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Afternoon Appointment
by
Virginia Walker
Neatly sandwiched between the crisp black lines of my calendar, I had carefully
written afternoon appointment. I studied the words for a week. I followed the
swollen curves of my careful cursive writing, the faint trailing pen line where
I crossed the t's. They only made these appointments on Friday afternoons. That
gave you the weekend to recover. That gave me a full week to see the words on my
calendar. To be expecting. To know what the words meant. I didn’t allow myself
to think about it too much.
He gave me the envelope on Friday morning. We were at work. He met me in the
little kitchen where everything was miniature. There was a tiny sink, a dwarfed
microwave for heating up single cups of soup, a small coffee maker and half-size
refrigerator. The room always held the bitter smell of an empty coffee pot left
on a hot burner, caramelizing the glass pot with a tar like substance. We met by
the petite refrigerator, out of view from the people walking to the copy room.
He slipped me a white envelope that he had strategically folded to fit into his
back pocket. I felt like we should be wearing long trench coats, dark glasses
and hats pulled seductively over our eyes. I almost smiled at the absurdity of
the secret transaction. Another secret.
The bills inside the envelope were warm from being trapped against his body,
buried in the crisp white paper. I felt the heat of the money through the
envelope, but did not count it. Our silence made the tiny refrigerator's hum
deafening. He reached his hand up towards my arm, making a gesture to touch me.
I guess he was trying to reassure me. As he reached for me, the overhead
fluorescent lighting glimmered against the thick gold band that choked his
finger. I turned to leave the kitchen. I didn't want him to touch me. I put the
envelope in my pocket and went back to my desk.
Through out the morning, I unconsciously slipped my hand into my pocket and
fingered the sharp edge of the envelope. After lunch, I packed up my desk. I
carefully drew a line through the last entry on my calendar, afternoon
appointment.
I was early for the appointment. The clinic's waiting room was spacious and
bare. At the far end, there was a wall interrupted with a sliding window. The
receptionist sat behind the glass, separated from the waiting. On a narrow ledge
below the window rested a clipboard that had a pen tied to it with a piece of
string. How many pens were stolen before they resorted to tying pens? I signed
the name Mary on the next available line. I noticed there were lots of Mary's
and Jane's signed in. First name only. The receptionist slid open the glass
partition and grabbed the clipboard.
"Mary" she said it like a question and gave me a bored, knowing look. "We only
accept cash."
I reached into my pocket and handed her the envelope, still warm from my body
heat. Maybe still holding his body heat as well. She counted the bills in front
of me and then told me to have a seat. The glass window abruptly slid shut. I
sat in one of the mismatched plastic chairs that lined the walls. I discreetly
studied the handful of other women in varying colored plastic chairs, slouched
or leaning with their chins heavy in their hands. I allowed myself to be
distracted by the others, the waiting. It was easy to lose myself in a game of
concocting soap opera stories for the women. I was drawn to a woman in her
forties with short, overly stylized brown hair that refused to move as her head
subtly, yet convulsively twitched as she flipped through pages of an outdated
Glamour magazine. Whenever she caught my eye, I quickly focused on the cheap
framed print hanging slightly askew above her unmoving hair. She had a story.
She was probably married. She probably has three teenage kids who take her for
granted. I bet her husband traveled a lot. This was her midlife crisis. Just a
phase.
"Mary."
"Mary."
"Mary?"
I jolted back to myself. Today, I was Mary. A faceless nurse called for me, her
thick, dark hair shadowing her face as she looked down at the clipboard in her
hands. I unpeeled myself from the plastic chair and followed the faceless nurse
as she led me down a corridor to a large, open room. The room was windowless and
the off-white walls displayed black scuffs like graffiti. In the middle of the
worn linoleum floor, there was a large metal table with shiny stirrups that
jutted towards the low ceiling. One wall was lined with cabinets and a waist
high countertop that housed a steel sink. There was various medical
paraphernalia throughout the room. A cardboard box of latex gloves with limp,
empty fingers dangling from a torn hole. A scrawny IV stand draped in strands of
clear tubing.
The nurse lifted her head towards me, her tangled hair parting to reveal her
face. When she finally made eye contact, I saw the white tipped blemishes that
dotted her cheekbones and forehead. She instructed me in an almost whisper with
broken English and a heavy Spanish accent. "Take clothes off, waist down". There
was a plastic, bright orange laundry basket on the floor for me to set my
clothes in.
After partially undressing, I sat on the raised metal table, naked except for my
t-shit. My bare ass cheeks were spread flat onto the cold metal. A piece of
stiff paper "blanket" covered my naked lap. The nurse, who now I realized was
years younger than myself, fumbled through various drawers and brought out thin,
shining needles the length of my forearm. She carefully laid the needles onto a
metal cart then and left the room, her white lab jacket whispering as it brushed
against her body. Sitting on the large table, with the looming equipment
surrounding me, I felt miniature, like the rotting, bitter coffee pot in the
kitchenette. I studied the enormous needles neatly lined up on the cart,
waiting.
The doctor came in with her assistant and she instructed me to lay me down. I
saw the doctor and assistant's practiced motions and movements as if I were
hovering in the corner of the room, watching someone else lying half naked on a
metal table. The assistant, a plain woman, maybe in her thirties, placed my bare
legs in icy metal stir-ups and systematically strapped my calves into the
clamps. She glanced at me and smiled briefly, as if to reassure me that this was
all normal. I had spied a large machine in the corner. It was a dull gray
plastic barrel with tiny black wheels for feet. It looked like a shop vacuum,
the kind you would use to clean out your car.
