A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That Read online

  Here it was just three A.M. and Big Brad was gone, the sober one was tucked under his own sheets or his girlfriend’s or his wife’s. His harsh kisses, however, were still there, in the bedroom—three hickies on Angela’s neck turning from pink to red to purple.

  13.

  While my mother slept that first night, leech number one escaped, wiggled out from under the gauze and traveled her body, from breast to neck as a lover might have. It twisted by her shoulder blade, pausing at her collarbone, and rested at her neck, where it sucked and sucked and sucked.

  In the morning, I opened the heavy door to her hospital room and found the leech there, fat and full—the size of a big man’s thumb. I stood with my hands over my mouth, not making a sound. My mother was still asleep or doped up, but what I believed to be reflex or intuition or simply an itch brought her hand to her neck. She opened her eyes, touched it, and screamed. I held my breath.

  Two nurses burst through the door, an older nurse followed by a much younger nurse. The older nurse joined my mother, matching my mother’s screams with her own equally horrified gasps. The young nurse, a stern woman with a mouth like a cut, glared at the older nurse. She narrowed her eyes and grumbled something I could not make out. She pointed at the door. “Stop it, Donna,” she said, “or get out.”

  The older nurse composed herself. She straightened her white pants, adjusted her polyester jacket. She fiddled with the stethoscope that hung around her neck.

  I was biting the inside of my cheek. Madly. I tasted blood. My hands shook.

  The stern nurse shot a nasty look in my direction.

  “Help her,” I said. “Do something.”

  The nurse went to my mother’s bedside. She twisted my mother’s head to one side, and with a gloved hand, slowly, deliberately, peeled the plump creature from her neck.

  “Goddamn,” she said to all of us. “Grow up.”

  14.

  My mother spent a week in the hospital recuperating, and when I wasn’t visiting her or teaching, I found myself researching leeches on the Internet. I was gathering facts—perhaps I’d write a series of poems or maybe a story. As was discovered the morning after my mother’s therapy began, one problem with leeches is that they migrate, moving from the needy area of the body to other areas, private areas. In the nineteenth century, leeches were reported to have disappeared inside a woman’s rectum, attached themselves in the upper airway, and ascended into her uterus.

  The Hirudo leech has three jaws and three hundred teeth, and is the leech most doctors, including Dr. Morgan, prefer.

  The leech uses its own anesthetic, so its bite is painless—my mother later attested to that.

  When the leech was placed on my mother’s breast, it injected an anticoagulant serum to prevent blood clotting, which was, after all, the point—why the leech ended up there in the first place—that anticoagulant, that thinning, flowing blood, which fed not only the larcenist worm itself, but the tissue it pinched and visited.

  The leech ate and ate, gorged itself until it had ingested enough blood to equal five times its body weight. In the end, before it was dropped into a bin with its satiated cousins to die, it was a bloated, fed thing; it was a body plump with mother.

  The whole thing was a vile contradiction, and though I had done the research and tried to think about it rationally, I still had nightmares and a growing distaste for snails and ants and even cats—anything that crawled or pilfered.

  Now, mid-December, six weeks after reconstruction and the medicinal leech therapy that followed, the two of us were at Dr. Morgan’s office, waiting for the bandages to come off. My mother sat on the table in a blue gown, excited, swinging her legs like a girl. Dr. Morgan had just joined us, and I’d moved from my mother’s side to the far corner of the room to give them space.

  While I watched the doctor talk to my mother, I remembered that the word leech might have been derived from the old English word laece, or physician. The first written record of the therapy was found in the Corpus Hippocraticum. Hippocrates believed that disease, all disease, was caused by imbalance of the four humors: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. He thought that the medicinal use of leeches could play a central part in restoring balance. I thought about my mother tipping over in the grocery store, reaching for the frozen peas and falling into the freezer. I stared at Dr. Morgan’s back, the tilt of his head, and wondered if, when the bandages were removed, my mother would finally feel balanced, restored, if those matching breasts she’d longed for would be enough.

