Truth be told, I simply assumed something was wrong with him. I had, after all, successfully created one offspring with another man. So it shocked the daylights out of me when a doctor who looked young enough to be one of Graham’s summer high school farmhands said, “Mrs. Jacobs, I’m so sorry to tell you this, but according to your preliminary tests and ultrasounds, it appears that you have a condition called endometriosis.”
I only half listened to him chattering on about tissue surrounding my ovaries. I was stunned because I hadn’t let myself consider that something might actually be wrong with me. I think I came back into the space across from the huge, mahogany CEO desk that made my physician look even more like he was playing pretend right about the time he said, “A simple laparoscopic surgery could both diagnose the extent of the disease and clean it up so that it would be easier for you to conceive.”
Without so much as thinking, I said, “Great. I’m available tomorrow.”
Graham looked at me skeptically and said, “Khaki, let’s not be so hasty.”
I glared at him and, I must admit, raised my voice a bit. “Hasty? I’m fairly sure that after three years making this decision isn’t hasty. I want to be pregnant now.”
I knew I sounded like a spoiled child, but I didn’t care. I turned my raised, worked-up voice to the doctor. “This surgery will mean I’ll get pregnant, right?”
He looked a little scared of me, which was logical. I was something to fear.
“Well,” he started, “it will certainly increase your odds, but . . .”
I set my hand on the desk and peered at him. “But what? Spit it out. What are you trying to tell me?”
He leaned back farther in his chair, and said, “There’s some evidence that women with endometriosis have difficulty carrying a child. Uterine muscle cells lose their ability to expand and contract—”
I inhaled sharply and loudly, cutting him off. “What’s the bottom line?” I asked, far too irritated to sit through an hour’s worth of medical jibber-jabber.
“The uterus isn’t . . .” He rubbed his fingers together, looking for the right word. “Stretchy.”
My OB-GYN had just used the word stretchy when referring to my uterus, and I might not be able to have a baby. Not the news I had dreamed of. Instead of asking for a Kleenex, I looked at Graham and said, “I am happy to discuss this with you further when we get home.” Then I looked back at the doctor and said, “Theoretically, how quickly would I be able to get in for the surgery?”
“Well,” he said, and I could tell by his body language that he was fully prepared to put both hands up to cover his face in case I launched a pointy object at him. “Dr. Stinson is one of the foremost experts in the country in this disease, so I would assume you would want him to do the surgery.”
“Of course,” Graham responded before I had the chance to say that any old resident would be fine with me as long as he or she could un-gunk my ovaries.
“Honestly, you’re probably looking at seven to eight months before he can work you in.”
I pulled my thick sweater tighter around my waist and practically spat at him, “What!”
I thought about Alex, like I do about every thirty seconds when I’m not with him. Finding out you’re pregnant with your dead husband’s baby pretty much classifies as a miracle no matter how it happens, so I wasn’t one bit above believing that his conception was an act of God. But I asked all the same, “So if I have this condition, why did I have such an easy time getting pregnant and carrying my son?”
The doctor just shook his head. “I wish I had a clear answer to that question.”
I wanted to roll my eyes, but I was starting to calm down a bit, realizing how lucky I was to have Alex, how I had taken for granted how simple and natural it had all seemed, like it was my right as a woman to automatically get pregnant.
The doctor continued, “The disease affects every woman differently, so you may have had it all along and it didn’t affect your fertility, or it may have started after you already had your son. We may be a little bit clearer on that after the surgery, but there’s no way to really know for sure when it began.”
I nodded and looked at Graham, wondering how difficult it was for him to look unfazed by all of this. But I wasn’t surprised. He was always, always my rock.
I stood up, grabbed my toy- and Goldfish-full Lanvin tote off the floor and said, “Thank you so much, but I think I’ll try to find someone who can work me in a little more quickly.”
I was already Googling “endometriosis experts NC” on my phone as Graham followed me out the door saying, “Sweetheart, I know you’re upset, but let’s calm down for a second.”
I crossed my arms and huffed, “I don’t have time to calm down. I have to find another doctor, and Daniel is coming to town today to help me buy for the store and I have to get a blog post done in the car on the way back to Kinston, and I promised Father John that I’d design the event hall for the church bazaar this weekend.” I sighed, let my shoulders fall, and said, “And all I want to do is climb in bed with my little boy and take a nap.”
In the midst of that freezing parking lot, my breath billowing around me like the steam I needed to blow off, Graham, as he so often does, wrapped his strong arms around me and rested his chin on top of my head. He was as rock-solid and even-keel as I was crumbling and hysterical.
“It’s going to be okay, you know,” he said. He kissed the top of my head. “If this is supposed to happen for us, it will.” He kissed me again and added, “And if it’s just the three of us, I’m happy as a clam.” I could feel his jaw shift into a smile as he said, “We’ll get a bigger boat.” He squeezed me tighter. “Hell, maybe we can even upgrade you to a little larger work apartment in the city.”
He was trying to cheer me up, and I didn’t want him to know I was crying, so I didn’t say anything. I pulled back, turned away quickly so that he wouldn’t see me wipe my eyes, and said, “How do we know those clams are even happy?”
