Achingly Alice Read online

  I was wrong. The next day after school, Pamela came home with me, and I was thinking about telling her how I’d felt at Patrick’s, when the phone rang.

  “Alice,” came Elizabeth’s voice, and I could hear Nathan screeching in the background. “You’ve got to do something for me. Please?”

  “Sure. What?”

  “I’ve got to go to the doctor’s, and Nathan’s really fussy. Mom thinks he’s sick, and she’s not feeling so good herself. If I don’t go today, though, I can’t get another appointment for two weeks.”

  “And you need someone to go with you?” I asked, making a guess.

  “A-Alice, I’ve got to have a pelvic exam.”

  “Oh!” I said. “Sure. Pamela’s here. We’ll meet you outside.”

  I hung up and looked at Pamela.

  “We’ve got to go to the doctor with Elizabeth,” I said.

  “What happened?”

  “She needs a pelvic exam.”

  “Oh, my gosh!” said Pamela, and grimly picked up her jacket.

  This was it, the thing we had dreaded for as long as we could remember, and it was happening to Elizabeth, of all people.

  5

  FEMININE PRODUCTS

  LESTER HAD JUST COME HOME FROM THE university and was putting his books down in the living room.

  “We’re going to the doctor’s with Elizabeth,” I told him. “I don’t know what time I’ll be back.”

  “It’s your turn to cook tonight, kiddo,” he told me.

  “I don’t care, I’ve got to go with her. We’ve both got to go.”

  “What’s she having? A lobotomy?”

  “A pelvic exam, Lester! Her first pelvic!” I said.

  “Oh,” said Lester. “Well, tell her to close her eyes and think of England.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind,” said Lester.

  We went outside and met Elizabeth coming across the street.

  “We’ve got to take the bus to Pershing,” she said. “To the medical building.”

  “You okay?” Pamela asked, studying her hard. “What’s wrong with you?”

  Elizabeth looked as though she was about to bawl. “Mom promised to go with me! It’s all so embarrassing!”

  “Well, you can tell us,” I said.

  “It’s this … itch. You know. Down there. It’s driving me crazy. And sometimes I … I feel sort of wet.”

  “Oh, I’ve had that,” said Pamela. “The wet part. You know what it is, don’t you?”

  Now I was curious. “What?”

  “The hots.”

  “Pamela!” Elizabeth snapped.

  “It is! When you see a sexy movie or kiss your boyfriend, sometimes you get a little wet. It’s normal.”

  “But the itch …”

  “Well, if you’ve got an itch, I guess you should see a doctor,” Pamela said. “That shouldn’t be too awful.”

  Elizabeth’s face grew redder still. “But a … a man looking at me down there …”

  “Oh! A man!” Pamela and I said together.

  “It’s Mom’s doctor. She said I probably ought to be going to him now. Oh, guys, I’m so scared!”

  I put my arm around her shoulder as we waited for the bus. “I don’t know if this will help, but Lester said—”

  “You told Lester?”

  “I just said you were having a pelvic—”

  “You told Lester I was having a pelvic?” she screeched.

  “He knows you have a pelvis, Elizabeth. Relax,” Pamela told her.

  “He knows I’ve got an itch?”

  I thought she might pass out.

  “All I said was that you were going to the doctor to have a pelvic exam, and he said to tell you to just close your eyes and think of England.”

  Elizabeth blinked. “Why?”

  “It’s what he said.”

  “What’s England got to do with it? They don’t have pelvics in England?”

  “I don’t know. He’s weird. Forget it,” I told her.

  We crammed in together on the back seat of the bus, one of us on either side of Elizabeth, and to make her feel better, tried to think of things she could be going to the doctor for.

  “What if you were going to the doctor to have a foot amputated?” I tried. “You would gladly go through a pelvic instead, Elizabeth, and it wouldn’t seem like such a big deal.”

  “What do feet have to do with it?” Elizabeth said irritably. We obviously weren’t helping at all.

