premonition. I don’t know why I expected something different from this doctor.
She looks at the clock. “Why don’t we go ahead and do an ultrasound.” She turns to the nurse, who guides me to the examining table, where I quickly pull down my underwear and hoist my feet into the stirrups. The doctor rolls a lubricated condom down onto the ultrasound rod thing and gently pushes it into me, probing while we both look at the screen.
“Lights, please.” The nurse dims the lights and the doctor keeps searching for something while telling me to relax. After a good five minutes of probing, she pulls out the rod and takes her gloves off one by one.
“Well, it’s too early to see anything at all, so why don’t you come back next week and we can take another look for the sac and the heartbeat. We’ll take some blood today and run some tests. Don’t worry in the meantime. Either way, you’ll be fine.”
“Yes, I know,” I say, putting my clothes back on as fast as I can. I don’t say anything else to her and stalk out the door, trying not to look at the swollen women in the waiting room.
* * *
—
I KNOW IT’S CRAZY, but I took the entire day off for this doctor’s appointment today—Department Head Lee said, “God, what is it now?” in his sharpest voice when I told him last week. He kept asking the specific reason, but I held out to the last. “Just a personal day,” I said, looking down at his shiny brown shoes, and that’s when he proceeded to rap me on the head with a rolled-up sheaf of paper. “As everyone knows, this is why women can’t advance,” he said in a loud voice for the entire department to hear, then told me to get out of his sight.
I’d debated whether to take just a half day but it was the thought of my hour-and-a-half commute that decided it for me. So I am sitting in a bakery café on Garosugil, gloriously alone, biting into a buttery almond croissant and flicking crumbs off a scarf I just bought at the boutique on the corner. I don’t know what possessed me to buy this scarf—we are so strapped for money as it is—but it’s been a while since I bought anything and it looked so chic on the mannequin in the window. Now that I have it on, I can see that the fabric is cheap and the ends are unraveling already. Like everything else in my life, the impulsive choice—the wrong choice.
When I finally check my phone there are three texts from my husband. “Everything okay?” “Haven’t heard from you in a while, is something wrong?” “How are you feeling?”
I text a quick “Sorry, busy at work. Will call later.” I should have known he’d find a way to interrupt any happy excursion.
On the walk back to the subway station, I try to close my mind to them, but all I can see are babies in their strollers. Just how many babies are there in this city? Aren’t the government and the media always bemoaning how our birth rate is the lowest in the world?
All the strollers look precariously high—the Scandinavian ones that are everywhere these days. I want to yell at the mothers—the babies look like they’re going to fall out! Stop texting and strolling!
A little baby peers up at me from his stroller and scowls while his mom is browsing through an accessories rack on the street. He’s wrapped in a two-tone embroidered cashmere blanket that I recognize from the European baby clothes blogs—it must have cost more than my monthly salary. I give the mom a hard once-over—she looks haggard, even under a full load of makeup.
I don’t want anything to do with boys—I just want a tiny little girl, to dress up in soft, chic beige and pink and gray dresses and bounce in my lap. I wouldn’t get one of those top-heavy strollers but a sturdy one with a big basket on the bottom for when I’d go grocery shopping with her to make her baby food. All-organic porridge with a little bit of meat and mushrooms and beans