The Untelling (20 page)

It was difficult to pinpoint exactly what was so offensive about Dr. Morrison. It wasn’t simply the matter of her physique. We’d seen narrow women before. There was something in her manner that seemed a little superior. When she took my hand, it was as though she wore rubber gloves.

“Where are you from?” Mama asked with suspicious eyes.

“Johns Hopkins,” Dr. Morrison said without looking up.

“No, where are you
from
?”

“Detroit, Michigan.”

“Oh Jesus,” my mother said.

I saw the remark register with Dr. Morrison, but she ignored it, opening a drawer and producing a paper robe. She handed it to me and left the room.

“It’s hot in here,” Hermione said.

“I don’t care for that woman,” my mother said. “Did you hear how she talked to me?”

“I didn’t notice anything,” Hermione said.

But I knew what my mother was talking about. Dr. Morrison spoke with the same quiet condescension as bill collectors, the way they call you ma’am but don’t mean it.

I looked at the paper robe in my hand and stood up. I’ve never liked undressing in front of anyone. Maybe I was still traumatized by my “precocious puberty.” Even with Dwayne I was shy. He’d step out of the shower in his full glory, walk across the bedroom, go to the kitchen for a beer. He’d stand in the yellow light of the refrigerator, naked and dripping wet. When I showered, I emerged wearing a robe, maybe something sexy and revealing, but I preferred to have fabric covering me if the lights were on.

I stood before the examining table and unhooked my belt, and pulled it from around my waist.

“It’s cold in here,” I said.

“I haven’t been cold in years,” said Mama.

“Do you want us to give you some privacy?” Hermione asked.

I gave my sister a grateful smile.

Mama pulled her fingers through her short hair. “We’re all ladies here. She doesn’t have anything we haven’t seen before.”

“I guess,” Hermione said.

I unfastened my skirt and slid it over my hips and took off my blouse. I tried to move quickly, pulling my panties over my thighs in a blur, unhooking the bra in an embarrassed flurry of motion. Hermione looked away, but I felt my mother’s appraising eyes. Mama, I knew, thought I was a little too heavy. My stomach sagged at the navel. On my back there was a little fold of fat where my bra fastened. I wiggled into the stiff paper gown and sat goosefleshed and shivering at the edge of the table.

Dr. Morrison returned with some sort of computer and a rolling cart. Mama and Hermione pressed their legs aside as Dr. Morrison shoved the cart to the table where I waited.

“It’s a portable ultrasound,” she explained with that quiet condescension of hers. “We’ll insert the wand into the vagina and get a better look at your reproductive organs.”

She held the wand and turned it a couple of times like she was trying to sell it to us.

She stood aside as I scooted to the edge of the table and spread my legs until my feet touched the stirrups. Thankfully Mama and Hermione could only see my profile.

“Scoot up a little more,” the doctor said. “Put your bottom at the very edge of the table.”

I moved forward, hoping that I wouldn’t fall off.

“Good,” she said. “Right there.” She slathered the wand with clear jelly. “I’m going to insert now. There’ll be some pressure.”

I closed my eyes and battled the urge to cry out. The procedure didn’t hurt exactly, but the wand inside me was hard and cold. Dr. Morrison maneuvered it like a joystick, grunting at the images on the computer monitor.

“Doesn’t look good,” she said, pulling the wand sharply to the right.

I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me, Mama, or Hermione. She spoke in a voice as bland as egg white, like her words would be of no particular interest to anyone present.

I rose up on my elbows, hoping to see the monitor, but a sharp pain forced me back onto the paper-draped table to recover.

Mama said, “What doesn’t look good?”

“See,” Dr. Morrison said, wiggling the wand to the left. “The ovaries are very shrunken. Atrophied.” The wand banged against my cervix, but I didn’t flinch.
Breathe and you will know peace.
I took my air in small mouthfuls, drying out my tongue and lips.

“I don’t see anything,” Mama snapped.

Over my knees I studied my left foot. The knuckles of my toes were gray and dry, but my nails were pretty, sparkling with bronze polish. I noticed what looked to be the beginnings of a bunion.

Hermione said, “Maybe if you could just explain things to us.”

Dr. Morrison touched the monitor. “Her ovary is here, but we can barely see it. Afollicular.”