  “I’ve heard of girls who have to go to the doctor because they get to be eighteen and still haven’t had their periods,” said Pamela.

  That was a new one to me.

  “So what does the doctor do?” I asked. “Puncture their … ?” And then, when Elizabeth moaned, I said, “Listen, we’ve been through a lot together, and we’ll get through this.” I was desperately fishing around for a change of topic. “Do you remember when I moved here from Takoma Park?”

  Elizabeth smiled a little. “Yes. Mom and I sat out on the porch watching the movers take stuff in, and Mom said, ‘Well, Elizabeth, it looks as though you’ll finally get a friend your own age.’”

  “And you brought over our dinner that first night,” I reminded her.

  Elizabeth straightened up suddenly. “And you were so rude, Alice!” She laughed a little.

  I laughed, too. “That’s because Dad had promised to take us to Shakey’s for pizza that night, and then I knew we wouldn’t be able to go. We had to eat your meat loaf, instead.”

  We all started laughing.

  “I wanted Miss Cole for a teacher that fall, but got Mrs. Plotkin,” I went on. “I even tried to get Mrs. Plotkin to kick me out of her class so I could have Miss Cole. And then, I ended up really loving her.”

  “She had a heart attack, you know,” said Elizabeth.

  “I know. I went to the hospital to see her,” I said.

  Thinking about Mrs. Plotkin in the hospital got us thinking about doctors again, and Elizabeth took a deep, quavery breath and stared straight ahead.

  The bus stopped at the corner of Georgia and Pershing, and we walked the few blocks to the medical building. We took the elevator to the second floor and went through the door that said GYNECOLOGY. Elizabeth signed in at the desk.

  Then we sat together on the vinyl couch and pretended to look at People magazine.

  “I’m going to ask him if he can prescribe something without looking at me,” Elizabeth mewed plaintively. “If I just tell him how it feels, maybe he can give me some medicine.”

  “If he could do that, you could have just talked to him on the phone,” I said. “Besides, there are probably a lot of different things it could be, and he won’t know which it is without examining you.”

  Elizabeth whimpered again.

  “You could always just poke a hole in the sheet,” said Pamela.

  “What?” cried Elizabeth.

  “The sheet. It’s made of paper, you know. Just tell him to tear a little hole down there, and then he won’t see anything except what he absolutely has to.”

  Elizabeth shoved her away. “That is so obscene, Pamela! That’s awful!”

  “So I was just trying to be helpful,” Pamela said, but I think she was beginning to enjoy the whole thing. It was our chance to find out what a pelvic was like without having to go through it ourselves.

  “Maybe the nurse could look and tell him what she saw,” Elizabeth said hopefully.

  “And miss his chance?” Pamela teased. “Why do you suppose he became a gynecologist in the first place? Think about it, Elizabeth. Of all the things this guy could have been, he chooses a job where he spends the whole day looking at naked women.”

  Elizabeth closed her eyes.

  “Oh, Pamela, shut up,” I said. “Somebody has to do it.”

  “I know, but doesn’t it make you wonder?”

  I began to wish we’d left Pamela home, and was sure of it when I realized that Elizabeth was breathing too fast. Hyperventilating.
I was about to suggest we get up and walk down the hall when a nurse came out of the examining rooms and walked over.

  “Elizabeth Price?” she asked. “Now I wonder which of you girls she could be?”

  The one who was breathing through her mouth with her eyes closed, who else?

  “She’s a little scared,” I said.

  “Oh, I’ll be right with you the whole time,” the nurse told her, taking her hand, and Elizabeth rose to her feet like a Christian going to the lions.

  “Think of England,” Pamela whispered after her as Elizabeth followed the nurse through the door.

  “What do you suppose that means?” I asked, and we both tried to figure it out.

  “Maybe it has to do with all the queens who were beheaded, and you can be glad the doctor is working on you down there and not up by your neck,” Pamela suggested.

