The Blue Cotton Gown (7 page)

“Have you told anyone else yet?”

“No. I couldn’t. I couldn’t without crying. I wanted to tell you first, so I waited until the office was closed and you’d be alone. I just feel so sad. Aran wanted so bad to go to college. She would have been the first in my family.”

I take a long breath. “So will Aran come see me?”

“She’s still on my insurance, but I don’t think it covers obstetrics.”

“It doesn’t matter about insurance. You know it doesn’t. I’ll get her an appointment when I get back from Canada. Did I tell you we’re going to the island? If my schedule is full, I’ll see her at five on Tuesday.” We stand up, holding on to each other. Trish’s head comes just up to my shoulder.

If I had known then the pain that was coming, maybe I would have done something different. But you never know, do you? You can’t see it coming. The seeds of love and despair were already planted, already sown, like an embryo growing, or maybe a cancer.

Earth Dream

Somewhere between Cleveland and Sandusky, along the tollway where it stretches flat against the heartland, I start to nod off. Tom expects this and finds an oldies rock-and-roll station coming out of Oberlin. I pat him on the leg. “Just gonna take a little nap . . .” He smiles, knowing how I am. I don’t sleep well in bed at night, but put me in a warm car in the passenger seat and I sleep like a baby. I wake when we get to the ferry dock, trying to hold on to the dream:

An old woman wearing a long white dress sits at the side of a garden. In her basket are children, miniature children, toddlers to teens. My boys are there too, little blond boys, now really men. I sit down beside her.

What have you learned?
I ask the wise crone.

Her voice is the sound of water flowing over stone.

The sun rises. The sun sets. We do not need to hold it up.

The river flows downhill. We can swim with it or against. Spring always comes.

The river flows downhill and I am swimming against it.

*

chapter 4

Liberation

A low rumble as the ferry plows through dark waves, and the smell of diesel exhaust. I love this two-hour ride across Lake Erie. Usually we come in the daylight when we can see the other islands: Kelleys, South Bass, and Middle Bass Island. Tonight we see only the lights of cottages on the black masses that jut up from the lower basin of the huge freshwater inland sea. There’s something beautiful and exotic about the darkness and the water. We could be off the coast of France, but we’re only five hours from Torrington.

I take a deep breath and let it out slowly, let the weight of the past few months blow into the wind. Officially it’s not summer yet, but our first trip of the year to the Pelee is always summer for me. I’m looking forward to the long weekend at our cottage, which sits on the southern shore of Pelee Island, the southernmost tip of Canada.

“You cold?” Tom asks, putting his arm around my waist and pulling me over. “I could go down to the car and get you a sweater.” “No, I’m fine.” I snuggle up to him. I always feel like we’re com-ing home when we go to the island. Something unwinds inside me. An hour later, at the front door of the big yellow farmhouse, we scratch around in the flower bed, searching for the key. There are no street lamps, no ambient lighting, just the wide stretch of lawn and the trees and the starlight. I always forget which rock the key’s under. Tom always remembers. Just inside the door he finds the switch and flicks on the overhead. Blinking into the white, I see

the familiar photographs arranged on the shelves along the family room wall, years of vacations captured in mismatched frames. Im-ages of our three boys fishing, boys eating at picnic tables, boys on the ferry boat, boys playing in the water, boys dunking their father. There’s even a few of my husband and me.

Tom drags in our bag and a small red cooler. The beds are already made with the colorful quilts I collect. Canned food is stored in the pine cupboards. All we have to do is put the milk in the fridge and open a bottle of wine.

I check out the house while Tom digs around in the drawer for the corkscrew. The kitchen is tidy. The big table that seats ten has the same vinyl lace tablecloth that I put on last fall. The house-keepers are doing a good job, and the weekly summer renters are being kind to the place. I pull the blinds up and continue my inspection. Even though it’s dark tonight, I want to see the sun and the lake in the morning.

In the living room, the sofa and love seat are covered with match-ing green quilts. My photographs cover the walls, and Tom’s pottery is displayed on the built-in shelves. I open the sliding glass door to let in some air and open the windows in the big downstairs bedroom where my favorite blue patchwork is spread over the bed.

“You ready?” Tom yells. “Coming.”

