Starling Days

by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

  “Polycystic ovaries.” The technician pressed a button on the keyboard and the image onscreen froze. The dildo was retracted. “You have cysts growing in the walls of your ovaries.” The technician touched the screen, her finger covering one of the blobs. “Basically, these are collections of fluid.”

  A coldness, like a sprinkler system turning on, drenched Mina. Until now, the appointment had felt ridiculous. How many times had she seen a doctor to be told that the problem was probably stress? Here was an image. A visible thing was happening to her. Blobs were growing inside her. When had they started? Why? She stared at the onscreen shadows. As Aeneas, great hero, ventured towards the land of the dead, the Ferryman warned him, “This is the land of shadows, of sleep, of weary night.” Mina had the odd notion that the shadows that clustered at the edge of the river Styx might have looked like this. If she was hospitalized, would Oscar bring her grapes again? Would she want grapes? When had grapes and sick people become a thing? Thoughts popped like bubbles of soap until one rose to the top of her tongue.

  “Are they, um, cancerous?”

  “Oh, no, nothing like that. It’s totally unrelated to cancer. Your gynecologist will talk to you about it in more detail. But please don’t worry. This is nothing to panic about.”

  “So?”

  “I’ll send the results over to her, and her office will call to schedule an appointment.”

  “Oh-kay.”

  “Really, don’t worry. Like one in ten women have it.”

  How was that possible? Mina had never heard of it. She prodded her stomach above where she thought her ovaries were. The skin was squished but revealed no secrets. She looked up at the screen that must have shown so many babies and saw her cysts. Really? This is what grew inside her? Really? Today would be a downtick day.

  There were so many types of white. White with yellow undertones. White with green undertones. White with peach, blue, fawn undertones. The internet disagreed about the best type of white. One faction thought yellow-white was warm and welcoming. Another thought it was overdone. It had never occurred to Oscar that white could be overdone. The fashionable people liked white with grey undertones, which the rest of the internet said was dirty and cold. None of the paints were called anything useful. They were labeled Stone and Cloud and Wool, names that made him feel like the paint was mixed with mud and sleet and grass.

  He’d bought sample pots while Mina was at her appointment. She was back, and they were painting test sheets. He dipped his brush into the liquid and striped a long stroke of white across the white paper. Mina finished a sheet, and lifted it carefully, pinching it at the corners. Gravity billowed it out like a sail as she carried it over to the newspaper they’d laid across the floor. She placed it below the other completed sheets to dry.

  “What do you think? Grey-white or yellow-white?” he asked Mina.

  She shrugged and swirled her brush in the water glass. It pinged against the sides. Round and round her wrist went until the water clouded over. “They’re just white.”

  “Just white? What did Virgil think of white?”

  Mina slouched, her hair falling across her eyes. He’d thought this project would be fun for her. She’d always loved getting the apartment ready for their parties, choosing the decorations, coming home with themed napkins.

  “You have to wait for them to dry.” Mina tore off a sheet of paper with a great ripping noise. She grabbed the butter knife, wedging it under the lip of a new pot. She screwed up her face, pushing down with both hands.

  “Let me,” he said.

  The lid popped up before he could grab the can.

  “Did you know the old word for the inner labia was nymphae? They’re your little nymphs,” Mina said. The smile she gave him seemed to be a feat of muscular strength rather than any depiction of joy.

  “I don’t think I have little nymphs. Though yours are lovely.”

  “Fair. But you know I’d forgotten that it was the creepy teacher we had in third grade who told us. No one had any idea where to look.”

  “Huh.”

  She made a long sweep down the middle of the sheet. “There are cysts in my ovaries,” she said, and plunged the brush into paint.

  “What?”

  “I have to wait to talk to my gynecologist. But yeah.”

  “You said the appointment went fine.”

  “It did. Like one in ten women have them. It’s nothing.” Her voice was flat.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this?” He put down his brush.

  “I’m telling you. This is me telling you.”

  He pulled out his phone and started googling. He scrolled past diagrams of wombs spread out in pink butterflies until he got to the list of symptoms.