“Speak English,” Mama said.

I could tell from Mama’s tone that she had turned a corner. She spoke quietly now, with a little pause between each word, as if she were struggling to restrain herself.

“Mama,” Hermione said, “we’re here to help Aria. Please behave.”

Mama said, “Her name is Ariadne.”

I was glad that Mama didn’t listen to Hermione. I wanted her to misbehave. I’d seen Mama unleash her fury on strangers before. She’d been evicted from Rich’s at Cumberland after slapping the rouge off a saleswoman who demanded ID before taking her credit card. I had been seventeen and ashamed—thrown out with her, although I hadn’t struck anyone. My sympathy had been with the racist salesclerk. When we left, my mother’s handprint stained the clerk’s powdered cheek like a birthmark. But this time I wanted Mama to act up, to overreact, to be violent and a little crazy. I’d seen her erupt dozens of times, but never had she rained fire on my behalf.

The doctor remained calm, even when Mama rose from the leather couch and studied the computer screen from over her shoulder.

“Her ovaries have stopped functioning,” Dr. Morrison said.

“We knew that when we came here. I didn’t drive across town for you to tell me something I already knew. We came here to ask you what we can do about it. I’ve got money,” she added. “So tell me what is possible, not just what you think I can afford.”

“Can you take the wand out?” I asked.

“And maybe turn on the light,” echoed Hermione.

“Of course,” Dr. Morrison said, and did both. I took my feet off the stirrups. Sitting up, I let my bare feet hang from the side of the table and pressed my knees together as the sticky lubricant wet my thighs.

Mama looked fierce and dangerous with the polished nail of her index finger inches from Dr. Morrison’s nose. “I know your kind. I grew up with girls like you.”

“Mama,” Hermione said in a voice clear and firm. “Calm down; you’re going to get us thrown out of here. Sit down.” She patted the space beside her on the couch.

Dr. Morrison was scared. You couldn’t see the fear in her face, which remained fixed in her careful half-smile, but her fingers fluttered in her nervousness. I wasn’t sure what would happen if Mama were to hit the doctor, but I was excited by the idea.

“Mama, sit down,” Hermione said again. “Dr. King didn’t die for you to come in here and fight with the doctor. Come on now.”

Hermione patted the couch and Mama sat down. I marveled at Hermione, who wouldn’t look my way. Closing my eyes, I wished my sister had been there all those years when I needed someone to put oil on the water, to extinguish my mother’s wrath.

Mama breathed a couple of heaving breaths and unzipped her jacket before Dr. Morrison retreated to her dainty oak desk. She crossed her legs in her smart pantsuit and then, as her shoe swung away from her slender heel, said, “Aria is infertile. She has no genetic material.”

Hermione said, “Well, aren’t there options? Can’t she freeze the eggs she has left?”

Mama said, “What about that?”

Dr. Morrison shook her head. “It doesn’t quite work like that. We can’t freeze ova. We can only freeze embryos.”

Mama said, “I know I have heard of women having their eggs harvested. Career types.”

“That’s purely science fiction.”

“You know what,” Mama said. “I don’t like your attitude.”

“I’m engaged,” I said. Everyone turned and looked at me as if a pet turtle had suddenly spoken. “Could my fiancé and I make some embryos and freeze them?”

Dr. Morrison spoke to all of us in a voice like a gavel. “Ariadne, you are afollicular. There are no ova to fertilize.”

This pronouncement was so grave and so absolute. Everyone stopped talking and I put my fingers in my mouth. “Why is this happening to me?”

Dr. Morrison shook a chiding finger at me. “Now, don’t start feeling sorry for yourself. Your heart is fine. You have two perfect lungs.”

“Is that enough for
you
?” Mama was on her feet again in the crowded examining room. “Dr. Morrison, I asked you a question.”

“What exactly do you want to know?” The doctor spoke evenly, but her eyes were skittish, darting to the shut door and back again.

“I want to know if you get up every morning content because you have two lungs. Two
perfect
lungs. Why should Ariadne have to be grateful for things everyone else gets to take for granted?”

“I’m not sure I understand,” said Dr. Morrison.

“When I lost my husband and my youngest daughter, people kept telling me what I needed to be grateful for. How I needed to be satisfied with what I had left. Who are you to tell us what we should be grateful for, what should make us content?”

