Wonderland (47 page)

“No, please, Mrs. Vogel,” a man said in surprise.

He gripped her knees and spread them apart again.

She was trying to lie still but her heart had begun to pound wildly. Sweat on her face, under the heavy coils of her hair, which had come loose. A flash of heat shot upward from the cold dark between her legs, that open darkness, telling her she would die. She was going to die. It would come to her like this, the insertion of an instrument, opening her and turning her inside out, the dark heat rising to her heart with the ferocity of love—

She began to struggle.

“Mrs. Vogel—you’ll hurt yourself—”

The nurse seized her hands.

But her body had begun to fight and it could not be stopped. The table rattled. Something came loose—one of the stirrups. Helene felt herself recoiling backward on the table, away from that instrument, but it came along with her, inside her, hurting her.… She saw a wild, black space, open to the light and its veins pounding, something not meant to be seen. The strange man could see it. Jesse could see it. The rim of that instrument was like intense searing light.

She heard herself screaming.

The doctor was saying something to her. He was giving instructions. Helene threw her head from side to side. She could hear nothing. Why was this man talking to her? There was something stuck up inside her body, a terrible bright pain, and this man was trying to talk to her! She could kill him!

“Mrs. Vogel—”

Her smock was bunched up beneath her body. The muscles in her legs fought. She screamed. Another jerk of her body—a small thin shot of pain—

Then it was over. The thing was out. Gone.

Still she threw herself from side to side. Her head struck the table; her cheeks hot against the leather, which felt like a cheek itself. Faces
against faces. All of them sweaty and slippery. So Jesse, her husband, had slapped himself against her, his face grinding against hers in the dark, so he had entered her body with his own, his flesh into her flesh, marrying them.

No
.…

And suddenly she saw a young woman lying on a table. Herself, contorted like that: a woman on a table, on her back, her face twisted and demented. She had fallen from a great height and her face was twisted permanently.

“Mrs. Vogel …?”

What was that raw reddened gap between her legs? So vivid it sucked all the air into it—the entire white sky might be drawn into it and lost—a face more powerful than her own face, a raw demanding mouth.

“Mrs. Vogel, please—”

“—not my name!—”

She sat up, weeping. Alone with the nurse. Had she frightened the nurse? The doctor had left. Two women alone in this room, both frightened. Helene could not understand what had happened.

“You hurt yourself, it’s bleeding.… Here, wait.…”

She fussed with something, not looking at Helene. Helene caught a glimpse of a wad of cotton with a smear of fresh blood on it.

“You could have hurt yourself badly,” the nurse said.

Helene forced herself to stop crying. She took long, slow, deliberate breaths to calm herself.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

She tried to get up. Her legs were shaky.

“He didn’t finish the examination?” she asked.

“I’m afraid not.”

The nurse handed her a tissue and she wiped her wet face. “Are you feeling better now?”

“Yes. Yes. I’m sorry I lost control of myself.”

She glanced covertly at the nurse’s prim face. She had disappointed this girl.

Left alone, Helene dressed quickly. She threw the white gown onto a chair and saw with disgust that it was streaked with blood. There was nothing for her to think now; she stood in a kind of vacuum, dressed for the street, ready to escape. In one of her university courses she had
studied physical defects that sometimes accompanied retardation—children without arms, without legs, some of them even without faces—and she had thought, staring in a chilled fascination at the photographs,
There is nothing to think about these children
. Thinking demanded a space that could be entered—you stepped forward into that space, pushing other things out of the way, claiming a victory, a territory. In a vacuum you could not move one way or another. Everything was transparent and eternal. There was nothing to think.

An eternity in the body of a woman: the explosion of small, soft, gentle cells, coils of absolute power. Nothing could stop that power.
It floats upon a background of darkness, pinpricked by tiny dots of light
.

Her flesh still tingled between her legs. It might have been glowing. A tiny burning clot of moisture seeped down … Helene took a tissue out of her purse and dabbed between her legs with it.
Let it be blood. The start of five days of blood
. But when she brought the crumpled tissue back out, careful not to touch her clothes with it, she saw that it was bright blood—too bright for menstrual blood. So she stood very still, waiting. The past three weeks had been a nightmare of waiting like this. She would feel something move in her loins, seeping down hotly … but it would turn out to be only a vapid colorless moisture, not blood. Mucus. A quarter’s size of dark clotted blood would have redeemed her. But no. No blood. The cycle was not going to end this time.