  All we could really think about was Elizabeth, though, and what was happening to her. Now she was probably taking off her clothes … Now she was climbing up on the examining table.

  I didn’t want to think about it anymore. I grabbed the magazine again, and Pamela and I kept turning the pages, but neither of us was reading.

  When twenty minutes had gone by and Elizabeth still hadn’t come out, Pamela turned to me. “You don’t suppose she’s pregnant, do you?”

  “What?”

  Pamela shrugged. “You can never tell. Mom said that when she was in high school, the girl everyone thought would never marry was the first one down the aisle, and that of all the girls in her senior class, it was a minister’s daughter who got pregnant.”

  “But if Elizabeth’s pregnant, who would the father be?” I asked.

  “With Elizabeth, it would probably be an Immaculate Conception,” Pamela quipped.

  Now I was certain we should have left Pamela home.

  It was another ten minutes before Elizabeth came out. She looked like a zombie. She was clutching a prescription and stared straight at the door as she walked directly across the waiting room. We had to grab our jackets and hurry to catch up with her.

  “Elizabeth?” I said out in the hall. “Is everything all right?”

  She kept walking and pressed the button for the elevator.

  “What happened?” asked Pamela.

  Elizabeth turned and faced us: “I have just gone through the worst embarrassment of my entire life.”

  “It was that bad?” I croaked.

  The elevator came and we got on. The door closed.

  “You wouldn’t believe how awful,” she said, leaning against the wall and closing her eyes.

  “Well, tell us, so we’ll know!” I pleaded. “Sooner or later Pamela and I will have to go through it.”

  “First,” said Elizabeth, “you have to take off everything from the waist down.”

  Somehow that seemed worse than taking off everything.

  “In front of the doctor? Like a striptease?” asked Pamela.

  “No!” Elizabeth was horrified at the thought. “Of course not! They give you a paper sheet, just like you said, to wrap around you, and then you get up on an examining table and the doctor comes in, and then …” She covered her face with both hands.

  “No matter how awful it is, we have to know,” I told her.

  “The nurse asks you to lie down and put your feet up in these stirrup things, and then you have to wiggle down until your bottom is right at the edge of the table.” Suddenly Elizabeth started to cry.

  Pamela and I stared at each other in horror.

  “And then … ?” Pamela asked tremulously.

  “The d-doctor sits on a little stool right between your legs, and they lift up the paper sheet and turn on a light.” Elizabeth sobbed. “I kept my knees together and finally the nurse had to come over and hold them apart.”

  I realized that I had covered my face, too, and we were all standing there, hardly breathing. Nobody had pushed the button, so the elevator hadn’t moved.

  “Then … ,” said Elizabeth in anguish, “he looks.”

  I couldn’t believe this. “H-He just turns on a light and looks?” I bleated. “He just sits there like he’s watching television?”

  “Well, he’s examining you …”

  “And he doesn’t say anything? Just looks and examines you?” Even Pamela was horrified.

  “Oh, he’s talking the whole time. He tells you exactly what he’s going to do next, and the nurse is chattering away about how it doesn’t seem possible that it’s a brand-new year already, did I go out on New Year’s Eve and kick up my heels? And all I can think about is that my heels are practically up on the doctor’s shoulders that very moment!” She sobbed loudly. “I will never go to a doctor again, I will never have a baby, I will never let a man look at me like that! I just can’t stand it! I’ll die if I ever have to do that again!”

  “Did it hurt?” I asked in a small voice.

  Elizabeth wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “No. But then the nurse left the room, and he said I could sit up. He wanted to talk, and I couldn’t even look him in the face. He wanted to know if I had any questions.”

  “Ha! I’d ask why the nurse left the room!” said Pamela.

  “Since I didn’t say anything, he said that I had a vaginal discharge, and that’s what was making me itch. And then he said …”

  Somebody on the first floor must have pushed the button, because the elevator started to move.

  “He said what, Elizabeth?” I asked.

