While the alcohol I had been consuming pushed me further each day from the reach of congestive heart failure, it was also causing me to black out, sometimes for hours at a time. For months, I had been waking up in my bed at home with no memory of how I made it back, but lately, things had become a bit more complicated. I might be enjoying an afternoon cocktail at a sunny café in the Village only to find myself hours later having a late supper in Chinatown with a raucous group of total strangers, or holding hands with a Senegalese watch vendor in a Duane Reade, waiting in line to buy hair dye. There were vague flashes of memories of men at parties — a hand there, a mouth here, a laundry room. I couldn't be sure how far things had gotten, but given my demographic — perpetually drunk twenty-year-old students of experimental theater living in New York City with self-esteem issues and no particular religious or moral convictions — a gambler would have no trouble calling the odds.
"I think so," I said.
Given my fuzzy recollection of which pilgrims had of late been admitted through the sacred portal of our Mother Goddess, the he-nurse asked if I would be willing to submit my reproductive organs to a few simple tests. I agreed. He informed me it was possible I had fallen prey to an opportunistic infection, transmitted by unprotected sexual contact. I confessed that this had crossed my mind. Having signed the necessary consent forms, I followed him down the hallway to a small examining room where he presented me with a paper gown and gallantly took his leave.
"Good luck," he said.
"Thank you," I said. "You've borne up admirably."
He blushed at that. "Oh, well, just part of the job."
I undressed and sat on the examining table, the smooth paper cool against my bare bottom. The Smell filled the room, and I clamped my legs shut, hoping to contain it, when the door swung open.
She didn't remember me, but I knew her at once. Being a university health center, each staff member needed to be something of a jack-of-all-trades, ready to set a broken bone, perform a urethral swab, or administer an I.V. at the drop of a hat, and it was this very woman who had treated me when I came to the clinic in the first semester of my freshman year, ill from severe dehydration brought on by a particularly virulent (and untreated) strep infection.
"Would you mind lying down for me so I can take a look?"
I scooted to the edge of the table and positioned my feet in the stirrups, lowered myself onto my back and spread my knees, watching her face all the while for the first flinch of repulsion when the stench hit it.
There was nothing. Just the cold, familiar unpleasantness of the speculum.
"Well, here's your problem." My doctor (later I would find out she was really a P.A.) was suddenly sounding like an auto mechanic. Leaving the speculum in place, she stood up to change her surgical gloves. "When was your last period?"
Had it been tampons, and not hair dye, I was trying to purchase with the Senegalese watch vendor?
"I don't get my period," I said, as haughtily as I could manage naked from the waist down with a metal clamp affixed to my parts most delicate. "I am an anorexic."
"Be that as it may," said the doctor. "You've got a tampon stuck up in there. Been there for two, maybe three weeks, from the look of it."
?
??
????
"I . . . didn't know that could happen," I whispered.
"Neither did I," she said. "But there's some blood, so it looks like you definitely had your period. Did you just forget you had it in?"
"I've been drinking a lot lately," I said.
"I'll have to take it out in pieces," she said. "Frankly, I'm surprised you're not dead."
"Maybe all the alcohol kept me from going septic," I laughed weakly. "Like you know how they use it to sterilize things, like in the movies?"
Surgical scissors in hand, she regarded me for a long moment.
"That's doubtful."
Was it possible? Had I been drinking that much? So much that I failed to remember getting my first period in more than eight months? As I watched the long instruments flashing back and forth between my legs, bearing on each return trip a tuft of soiled white cotton, I tried in vain to capture an inkling of what had happened — a stained pair of panties, a knee hoisted on the edge of the sink for easy insertion. Could I have dismissed PMS symptoms — a headache, cramps — as a bad hangover? Had it been tampons, and not hair dye, I was trying to purchase with the Senegalese watch vendor? Eventually, in the interest of science, I was forced to conclude yes. I had been drinking that much.
The doctor had finished. "Okay! You can get dressed. Go home, take a shower and you'll be fine. I'm going to tell Dr. Gupta that you're menstruating again. She'll be so pleased!"
"Thank you," I said. "Are you sure I don't need any medicine or . . . anything?"
She looked at me for a moment, her face suddenly warmer, and I imagined I saw a flicker of recognition in her eyes.
"You might really want not to drink so much," she said softly. She smiled a little. "You're just a baby."
A few weeks later, the baby woke up at 7:34 a.m. hooked to an I.V. on a stretcher in a downtown New York City hospital, having been delivered by ambulance a few hours earlier, with facial lacerations, three stitches in her knee, and a severe headache. The attending physician was unsure of the circumstances of the baby's accident; he did, however, mention that the vigilant E.R. attendants had performed a rape kit on the semi-conscious baby, and finding no evidence of assault, proceeded to pump her stomach, treat her wounds and administer intravenous hydration. The general consensus among the attendants was that the baby, in a state of extreme inebriation, had collapsed in the street and injured herself, and that a well-meaning but anonymous third party, concerned for her safety, had phoned the ambulance. At 9:12 a.m., the baby was disconnected from her I.V. and discharged on her own recognizance, along with a prescription for a mild antibiotic, a topical soothing cream and a hospital bill for emergency services rendered. The bill for the ambulance, she was informed, would arrive in the mail. n°
Rachel Shukert is the author of Have You No Shame? (Random House/Villard). Her work has also been featured in Best Sex Writing 2008, Best American Erotic Poems, and 2033: The Future of Misbehavior. She lives in New York City with her husband and her cat. Her website is rachelshukert.com.