He smiled and opened my car door for me. As I stepped up on the running board of the Suburban, I said, “Do you think this is why my stomach hurts so badly all the time?”
Graham shook his head. “Your stomach hurts all the time and you didn’t think to have it checked out?”
I shrugged. “I thought maybe it was from having a baby.” I leaned my head against the window, the freezing pane soothing my hot head. “Plus, who has the time?”
As I looked out the window, the sky appearing again after the level after level of concrete parking garage, I realized that maybe I had been in denial all this time. Deep down, I knew something was wrong. But considering that I might not be able to have any more children was like considering moving to another country. For some people it might have been just right. For me, it felt completely foreign.
Jodi
DUST AND ALL THAT
I used to feel right sorry for lettuce when I was coming up. You could pickle them winter beets and keep ’em all purple and juicy. And you could throw broccoli in the freezer and keep it all green and crunchy. But poor lettuce. You cain’t do one dern thing to save it.
Me and that lettuce, we was the same. ’Cause I was different too. When other youngens was having tea parties with their dolls, I was puttin’ together carburetors with Slick Sal and Hard-Time Tony at Al’s Body Shop. Momma, she was always serving time for swigging a few and then sneaking Aqua Net or Pond’s in her purse. I never had no polished toes or braided hair. I changed oil and rotated tires. And thank the good Lord up above, really. I weren’t the kind of girl from the kind of family where people get to talkin’ ’bout going to college or bright futures or any of that other hog slop. I was from the kind of family where people got all worked up like you had cured cancer if you got outta high school.
Mrs. Petty, the fancy, thin high school guidance counselor who told me that she put rubber bands through the button
holes in her pants to make them fit all the way through her pregnancy—good advice once I was pregnant—had called me to her office one day and said, “Jodi, I think you’ve got a lot of potential. I think if you’d take the SAT one of these Saturday mornings we might get you a college scholarship.”
“I work down at the garage Saturday mornings,” I had said, looking down at my grease-stained fingernails.
Mrs. Petty, she pinched up her pink-lipsticked mouth and said, “Surely you could take a morning off.” She waited, but I didn’t say nothing. “Or maybe we could find another surrounding school that’s offering the test in the evenings.”
You knew by her look that she couldn’t understand where I was coming from any more than I understood her pretty blond children and sweet, faithful, sober husband in one of them white houses up on the hill. I ain’t never thought about leaving Kinston or college or nothing else. Nobody ever told me I was worth something or could do nothin’. So I weren’t gonna jump up and hug her neck and say, “Wow! I could go away to a college where won’t nobody understand or accept me for free?”
Plus, there weren’t nobody to take care of Daddy if I weren’t home. And I was a darn sight better than Momma at caregiving even if I was only seventeen. Lucky for me, the garage where Daddy worked ’fore he took to bed, where I was working on Saturday mornings, had an opening for me full time. Spark plugs and changing batteries and replacing fan belts—them things I knew. College and other fancy mess was for rich girls.
I was doing right good ’til I started showing up at work drunk. Al called me right there in his office and said, “I’d try to keep you out of respect for your daddy, darlin’, but it ain’t safe to operate heavy machinery when you’re sauced.” I nodded and hung my head, but by that point, I didn’t care ’bout nothing but my next drink. So I sure as hell wasn’t worried ’bout keeping my job. “Get yourself cleaned up and you always got a job with me,” Al had said.
And Al, he’s a man as good as his word. Once I quit smelling like Jack, my job was all mine again. The thing is, them greasy, hard-living, missing-teethed men didn’t get all hot and bothered over an addiction. But they couldn’t near look at me when they found out I was pregnant. Al bit down on the toothpick hanging outta his mouth and said, “How the hell you gonna fit underneath a car when you look like you swallowed a watermelon?”
“Al, your damn belly’s twice as big as mine’ll ever hope to be.” I smiled like my grandmomma taught me, crossin’ my fingers and toes.
He laughed, but no dice. “Honey, you’re better to look at than all these other jackasses around here, but I can’t see having some knocked-up chick running around my garage. It seems like it’d look irresponsible, be bad for business.”
I got canned the day after I decided for sure I’s gonna have you. I found an old tube a’ Momma’s red lipstick crammed between my car seats, bought a newspaper, and circled anything I could right near understand. I got interviews for being a fry chef, Walmart greeter, store clerk, bakery manager, dry cleaner, Laundromat attendant, housekeeper, yard mower, and coffee maker.
Turns out, I ain’t got one real skill apart from mending cars. ’Course, I could plant an old leather shoe and make it grow into something beautiful and cook it up into something right near delicious. Grandma, she’d made sure of that.
I was just laying in my bed in the trailer, looking up at the ceiling, turnin’ my eyes down every few minutes at how my belly was just bowing out the tiniest bit, like a crescent moon half sneaking out of the sky. I didn’t want ’em to, but them tears escaped down my cheeks, thinking about my grandma, all them days I spent on an old upturned bucket rolling out biscuits or putting up all them sweet peas she loved so much.