She was already in her second month of pregnancy. She knew this. She wanted to shout at them in anger, at their satisfied faces:
Jesse, I’m pregnant, are you happy? Father, I’m pregnant! It
was a fact that had nothing to do with her personally. It could have been said of any woman, anyone at all. Something was floating lightly, invisibly, inside her. It swam in a cupful of liquid that was its universe, transparent and eternal.…

When she stepped out into the corridor she saw Dr. Blazack himself waiting for her. He was a small man, after all. “Mrs. Vogel, could you step in here for a minute …?”

“I’m leaving. I’m going home,” she said quickly.

“But Mrs. Vogel …”

She hurried out, looking at no one. She had failed. Dr. Blazack would telephone her father, and this evening the telephone would ring and she would have to answer it before Jesse did.
Her father
. She would have to talk to him.… What had happened to her fingernails? Two were broken. She must have broken them in her panic, during the
examination. She was still tense and contorted. Her muscles cringed. She walked awkwardly, aware of the chafing of her thighs, where the insides of her thighs rubbed together. She was very conscious of them touching and wondered why she had never noticed this before.

Jesse was always telling her about the bad surprises at the hospital. Things broke, went wrong, collapsed, burst. There were hours of routine work, the filling out of reports, the blood samples, the spinal taps, transfusions, shots, intravenous feedings—and then suddenly there were the surprises, lungs filling suddenly with fluid, lips gone white, blood pressure falling, falling, as arteries somewhere collapsed—How did you make sense of such things? The body is a machine, but the machine sometimes breaks down.

It could happen to her: she could pick at the wall of the womb until it broke down into bleeding.

She drove along State Street in a haze of traffic. She was free for the day now. She would find a hotel, rent a room. She would run over to Kresge’s. Then, in the hotel room, she would run hot water in the bathtub and undress and sit in the tub, her legs slowly spreading. She would ease the thing up into herself. Angrily and calmly. Its pressure would be very sharp and very thin, unlike the broad, coarse pressure Jesse brought to her.

Pressure. Then a sudden sighing release as the needle sank in.

The water pinkening with blood.

What she must remember is
to leave the tub unplugged and the water on
. That way there would be a continual flow of fresh water, splashing and hot. The blood would drain out and new water would rush in and everything would be clean.

Noon: a clock advertising tires. Cars and trucks were moving through downtown Chicago steadily, in a constant noisy bustle. The sound of horns. More horns. One lane was blocked off ahead, in front of the Drake Hotel; there must have been an accident. She would have to get into the left lane. She hadn’t been paying attention and now she was being drawn into the blocked-off lane, she couldn’t get out of it … a police car was parked there and men stood around. She waited patiently. What she must remember:
to keep the hot water running into the tub
.

After a few minutes she eased into the left lane. Slowly, achingly, the line of traffic drew her onward. What she must remember—The
traffic light ahead turned from green to red. What did that mean? She waited until it turned green again. Driving was a struggle: she sensed vehicles on all sides of her, about to lunge into her. But when she looked out she saw only cars and trucks with ordinary people in them, their hands gripped like hers on their steering wheels.

She braked to a stop suddenly. Then she drove forward again and everything was suspended. She could not remember exactly what she was doing. Where was she headed? She must not forget the bathtub, she would have to scour it first, make sure it was clean, then turn on the hot water … very hot water.… Behind her, around her, on all sides of her traffic moved onward. It pressed against her and would not let her free. She would scream at Jesse:
There are too many people! I can’t have a baby in all these people!

Steel knitting needles.

