed the small airport waiting room in three strides and encompassed her in a bear hug. He smelled of fresh air and sawdust and sweat. He was delicious, he was wonderful, he loved her, she was safely home in his arms, everything was possible.

As Steve drove her back to their house, she chattered about Julia and her escapades, and Donald James’s gossip, and gave him only a superficial and cheered-up version of her visit to the lab.

“So what happens next?” Steve asked. “I mean, if you’ve got one tube blocked?”

“I don’t know,” Sara answered. “I have to talk to Dr. Crochett. He did tell me that twenty percent of all women who have this procedure get pregnant that month. It’s supposed to be therapeutic as well as diagnostic.”

“Well,” Steve said, and took Sara’s hand. “That’s good news.” He looked at her and smiled. “Thanks for doing all this stuff,” he said.

“Sure.” She smiled back.

It was Steve’s lunch hour, and once at home they heated up a can of chili, covered it with grated cheese, and sat companionably together in the kitchen. They talked about their past day apart and Sara was in two worlds at once; part of her aware of the thick pad between her legs at this unusual time of the month; she was bleeding slightly from the morning’s procedure. She didn’t want to mention this to Steve; it wasn’t the right sort of thing to discuss over a meal, and she didn’t want to seem to be asking for pity. But she could not escape her awareness of it, of how her lower body felt, of all she had been through that morning, of the things she had left unsaid.

Steve leaned back in his chair. He studied Sara; she could tell something was up.

“Yesss?” she asked. Perhaps he was thinking of going to bed right now. God, she hoped not, she really wouldn’t enjoy it right now. But she knew that at least one tube was open.…

Steve grinned. “What would you think about going to New Orleans for the Super Bowl? It would be expensive, but how many times do you get to see the Patriots play in the Super Bowl? Several of the guys have been talking about going—I think it would be a lot of fun. What do you think?”

Sara looked across the table at her husband, who was tipped back in his chair, his arms stretched up so that his hands were crossed behind his head. He was wearing grubby old work jeans that were more brown than blue now and several plaid flannel shirts under a torn wool sweater. Through all the layers of clothing his healthy muscles and strong frame showed; his body looked as thick and hard and impermeable as steel. Like Superwoman, she could see through those clothes to the flat stomach, the tight muscles that lay under his hairy chest and abdomen.

“Oh, yes, the Super Bowl!” Sara said, and suddenly, to her surprise as much as Steve’s, she was in a rage. “Well, why not? Why not spend time and money to watch a bunch of men smashing into each other? You can’t really hurt
men
, can you? Not where it counts. Their private parts will be protected, you can count on it. No matter how they bash each other around, they’ll still be able to make babies. No one’s going to fool with their penises!”

Steve looked at Sara as if she had just lost her mind.

“Sara,” he said with concern, “what are you talking about?”

Sara looked at her husband in dismay. What
had
she been talking about? She lowered her head into her hands, hiding her face, which contorted now as she began to cry. Steve rose, came around behind her chair, put his hands on her shoulders.

“Sara?” he asked.

“Oh, Steve,” she sobbed, “it was so awful. It was frightening and humiliating and unpleasant and you talk about the Super Bowl.”

Steve tried to embrace her, but she remained rigid, crying into her hands.

“I didn’t know,” he said. “I didn’t know. You didn’t tell me. You seemed okay.”

“Well I am
okay
,” Sara said. “And it wasn’t anything
drastic
, it wasn’t
that
bad. But it was bad. And I had to do it, all by myself, I had to lie there with a strange man doing things to my … and you weren’t even thinking of me, you were out in the fresh air, building houses, talking to your friends about the goddamned Super Bowl!”

“Well of course I was thinking about you,” Steve said. “Sara, of course I thought about you this morning. You know that. But you sounded fine when I spoke with you yesterday, and you told me before you went up that it was going to be a piece of cake. Those were your exact words, remember, ‘a piece of cake.’ ”

“Well, I was wrong,” Sara said. “And if you’d had any imagination, any
sensitivity
—I mean, I told you what they were going to do, I told you they were going to force dye through my Fallopian tubes. You might have thought about it a little, that it would be unpleasant for me, that it might hurt.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” Steve said, rubbing her back and shoulders. “I didn’t mean to be callous.”

