A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That Read online

  The girl stared at her palm, at the money Ella offered her. She sniffled. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. Her friend nudged her. “Take the money” the friend said.

  So when Georgia, who’d recently been diagnosed with HPV, came into the cubicle, dripping wet, pulling off her jacket and shaking off her umbrella, Ella was in no mood. The umbrella was broken, one metal bar twisted, like an injured leg, or like the bat’s wings she’d been dreaming about, Jack had been talking about, the metal bar like one of their covered fingers. “Your umbrella’s broken,” Ella said.

  “It’s a windy fucking day,” Georgia said.

  “Sit down.”

  “My jacket is soaked. Can you hang it up somewhere?” She held the dripping jacket in the air between them.

  Ella noticed that Georgia had filled out a bit. Her face was fuller. “You look good,” she said.

  Georgia mumbled something under her breath. She dropped the jacket in Ella’s lap, leaving a wet stain on her lab coat.

  “Damn it, Georgia.”

  “Sorry,” she said.

  Ella stood and put the jacket over her arm. She walked down the hall to the closet, huffing so that Georgia could hear. When she sat back down, she stared hard at the girl and shook her head.

  “I’m up to one-twenty. Are you happy now?” Georgia said.

  “The question is, are you happy?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  And Ella did what she’d been trained not to do: she raised her voice. “How does a girl like you begin, Georgia? I mean, how does it start? What were you like at twelve or thirteen?”

  “A girl like me?”

  “Yes, how does it begin for you. That’s what I want to know.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Can’t you find yourself one boy? And be safe with him?” Ella said. “Or how about keeping your legs closed? There’s an idea.”

  Georgia leaned back on the stool. She shook her head. “I could get you fired for that,” she said.

  “Go ahead,” Ella said.

  Georgia glared at her.

  “Go tell my boss I’m a horrible counselor. I’m certainly horrible with you—haven’t made one bit of difference in your life, your behavior,” Ella said.

  “My behavior” she said.

  “It’s useless, the time we spend together. You’re never going to stop.”

  “It’s not your job to stop me. Just do your job,” the girl said.

  “I obviously can’t,” Ella said.

  Georgia looked at her. She leaned forward and spoke. “You think finding one boy is the big answer? You think marriage is some great thing? I wouldn’t want one boy if that one boy was Jack Bloom.”

  “Stop it,” Ella said.

  “I’m just saying—”

  “I know what you’re saying, Georgia, and you’re sixteen years old. Don’t talk to me about my life.”

  “I know how old I am.”

  “I don’t think you do. You don’t know what it means to be sixteen—how many times you should, should …”

  “Should what?”

  “Should be saying no, Georgia—you should tell those damn boys no.”

  “Something’s wrong with you,” Georgia said.

  “Look,” Ella said, “right now, this minute, something’s wrong with you. Your health. Condyloma needs to be watched. You’ve got to take care of yourself.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Georgia said, flippantly.

  “It’s not enough to just look at a boy—you can’t see condyloma, at least not in the dark,” Ella continued, knowing her words were futile. “It’s difficult to spot, that’s what I’m saying. You’ve got to be more careful.”

  Georgia nodded.

  Ella told her that the virus, HPV, could be dangerous. She told her that if it went to her cervix, it could cause cancer. There could be changes in her Pap results. Abnormalities.

  Georgia leaned forward. “Hey,” she said, “what’s it doing now?”

  Ella looked at her.

  “Do I have cancer now?”

  Ella had the girl’s test results right there in her lap, and though she’d already read them and knew that Georgia was okay, she opened the folder for dramatic effect and pretended to be reading from it. She slapped the folder closed and said nothing.

  “What’s it say?”

  “You’re fine right now, Georgia.”

  “I knew it,” she said. “I feel great. Nothing’s wrong with me.” And then she was rummaging through her purse. “Fuck, no gum,” she said. “I need a mint or something.”