  “You aren’t fat or hairy.”

  “Thanks. I’m glad you noticed,” she said.

  “But you aren’t.”

  “There are things growing in me and that’s all you can say?”

  He kept reading. It was a long list. Type 2 diabetes, an excess of male hormone—those weren’t great. She didn’t seem diabetic. Co-morbid with cardiovascular disease, and obstructive sleep apnea. Then there it was: depression. Polycystic ovarian syndrome was co-morbid with depression.

  “Co-morbid” was a strange word. It sounded like the group noun for a cluster of sad teenagers. But he thought he understood the gist: two bad things happening at once. It was simple. His wife had tried to kill herself because of a hormone imbalance.

  “Read this.” He held it out to her.

  “I already did. And yes, yes, I noticed the depression thing. But do you know what? There’s no cure. No really clear causes either. Though one of the suggestions is it might be brought on by stress. So, there is that. It’s probably all stress. Stress. Stress. Stress.”

  She said “stress” like she was saying “fuck” or “goddamn.” He went to hug her. She stepped back.

  “You’re all . . .” she paused, as if trying to think of the right word “. . . painty.”

  He looked at his hands, which were splattered with all the varieties of white.

  “I have a headache,” she said. “I’m going to take a bath.”

  Mina dripped from bathroom to bedroom. The wallpaper birds glared at her as if they knew about their planned eradication. Oscar must have finished the samples by now. She shouldn’t have snapped. A draft blew across her knees. Mina tucked the towel more tightly around her. Her hair stuck damply to the sides of her face.

  Could her ovaries really be why she wanted to die? It sounded suspiciously like the ancient Greeks blaming hysteria on a wandering uterus. Then again, it was better than any explanation she’d had. Mina was trying so hard to be happy and good and it wasn’t working.

  She flipped open her laptop. It had too many windows open. And each of the windows had too many tabs. She wasn’t like Oscar. She couldn’t maintain an inbox with zero unread messages. The number was in the thousands now. Mostly spam. But probably some worthwhile things had got lost too. She opened a blank email and typed, I want to die. I want to die. I want to die. Her fingers slammed down on the keys in a way that felt almost as good as screaming.

  “What’re you up to?” Oscar asked, his voice conciliatory.

  “Nothing much, just email.” She Xed out. And from the next tab blossomed Phoebe’s face.

  He lay on the bed next to her. “Is that Pheeb?”

  Tiny Phoebe grinned up at them. “It’s about a trip she took to a flower market. It’s only open on Sundays apparently.” Next to the photos of Phoebe were image grabs of Dutch masters, flowers bursting out of vases.

  Oscar took the laptop and scrolled to Phoebe standing in front of buckets of peonies.

  Mina said, “It’s weird. You think this flower’s so personal and particular to you, then you remember that everyone loves peonies. Though they’re out of season now. This is from June.”

  Oscar gave her a strange look. “Do you want to go?” he asked. “I’m sure we could find time this week
end.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mina said. “For before, I mean. You were trying to help.”

  Oscar massaged his eyebrows. “Perhaps you should think about going back on your meds.”

  “They don’t work, you know that.”

  “Different ones, then.”

  “Oscar, it’s only been a few weeks,” Mina said. “Give me a chance. Everyone online says there’s supposed to be mood swings at first. But they’ll balance out.”

  “What if they don’t?”

  “Please, Oscar.” She knew she sounded like a child. A child begging to be allowed to stay awake another hour into the night, as she had done so long ago. Her grandmother had always shaken her head and pulled her by the hand to the narrow bed in the room they shared.

  “Okay,” Oscar said.

  After he’d showered off that morning’s run, he checked in on his wife. Mina was still in bed, head fallen between pillows. It came to him again, the image of her as a body, as a rotting thing. He needed to pull himself together. He squeezed antiseptic gel onto his palm. Amber crystals ridged the line of the cut. Something was going wrong with the healing.

