Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [132]
Taylor has been waiting so long with Turtle in the free clinic waiting room she feels sure they’ve had time to pick up every disease known to science. One little boy keeps licking his hand and coming over to hold it up in front of Turtle, presumably to give her an unobstructed view of his germs. Each time, Turtle withdraws her face slightly on her neck like a farsighted woman trying to focus on small print. The little boy chuckles and pitches crazily back to his mother, his disposable diaper crackling as he goes.
Every now and then, the waiting-room door opens and they all look hopefully to the nurse as she reads off someone else’s name. In the bright passage behind her, Taylor hears busy people scurrying and saying things like “The ear is in number nine. I put the ankle in two.” The longer they wait, the more vividly Taylor can picture piles of body parts back there.
At last the nurse calls Turtle’s name, in the slightly embarrassed way strangers always do, as if they expect the child answering to this name to have some defect or possibly a shell. As she follows Turtle down the hall, Taylor wonders if she did wrong, legalizing this odd name. She has no patience with people who saddle their children with names like “Rainbo” and “Sunflower” to suit some oddball agenda of their own. But “Turtle” was a name of Turtle’s own doing, and it fits now, there is no getting around it.
They wind up in a room empty of body parts. The glass jars on the counter by the sink contain only cotton balls and wooden tongue depressors. Turtle climbs onto the examining table covered with white butcher paper while Taylor lists her symptoms and the nurse writes them on a clipboard. When she leaves them and closes the door, the room feels acutely small.
Turtle lies flat on her back, making crinkly paper noises. “Am I going to get a shot?”
“No. No shots today. Very unlikely.”
“A operation?”
“Positively not. I can guarantee you that. This is a free clinic, and they don’t give those out for free.”
“Are babies free?”
Taylor follows Turtle’s eyes to a poster on the wall, drawn in weak, cartoonish shades of pink, showing what amounts to one half a pregnant woman with an upside-down baby curled snugly into the oval capsule of her uterus. It reminds Taylor of the time she cut a peach in half and the rock-hard pit fell open too, revealing a little naked almond inside, secretly occupying the clean, small open space within the peach flesh.
“Are they what? Are babies free?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, let me think how to answer that. You don’t have to buy them. Just about anybody can get one to grow inside her. In fact, seems like the less money you have, the easier it is to get one. But after they come out, you have to buy all kinds of stuff for them.”
“Food and diapers and stuff.”
“Right.”
“Do you think that’s why the real mom that grew me inside her didn’t want me?”
“No, she died. Remember? Her sister, the woman that put you into my car, told me your mother had died, and that’s why they had to give you up. You told me one time you remembered seeing your first mama get buried.”
“I do remember that,” Turtle says. She continues to study the peach-pit baby poster. Taylor picks up a magazine and is startled to read news about a war, until she realizes the magazine is several years old.
“Hi, I’m Doctor Washington,” says a tall woman in a white coat who breezes into the room as if she’s run a long way and doesn’t see any point in slowing down now. She has long flat feet in black loafers, and a short, neat Afro that curves around her head like a bicycle helmet. She looks around the room quickly, as if she might in fact be anticipating a blow to the head. Her eyes settle on Turtle for a moment, but the rest of her body remains tense. She holds the clipboard in one hand and a pencil in the other, poised between two fingers, jiggling in the air.
“Stomachache?” she says to Turtle. “Cramps, diarrhea? For two or three months?”
Turtle nods solemnly, owning up to all this.
“Let’s take a look.” Actually she looks at the ceiling, appearing