  “I’m telling you to be careful with this one. You’ll be treated, the symptoms disappear, everything’s fine, and then it can come back. I’m not saying that it will, but it can—it’s possible. If it goes to your cervix, you won’t even know. You’ve got to watch out, take care of yourself. Don’t miss appointments.”

  “You should leave him first, Ella. You should pack your bags and go. It’s your marriage, right?”

  “Don’t assume things.” Ella shook her head, pissed. “Your imagination astounds me,” she lied.

  Georgia shrugged.

  “Besides, I’m not going to take relationship advice from you. Come on, Georgia. Think about it.”

  “Do you have any gum?” Georgia asked. “How about a mint?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What about a piece of candy?”

  Ella patted her pockets for proof. “Nothing,” she said again.

  “Damn,” Georgia said.

  “Look, Georgia, you’re okay now, but I want you to be vigilant.”

  “I heard you.”

  “I want you to stay on top of this—don’t miss even one Pap.”

  “Right,” she said. “Okay. I wish I had a mint,” she said.

  11.

  There were a half dozen ten-story buildings all in a row. There were palm trees and short green hills, ecology scholars and technical engineers, bat lovers and defenders of poisonous snakes. He’d been spending more and more evenings here, thinking things through, he said. He felt more at home at work, especially these last few weeks, he told Ella.

  They went to building number 3 and took the elevator to the fifth floor. Jack punched in his code, and the glass doors opened for them.

  And there, pinned to corkboards, were the bats he studied and loved.

  Jack took her by the hand and led her around, introducing her. She knew he’d given the bats names. He’d spoken about them, calling them Candy and Rudy and Maggie at home, but it was different standing there, watching him coo, watching him talk to the dead bats as if they could hear. She thought about this and let go of his hand.

  “Here we are—finally,” he said, pulling up a stool for her to sit on. He opened his arms out wide and looked around. “What do you think?” he asked her.

  “It’s intense,” she said.

  “Let me get us some coffee. Let’s have some coffee and talk about things.”

  Jack left the room to make coffee, and after a few seconds alone with the bats, Ella was aware of her heart and lungs. She left the lab too and stood in the hall, waiting. She was thinking about the documentary he brought home months ago. The Livingstone’s bat that was born in the Los Angeles Zoo a year earlier and had been rejected by his mother. The bat had to be nurtured by a human. Michael, the zookeeper, cared for the orphan bat. He named him Oliver. The bat had to be fed almost constantly, so Michael kept him in his bedroom. Ella imagined Michael feeding Oliver pears and peaches and tiny chunks of apple.

  When Jack found her in the hall, he kissed her cheek. “I’m sorry I left you there ,” he said. “I should have—”

  “It’s okay” she said, cutting him off.

  Jack carried only one cup of coffee. “I can’t find the extra cups. We can share, right?”

  “Okay,” she said, taking the cup from him, bringing it to her lips and taking a sip. The coffee was hot and perfect, with just the right amount of cream. They stood in
the hall a moment and looked at each other before moving back into the lab.

  Jack pulled out two stools and they sat down next to each other. It was a lot like sitting side by side in a bar, except that instead of rows of bottles above their heads there were bats behind glass cases. Jack picked up her hand. “Can you trust me, Ella?” Jack said. “Can you at least make an effort?”

  When he said effort, Ella thought of high school math tests. She thought of gym class and running an extra lap. She thought of trying not to cuss or giving up caffeine. She thought of Sarah’s lips on Jack’s lips. She remembered Sarah’s hand making its way into her husband’s jeans. Ella remembered that the zookeeper Michael taught Oliver to fly. How did that work? she was wondering. How did a man without wings teach a bat to use his own?

  “I’ll make an effort,” she said, and it sounded silly, like a lie, like something she could not possibly make.

