''It will only hurt for a minute,' he says. 'Then you can leave here and go on with your life.'”
“Tell me what you’ll be wearing, hon,” says the woman on the phone. “You know, so I can spot you right away.”
Sitting in the dusty light, naked and still damp from her bath, Serena picks at the puckered seams of her dress, thinking about her mother, a seamstress who specialized in clothing for family celebrations. This time of year, August, when the First Communion, wedding and graduation rush was over, and the demand for holiday finery hadn’t yet begun, she sewed cocktail dresses for herself, spangled wonders with spaghetti straps and low-cut backs, planning to get her singing career back on track.
Twice during the night, Serena had thrown up, gagging over the bus’s stinking toilet. Waiting by the newsstand, Serena feels again the urge to puke, but is afraid to leave the bench, to go into the bathroom, in the case the woman comes. She whispers the Hail Mary,The nausea passes but a corrosive fluid bubbles in her throat.
“Warm,” she says when Serena hands her the two neat rolls of cash. The woman removes the rubber bands and flattens the bills out in her lap. She counts them twice, then puts them into her purse. The procedure is performed in the kitchen, on a table that is draped with white. Soon Serena, too, is draped like a piece of furniture, her feet strapped to the tops of kitchen chairs placed backward at the table. Lying on the table, she can see, through the window over the sink, a scrap of blue sky and wisps of cloud. The doctor is bald and he wears bi-focals, a surgical mask, a short-sleeved seersucker shirt. He is huge, puffy, like a plastic creature someone has inflated.
Serena hears the clanking of the instruments and the low voice of the doctor telling her what he is doing, a voice she doesn’t want to hear. She does not want to know what he is doing, but she cannot seem to tell him. She cannot speak. Then she sees her mother’s sewing room, the furniture and floor draped with clean white sheets to protect the fragile fabrics she fashions into gowns.
Serena looks away but not before she’s glimpsed the puddled blood and clotted tissue shining in the silver pan. The woman in the sunglasses comes and takes it. A moment later, Serena hears a toilet flush.
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