I stood at the living-room window, picking at a thread on a curtain that had begun to unravel, listening to the ups and downs of my mother’s voice across the room. She was not high tonight. In fact, she had sounded so low when I’d knocked on her door, I wasn’t even sure she’d help.
“Yes,” she said into the receiver, and, “I think so.”
My gut turned. The pit of my body threatened to twist itself free. I wanted to throw myself onto a bed. But necessity demanded that I stay put, face drawn into the folds of an ugly brown curtain.
My mother had phoned the doctor on call at the Genesee Hospital on my behalf. What started as a normal period had progressed to pain that made me cry out. The tearing in my abdomen was sharp, the lower half of my body throbbed.
She’d been on hold for over five minutes, but finally someone was there, pumping her for information while I picked at the curtain and listened. The sound of her saying my name and date of birth soothed some of the pain I felt, and I had to work to suppress a smile.
My mother’s voice was more pointed than usual, more urgent, but the quality of it remained clear, and with her natural cadence, sounded like water running over rocks.
Until the last question.
The energy shifted. She became tentative, her voice lowered as she stretched the cord and ducked into the other room. “Well, I’m not sure,” I heard her mutter, and, “I don’t think so.”
“Hold on,” she said, “I’ll ask.”
I turned to face her, but she didn’t meet my eye as she let the words out. “He wants to know if you are sexually active.”
Her eyes were on the floor as she spoke, and I turned and continued to pull at the thread.
I’m not sure whether I mumbled or simply nodded, but she stepped into the next room to finish the call, and could not look at me straight for months afterward.
It was the first and last time my mother and I ever discussed my sexual activity. I was seventeen, just finishing my junior year of high school, and doubled over in pain.