had been a child in the waiting room. I read “Goofus and Gallant” in Highlights, just the same as I always did at the dentist. Goofus chewed with his mouth open and used his hand to wipe his mouth. Gallant chewed with his mouth closed and used his napkin. I felt like I was waiting to have a tooth filled. The smell was the same as the dentist’s office, too, that sharp chemical combination of whatever they used to clean the floors and whatever they used on the patients. The carpet was somewhere between tan, brown, and grubby. The way we all stared down at it, you would have thought it had the secret of life woven into the pile.
“Ruth Kostovich,” one of the nurses said, and I didn’t move at first. “Ruth?” she repeated, and I put down Highlights. The girl next to me picked it up. Somebody had already done the puzzles in pen.
The doctor was a woman. I had never seen a woman doctor before. She asked me if I had ever had an internal. When she saw the look on my face she explained about a speculum. She said it would be cold. I put my arm over my eyes. The lights were bright.
“Count backward from one hundred,” the nurse said. I remember ninety-seven.
I woke up and had orange juice and an Oreo. Then I threw up into a basin. I had two Ritz crackers and fell asleep for an hour. A nurse led me to a chair in the waiting room, but there were no magazines on the table right next to me and I didn’t want to try to walk across the room. I just sat and thought about nothing for a while. The nurse at the front desk said I had to wait for a friend or relative to pick me up before I could leave. When she was on the phone I slid out the door. The elevator took even longer and I was afraid the nurse would come looking for me, but there were plenty of women to keep her busy. I leaned against the wall while I waited for the elevator.
On the bus back I started to cry because I remembered the doctor putting her hand around my ankle as she left the room and whispering, “I’m glad I was able to help you.” I started to cry because I realized I was free. I was one of those people who read the papers every morning, at first because we had to for social studies, later because I just liked to do it to remind myself that there was a world outside of where I was. I already knew that a year ago there wouldn’t have been any doctor, any waiting room, any anesthetic. I wondered how you found someone to do this before, and what it felt like. I was glad I didn’t have to find out. Maybe Laura knew.
If anyone had asked me how I felt, I would have said, scared and relieved. Scared that someone would find out, relieved that it was over and I was done. I never for one moment thought of it as a baby, even when I was reading Highlights for Children. I thought of it as an anchor, dragging me down. I thought of it as my mother’s disappointment like a living thing, more of a living thing, more real, than whatever had been inside of me. I thought of it as a lifetime of mornings spent listening to Steven’s stories at the table, of mopping kitchen floors and folding ragged towels, of going to dinner at the diner and maybe the steak house on my birthday and looking around and thinking, No, no, no, this is not my life, this is not my life. I didn’t know what my life was, or would be. I just knew it couldn’t be that.
I never told anyone beforehand, especially not Steven, because he would have started making plans, a two-bedroom house with a tiny bedroom for a baby, a small ceremony with LaRhonda and Fred standing next to us. You were supposed to be so smart, Mimi, I could hear LaRhonda thinking as she stood next to me holding a bouquet. Steven would have tried to stop me. No one was going to stop me. I paid with cash from the corn can. Then I folded the whole thing up and put it in a sealed envelope in my mind, and that’s where it