  Jack clapped his hands together like a kid and jumped up from the stool “Good,” he said. “Let me introduce you to Carmen.” For a minute she thought he had a secretary, a dark-haired beauty that he hadn’t mentioned, but he took her hand for the second time that day and pulled her to the back of the lab, where Carmen, pinned like the others, hung behind a glass case.

  “Livingstone’s Fruit,” Jack said.

  “So this is Carmen,” she said, relieved.

  “Isn’t she wonderful?”

  And Carmen was wonderful, Ella agreed, especially her wings, spread out like a blanket, like a huge black fan.

  12.

  They stuck their brown lunch bags on a shelf in the refrigerator, right next to the samples that were waiting to go to the lab, the brown bags of gonorrhea and syphilis. In the common room they ate their sandwiches, sipped soft drinks, and discussed the girls of the day—this one raped by a quiet neighbor, this one left in a gutter by a boy she still loved, a boy Ella better not be looking at, she said, and this one, Georgia Carter, with an object stuck inside of her, way up high, so high that no amount of pull or tug or yank could release it.

  It had been several months since Ella had seen Georgia, months since her condyloma had been diagnosed and treated, months since they’d had that argument about Georgia’s behavior and Ella’s marriage, and now Georgia sat there, looking at Ella as if she were any one of the counselors up front; it was a look she might have given Sarah, whom she obviously didn’t like or want to know. “I think about you,” Ella said meekly.

  “Yes, well,” Georgia said. She shifted on the metal stool, obviously unhappy behind their inadequate curtain. “Can’t a girl get some privacy?” she said, sighing. She pulled a piece of gum from her blouse’s little pocket. She popped it between her lips and chewed without inhibition; Ella could see the white stick bending and folding in her mouth.

  She leaned forward and spoke to Georgia softly. “Can you tell me what the object is?” she asked her.

  Georgia shook her head no.

  Her weight hadn’t changed since she’d last been to the clinic, so perhaps Ella didn’t need to worry there. She’d cut her bangs, and they framed her face now. She looked funny to Ella, like an overgrown baby. Georgia noticed her looking and brushed the bangs with her hand. “I’m sorry about last time,” Ella said.

  “Whatever.”

  “I am, Georgia. It was wrong of me. I should have called you to apologize. I picked up the phone, in fact, I…”

  “Stop it,” she said.

  “Okay,” Ella said, leaning forward.

  “It would have been unprofessional to call. You’re only unprofessional to a point.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  Georgia muttered something under her breath that Ella could not make out. She sneered. Ella asked if she were here alone.

  “I’ve got a boyfriend now.”

  “Good,” Ella said, not sure if she believed her.

  “His name is Jim. He’s tall, seventeen. We’ve got the same birthday,” she said.

  “Is Jim here?”

  “He sells shoes—makes a lot of commission. He wants to take me away.”

  “Where?”

  “The mountains.”

  “Is Jim here?” Ella repeated.

  “Say what you mean—you want to know if he’s okay with this, with the fact that I’ve got something stuck up there,” She motioned, to her pelvis. “Right?”

  Ella shook her head.

  “What you want to know is does he still love me?”

  “No,” Ella said, “I’m not talking about love.”

  And Georgia looked at her hard and said, “Of course you’re not.”

  13.

  At closing Ella gathered the speculums up like silverware, and after dipping them into the steaming water, stuck them in an oven to bake. Later, she’d bake sweet bread for a man she thought she knew, and even later, he would leave her, but not before giving her a germ or two of her own.

  Years from now, he would stand with a new wife at the mouth of Bracken Cave. Inside the cave twenty million free-tailed bats would be hanging by their toes. At dusk these bats, pouring from the cave, would swirl and loop in search of blood.

  Years from now, Georgia’s condyloma would spread to her cervix, causing a cancer they would not find until it had eaten everything.