Dr. Morrison waited until Mama sat back down. “I apologize if I have offended you.” She paused. Her boundaries were clear and firm. This was not personal. This was just her job. “What I really want to help Ariadne with is hormone replacement. When the ovaries stop producing estrogen, there are two major results: bone loss and thickening of the arteries, heart disease.”

“I know all about hormone replacement,” my mother snapped. “I’m fifty-three years old.”

Now Dr. Morrison turned to me. “You’ve lost a lot of bone. You have osteopenia. It’s not as bad as osteoporosis, but it’s still serious.”

“We didn’t come to talk just about that. My daughter is just twenty-five. She is engaged to be married. We want to talk about fertility.” She read from Dr. Morrison’s card. “You are a reproductive endocrinologist, right?”

Dr. Morrison looked at me and said, “Is this what you want to talk about?”

“Yes,” I said.

I looked at Hermione, to see if she was planning another intervention, but she studied her leather sandals.

“This is something that I usually prefer to discuss with a woman and her partner. Maybe the two of you would like to make an appointment?”

“You can just tell me now,” I said. “I’ll tell Dwayne whatever I find out.”

“There’s always the slim possibility that you could conceive naturally—sometimes the ovaries release one last egg—but the odds against it are even greater than the odds of early menopause. I have a colleague whose FSH was higher than yours and she managed to have a child. But as I said, it is rare. There are fertility treatments, but they are expensive and virtually ineffective for someone in your condition.”

“Are there other options?” I said.

“Egg donation. Your womb is in wonderful shape.” She went to her desk and pulled what looked like an X-ray from a cardboard sheath. Holding it carefully by its edges, she showed me the film, but all I saw were vague shapes in deepening shades of gray. “Look at it, look at the curve. It’s a beautiful uterus. You could carry a child to term with no problem.”

“But why? What would be the point of going through the whole pregnancy ordeal just to give birth to another woman’s baby?”

“We have a great egg donation program here. You use a donor egg and your partner’s sperm. We screen the donors for all sorts of genetic defects—diabetes, breast cancer, et cetera. It would be your baby in almost all ways—your womb, your placenta, your blood, everything. There’s only one problem.”

“Besides the fact that it wouldn’t be my child?”

“Yes,” Dr. Morrison said. “None of our donors are African American.”

“That doesn’t really matter,” Hermione said. “If you have a black daddy, you end up a black baby no matter what.”

“But she would sort of stand out,” Mama said. “We don’t have any really light-skinned people in our family, and Dwayne is rather dark.”

Dr. Morrison waited until they finished jabbering and said, “And there’s the other option. You can use the egg of someone you know.”

My mother was quiet only a second before speaking up. “My eggs are probably too old. But Hermione could help, if she wanted to?”

“I would,” Hermione said. “I know that I owe you, Aria.”

“This could work,” Mama said slowly. “This way Dwayne can still be a father, and you can have a child that is still part of our family. But things are never as easy as they sound.”

“Is it expensive?” I asked.

“Not really,” Dr. Morrison said. “Not compared to the other options.”

“How much? Like in numbers.”

Mama said, “Don’t worry about money. A decision like this shouldn’t come down to money.”

I bit the nail away from my finger until I felt pain, kept pushing until I tasted blood. I understood why it would be best to have a family egg, but I didn’t want to give birth to Hermione’s child. I wanted Dwayne and me to make our own family, an immediate family, not some space-age extension of the family I already had.

And how would Hermione feel? No matter what papers she signed, there would be a part of her that would consider my child to be hers. Like Dwayne, who still considered Trey to be his son, even though he had signed away his parental rights. Charla could draw up another set of paperwork for her new husband to sign, changing Trey’s last name, but he would still be Dwayne’s boy.

And where would it leave me, to be the mother of a child and not its mother too? What about Little Link having a brother or sister that was also a cousin? There was something sordid in all of the overlapping of relationships, like in the movie
Chinatown
when the woman sobs, “She is my sister, she is my daughter.” In a healthy family the lines are clear, unassailable.

Breathe and you will know peace.
I breathed deeply, filling out my stomach and then upward to my chest. I did it again and again, inflating, deflating, until my head felt light and the room shifted in gentle waves. I lay back on the cold table, drunk with so much air.