Conversations with Friends(66)

No. I don’t know.

It’s funny. I think I’ve learned more about your feelings in the last twenty minutes than in the last four years.

I felt light-headed, staring down at the manuscript until the words wriggled like insects. It was the first draft, the one I had sent to Valerie. She must have let Melissa read it.

It’s fictionalised, I said.

Bobbi stood up from her chair and looked my body up and down critically. A strange energy wound itself up in my chest, as if we were going to fight.

I heard you’re getting good money for it, she said.

Yeah.

Fuck you.

I actually need the money, I said. I realise that’s an alien concept for you, Bobbi.

She grabbed the pages out of my hands then, and the back of the staple tugged against my index finger and broke the skin. She held the manuscript in front of me.

You know, she said. It’s actually a good story.

Thanks.

Then she tore the pages in half, threw them in the trash and said: I don’t want to live with you any more. She packed up her things that night. I sat in my room listening. I heard her wheel the suitcase out into the hall. I heard her close the door.

*



The next morning my mother picked me up outside the apartment building. I got into the car and strapped my seat belt on. She had the classical station on the radio, but she turned it off when I shut the door. It was eight in the morning and I complained about having to get up so early.

Oh, I’m sorry, she said. We could have given the hospital a ring and arranged for you to have a lie-in, would that have been better?

I thought the scan was tomorrow.

It’s this afternoon.

Fuck, I said mildly.

She placed a litre bottle of water on my lap and said: you can start that any time you like. I unscrewed the cap. No preparation was necessary for the scan except drinking a lot of water, but I still felt like the whole thing had been thrown at me unexpectedly. We didn’t speak for a while, and then my mother glanced at me sideways.

It was funny meeting you like that yesterday, she said. You looked like a real young lady.

As opposed to what?

She didn’t answer at first, we were going round a roundabout. I stared out the windscreen at the passing cars.

You looked very elegant together, she said. Like film stars.

Oh, that’s Nick. He’s just glamorous.

My mother reached suddenly and grabbed my hand. The car was stopped in traffic. Her grip was tighter than I expected, almost hard. Mum, I said. Then she let me go. She tidied her hair back with her fingers and then settled her hands on the steering wheel.

You’re a wild woman, she said.

I learned from the best.

She laughed. Oh, I’m afraid I’m no match for you, Frances. You’ll have to figure things out all on your own.





27




In the hospital I was advised to drink even more water, so much that I was in active discomfort while sitting in the waiting room. The place was busy. My mother bought me a bar of chocolate from the vending machine and I sat there tapping my pen against the front cover of Middlemarch, which I had to read for a class on the English novel. The cover depicted a sad-eyed lady from Victorian times doing something with flowers. I doubted Victorian women actually touched flowers as often as art from the period suggested they did.

While I was waiting, a man came in with two little girls, one of them in a pushchair. The older girl climbed onto the seat next to me and leaned over her father’s shoulder to say something, although he wasn’t listening. The girl wriggled around to get his attention, so her light-up sneakers pushed against my handbag and then my arm. When her father finally turned around he said: Rebecca, look what you’re doing! You’re kicking that woman’s arm! I tried to catch his eye and say: it’s fine, it’s no problem. But he didn’t look at me. To him, my arm was not important. He was only concerned with making his child feel bad, making her feel ashamed. I thought about the way Nick handled his little dog whom he loved so much, and then I stopped thinking about it.

The registrar called me up and I went into a little room with an ultrasound machine and a medical couch covered in white filmy paper. The technician asked me to get onto the couch and she rolled some gel onto a plastic instrument while I lay there looking at the ceiling. The room was dim, evocatively dim, as if it contained a hidden pool of water somewhere. We chatted, I don’t remember about what. I had the sense that my voice was coming from somewhere else, like a small radio I kept in my mouth.

The technician pressed the plastic thing down hard into my lower abdomen then, and I stared upward and tried not to make any noise. My eyes were watering. I felt like at any moment she was going to show me a grainy image of a foetus and say something about a heartbeat, and I would nod wisely. The idea of making images of a uterus that had nothing in it struck me as sad, like photographing an abandoned house.

After it was over I thanked her. I went to the bathroom and washed my hands a number of times under the hot hospital taps. I may have scalded them a little, since my skin came up very pink and the tips of my fingers looked slightly swollen. Then I went back to wait for the consultant to call me. Rebecca and her family were gone.

The consultant was a man in his sixties. He squinted up at me as if I’d disappointed him in some way and then told me to sit down. He was looking at a folder with some writing in it. I sat on a hard plastic chair and looked at my fingernails. My hands were definitely scalded. He asked me some questions about the time I had been admitted to the hospital in August, what my symptoms were, and what the gynaecologist had said, and then asked more general questions about my menstrual cycle and sexual activity. While he asked these questions he was flipping sort of non-committally through his folder. Eventually he looked up at me.