  Georgia had a banana inside of her. Dr. Wheeler shook his head and smirked as he confided to them in the common room. It was lunchtime. Just moments earlier, Ella, so anxious to hear Georgia’s verdict, grabbed the wrong bag from the refrigerator shelf. She sat peeking inside at the sample of gonorrhea on her lap. She quickly folded it closed and feigned fullness.

  “It was months ago ,” Sarah whispered into her ear. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Ella nodded.

  “I told you it wouldn’t happen again and it hasn’t. It’s okay if he picks you up from work. I’ll stay away from him, I promise.”

  Ella nodded again.

  “I’m sorry,” Sarah repeated.

  “I heard you the first time,” Ella said.

  “He’s just, he’s just …” she stammered.

  “He’s just my husband,” Ella said, louder than she had intended.

  Dr. Wheeler looked at her. “What, Ella? Did you say something about your husband?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s nothing.”

  “It was a banana,” Dr. Wheeler said. “A banana,” he repeated, looking at them. “Can you imagine a girl wanting something so badly?”

  Rachel Spark

  1997-1998

  Creatures

  1.

  I knew there were women who were proud of their mastectomies. I had a DoubleTake magazine open on my nightstand, left there purposely with the hopes that my mother would find it. A pencil ran the length of the magazine’s spine, saving the page. Even though I knew photographs weren’t going to affect my mother’s decision, I wanted her to see these beautiful tattooed women—one with a colorful snake where her right breast had been, one with halos of red and yellow flowers circling both puckered scars.

  My mom had started talking about reconstructive surgery, dropping comments about balance and symmetry into our conversations. It was summer, just over a couple of years since the mastectomy, just six months before her first recurrence, two years before I met Dirk or Rex, and my mother wanted her body back, she said—as if it, her body, had taken a trip or been stolen from her, and breast reconstruction would return it to its rightful place. I wanted my mother to wait until she’d been healthy for at least three years before deciding because I knew that the disease was most likely to recur within that window. I wanted her strong when or if it showed up, not recouping—but she wanted to get on with things. I believed that these things my mother wanted to get on with included meeting a new man, and I worried that her self-image was wrapped up in what was no longer hers—breasts, abundance, and probable health.

  It was morning, a Saturday, and she stood in front of her bedroom mirror in a black one-piece bathing suit, white shorts, and tennis shoes,
complaining, saying, “I’m out of whack, Rachel. I feel like I’m about to tip over.” The two of us had planned to have our coffee downstairs, sit outside on the sand, and play a game of Scrabble before it got too hot.

  I stood in the doorway, towel over one shoulder, holding the game under my arm.

  “Look at this,” my mom said, pulling at the black fabric where it dipped and wrinkled. She held the rubber breast in the other hand. The problem, she said, was that her remaining breast seemed bigger and was cumbersome without its match. “Look at it,” she said. “Look at me.”

  I was looking. I did look. I looked all the time—when my mother was dressing or undressing, when she was stepping out of the tub, when she was sleeping. I had looked the night before, as my mother stood in the kitchen, ready for bed, saying goodnight. She held a steaming cup of chocolate. She blew into the cup and the vapor rose. I smelled the milk and sugar. Her hair, as they had promised, had come back in curls. When she leaned forward to kiss my cheek, I noticed the blue gown, the way it fell over her healthy breast, the way the silk wrinkled and dipped where her left breast had been, how it behaved like the black fabric my mother was now pulling on.

  Unlike her, I wasn’t thinking about aesthetics or symmetry, but time—the days and weeks and months out of her life that the reconstruction would certainly steal. “Think how stressful the surgery would be on your body” I said. “Are you ready for that sort of stress? Is your body ready?”

  “Where are the beach chairs?” she said, irritated, changing the subject. “Are they in the front closet?”

  “What did the doctor say—that it could take you up to six months to recover?”

  “That’s the worst-case scenario, Rachel. Why must you always think like that? How did I raise such a negative daughter?” She put the rubber breast down on her dresser and sat on the bed. “I need you with me.”