Cursed Bunny(6)

“But I’m unmarried and have no boyfriend.”

“You’ve never had any sexual experiences? Or taken any pills?”

“I did take some birth control pills for a while because my period wouldn’t stop—”

“For how long?”

“Six months.”

The doctor gave her a sharp look, narrowing her bright blue eyeshadowed, thickly penciled eyes.

“Were they prescribed?”

“The doctor told me to take them for a couple of months, and you don’t really need a prescription for birth control pills …” Her voice trailed off as she felt oddly ashamed.

“If the doctor told you to take them for just two to three months, you should’ve taken them for just two to three months!”

“Well, uh, my period just wouldn’t stop …”

The doctor sighed her irritation out her vividly painted red lips. “If your body happens to be abnormal, a side effect from taking birth control pills for a long time can be pregnancy.”

“Really? But … aren’t birth control pills made to prevent pregnancy?” Her objection came out meek.

The doctor’s black-and-blue gaze immediately turned sharp again. “You’re the one who overdid it with the pills— it’s your own fault. Medicine isn’t candy you can gorge on whenever you feel like it.”

“What … what do I do now?”

The doctor flipped through the chart. “Does the child have a father?”

“Excuse me?”

“Does the child have someone who can be their father?”

“No …”

The doctor looked up and again gave her a scary look through her thick makeup. “Then you better hurry up and find a man who’s willing to be the father.”

“The child’s father? Why?”

The doctor shot back, “You’re carrying a child—of course the child needs a father!”

“But, uh, what happens if there’s no father?”

“You’re in a situation where you’ve become pregnant under abnormal circumstances, which means that if you don’t find a male partner, the cells of the fetus will not properly propagate or grow. You know how in grocery stores there are freerange fertilized eggs and non-fertilized eggs? It’s the same thing here. If the fetus does not properly grow, then your pregnancy will not proceed normally, and this will ultimately be bad for the mother. Do you understand what I’m saying?” Clearly, the doctor was annoyed with her.

“W-what do you mean bad?”

“That depends. You’re only six weeks along right now, so I can’t really tell you what’s going to happen.” The doctor sighed. Then, she glared at her again and threatened, “You better find a father for that child, fast. If you don’t, things will really get bad for you.”

Her family concluded that she should take a leave of absence from school and get set up by a matchmaker before she began to show. She wrote “sickness” on the request form as her reason for taking leave. Her short-tempered thesis advisor threw a fit over her taking a break just when her thesis was finally shaping up. She regretted the interruption in her work as well, but there was nothing to be done. The people in her department commiserated with her as if she had contracted a fatal disease.

She didn’t have much to do once she had left school. Her family became busy instead, coming together for the great “Find the Child a Father” project. It wasn’t long before her mother and the matchmaker had set up her first matchmaking seon date at a café.

An awkward silence descended between her and the man as soon as the matchmaker and her mother left the table. This was her first time on a seon date, and she didn’t know what to say to this complete stranger or where to look or what to do with her hands. Her morning sickness, which had seemed to ebb, had come back that morning with a vengeance, and the strong air-conditioning breeze of the fancy hotel café, coupled with the smell of the black coffee, was making her shiver and her insides flip-flop.

The man, somewhat apologetically, began to speak. “So … you’re a graduate student?”

“Yes …” Her lips were blue from the cold and she could barely manage to answer him through her shivering.

“What are you specializing in?”

“Slavic literature—”

“How very unusual! I’m sure there can’t be many people studying Norwegian literature in Korea?”

“Uh, that’s not quite—”

She suddenly couldn’t stand the smell of the coffee. Casting her dignity to the winds, she bolted from her seat and sprinted to the ladies’ room. For a long time, she wrung out nothing from her stomach other than a little coffee, air, and bile. She prayed the man had left as she washed her mouth and hands.

But he was waiting for her in front of the ladies’ room with worry written all over his face. He quickly supported her arm as she came stumbling out the door. “Are you all right?”

“Yes … I’m so sorry.”

She was bright red and didn’t know what to do with herself. The man helped her back to their table. As she leaned on him during the short distance of their slow walk back, she noticed how his shoulders were wide enough to wrap around hers in an embrace. Her hands and shoulders, freezing from the air-conditioning, registered that the man’s arm was strong and hard, but at the same time warm and appealing. The room was still spinning, her legs threatened to give way, and she was so ashamed that she wanted to make a run for it, but as she became conscious of these facts about his body, her red face grew even more crimson.