She would park the car and abandon it. Run, get into the crowd on the sidewalk, become anonymous. Become protoplasm. But she could not find a place to park. The balloon was inside her, fixed. She was passing drugstores, taverns, shoe stores, pawnshops, liquor stores, clothing stores. Movie houses. Old men loitered on the sidewalks here, looking around blankly, without judgment. Downtown at noon. These sights confused Helene. She might have intruded upon a sacred landscape, it was so certain, so definite. All the buildings were old, fixed, had the look of having been here for decades. The people all knew their way around perfectly. Everyone who was here belonged here. They had chosen to come here, walking in slow, measured strides or standing on the sidewalk, motionless, looking around. They had all been born at one time or another, at a precise moment. If their mothers had tried in desperation to scrape them out and lose them in bathwater they would have resisted—would have clutched the walls of flesh and refused to let go—why? Why should anyone give up life? Why not fight for it? There was an army in the womb and it would not die without a fight.

Helene’s eye was drawn to three young women strolling on the sidewalk—flashily dressed, very cheap and pretty, their hair bleached and puffed out around their stark, glamorous, high-colored faces—how she hated them! feared them!
Must remember to buy Dutch Cleanser
. The tub would probably be dirty. She would scour it clean and get rid
of all that impersonal dirt.… She followed the girls with her eye, repulsed by their cheerful sexual glow that was like a beacon shining out of their faces, so obvious, so disgusting, and she thought of the faint line of dirt that formed on the collars of her clothes and Jesse’s shirts after a single wearing. Where did it come from, that dirt? Clean as she and Jesse were, they were not really clean. She must remember to buy cleanser. Otherwise she would not be able to force herself to sit in that tub.

Pedestrians passed close about her, crossing with the light. They walked with their collars turned up against their faces, like Arabs, trying to protect themselves from small whirling clouds of grit and papers. The wind was quite strong today. Their eyes were half-shut, as if with a strange contentment.
All of them swelling outward in sacs, their lips thirsty and pressed against the walls of sacs, sucking blood
. Nothing could dislodge them.

She could not find a place to park. She kept driving helplessly, heading north toward LaSalle Metropolitan Hospital. She felt herself drawn there, the car drawn there. There was something she must do but she could not quite remember it: the bathtub, the Dutch Cleanser, the hot water. Scalding water. People passed in front of her car when she stopped for a red light, walking tirelessly, fiercely. They had the look of city people who have spent all the days of their lives tramping the city streets, up and down, contented, knowing exactly where they were going. Helene feared their strength. She felt lightheaded suddenly, knowing that something was going to happen to her.

What she must remember
.…

She wanted to stop this car, park it at a curb. Anywhere. She wanted to abandon it. She wanted to run to a telephone booth and call her father and scream at him.
I am Helene Cady! What has happened to me? I was supposed to grow up into a certain person, but where is that person? I’ve waited for years and nothing has happened, marriage hasn’t made any difference … and now my life is over, I can’t tell myself that it will happen in the future, I am through waiting for my life to happen.… I am everything now, at this moment, that I will ever be. It’s over
.

She parked in the visitors’ parking lot of the hospital. No moisture between her legs? No ache in the pit of her belly? The hospital was a large seven-story building with a broad, sandblasted façade and scores
of windows. It had an old, decrepit, stained look—tar seemed to have seeped down from its roofs; its chimneys were enormous and blackened, like the chimneys of factories. The big front lawn was a bright false green, dotted with refuse. A new wing was being added, but work had been temporarily halted and girders were exposed like raw, orange, comically exaggerated bones.

Helene entered the hospital through the big front door. A sound of wheezing as the door revolved. Inside, the familiar odor of a hospital. Helene went at once to the elevator and took it to the basement, conscious of people milling about her, the bustle of noontime. In the elevator with her were two young doctors, probably interns, Jesse’s age, and a small flirtatious nurse, and a woman in expensive street clothes who glanced around hopefully. Helene hurried down to the staff cafeteria. She had met Jesse here a few times. But now she didn’t see him, so she sat by herself at a corner table, exhausted, and stared straight ahead of her. Her mind shuddered and went blank. Doctors, young men, passed by her—someone was laughing loudly, with laughter as robust as Trick’s had been; the men conferred together as if they sensed how everything was in their keeping, everything belonged to them. Their tired, laugh-lined faces, youthful and aged faces, possessed certainty, a power, a maleness that was unconscious in them. Helene stared at them leadenly.