Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [133]
“Here?”
Turtle nods, making a crackling sound as her head grinds against the white paper.
“How about here? This hurt?”
Turtle shakes her head.
Dr. Washington pulls down Turtle’s shirt and turns to Taylor. “How is the child’s diet.” She states it, rather than asks.
Taylor feels her mind blank out, the way it used to in school during history tests. She tries to calm down. “I make sure she gets protein,” she says. “We eat a lot of peanut butter. And tuna fish. And she always gets milk. Every single day, no matter what.”
“Well, actually, that might be the problem.”
“What, milk?”
The doctor turns to Turtle. “How do you feel about milk, kiddo?”
“I hate it,” Turtle says to the ceiling.
“What kind do you give her?”
“I don’t know,” Taylor says defensively, feeling as if the two of them are ganging up. “The store brand. Two percent.”
“Try leaving out the milk from now on. I think you’ll see a difference right away. Bring her back in, in a week or two, and if that hasn’t taken care of it we’ll check on other possibilities. But I think cutting the milk’s going to do it.” She writes something on the clipboard.
Taylor senses that Dr. Washington is about to move on to an ear or an ankle. “Excuse me, but I don’t get this,” she says. “I thought milk was the perfect food. Vitamins and calcium and everything.”
Dr. Washington slumps against the counter, losing a few of her imposing inches and visibly shifting into a slower gear. “Cow’s milk is fine for white folks,” she says, looking directly at Taylor when she says this, “but somewhere between sixty and ninety percent of the rest of us are lactose intolerant. That means we don’t have the enzymes in our system to digest some of the sugar in cow’s milk. So it ferments in the intestines and causes all kinds of problems.”
“Uck. I never knew that.”
“Yogurt may be okay, and aged cheeses. You can give them a try. And some kinds of orange juice are calcium-fortified, that can help you out some with her calcium. If you’re determined to give her milk, you can get the kind that’s lactose-reduced. There’s a large Asian-American population in this city, so you can find that in most of the markets.”
“My daughter isn’t Asian-American. She’s Cherokee.”
The doctor lifts her shoulders in an offhand shrug. “Asian, Native American, African, we’re all in the same boat. A lot of times it doesn’t present until adulthood, but it can start showing up right around her age.”
Taylor can’t understand how such a major truth could have passed her by. “I always thought milk was the great health food. The people look so perky in those commercials.”
The doctor taps her pencil eraser against her cheek and looks at Taylor with something that could be loosely defined as a smile. Her eyes are so dark the irises appear almost bluish around the edges, and her half-closed lids give her a lizardish look. “Who do you think makes those commercials?”
“The guardians of truth,” Taylor says, sulkily. “Sorry, I didn’t think about it.”
For the first time, Dr. Washington’s superior-reptile look melts into genuine sympathy. “Listen, nobody does. I break this news to parents of every color, a dozen times a week. You were doing what you thought was best, that’s the main thing.”
Her white coat is standing up straight again, then gone.
Turtle slides off the gift-wrapped examining table and bounds out the examining-room door like a puppy let out of its pen. Taylor finds she can’t get up from her chair. She is paralyzed by the memory of Annawake Fourkiller’s final warning, in Tucson, before she drove away: “I bet she hates milk.”
Taylor catches up to Turtle outside the clinic. Turtle is shading her eyes and looking straight up at the sky, which for once is miraculously unclouded. A jet has left a white, rubbed-out gash of a trail, ugly as graffiti.
“An airplane makes that,” Turtle informs her, and Taylor wonders how she knows this. It’s one of several million things they have never yet spoken of, precisely.