  “Wait till we get outside,” she told me. “This is the really embarrassing part.”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it. What could be more embarrassing than lying on a table with your feet in the air and a doctor sitting there looking? But I was beginning to feel something else: that Elizabeth was enjoying telling us. For the first time in her life, she was telling us something that we didn’t know.

  Once we got downstairs, she had to turn in the prescription at the pharmacy, and then we sat on a bench along one wall to wait.

  “What? What did he say?” Pamela and I asked together.

  “He said sometimes you have a discharge because you have a slight infection, and other times it’s just a hormonal thing—that … that you get wet because you’re sexually excited, and that was normal.”

  “See? I was right! You get the hots!” said Pamela. “Boys get a hard on, and girls get the hots.”

  “And he also said,” Elizabeth continued, and we waited, “that some girls touch themselves down there, and that’s normal, too. That can make you wet, but masturbation can’t hurt you.”

  I’d heard the word before and was pretty sure I knew what it meant, but what I couldn’t believe was that Elizabeth had said it. Did Elizabeth touch herself down there, too? I wondered. There were some things even we didn’t ask each other.

  “I have to put on some kind of ointment and I’m going to douche,” Elizabeth said.

  “To what?” I asked. I was learning all kinds of things I’d never heard before.

  “Rinse out your privates,” Pamela said knowingly. And then she added, “Mom says almost no one does that anymore.”

  “But I feel so gross!” Elizabeth told us. “I itch and I’m smelly and I’ll bet all the boys can smell me, and that’s probably why I was the last one chosen on a volleyball team in gym today.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. “Elizabeth, I don’t smell anything, and Pamela doesn’t smell anything, and the only thing we smell in gym is sweat. We all sweat.”

  “I don’t care. Even dogs can smell me. I walked to the mailbox yesterday, and this retriever came right up and sniffed. I was mortified! I told the nurse I felt gross, and she said if it would really make me feel better, I could douche, so I am.”

  We sat silently contemplating our womanhood.

  “I’ll bet doctors get so used to examining women that they don’t even think about it after a while,” Pamela said.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “I’ll bet it’s no different to them from lifting the hood of a
car and doing a tune-up.”

  “Or opening the oven to see how a roast is doing,” added Pamela.

  “They might even be thinking of baseball scores while they’re examining you,” I chirped hopefully. “And besides, we can always choose a woman doctor, you know!”

  “Yes!” Pamela and Elizabeth said together, and somehow the future seemed a lot more hopeful than it had before.

  After we got the stuff from the pharmacy and went back to my place, we went up to my room to see what was in the sack. There was a tube of ointment and a little white plastic pouch that held a rubber tube, a long nozzle, and a soft plastic bag that looked like a hot water bottle.

  “That must be the douche,” Pamela guessed.

  We stared at the contraption while Elizabeth read the directions:

  “Attach nozzle to the hose, the hose to the bag, and fill bag with very warm water. Lie down in tub on your back, insert nozzle into vagina, and hold until the bag is empty.”

  Elizabeth wasn’t about to douche in front of us, but we had to see how the thing worked. We had to know everything there was about being a woman. So we went into the bathroom, put the nozzle on the hose and the hose on the bag, put the opening of the bag under the faucet, and turned on the water.

  Instantly a stream of water began spraying all over the bathroom.

  “Shut it off! Shut it off!” I cried.

  “Hold the bag lower!” yelled Pamela.

  “No, hold the nozzle higher!” I shrieked.

  In the confusion, Elizabeth disconnected the hose from the bag and water poured all over the floor. We all screamed.

  Lester tapped on the door.

  “Al, do you suppose I could use the john?”

  Elizabeth shrieked again.

  “Just a minute!” I told him.

  I grabbed the bath mat and mopped up the floor, Elizabeth slipped the douche bag under her shirt, and we all traipsed out of the bathroom, dragging the hose behind us.

  “Ladies?” came Lester’s voice.