Balance of Fragile Things Read online

  “Sir, I have to call your doctor. It’ll just be one moment.”

  “Why do you need to call her? I brought the paper like I’m supposed to, right? You think I’m stupid?”

  Maija was tempted to say yes but forced her face into a smile instead. “Not at all; this is only protocol.” She ignored the blinking lights as she dialed the doctor’s number.

  “What kind of call?” The man yelled this in a voice that bordered on hysterical.

  The other customers were unimpressed by his antics, and they continued to stare impatiently at Maija over his shoulder. Maija heard the phone ring once through the receiver, but then she heard a familiar and unfortunate sound: three multi-tonal beeps followed by I’m sorry, the number has been disconnected or—and she hung up.

  She looked up at the man, then toward the exit door that led to the rear parking lot. For one millisecond she considered the shoes on her swollen feet and wondered if she could make it to the safety of the Cutlass before the man noticed her absence. For one moment she imagined an alternate reality where her ankles had wings and she could tell Tom Tingle that he was an ass as she flitted away. It was the worry she felt for Eleanora that jarred her back into reality once more.

  She went to the man at the counter and said, quietly but clearly, “I’m sorry, I cannot fill it. Your doctor is no longer in service. High dose.”

  The man seemed stupefied by her quick and fearless response, but he held his ground through confused eyes. “Can’t fill it? This is legit, and you are required by law to fill it for me.”

  “No, I’m not.” And she really wasn’t. She had that one and only eject button in her back pocket that allowed her to toss out the crass, the slovenly, and the frighteningly rude. She’d never refused before—but Mr. Halitosis was different. He scared her. She could tell he was a drug user.

  He asked to talk to her boss as he scowled at her. The man’s open mouth allowed Maija to glance at the source of his gutter breath. He suffered from oral dental hyperplasia, a strange and off-putting condition that could have been brought on by his medicine. His gums grew halfway over his teeth, leaving the enamel looking like lumps of pebbles. And his saliva had all but dried up, which created a warm, dry nest where bacteria could grow. Maija sympathized, or tried; he needed better medical treatment because he obviously couldn’t take care of himself.

  “Boss, yes, well, I am sure he would be happy to—” Maija turned and saw only an empty stool spinning around. Tom was gone. Shandy was biting her chipped purple fingernails and reading a magazine behind the register. Maija stood alone.

  “Where’s Tom?”

  “Huh?” Shandy replied with a digit wedged between her lips.

  “Tom—where is he?”

  Shandy shrugged and went back to her article. Maija glimpsed the article: “Swine-Child,” about a forty-pound baby born with the head of a pig. She never had seen such articles in Latvia. Here anyone could say anything and make money from it. But, she thought, that is one of the reasons she’d immigrated.

  She told the man that her boss was gone at the moment, but that he was welcome to come back later or try a different pharmacy. He grabbed the slip of paper, crumpled it up, and threw it at Maija’s face without saying a word. Relieved by his exit, she went to work on Eleanora’s medicine. Like a confident cuckoo that clucks an hour late, Tom reappeared with a sub sandwich in his hand—it was only ten in the morning.

  Maija took a deep breath. This was the first hour of her day; she would have to stand here in the medicinal trenches behind the counter wearing her white god coat for at least nine more hours. She dug her heels into the rubber mat that helped her stand for hours on end and counted pills with a metal spatula. Eleanora was conducting a one-person fashion show in the slim, two-by-four-inch mirror on the side of the reading glasses display. She fluffed her wispy hair with her thin fingers, flashed a diamond the size of a walnut that couldn’t have been real, and puckered her thin, almost nonexistent lips.

  Mr. Herbert Finch, her husband, was a small and quiet man. Maija had only seen him a few times, years ago when she’d visit Eleanora for tea. The Finch flock had never accepted any of her dinner invitations, so she hadn’t had the chance to speak with him a great deal, or graze his hand for a tidbit of his future. He was shorter than Eleanora and much older. The gossipers in town whispered about how Eleanora had only married him for his potential fortune. Maija marveled at how ironic it would be if Eleanora died before her older husband. She felt a little sorry for Herbert.