  Watching her body curled like a shrimp, it occurred to him that his wife was a liar. She hadn’t told him that she was planning on leaving her life. And she’d tried to do it twice. Oscar could remember the first lie he’d ever told. His mother had bought him a new green umbrella. A bigger boy broke it. When Oscar came home he said the umbrella was lost. Fear had clutched him when he saw his lie had been successful. His mother couldn’t tell. It was as if the world he lived in and the world his mother lived in had separated. Reality was not solid. It was as squishy as Play-Doh.

  He stroked the side of Mina’s head. “I’m going upstairs to call Dad. Should I wake you when I come back?”

  “Love you,” she said.

  “You too,” he replied.

  He took the winding staircase quickly, fumbled for his keys and opened the door to 5B. It was directly above 4B where he and Mina were staying. Mina was somewhere below his feet. Oscar paced across the shadowed room and pulled open the curtains. Dust rushed into his mouth and eyes. He blinked past the pain until the room refocused. The same acidic yellow pine furniture as downstairs. Even the same awful orange sofa. Just dirtier.

  He leaned against the window frame and called his father.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  There was a pause at the other end as if his father was trying to place the voice.

  “Oscar.”

  He began: “I’ve been emailing that ramen place in Williamsburg about the shipment that got delayed and I think it’d be a good idea to offer them a discount on their next order.”

  “If we have to. What else?”

  “Dad?”

  “Mm.”

  “I think it would be a good idea if Mina and I repainted the flats ourselves.”

  Another pause.

  “It would be good for her—us. After talking to the estate agents and looking into building costs, I don’t think a full refurb makes sense. A slap of paint and we can get these on the market.”

  A pipe somewhere in the building let out a displeased gurgle. “A decorator would be faster,” his father said.

  Oscar tried to sound certain. “They’re overpriced. And as long as we do a respectable job, it should be fine.”

  “If the paint job looks unprofessional that’ll turn buyers off.”

  “We can do a good job,” Oscar said. “It might take a bit longer but handling sales long distance has been working out.”

  “Fine. Do what you think best.” The voice already seemed to be moving into the distance.

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  Dust spun through the empty room. Each mote was firefly gold in the evening light. His throat burned. He ran a hand along the wallpaper. It was bubbled and warped. Between two panels the paper had come loose entirely, leaving an oval slit. He dug a finger into the gap. The space was cold and damp. Disgusting. He pulled, and the paper came off without too much effort. He always took a certain satisfaction in peeling an orange in a single coil. He imagined this room peeled in one easy spin. He kept pulling the paper, following it sideways, until he met an empty bookcase. He tugged at the shelves. Nothing. He tensed his core. Nothing. He kicked the side. Dust puffed upwards. He couldn’t let this shit get to him. He had to proceed calmly. He pressed his head against the wall to see how it was fastened. But his view was blocked by a curve of paper stuck between wood and wall. The space was too narrow for his fingers. Carefully manipulating the edge of his credit card, he eased the paper out. It fell.

  As he picked it up, he realized it was photo paper with Fujifilm watermarked across the back. He flipped it over.

  In the photo, a fat-faced baby looked up from its crib. Red trains were printed on its blanket. A very average baby blanket, the kind probably made in the thousands. Not a big deal, but trains had chugged along his blankie. Blankie, which had shrunk and faded and been abandoned.

  Oscar exhaled. He wiped the photo with his sleeve. It was blurry and out of focus. Oscar looked again, squinting at the room. The photo hadn’t been taken in the room he’d grown up in. The walls there were a lavender that was more cheerful than attractive. The walls in this photo were dark with splotches of color, not unlike the room in which he stood. And then it was obvious. The blobs could be birds.

  Had he been here before? His nails dug into the scab on his palm. Pain swooped up his arm.

  OCTOBER

  October was soggy. Rain rubbed the world grey, the way a broken pencil lead will gradually darken the inside of a pencil case. Mina felt smudgy too. She stretched out on the bright orange couch, her face pressed into the cushions. The wool was bobbled. With one hand she picked at the fuzz, while with the other she scrolled through her email.

