“Are you sure, Mrs. Lester, she’s menstruating?”
Dr. Kreushkin fingered my boobies; I kicked my legs and shrieked with laughter.
“Wha’ you mean, am I sure? She ruined me a whole week of un’erwears, de child, den it stop like dat, for months, an’ now she has pains like a knife in her ovries …”
“What are ovries?” I sat up on the examining table to ask; the long paper towel doctors cover their examining tables with fell off the side.
“You, please keep quite, you.”
“When you say she bled, did she flow heavily or just spot?”
“Spot, only spot, bu’ she so skinny, look a’ her, how can you expect more?”
My mother used her hands to brush my hair away from my face as she spoke, gathered it together like a ponytail, and looked around for an elastic band; finding none, she held it there too tightly.
Dr. Kreushkin contemplated my young body that my baggy white Tuesday underwear and bare feet only accentuated; it looked like I was wearing a nappy. When Dr. Kreushkin asked me to take my underwear off, I stared at the wall, and wished I could be sucked into it. I untangled the undies from my feet, glanced worriedly at my crotch, and looked around as to where I could dispose of them, when my mother offered me her hand.
Dr. Kreushkin opened my legs and then bent each one. He slid his hands into a pair of disposable dishwashing gloves. Before he even touched me, I closed my legs tightly.
“Come, come, I’m not going to bite …”
Denying it meant the idea was going through his mind. If he was searching for the mysterious hole, he wasn’t about to find it for I myself had already looked, and with the magnifying side of my mother’s dressing table mirror where even a pore looks like a crater, and a face, the last thing in the world anyone would want to walk around and face people with.
“Do I have a right to know what you’re searching for? Did I do something wrong? Am I being punished for … something I did?”
Dr. Kreushkin’s eyes widened in surprise, which exposed the upper pink edges of the lower eyelids that have always reminded me of ham.
“Mrs. Lester? Haven’t you taken the time to explain the facts of life to your daughter?”
“I a’ready explain all, she knows ev’ryting dere is to know.”
My mother drew my hair together again and began to toy around with it; she hesitated between a ballerina bun, tight and high on top of my head, or a schoolteacher’s bun, coming loose at the nape.
“Does she comprehend the function of the ovaries?”
I could tell she was about to say I did and since I would not be allowed to contradict her, I spoke up, “No! What are ovaries?”
She dropped my hair back onto my shoulders, shot me a look of contempt, “Egg! You have egg!! So, nosy, you more hap’pay now to know?!”
No wonder egg white had already started seeping out of me, and my mother had two hollow egg shells on her dresser, with a photo of Cecilia and I each inside.
“How can the baby breathe? Is there air in the egg shell?”
Dr. Kreushkin checked my mother’s face and his watch before responding that the egg is more like a seed in a woman’s stomach from which a tree grows than an egg from which a baby hatches.
“But how does the baby breathe in there?”
What I really wished to understand was how much air must be pumped into a woman’s stomach and if the hole weren’t a sort of valve like one used to inflate a bicycle tyre.
My mother scratched the back of her neck and turned to the side as Dr. Kreushkin explained to me the miracle of life, that because the earth used to be entirely covered with water and we all originated from the sea, a woman’s stomach contains water during pregnancy and not air. He was just revealing how an unborn baby at one point develops short-term gills, a residue of evolution, when my mother censored his speech with a shift of her ice-blue eyes in his direction; she handed me back my underwear.
I was overtaken by unexpected bliss. How logical it all suddenly seemed. Noah’s ark had sailed the flooded earth, the waters after forty days subsided, and now on land, high and dry, there lingered puddles in a woman’s stomach. Newborns’s eyes, Mrs. Wella had told us, are always blue, be the infant red, black, yellow or white. Noah’s flood has lingered, I thought, in places long forgotten.
As I was getting dressed, I could hear Dr. Kreushkin and my mother talking in the next room about whether it would be better to regulate my bleeding with patience rather than with some substance they simply referred to as “the pill”.
“Excuse me,” I fumbled to fasten my oversized sandals, “How am I to know when a baby will come out of me?”
My mother’s reply was imprecise, like when would I stop growing, or be allowed to listen to music when I wanted to without asking: “De time will come.” Such a reply was nonetheless reassuring, because the time had come for me to walk instead of crawl, to have knees clear of scabs, and to be able to sleep without checking under my bed to make sure no one was there; so time, though slow in coming, comes.
Dr. Kreushkin’s reply was vaguer than my mother’s, it hid the truth in just another cabbage patch: “The egg must be fertilized first, Kate, in order to grow …”
My mother opened the door and held her hand out to me.
Dr. Kreushkin kept hold of my shoulders, “Kate. You look troubled. Are there specific questions that are bothering you?”
It was now or never. Maybe something was wrong with me, and I should mention it to a doctor. How could I word it? I didn’t have the vocabulary for the symptoms.
“Well … actually there is something that’s bothering me … down there.”
“Where, exactly?”
I don’t know how I mastered the courage, but this time I pointed directly at the zone between my legs.
“… and it … itches. It itches. Not a little itch, no, a big big itch that scratching doesn’t help. An itch deep inside of me. An itch that wants relief, although in a way, it doesn’t.”
When I first heard myself use the word “itch”, I was disappointed with myself, a hopeless coward; but the more I went on, the more I found the way I put it was actually quite nice.
Dr. Kreushkin looked at my mother calmly. “Yeast infection.”
“A’ her age? So lil’?”
Yeast? I’d misheard.
“A wet bathing suit, that’s all it takes for yeast infection, Mrs. Lester.”
“Yeast, as in bread?”
“Yes, all women have yeast inside of them, there where it itches you inside, Kate.”
“The Bible says a man will leave his father and his mother and he must cleave to his wife and they must become one flesh. How do man and wife become one flesh?”
Dr. Kreushkin was going to tell me something, but my mother pleaded, “Don’ put any more ideas into de child’s brains, please, dat’s ’nough for today!”
I changed my tactic.
“How is the egg, hm-hm, ‘fertilized?’ ”
“Look at de child, how she’s all excit-ed, she’s sweatin’, look, her forehead, please, no more.”
Dr. Kreushkin lowered his eyes and the side of his mouth twitched; I would never know those words that tried to get out.