Patient, Female

During clinic the following week I try to establish an efficient pace. I’ve got 15 interns and students in groups of three, each student having been lectured about my pedagogical purpose and my superiority to the plastic torso down the hall. (I put my fingers inside it once; the vagina was long and narrow, like a garden hose.) Because I’ve been coaching a petite East Indian woman through what she clearly feels is a humiliation for us both, I haven’t noticed the fair-skinned, dark-haired would-be doctor waiting his turn at the side of the room. Only when he steps toward the table do I remember his face. I know him. Jerry Tomo. I knew him in high school. Not well—we didn’t exactly travel in the same circles—but he was the kind of person everyone knew.

I’ve got enough time to straighten my gown and say, Sorry, personal acquaintance, but any objection would seem belated, since he’s been watching the other exams from three feet away. Also, he hasn’t said anything. Which means I could be mistaken. If he was Jerry Tomo, he probably would have excused himself. Instead, sure-footed and graceful, a Gene Kelly of the exam room, he steps toward me and smiles.

“I’m Dr. Tomo. I’m here to do your exam.”

Perfect form. A+. We shake hands.

“Do you have any questions or particular concerns today?”

I open my mouth, then close it.

He strides to the sink. “Any allergy to latex?” He turns off the faucet with a paper towel.

I let him guide me into position on the table and open the top half of my gown, the little bow giving way with a hiss. Again the brief, reassuring smile, and then Jerry is all business. The other students crane their necks to observe as he palpates my breasts, a privilege I would have paid a hundred dollars for in high school.

“Any tenderness?”

Not coming from you, I imagine saying.

“Slide down to the end of the table,” he says. “You’ll feel my hand against your thigh.”

He warms the speculum in water, then snaps on the gloves. Cervix, ovaries, uterus. I examine a stain on the tile ceiling.

“Everything seems normal. We’re all done now,” Jerry says. He helps me up. The East Indian woman bows to me, by way of thanks. Jerry holds the door for her as they leave the room.

"Guess who I saw today.” My father and I are eating dinner: tuna casserole with olives. I added the olives on a high-calorie whim at the last minute, and they crop up, bleak and oily surprises, among the noodles. “Jerry Tomo.”

My father nudges a couple of olives toward the edge of his plate.

“From high school,” I add.

“I don’t remember. Did you go out with him?”

“No.” The only people I went out with in high school were Cheryl and her older brother, Dale, who is now safely tucked away from the public eye somewhere in Texas. “He was on the baseball and basketball teams.”

My father is squinting down at his plate as if trying to understand its contents. “And now he’s a doctor. And you saw him where?”

I reach for the bag of potato chips we opened for hors d’oeuvres and fill my mouth with a few of them.

“Tomo. Jerry Tomo.” My father puts down his fork. “That’s where you could have been,” he says. “That’s the life that passed you by. The one you passed up. Jerry Tomo.”

“Jerry Tomo isn’t a train I was supposed to catch.” I brush some potato-chip crumbs off my lap. I can almost see my father’s thoughts as they take shape. He is imagining a different daughter, a perky, Rollerblading creature who might have married the surgeon next door instead of flunking out of 11th grade and taking 15 years to claw her way back.

“Cheryl had the sense to quit,” he says.

“I’m not going to quit.”

We stare at each other for a while. Someone has cheated me, I think. Someone has leaned over the game board of my life and removed my mother when I wasn’t looking, leaving me alone to march through a series of pointless colored squares with this irritable old man, plague of my teenage years.

“You’re determined to humiliate yourself,” my father says. He stands up, then slowly shovels his dinner into the sink. “You know your mother would never have asked you to do it.”

I feel as if someone has opened a door in the side of my head. “She never asked us to do anything. She didn’t even complain until it was too late, because going to a doctor was too much trouble.”

“She was always nervous about doctors and hospitals.” My father stands with his back to me, at the sink. “But Dr. Chang was good to her,” he says. “He was very good to her at the end.”

I imagine myself jerking the window up in its sash and picking up our plates and our food and our forks and hurling the whole mess into the dark brick void between apartments. “She didn’t ask him for anything, either. Nothing. She never expected him to help her.”

My father turns toward me, eyebrows lifted in surprise. “That’s because she knew right away. She knew there was no help coming.”

This is what I will never understand. How can no help be coming? How can we live in a world in which no help arrives? “I’m not humiliated,” I tell him.

He turns on the water to wash the dishes. “Then what are you?” he asks.

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