As we climb up the steps to the deck on the break wall I almost trip. One board is loose, and Tom says he’ll fix it in the morning. He carries the wine. I can smell that our two acres of grass have been mown by our local handyman just today.

In front of us is water, twenty miles of water, and far in the distance are the lights from small towns on the U.S. side. Tom grew up in northwest Ohio. He can point out Port Clinton, Marblehead, and Vermilion. With his parents and two brothers, he lived in the house in Fostoria on Colonial Drive until he was eighteen. The same house. The same bed. Even now, when we visit, nothing has

changed. The silverware and waxed paper are in the exact same drawers.

Tom’s father was a welder at the Union Carbide factory. His mother was a stay-at-home mom who volunteered for the Red Cross and led a Boy Scout troop. The family fished these waters, pulling up thousands of perch, walleye, and bass. I think sometimes that it’s Tom’s secure upbringing that gives him his optimism, the same way my background makes me wait for something to go wrong.

We sit quietly on the deck, taking in the smell of fish and grass, no car noises, no voices, just crickets and water and wind. We watch the sky, watch the sliver of moon and the clouds as they open and close around it.

I break the silence. “Had an interesting patient this morning.” Tom groans. “Can’t you ever stop thinking about work, Patsy?

Give it up.”

“No, really, this is interesting.”

“Okay,” he says with a grunt, filling our wineglasses a second time and scooting his chair closer to the railing

“She wants to become a man. She wants us to help her.”

Tom chuckles. I see the flash of his teeth when he smiles into the dark. “What did you say?”

“That I’d think about it and talk to you.”

“I don’t do that kind of surgery. She’d be better off in Cleveland. I know someone who does it. Remember? When I was a resident there I assisted Dr. Ernest with making a vagina into a penis.”

“My patient doesn’t want surgery. She just needs help with the testosterone injections and labs. It’s all organized through some cen-ter in Pittsburgh. She gave me a protocol that tells what labs to draw to be sure there aren’t any serious side effects and gives all the technical information about the injections.”

“Why doesn’t she just go to Pittsburgh then? Why’d she come to us?”

“Her significant other is our patient. You remember a woman named Jerry Slater? I think that was it . . . Kasmar says she met you at the hospital when you did Jerry’s surgery. She says she’s Jerry’s
husband.
Does that ring a bell?”

“Sure, I did a scope on Jerry for a cyst last year. She’s a nurse at the university hospital. That tall, thin woman’s her partner? I didn’t even know Jerry was gay.” Tom remembers everyone’s name. Phone numbers, even.

“Come on! You can’t tell by looking. I could be gay,” I tease him. “Right,” Tom says and laughs, trying to pinch my nipple through

my sweatshirt. He’s on target.

“Okay, now, listen. What do you think? Should we do it?” I hold him back with one hand.

“You’re serious? Why would we?”

“Because she’s a nice person, and if we help her she won’t have to drive all the way to Pittsburgh each month.”

“You like her? How old is she?” Tom rises to peer down into the churning water.

“Yeah, I do. She seems intelligent and committed . . . about forty-seven, I think. I admire her. My only concern is metaphysical. Is it right? Is it messing too much with nature?”

“People do a lot weirder things. Will she be hurting anyone?” He turns to me.

I shake my head no.

“Well then, it’s a free country. I think we should help her. Who else in Torrington will?” Tom slides his gaze back to the distant shore and lifts his wineglass up to the sky. Fireworks are going off in the distance at Cedar Point Amusement Park, as they do at ten every night in the summer. The waves crash below us under the deck.

I lean against him and lift my glass too.

aran

On Tuesday morning, back home, sitting on the porch holding my morning coffee, I sight the first Baltimore oriole of the season, a blaze of fire on the top of the peach tree. An hour later, in the clinic, I scan my schedule for Trish’s daughter’s name and find it in an im-provised slot at the end of the day.

At five, I knock on the exam room door, a new chart for Aran under my arm. I see a petite young woman with the same sandy blond hair as her mother, but cut very short. She has an unblem-ished face and three silver studs in each ear. The boyfriend, a solemn, stocky eighteen-year-old with buzz-cut red hair and thick eyebrows, slouches low in the guest chair. As I step by, he moves his black army boots out of the way.