I closed my eyes, and I was five years old again, the warm near-spring wind blowing, the tall grass of that field tickling my bare feet and pushing that long, unkempt hair right in my face so I could get a whiff a’ that smell from Momma smoking right beside me on the couch.
Grandma, looking back, she was too old to be kneeling over that plot of dirt like she was, getting her hands all dirty kneading down in the earth. But she motioned to me, the wind catching her short silver hair too. “Come here, darlin’,” she’d said. “Let me show you somethin’.”
I kneeled right down beside her, and she handed me a seed. One round, perfect, smooth seed. I’ll never forget how it felt in my fingers, how it gave energy to my whole body. I looked up at her, her eyes too blue and glowin’ for somebody who’d lived hard on this farm, those deep lines in her face that hadn’t ever seen so much as a stitch of makeup. I smiled. And she smiled a knowing smile right back.
“That love of the land, that living right near it and on it and in it, that understandin’ how it all works, it’s in your blood, Jodi. No matter what happens in your life, no matter how much people let you down, you can count on the land. It won’t never let you down.”
The sun was starting to set as I pushed that single seed into the straight row of fresh, tilled dirt. And I don’t know how I knew, I’s so little. But it was like when you wake up and it’s still dark and the birds ain’t chirping but you just know that if you look out your window the sun is gonna be risin’. I just knew that that little seed was gonna take hold and grow up tall and make me feel like God remembered me out here in the sticks after all.
That was the first year I helped Grandma plant them little dirt rows. And I did it every year after that too. Every year for eleven more years, me and Grandma planted seeds until we was worked right to the quick. The day that last crop was ready to harvest, not a month before Daddy got the pancreatic cancer, I found Grandma, laid up over them sweet peas, deader than a doornail. I just sat there with her a long time, hummed her a lullaby with my arms around her. Me and Daddy had her cremated and scattered her all around that field. Felt like the right thing to do for somebody that loved the land like my grandma. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust and all that.
Grandma, she’s the only real momma I ever had, only one in my whole life ’sides Daddy who ever cared about me or thought I was worth teaching something. The only thing that made losing her even tolerable was that she didn’t have to watch Daddy, that boy she loved so much, suffer so.
’Course, the worst part a’ all of it, the worst one a’ them deaths, was letting go a’ that field, the only place on God’s green earth that my little-girl dreams could run wild and free, the only place I knew I’s worth something and could make something beautiful grow.
I sighed long and low, swallowing them tears away, putting my hands on my little sprout. “Grandma,” I said out loud, my stomach growling, saying it knew right good I hadn’t had nothing fitting to eat in near about a week. “I cain’t very well make a living offa talking to them plants the way we used to. So what in the hell am I gonna do?”
I don’t know if it was Grandma or God or that hungry ache in my stomach that made the answer seem right clear. But I knew what I had to do. Daddy woulda whooped me good if he thought I was one of them people standing in line for a handout, living off the government. But my daddy, he weren’t never at a real dead end like me. When every dag dern door was slamming hard and fast in my face, that check was the window God opened.
Khaki
YANKEES DO HAVE MANNERS
Unless they have a severe aversion to the color, I always paint my clients’ offices a shade of green. Green helps focus the brain and hold attention. That day, I was wishing I had a little green because all I could think of, driving from that Chapel Hill doctor’s office to the Raleigh airport to pick up Daniel, was pink and blue.
Daniel was a fellow designer who had been working at my antiques store in New York for years and became manager right around the time I became a bi-state commuter. He had taste as flawless as a Tiffany diamond, but I had yet to let him help me with the buying for the store. Graham says it’s because I’m a control freak. I say it’s because I’m particular.
When we pulled into the cigarette haze also known as baggage claim, Daniel was already waiting with his roller suitcase, looking freshly pressed as always, like he hadn’t even been on a plane. We didn’t get out to greet him because the terminal was a mess of uniformed officers and blowing whistles and buses.
“Hey, y’all,” Daniel said, sliding into the backseat of the Suburban. Graham and I looked at each other and laughed, exactly what we needed to break our baby-fueled tenseness.
“What?” Daniel asked.
“Oh, nothing,” Graham said. “It’s just interesting to hear ‘y’all’ with a Queens accent.”
“No good?”
I looked back and said, “Dan, you need to put your seat belt on.”
He looked around, confused and said, “Seat belt? I’m in the backseat. You don’t have to wear a seat belt in the backseat.”
Graham snorted like Daniel was going to be sorrier than if he’d renounced the Republican Party to my daddy.
“Oh, sure,” I huffed. “No problem. Leave your seat belt off. Then when you come flying through the windshield in a wreck, you won’t only kill yourself. You’ll hit Graham and me, snap our necks, and kill us too.” I turned around to look at him again, and he was already buckling as I said, “We wear our seat belts in this family.”
“Geez,” he said. “I’m buckling. I might even wear my seat belt in cabs after that lecture.”
Graham patted my leg reassuringly. He knew that I was more wound up than usual because, while I was jabbering on to Daniel about seat belts, all I could think was: What if I never get to buckle another baby seat into the back?
Dear Carolina Page 4
