There's something sweetly pleasurable in a series
of answerable questions: Name. I spell it. F as in
Frank,
D as in dog. Address. 109 9th St. Is there an
apartment number?
Third floor, I say. Social, the woman abbreviates,
in her expert question-asking voice, coming in clear
through the ether, and I know what she wants and I give it,
the numbers like a nursery rhyme I can say without
thinking,
like driving to work on autopilot. Insurance, she says,
and I read from the card in my palm. You said United
Healthcare, Oxford?
That's correct, I say, a perfect simulacrum of my
mother,
phone tucked between her shoulder and her ear as she did the
dishes.
I have no good reason to call the gynecologist. It's been
three years
since I’ve been, three since I slept with a man, and nearly
twenty-five, now, since I was born – reason enough to have a
blow out party, which I’m already in the midst of planning.
Facebook prompted: Date. Time. Location. Guests.
Then suggested my cousin Laura, and for an instant, I forgot
she was dead. Cervical cancer. Date of birth, the woman asks
on the phone.
I tell her. This morning I left to get coffee and saw a man
prostrate
on the sidewalk outside my door. I thought he was fixing
something
underneath a car. Then I saw he was thrusting his body
against the cement,
moaning, his wild glazed eyes meeting mine for a moment as I
walked by.
Things aren’t always what they seem. Nobody gets an
irregular pap
smear and thinks they're going to die. You’re all set, the woman
says, on the phone. I'm all set? I ask, and she says it again,
and that’s that. When I hang up I check the weather on my
phone,
flipping through the cities that I’ve been to, each with its
own
background showing the weather. Its cloudiest where I am
but cloudy almost everywhere, and in Savannah, it’s pouring
rain,
white drops like tiny incisions, slicing down the glass
screen, going nowhere.