  Christmas music played throughout the office. It seemed to me that something was wrong with the speakers because the music was louder, more intense, than it had been only moments earlier. I was staring at the speakers, wondering what was up—was the volume intentional?

  “Forgive us,” Dr. Morgan said. “They’re broken. Someone is coming later this afternoon to fix them.”

  “Is it like this in every room?” I wanted to know.

  “Just this one.”

  “Lucky us.”

  “Rachel,” my mother said. “Be nice.”

  “I could ask the girls up front to turn it off, if you like.”

  “Oh, no,” my mother said. “Let’s not punish everyone. It’s not that loud—right, honey?”

  I didn’t answer her.

  Christmas music was just one of the things about the holidays that annoyed me—the inability to escape those songs, the same songs every year, and there I was in the doctor’s office with “Silent Night” something more than background music.

  A miniature stuffed Santa Claus sat on a chair of his own. I was right under the speakers, near the stuffed Santa, and near the sharp instruments that sat on a paper cloth. There were bottles of blue liquid lined up, cotton balls, flesh-colored tape, and oversized Q-tips. The scissors were huge, no scissors that I recognized. They looked like two carving knives held together in the middle by a small band of metal, the kind of knives the doctor and his family probably reserved for holidays, for the big roasts his family ate just a couple times a year.

  Dr. Morgan picked up the scissors and snipped at my mother. He unwrapped the bandages from her torso with anticipation, as if she were a gift, and I imagined him on Christmas morning, untying the ribbon on a present from his wife and kids with the same expectant look on his face. The gauze came away from my mother’s skin, up and over her shoulder and head. Each sheet was pinker than the one before it, and the last one was more than red, stained and maroon and sticking to her flesh. He pulled at it slowly, carefully, but still my mom winced.

  When she was half naked before us, Dr. Morgan actually said, “Ta-da,” almost sang those two little words, revealing to us what he gave her: a new breast, which was really a fat thing without a nipple from what I could see, red scars like bloody highways surrounding it.

  “Beautiful,” he said. “Happy holidays,” he said.

  And I nodded in agreement because it was, after all, an improvement over the hollowed-out space that was there before. I thought a moment about valleys and vacuities and holes, teeth that hurt, cavities, and the ditch that had been my mother’s chest, and then I thought about mountains and islands and trees, protrusions and tumors, too.

  “Beautiful,” my mother said, looking down.

  “Yes, beautiful,” I agreed.

  Georgia Carter

  1996-1997

  Cream

  1.

  At thirteen, these things scared Georgia Carter: other kids with IQs as high as hers, clowns, cartoons, and the flowers outside her bedroom window before they opened. She liked to understand things, especially her own fears. About the clowns, it was easy. It was the paint and puffed-up clothing; it was not knowing what was underneath or whom. And cartoons—well, they were just violent. But the other smart kids and the flowers outside her window, she didn’t understand. Especially the flowers. They just sat there, closed up and full of fragrance. What was there to be afraid of?

  One Friday afternoon, while her father w
as teaching math, while her mother was at the office, while her brother, Kevin, was working at The Fish Joint, dropping chunks of cod into hot oil, Georgia offered up her virginity to her brother’s best friend, Craig. She presented her virginity to Craig on the hand-painted clown plate. There were chocolate cookies on the plate as well, ones with white cream oozing from the middle. The more cookies Craig ate, the more of the clown she saw, parts of him at a time. A painted eye here, half of those exaggerated lips, until finally, all of him, his whole scary face revealed. The clown looked up at the two of them from the plate, black crumbs dotting his cheeks like fine hairs you’d never find on a clown.

  Georgia was thinking about those hairs as the boy opened her thighs. She was thinking about how a girl like her could be reading, doing English homework one minute, making plans for college, then offering a boy her sandwich cookies and virginity the next. The whole half hour that he was down there she heard him, saw him, pulling things apart—like the cookies, how he split them in two, then scraped away their creamy middles with one swift sweep of his bottom teeth.