Laying flat on my back, legs upward in the metal stirrups, I squinted against
the harsh fluorescent lights in the tray ceiling. I listened to the doctor
instruct her assistant as they inserted metal rings into my body, up into my
cervix, manually dilating my cervix. I clenched the paper blanket on my lap,
accidentally tearing it. The doctor warned me of a pinch, and then the towering
needles that the young nurse fumbled with previously were inside me and piercing
my cervix with a hot, sharp pain. Again, the metal rings in my cervix were
cranked open even further, feeling unnatural and cruel as they spread my body
apart.
Finally, the shop vacuum machine was unceremoniously rolled over and turned on,
its motor and sucking noises filling the room. The Doctor inserted a slim rod
into my body, past the stretched, straining cervix and into my uterus. She then
sucked and scraped the inside of my body. It felt rough and vigorous and I was
reminded of watching a liposuction procedure on the cable television channel.
They always showed a masked doctor nonchalantly attacking the fat under some
lady's thigh. That rod being violently thrashed in the body, sucking and
gurgling and churning. I was breathing in through my nose, out through my mouth
and focusing on the pockmarks in the styrofoam ceiling panel above me. Each
little divot in the panel was like an ancient scar, harboring secrets,
collecting the stony stares of every woman that had laid her back on the metal
table, breathing and praying. Some of the holes were deeper than others. Dark
caverns that allowed regret, sorrow and unspoken apologies to fester like mold.
Some of the holes were tiny ice picks, barely penetrating the surface, just an
after thought.
The pain was constant but bearable and mostly made my stomach sickly flip over
itself. Not the flip-flop it would do when we ran down the back stairs in the
hotel room, our shirts unbuttoned, our shoelaces untied. It was like the
churning I had felt when I leaned against the cool porcelain in the bathroom
stall, staring at the white stick, dripping with my urine, revealing another
secret. The sucking, gurgling machine was turned off and its roar died into a
sigh. The metal rings were removed from my cervix. I closed my eyes against
holey ceiling.
It was over. My body still felt wide open. Suffocating heat boiled around me. I
could feel my t-shirt, clinging and damp with my sick sweat. I laid motionless
on the metal table, acutely aware of my moist skin slipping in the metal clamps
that my legs were strapped into. The irony smell of blood permeated the room. My
body was rigid and felt as if frozen. And I was so damn hot. I could hear the
doctor and nurse talking to me, but it sounded so far away and my mouth was limp
and dry, refusing to carry my voice. The tossing of nausea grew in my stomach,
threatening to creep up and spew through my paralyzed mouth. Someone released my
legs from the stirrups, and they fell to the metal table, soft like Jell-O, legs
that did not seem to be attached to my body. The voices were telling me to get
up and I felt the room spinning, going light and dark over and over again. There
were voices near, but the same voices would go far away. The darkness behind my
closed eyes invaded my ears. It was so damn hot; maybe I was in hell now.
The nurse was adamant that I needed to go into the recovery room. I understood
her words, yet my body remained still. I felt someone fumbling to put my
underwear back onto my body, attaching an enormous white pad to soak up the
blood. I didn’t care that I was naked, sprawled apart as the poor young nurse
with bad skin wrestled with my Jell-O legs, trying to pull my panties past my
hips. I felt the other nurse removing my socks and someone put a wet, cold towel
on my forehead. They lifted me up and dragged me to a recliner in an open room.
A recliner that looked worn and tired. My body collapsed into the chair. I was
wearing only my underwear, with that enormous pad taped into it, and my T-shirt.
A nurse covered my waist and legs with a gray wool blanket. I opened my eyes in
spurts, giving me the effect of being really drunk at a nightclub with a strobe
light. I put all of my energy towards willing myself not to vomit. Suddenly,
viciously, the pain came. My empty insides ached through to my back, cramping
and screaming their own story. The nurse kept saying "Mary, Mary, Mary" and it
prompted me into an involuntary prayer that whispered in my head, "Hail Mary,
full of grace ..."
I felt cool hands take my blood pressure occasionally and put a new wet towel on
my forehead. I felt myself drifting, like I was floating on a raft in the sea. I
just wanted to sleep and not be in this nubby chair in a white-hot room. The
nurses took turns coming to me, snapping and saying Mary in a singsong tone.
Their breath was hot, telling me to stay up. They said I had to stay awake and
drink ginger ale and eat a cookie. They kept telling me that I needed to stay up
to feel better, but all I could do was drift to that sweet sea of nothingness
with cool green water below me and a forgiving blue sky above me. No nurses with
bad skin. No pockmarked ceilings holding secrets. No sideways glances and sharp
whispers. No ultimatums. No white-hot rooms. Just blue and green.
Slowly, over twenty minutes or so, I was able to open my eyes more. I had
stopped sweating. I even drank the ginger ale they kept forcing upon me. Every
crisp, sweet bubble washed down my chest and into my empty stomach. The bubbles
dissolved flat in relief. I could leave now. Her thick strands of dark hair
hiding her face, the nurse brought me the orange hamper with my clothes and
slowly, I dressed. I walked to my car, the thick cotton pad chafing my inner
thighs. Sitting in the drivers seat, I could feel that I was weak still, yet I
felt oddly strong. The sun disappeared behind the blue skyline, but left a red
stain in its wake. The afternoon had passed.
The End
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