Annabel - Kathleen Winter [73]
“I am. Is it all right?”
“I liked it when I was little. I thought it was Amble.” He remembered it had felt like a name you would call a newborn puppy or a child you loved. “But it wasn’t Amble. It was your little girl. Annabel. I like that too.”
“Your mother and I were good friends. There were things we both lost. Things that have to do with you and why you’re here. But you have to wait for the doctor. And for your father. It’s not my place.”
“What did you call the rushing thing?” He had been half asleep. Treadway’s voice was in the hall. Thomasina went out to him. “Rushing . . . what was it?” The hall grew louder. “Dad?” Was Treadway shouting? Treadway never shouted. Wayne had not discerned the words. Rushing. Landwash. Annabel. Lost. He slept.
Dr. Lioukras had done his best. He believed you could talk to any child over the age of eleven as if the fully realized person inside had begun to open, and he had tried to use words that were true. The limitations of medical language were no greater, in his mind, than those of language as a whole. Science, medicine, mythology, and even poetry shared a kind of grandeur, as far as he saw. He had two copies of Donald J. Borror’s Dictionary of Word Roots and Combining Forms, which broke biological terms into their earliest known fragments, and he read it just for fun. But even Donald J. Borror was having a hard time helping him now.
“This is one time,” he told Wayne, who sat propped up in bed balancing green Jell-O cubes on a knife and letting them melt on his tongue, “when medical science has given itself over entirely to mythical names. A true hermaphrodite” — he said it as if the state were an attainment — “is more rare than all the other forms. It means you have everything boys have, and girls too. An almost complete presence of each.”
“Only my balls aren’t the same as the other boys’. I saw in gym.”
“Right. You have only one testicle. And your penis. If you weren’t taking your pills . . .”
“My pills are about that?”
“Yes. Your penis wouldn’t be as large as it is now.”
“What would it be like?”
“Hermaphroditism is so rare. It’s not certain. You would become more like a girl than you are now. You’re already a girl inside.”
“Inside?” How could he be a girl inside? What did that mean? He pictured girls from his class lying inside his body, hiding. What girl was inside him? He pictured Wally Michelin, smaller than her real self, lying quietly in the red world inside him, hiding.
“You’ve been menstruating. That’s what the fluid was inside you. Menstrual blood that couldn’t escape.”
“Has it escaped now?”
“We let it out.”
“But it happens again, right?”
“In girls, yes. Every month. But in your case we don’t know how often.”
“Can it get out now? New stuff?”
“We’re hoping” — Dr. Lioukras had eyes you could see uneasiness in right away — “that with new medication, it will stop.”
“But if it didn’t stop, would it get trapped again?”
“You would have to come in again, like this time, if it happened. You would need another gynecological intervention.”
So it was with names — suture, true hermaphrodite, menstrual blood, gynecological intervention — that the doctor had done his best to acquaint Wayne with the story of his male body and the female body inside it. Dr. Lioukras was not happy with the talk. He had wanted it to be about life, and possibility, not blood and stitching and cutting. He had to remind himself that the work of a surgeon is poetry of a kind, in which blood is the meaning and flesh is the text. Without his work, he told himself, many people would be buried early among the stones on Crow Hill, over the slow, cold inlet, and would feel no more joy, or life, or love.
Now, after the operation, Wayne felt the power of names in a new way. His father ate his evening toast, sometimes with a kipper. Jacinta crocheted. They did not look outside at the night. Wayne tried to remember a time before he knew the word for sky. You explained away the mystery of the night, he thought, by naming its parts: darkness, Little Dipper, silver birch.
His mother