  In her sheets with a boy three years older, she made herself into someone new and tall. She planned a spicy wardrobe in her head, tight jeans and short shirts that would show her belly button. She watched the top of Craig’s head, his dark curls swirling about like the tongue itself, and she saw her whole life opening up or closing. She started thinking that she could crack his pretty skull in half if her thighs were stronger. But they weren’t—and neither was she, really.

  A boy like Craig would never do what she really wanted of him, which was stand with her under the sun, holding her hand in front of her third period gym class. Just stand with her. Lean against the wire fence, touching her pink knuckles with his fingertips.

  Now he stood at the foot of her bed with sweat on his face. He wiggled into his Levis and almost scowled. Yes, it was a scowl—his lips, the same ones he kissed her with, now twisting into a grimace. It wasn’t the face he made when he reached for her cookies. It wasn’t the face he made when he reached for her breasts. She had the feeling that he won, though she wasn’t sure what the game was called; she didn’t even know she was playing it. If this afternoon were Monopoly, she’d have given him Park Place and Boardwalk, offered up her thimble, her pink and blue and yellow bills.

  Still, at the front door, she was purring. “Will you meet me on Monday after third period?” she asked.

  He moved about on his feet, shuffling in his tennis shoes, one behind the other, then he started talking about science class. “We’re dissecting an animal on Monday,” he began.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said, “a cat. I can’t get to the Junior High in time.”

  “I guess not,” she said.

  “Besides, you’re in the smart kid classes, aren’t you?”

  She shrugged. She thought about lying, telling him no, that was a rumor, but what sort of rumor would that have been?

  “You’re like a genius or something. No way,” he told her.

  “I’m not a genius,” Georgia said.

  “Whatever.”

  “I took some test and they stuck me in those classes. I don’t even want to be there,” she said.

  “I’ve got to go,” Craig said.

  Georgia was sure he did have to go, and also sure that it was a momentous occasion for a boy like Craig to attend science class, to see those organs being scooped out of a cat, and even more momentous if he held the knife himself, did the cutting and the scooping. He’d be busy afterwards, she was certain, processing the whole valuable experience. Of course she understood. Of course she wasn’t mad. Yes, certainly, she’d tell Kevin that Craig came by looking for him.

  2.

  Within weeks Georgia was famous. Her brother’s friends came knocking when he wasn’t home. She wore tight shirts, shorts, and sandals when she answered the door. Her mother’s best perfume and the smallest bit of lipstick. The friends were obvious, coming without their surfboards or guitars, coming when they knew Kevin was away frying fish. One stood on the porch at eleven A.M., a Saturday, a fluorescent blue condom already in his fist. “Hey, Georgia,” he said, “how’s it going?”

  “It’s going,” she said.

  Usually she let them in, but this one with his plans in his fist was weird. His name was Harvard, but everyone called him Harvey. His front teeth hung over his bottom lip.

  “Where’s your mom and dad?” he said.

  “Looking at new houses.”

  “What’s wrong with this one?” He leaned forward, trying to get a look inside.

  “Nothing, probably,” Georgia said. “It’s just something they do together on the weekends. A habit. We’re not moving or anything. They just like to look.”

  “Can I come in and see it? The house, I mean.”

  “You’ve been here before, Harvey.” She rolled her eyes, shook her head. “God,” she said.

  “Come on, Georgia.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. We can watch cartoons or something. It’s Saturday,” he reminded her.

  “I hate cartoons.”

  “Well, we can talk.”

  “Talk, huh?”

  “Yeah, why not?” He lifted his hand over that mouth of his and yawned. The yawn was overly dramatic, fake, and came booming into the air between them. “I’m tired,” Harvey said. “We can lie down. We can rest together.”

  “You want to talk and rest, huh?”

  “Yeah,” he said, bending toward her.

