Eva knew that what was happening to her was wrong, it was a sign of powerlessness. But she did not stand up to it. Instead, she tightened her vaginal muscles, crossed her legs and wished that this blood would sit quietly inside, not seep out onto the white papered examination table. Fifteen more minutes reading about Nicholas Stavrogin and misguided Russian revolutionaries and Eva started blotting her vagina with tissues, hoping to absorb the pooling blood. Everything about the situation was undeserved, and yet she went along with it. She knew what would be right, but knowing and doing are two different things. She was afraid of being a problem.

An eternal moment later, only one more Kleenex remained, so she jammed it up there. Fifty-three minutes and finally the white physician got to her now, a bloody shamed adolescent girl with diminished, bloody thighs.

“Hello Doctor,” she smiled, trying to protect herself.

“Open up,” he blandly inserted a metal speculum. “You’re crazy to be doing this, it can make you sterile. Okay, relax.”

The threat and promise of sterility had long plagued her. Nathalie, Eva’s mother, had taken her six-year-old daughter on a tour of infected kindergarten bedsides to purposefully catch chicken pox now, instead of later, during pregnancy. Deliberate fertility was the holy grail, and the pock scar on her forehead, a mark of Nathalie’s responsible parenting. The goal of girlhood was to prepare for her future reproductivity.

Eva carried that particular intrauterine device inside her body for three years and then had it removed. Miraculously, no infection, no perforation, no pelvic inflammatory disease, no tragedy ensued. Now the Dalkon Shield is illegal and Eva is forty.

Forty is neither good nor bad but it is filled with meaning. Again, she found herself waiting too long in a suffocating examination room. This one, though, was cleaner, pinker, and more metallic, more expensive. Now, more vulnerable in every way, Eva waited, dreading the common dread of the dreary institutional demise that accompanies disease. The only thing she found attractive about those four walls was their unfamiliarity.

Let it stay that way.

She feared moving into that life, inhabiting forever the boring aesthetic that assaults the dying. Dying would be bad enough on its own without all that bad wallpaper.

Forty year old Eva’s shirt was off, her paper vest draped like a napkin over an elephant. She sat on the table debating a six month old issue of House Beautiful that lay torn on the mouse grey carpeting. Perhaps technically, she was still fertile. But her mind was not reproductive. Her hips hurt and she feared the physical pain, the financial deprivation, the daily psychic pain of potential children’s unfolding loneliness. She was just beginning to admit her suspicions of children, watching them more closely on the street. The struggle to love justice was so hard in this era, the barriers so intense. Why have children who will either hurt others or stand by and let it happen?

Of course she’d considered it. That deliberation was part of citizenship.

To have children included an obligation to purchase terrible products that murder the soul. But without possessions, her child would suffer and be inadequate. Which death is better? Nowadays, anything eccentric is wrong, there is no social space for singularity. How could Eva impose the pain of individuality on children she adores? And yet, what is the point of creating more conformity that will eventually turn on her, even in her own house? If they get rid of Rent Stabilization, will she even have a house? Can children be raised to be better than this historic moment? Not in this historic moment. Hence, no children.

So many years later and the receptionist at the front desk was still Puerto Rican, but so too was the female lab technician, as newly stipulated by law. One of the victories of subsequent feminism. There now had to be a woman in the room so that the male doctor could not molest unnoticed.

“Good morning, my name is Alicia and I am...”

“Alicia,” Eva delighted, revived by a frisson of justice. “You look great. “

“Oh, hi. How weird.”

“It’s okay,” Eva’s heart filled with sunshine. This was how it was supposed to go, goodwill and its deserved reward. “I helped you fight your landlord and now you’re helping me. It’s great. How’s your family?”

“My boyfriend’s okay and my son is doing very well. He’s in third grade. Do you have a lump?”

Yay, old fashioned New Yorkers. Finding strength in the casual. Worshipping at the alter of the matter-of-fact reality that we live in front of each other, so there is no reason to hide.

“I think I have a little thickening, some kind of mass in my breast. My lover found it. I never would have found it. Did your landlord sell the building?”

Alicia wrote down thickening and was whatever about the lover. Eva felt glad that she trusted her. More mutual aid society citizenship.

“Yeah, now we got a management company. It’s okay. I just started here a week ago. Medical technician. I like it.”

“Do you like it?”

“Yeah. That data entry was getting tired.”

Eva loved this. It was native cosmopolitan dialect of the

Urban indigenous. “You get benefits?” she asked.

“A lot. Too bad your law clinic closed. It was a good place.”

Back to the truth. Forget about thickening breasts, this was the real danger. Eva hadn’t fought hard enough and she knew it. Every day brought a realization of one more thing she should have done to keep it open. “Yeah,” she mumbled, ashamed.

“That’s a shame.” Alicia nodded, reading her mind.

The door opened just then and a distracted older man walked in, thinking about something else.

“Hello, I’m Doctor Pollack. This is Alicia.”

Oh no, Eva worried. He thinks that nothing happens before he walks into a room. Bad sign.

“Let's see what you’ve got here.”

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