I Knew a Woman

Chapter 1 Dr. William Riley's office was five blocks from our suburban Connecticut home. It was 1962, several years before my mother would finally learn to drive, so she and I set off on foot, the form for my college physical folded in her pocketbook. Dr. Riley's office was the first floor of his home, a tidy two-story box just like the other wooden houses along Prosper Streeta name that surely reflected the aspirations of the town's founding fathers. A tinkling bell announced our arrival. Mother and I joined the handful of people waiting in straight-backed chairs around the edge of the room. Some patients were sniffling or coughing, others just stared at the floral carpet. Glass-front cabinets held a dusty array of fraying medical books, and the worn rugs and heavy curtains smelled like an old grandmother's apron. It was early summer. In September, I would be a college woman. Almost eighteen, I was already convinced I knew more than my parents, certainly more than my mother. I had a boyfriend, and we'd had sex, an occasional slippery fumbling in the back of his Dodge that left me feeling powerful but not breathless and tingly. I was formulating a shaky theory: We women, I decided, had a magical, potent allure, as if we gave off some invisible chemical like the lovely nocturnal moths that cling to a screen door, driving the male moths mad. Men, for all their position in the world, were like these beating moths, humbled before us. Once a woman became a sexual being, I reasoned, she would always have the upper hand. When my turn came, the doctor himself waved us in. He was short and partially bald, his few remaining hairs the color of old sand. Silver wire glasses sat halfway down his nose, and his cheeks were tight puffs of flesh, as if he held seeds inside or notes that he'd squirreled away in medical school for future reference. I changed into my white gown (it smelled of Ivory detergent, and I imagined his wife as she washed a pile of gowns every day, holding her breath against whatever contagion clung to them), and Dr. Riley asked my mother the required questions about my immunizations and illnesses. Then he told her to sit in the wooden chair far across the room. As he examined me, I focused on Mother's thin, upright posture, her white gloves and unscuffed shoes, her splashy Lily shift aglow in the dim light. The doctor kept his blinds closed, creating a strange hermetically sealed dungeon, within which, I realized, a patient could lose orientation. I concentrated on my mother's bright image and the comforting hum of traffic outside the window, as if such human details could hold me to the real world. I hadn't seen a line requesting "pelvic exam" on my college form, but Dr. Riley told my mother it was time to do one anyway. She nodded, and I suddenly wondered if he might discover I wasn't a virgin. Smug and well versed in street knowledge, I instantly planned to blame any lack of a proper hymen on horseback riding. Although I had no idea what a pelvic exam was, I assumed that once a woman experienced sex, she could endure anything. Mother sat, hands folded in her lap, and watched as the doctor extended the metal stirrups from his table and motioned me down. I was suddenly anxious about the exam and embarrassed by my mother's presence. Sitting to my left, she saw me slide to the end of the leather table, how the white paper stuck and bunched under me. Surely she saw how plaintively my bare knees stuck out, how the skimpy sheet was pushed back over my pubic hair. She saw the doctor bend slightly as he inserted first the metal speculum, then his fingers, into my vagina. "She has a tipped uterus," he intoned to Mother, ignoring me as if I were simply the plastic model he used for demonstration. "I'll try toDavis, Cortney is the author of 'I Knew a Woman' with ISBN 9780375504181 and ISBN 0375504184.