  “What’s that in your fist?” she asked.

  And that’s when he uncurled his fingers and the condom fell to the porch. He let out an embarrassed laugh and dropped to his knees. She left him there, like that, reaching for the blue condom, on the ground, like a knight about to propose.

  3.

  It was days later, late afternoon, and Georgia was sitting on the couch watching the news. Kevin was at work, but Georgia’s parents were home—her father asleep, sprawled out on his chair in the den, her mother at the kitchen table, reading the paper.

  When Georgia heard a car pull up to the curb, she parted the curtains and looked out the window. It was Josh, one more of Kevin’s friends, turning off the engine and opening his car door, stepping into the street. It was Josh spraying something minty, she assumed, onto his tongue and looking toward their front door.

  Georgia dropped the curtain and turned back to the television, already making a plan in her head about how she might avoid dinner with her parents. She could smell the night’s roast baking in the oven, the garlic and rosemary, and though she was hungry and her mother’s meal was tempting, she wanted to join this boy for a ride if he, as she suspected, asked her.

  Josh was tall and muscular, popular and friendly—the best surfer in town—and Georgia had hoped he’d eventually come to her the way the others had. And now he was on the porch, knocking.

  Moments earlier Georgia had been mesmerized by a particular news story, one in which a botched liposuction procedure had resulted in the death of a sixteen-year-old girl. At first Georgia assumed that the reporter was talking about malpractice, a doctor, but when she saw footage of two police officers steering a handcuffed teenager toward a police car, Georgia realized she had been mistaken.

  The handcuffed girl had been a receptionist for Cosmetic Plus, a clinic on Fourth and Bower, and was a senior at Diamond High School in Seal Beach, which was just ten minutes away from Georgia’s own school. Apparently, the handcuffed girl had tried liposuction on her best friend’s thighs and accidentally killed her.

  Georgia imagined the girls, playing doctor in the middle of the night. After hours, and the two of them sneaking inside the clinic, using the arrested girl’s key. She imagined they were giggling and excited, planning to get something for nothing. They had a goal in mind: one of them would be more perfect in the morning. The receptionist had probably watched the procedure before, had stood in the hall, peering in, or maybe gawked at the doctor’s side
, holding a tray of equipment: a scalpel, a glass jar of cotton balls, a rubber hose. The reporter had shaken his head, his dark hair stiff and obedient. He’d made a tsk-tsk sound with his mouth, apparently not understanding their motivation—why would two girls try such a thing? Georgia was answering that question in her head when she heard Josh’s car door slam.

  Now there was his knock and the doorbell ringing and Georgia was getting up off the couch, straightening her skirt, saying, “I’ll get it.”

  “Who’s that?” her mother said, pushing her glasses up on her nose. “Georgia, who’s there?”

  “It’s Rebecca,” Georgia lied, closing the door on her knee, putting her calf and ankle and foot between her and the boy so as not to shut him out completely. “She wants to know if I can go study.”

  “I’m making a roast,” her mother said.

  “I’ve got a geography test tomorrow, Mr. Rupert’s class. You know how much better Rebecca does when we study together—remember last month? Remember how happy her mother was?”

  “It’s nearly dinnertime, Georgia,” her mother said, looking down at her watch.

  “I’ll eat later.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Save me a plate—please.”

  “All right,” her mother said, giving in. “But be back by eight. I want you home early.”

  “Eight?” Georgia whined.

  “Not a minute after nine. It’s a school night, Georgie,” her mother said.

  Once in Josh’s car, Georgia pretended he was her boyfriend. She pretended she was on a date. She told herself that he liked her. He was, after all, smiling and polite in a way Craig was not. He had both hands on the wheel—therefore nothing blue and glowing, no obvious plans in his fist—though anything at all could have been in his pocket. Georgia rolled down the window and started chatting. She told Josh about the news, about the girl from Diamond High School who was arrested. “She’s in jail,” Georgia said.