  Dear Mina,

  Thank you for recommending Boris. He seems like a lovely young man.

  However, I do not think his manner with Alfie is as successful. Alfie has been asking when you will be available again.

  I hope your research is progressing well.

  Warmly,

  Alexandra Davies

  Dear Ms Davies,

  I hope to be back in New York for the New Year. I’m sorry to hear it’s not working out with Boris, though it’s always nice to be missed! Can Alfie hold out that long for me? If he’s feeling uninspired, then he may want to check out Adrian Goldsworthy’s In the Name of Rome: The Men Who Won the Roman Empire. It’s in English, but I always think it’s nice to remember why you’re studying a language.

  Very best,

  Mina

  The Romans were great at war. The wars created the empire that fed the poetry, yet they never moved her. But teaching was not always about what moved you personally.

  Guilt spun in her gut at the thought of her research. She opened her computer to the monograph, if that’s what it was. At the moment it was a catalogue of women, some underlined passages and scribbled notes.

  Mina had never been able to decide if Iphigenia was one of the women who survived. King Agamemnon offended the goddess Artemis. The only way to earn her forgiveness was to sacrifice his daughter. Iphigenia was his youngest, a lovely and loving princess. She was taken to the altar. Then the story split. Sophocles has her die. A deal is a deal. A sacrifice must have blood. Herodotus has her rescued and slipped away to become a priestess of Artemis. Euripides goes further and has her retrieved from hiding by her brother. Did Iphigenia survive? Was blood required?

  How would Oscar think about the task? He’d make a plan. Read the stories she loved, then come up with a theory. But she didn’t know how to plan around the feeling that her bones were made of granite. It was all her neck could do to hold up her skull.

  “We need to decide.” Oscar’s voice came from the center of the room. She rolled her head towards him. He stood, his arms braced, against the table. If she sat up she knew she’d see the paint semifinalists. The grey-white champion versus the yellow-white champion. On the t
able were piled books about interior decoration and color theory, bought by Oscar. Fingers of paper stuck up from between the pages, marking what he’d found.

  A fly buzzed above her head. The plump blue body swerved into Mina’s vision. She waited for it to divert to the window or the ceiling light. The path spiraled closer to her face. Could she bear the tiny, sticky feet landing on her cheek? Mina thought of the sadness in her ovaries ripening into fat figs. If the sadness was coming from her body, there was no point in trying to understand it.

  A second buzz joined the fly’s. “It’s your phone,” Oscar said.

  “I know.”

  “Aren’t you going to get it?”

  “It’ll be fine.”

  Oscar came towards her, holding out the device. “It’s Dr. Helene,” he said.

  “Oh, God.”

  Mina grabbed the phone. “Dr. Helene.”

  “Hi, Mina.”

  Mina apologized, probably too many times. How had she forgotten the call? She made noises about time zones, although really it was just that the call had slid to the bottom of her mind, like an old takeout container rotting in the fridge.

  “One second, I’ll set up Skype.” She carried the laptop to their bedroom and propped it up on a pillow. She was aware that she was wearing one of Oscar’s old T-shirts from a marathon run years ago. It was not the garb of a woman who had her life together. At the other end of the video, Dr. Helene looked only slightly Cubist. She was wearing the same neutral tones she always did.

  “How have you been feeling?”

  “Fine,” Mina said.

  “How’s London?”

  “It’s okay.”

  For a while, they talked about polycystic ovaries and what that might or might not mean. Mina made the mistake of mentioning that she’d read it was genetic.

  “Do you want to talk about your mother?” Dr. Helene asked.

  “Not really. I don’t think there’s much left to say.”

  What new conclusion could be reached about an event that had happened so long ago? Everyone had a family tragedy. Some big and some small. And, anyway, Mina had grown up with a woman who fed her, who loved her, who held her hand as she crossed the street. What did it matter if that woman was her grandmother and not her mother? One of her favorite things about Oscar was that he’d never tried to build a case about who she was on the basis of her parents.