I go through the usual introductions and then get down to business. “Aran, I know this pregnancy isn’t what you expected. Your mom told me you’d never planned to have children. It must be a hard adjustment. You doing okay?”

“I guess . . .” Aran doesn’t look up. Her pink flip-flops hang from her toes.

“Do you think you’re going to be able to handle it? Because there are alternatives. If you aren’t already too far along you could have a termination or think about giving the baby up for adoption. You’re pretty young to be a mom.”

“I could never do that!” Aran says adamantly, now looking straight at me. Her blue eyes flash. “I don’t believe in abortion un-less there’s something wrong with the baby, and I wouldn’t consider adoption. How would I know if the baby got a good home or was being abused?”

“You could contact an adoption agency. All the prospective parents are carefully screened.” Jimmy is shaking his head no, but he still hasn’t spoken.

I decide I’ve gone on enough about alternatives. Clearly, they

won’t consider them, and I don’t want to push it. After the physical exam and the review of the information in the OB packet, I take the couple down the hall to the ultrasound room for an unofficial scan. As I’m typing in Aran’s demographics, there’s a tap at the door. “Can I watch too?” Trish pokes her head into the darkened room. Abby, my nurse, must have called her to come up from the family medicine suite just in time.

“Okay with you?” I ask her daughter. The girl shrugs. The three of them, Aran, Jimmy, and Trish, stare at the screen as unidentifiable shapes swirl around and I get my bearings. I’m not a whiz at ultrasound but I can usually find the embryo’s heartbeat. “There’s the fetus.” I point to the flicker of white life. “See its heart beating?” Aran and Jimmy stare at the screen without expression. Maybe they were hoping this whole thing was a mistake, that there wasn’t really a baby, that it was just going to go away.

Trish tries hard to be upbeat. With appropriate enthusiasm she says, “Well, hi there, little fellow.” The fetus raises its arm and waves. “He
is
an active one!” Then the room is dead silent. Nobody else says
anything.

When I glance up from the monitor to turn on the lights, I’m surprised to see Jimmy wiping his eyes.

Courage

It’s 2:00 a.m. and I’m still not asleep. I turn on my side, inspecting the stained-glass mandala that hangs in the window at the peak of the high ceiling, then I plump another pillow under my head. The full moon moves in and out of the clouds. This bedroom is a big box of moonlight. It’s so large, our whole log cabin at the farm would fit in the space. All over the world, families of ten live in houses smaller than this room.

I’m worried about Aran. I wish she would look into adoption. In this part of Appalachia, neither abortion nor adoption is seriously considered. There’s a strong feeling for family. Kin will take care of kin.

Though it’s rare for a mother in West Virginia to give up her baby, I’ve always thought it one of the noblest things a woman can do. And one of the hardest. I pad out to the porch with my dose of scotch and sit looking across the lawn toward the gazebo. Two deer stand under the peach tree. I recall one young mother . . .

She was twenty, unmarried, a college student. What was her name, Kari or Karen? She and her boyfriend came for every prenatal visit, and just like any other couple they got excited to hear the heartbeat, excited to see the baby on the ultrasound. By her seventh month she’d already visited a social worker and arranged for a placement.

During the delivery of a baby that’s going to be given up, you have to be careful with the words that you use. You don’t whisper to the woman in great pain while you hold her, “Think about
your baby.
Your baby will be here soon.” You don’t urge when she’s pushing, “Come on, Mom, you can do it!” And you don’t exclaim when you lay the wet infant on her chest, “Congratulations, you’re a mother!”

If you say anything at all as you hand the infant to the waiting RN, you quietly declare, “The baby’s doing great. It looks healthy.” You don’t even mention the sex. Then the nurse wheels him or her out in a bassinet, and the room is so quiet you can hear the moaning of the woman still in labor next door.

*

The day of Kari’s discharge, after she’s had the baby, my patient and her boyfriend ask over the intercom for the infant to be brought to their room. The RNs at the nurses’ station look at one another

knowingly, thinking the young couple will change their minds and refuse to relinquish. That’s what you call it when you give a baby up for adoption,
relinquish.
We’ve seen young women change their minds at the last minute, more often than not. The baby is brought to the young couple. At two o’clock, the light over their door starts blinking again.