“Oh, I know.” Sara sighed, wiping her tears with her hands. “I know you didn’t. And I’m sorry to blow up at you. I think I’m getting mad at you because of the way the two doctors treated me. They were so brusque and insensitive. They made me feel like—a
piece of meat.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve said again. “I wish I could have been there to help you.”

“And I wish, I really wish, that you had to bear just some of the bother of this!” Sara said. “I think that if you just had to, oh, say, go have some strange woman handle your penis, look at it, stick something in it, decide whether it was a
good
penis or not, then you’d understand a little more.”

Steve’s hands stopped caressing her back. Sara could feel how startled he was at her words, how he had withdrawn from her, puzzled by her anger.

“Well, Sara, it’s not my fault that the human reproductive system is the way it is,” Steve said. He crossed back to his chair and sat down. His expression was bleak.

He thinks that what I’ve just said to him is horrible
, Sara thought. She felt she had overstepped some boundary in their marriage. She felt he would never understand how it was for her, that no man could ever understand how it was for women. There he sat with his intact and solid body, insulted by the mere thought of someone messing around with
his
reproductive organ.

She felt that the gap between men and women was so huge that she would never have the energy to imagine crossing it again. Often she had thought of herself and Steve as one. But now she knew that was only a foolish illusion.

“I’ve got to get back to work,” Steve said, breaking into her thoughts.

“All right,” Sara said. “I’ll see you tonight.”

She sat at the table, head in her hands, while he put on his coat and cap and gloves. She did not raise her head for a good-bye kiss, and he did not come to kiss her but went wordlessly out the door, which he pulled shut firmly behind him.

“Oh, honey,” Ellie said. “Oh, sweetie.”

Even though it was the middle of the day, and prime-time rates were in effect, Sara had dialed her sister when she heard Steve pull away in their Jeep. Sara needed desperately to talk. She told Ellie about the procedure and then about how oddly she had reacted, first trying to persuade Steve that everything had been easy and fine, and then, to her consternation, lashing out at him for what wasn’t his fault.

“I think I’m going nuts,” Sara said. “I’m certainly acting nutty. But, Ellie, sometimes I feel that I’m ready to
explode
. I can’t seem to get control over anything. Everything in my life seems so
stuck
. I can’t get pregnant, and I can’t get this infuriating
Fanny Anderson to even talk to me on the phone. I can’t get anything to work for me. My life is just stalled.”

“Now look,” Ellie said, “you’re getting everything confused. This book business has nothing to do with getting pregnant. They are both frustrating problems, but they are not related. You’re making yourself crazy connecting the two this way.”

“I know,” Sara said. “I know.”

“Listen,” Ellie said, “will you listen to me, please? I’m just a nurse, but I do know something about all this. Sara, we don’t have any idea how much fertility or infertility is affected by stress. And you’ve put yourself under heavy-duty stress. Especially by thinking of your work and your body as the same sort of general thing, you’re working yourself right into a kind of trap. You really have to relax.”

“Oh, Ellie,” Sara said, “I know that. I’ve read that. I’ve heard that. But how do I
relax
? All I can think about is getting pregnant.”

“Well, let’s consider the possibilities. First of all, you’re only thirty-four. You’ve got a good eight years to get pregnant. You’re healthy, Steve’s healthy; you two have just gotten a late start, and it takes a little longer to get pregnant when you’re older. I know you can’t forget about it now that you want it so much. But perhaps you can think of some ways not to focus on it so much. When you were in your twenties, there was so much you wanted to do, enjoyed doing. You liked to travel, you liked to swim and ski and horseback ride.… Why don’t you and Steve take a vacation? Not a vacation to get pregnant, but one to enjoy yourselves. Doing things you really love to do.”