Raji and Beth were in the locker room after sewing veins on some old lady’s heart, chatting while they changed out of the scrubs they wore under their protective suits.
Other surgeons chattered among the rows of lockers, their conversations in several languages bouncing around the wooden cabinets.
Raji hadn’t quite worked up the energy to strip off her scrubs yet. She felt puffy, like she had eaten too much broccoli with cheese sauce all at once. Her hands still smelled like the rubbery, non-latex gloves, and the powder crusted in her knuckles.
Beth tossed her blue scrubs in the biohaz bin in the corner where the banks of lockers met. She sat in her bra and underwear on the wooden bench. “You feeling okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Ate some bad sushi or something.” If she had said that she was just generically sick, Beth would have insisted she describe her symptoms in order to diagnose her and prescribe ameliorating pharmaceuticals. However, nobody wanted to hear more details about diarrhea.
Beth scrunched up her nose and upper lip. “My bachelor’s is in microbiology. I never eat anything raw.”
“Yeah, I did general biology and philosophy. Guess that’s why I eat stupid things.”
“Oh, God. Remember the Malaysian Chicken at the Asian Students’ Association’s All-Asia Night? Five hundred people got salmonella. The ER was full the next day. I’m still surprised nobody died.”
Raji bit her lip, deliberating. “Yeah, it may not have been the sushi.”
Beth rubbed a deodorant stick on her armpits and waved at Joshua, the pencil-necked anesthesiologist, as he walked in. He walked around to the next bank of lockers to change because he was too prudish to get naked in front of female colleagues. Beth asked, “What do you mean, it wasn’t the sushi? Did you eat something else at room temperature, maybe some nice British mad cow steak tartare?”
“No, I don’t think that was it.”
“What then, one of those Japanese fish dishes where the fish is still flopping around on your plate?”
“I think I might have gotten knocked up,” Raji admitted.
“Shhhhhh!” Beth hissed, and she sneaked around the end of the row of lockers, looking to see who might have overheard. She came back and put her head right up next to Raji’s, whispering, “Was it that Alexander Astor guy from the masquerade? He looked hot. I mean, you couldn’t tell because he was wearing a mask, but he looked hot. Yeah, I can see doing him.”
“I lied. That wasn’t ‘Alexander Astor.’ That was Peyton Cabot.”
“Oh my God. Please don’t tell me that he’s the bassist guy, the fucking musician?” she hissed.
“Yep!” Raji tried to sound cheery about it. “The musician.”
“Of course, he knocked you up. Did he lie about using a condom?”
“No, things got rough, and neither one of us noticed the damn thing had broken.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet that’s what he said.”
“No, I believe him. We’ve been dating for over two years—”
“Jesus, Raji. I didn’t think you’d let it go on this long.”
“Yeah, well, we were just meeting and having fun. It’s not like we were living together.”
“Is he being a jackass about it?”
“No, he was perfectly supportive. Told me that he supported whatever I wanted to do. It was my body. All that stuff.”
“Well, that’s good. With all those weird Internet things going around, you can never tell who’s gotten stupid.”
“Yeah, he was pretty much perfect. He offered me any support I needed, financial or otherwise.”
“Is he going to drive you to the clinic and take care of you? Or are you going to have it done here? Dr. Jorgensen over in OB/GYN handles these things quietly for staff and faculty members. You can see her within an hour if you tell her what’s going on.”
Raji whispered back, “I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do yet.”
“What the hell do you mean?” Beth almost shouted. She looked around and then crouched down to whisper to Raji again. “You’re not going to throw your residency away over this. I won’t let you do it.”
“I mean, I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do yet.”
“I won’t let you marry him and drop out of the program and be a frickin’ housewife. That’s not you.”
Raji snorted. “I will not fuck up my life by getting married.”
“You can’t be a single mother and do your residency at the same time. Vanessa tried it, and she washed out to internal medicine in just a few months because she couldn’t handle the hours. I won’t let you do something stupid.”
Raji shook her head. “I’m not going to be a single mom. There’s a thing, in Indian families, an alternative. It’s kind of weird.”
Beth crossed her arms. “Go ahead. Hit me.”
“So I’ve got this cousin in India named Aarthi. She had an arranged marriage to a guy four years ago. It seemed to be working out. They liked each other pretty well, and everything seemed to be going well between the families. But then, when the time came to ‘complete the family,’ she couldn’t get pregnant. She hasn’t gotten pregnant even though they’ve been trying for three years. They’ve done IUI. They’ve done in vivo. They’ve done in vitro with a donor egg and donor sperm, and she’s still not getting pregnant.”
Beth asked, “Please don’t say what I think you’re going to.”
“It’s a caste thing. She can’t just adopt any baby out there. There are all sorts of taboos about it. The priests wouldn’t know what kind of pujas to say over the kid and stuff. They had an arranged marriage, so you know both sets of parents are very traditional.”
“I don’t like where this is headed at all, Raji.”
“So, in Indian society, if someone can’t have a baby, then her sister or sister-in-law has a baby for her. It’s normal. It’s expected.”
“Open adoptions always seemed weird to me.”
“The problem is that Aarthi doesn’t have any sisters, and the guy’s sisters aren’t up for it. So, she’s stuck. If I mentioned this to her, she would be all over me.”
“You can’t just up and go to India for nine months until you pop. You can’t take that long of a leave of absence from your residency.”
“I would stay here and do my residency until as close to the thing happening as I could. Then, the baby would be born there, and we could do an Indian adoption, which involves me just signing the papers because she’s family. No questions. No problems.”
“So, what? You would fly to India when you’ve got one week left? Or two? It’s not safe to go on such a long flight when you’re that far along in a pregnancy or so soon after a delivery. Can you imagine being at thirty thousand feet over the Atlantic Ocean and going into labor? Or if you had another problem? There’s nowhere to land!” She shook her hands like she was trying to fling off the anxiety of just thinking about it.
Beth had always been a nervous flier. On their high school senior trip to Washington, DC, Beth had been a basket case and insisted on holding Raji’s and Andy’s hands for the entire two-hour flight.
Raji said, “Look, I haven’t worked it out yet. It’s just that I have another option where other people wouldn’t.”
“What about Peyton Cabot?”
“What about him?” Raji asked.
“Have you told him about this adoption thing?”
“Not really.” Raji stared at the blue papery booties covering her sneakers. “But he said he’s okay with whatever I want to do.”
“Oh,” Beth said, her voice dropping in disappointment.
“Yeah,” Raji said. “Oh.”