  She finished her prescription and handed it to Tom for inspection. Tom, lifting his nose from his sandwich, gave the bottle a hurried nod.

  “Eleanora? It’s ready.” Maija stood at the receiving end at the window under a sign that read Pick up. Maija saw Tom pull a stack of official-looking papers on top of his sub. Even Shandy took a moment to look up from her magazine to acknowledge Eleanora.

  “Can I pay for these here?” Eleanora handed Maija five pairs of reading glasses. “I just can’t keep track of my glasses; if I stash a pair in every drawer, maybe I’d be able to read my day planner.”

  “Sure, no problem.”

  Maija attempted to touch Eleanora’s hand again as she took the glasses from her, but her fingers fumbled and missed their chance. She just wanted to be sure of what she’d seen; if she spent any sleepless nights drowning in guilt, she wanted to know whether she deserved it or not. But her insight was stubborn and defiant and refused to give her any further image or message.

  So Maija rang up the glasses and asked Eleanora if she was familiar with the medicine. She said she was, though she never looked up from the depths of her purse. Maija paused and told her it was very important for her to follow the instructions on the bottle. Eleanora waved her on, pulled out her overstuffed wallet, and dealt her a credit card out of a stack. Maija knelt down to swipe the Visa through the card machine under the counter. As she did so, she heard tires swerving on the rain-soaked road outside. The machine beeped at Maija, and she saw, much to her dismay, that the card was declined. She desperately swiped the card through the machine again, and again. It was social suicide, but she had to find the courage to efficiently ask Eleanora for another card. Maija stood with a board-straight back and gave a reassuring smile.

  As she was about to open her mouth and let the words march professionally from her tongue, an explosion sent her falling to the floor. The drive-through window had shattered and sprayed shards of thin glass across the pharmacy and everyone within a twenty-foot radius. The brick that had broken the window landed right on the counter and smashed the bag that held Eleanora’s medicine, denting the countertop.

  Shandy held her hand to her right eye and screamed, while Tom ran into the back room again. Maija looked up, through the broken window, and saw the man with the Dilantin prescription standing in the fog with his mouth contorted into a pout.

  Maija stood up, shaking, and yelled, “Asshole!”

  The man jumped in his car and disappeared.

  Maija cursed at the man in Latvian as she picked pieces of glass from her thick locks. Her net of hair had caught the majority of the glass and, thankfully, protected her face.

  Eleanora took her card and bag with the smashed prescription and glasses from Maija and ran out the door. Crap, Maija thought. She would put the pills and glasses on Eleanora’s growing tab.

  In only a few minutes, the police arrived and Maija gave them a description of the assailant. “He was like a beast—ugly, sick, and a drug user.”

  “Any idea what triggered this?” The office took notes.

  “He’s on an antipsychotic. I can’t imagine how he sees the world.”

  Shandy and Tom did not back her up. They said they hadn’t seen a thing. By the end of all the brouhaha, Maija’s watch only read two o’clock.

  After the police left, Maija took refuge in the break room and locked the door by shoving a chair under the doorknob. Her hands quivered as she drank tinny-tasting water out of a Styrofoam c
up. The fake wood paneling that seemed to cover every surface in the room, from table to cabinets to the sides of the ancient microwave, felt as if they were pushing in against her. The fluorescent tube light flickered. As she sat in a cold plastic chair, she lifted her knees to her chest and held them tight for a moment. Her breath left her lips dry and cold. Why, she thought, hadn’t she seen the man’s attack coming? Her sight was really off, and it had taken her intuition as well. She should have known that he would explode. She should have smelled it, if not dreamt it. She looked at the clock that smirked at her. Two o’clock! She’d promised to take Isabella to her first gynecological appointment today. This was one of those moments for which bottling up emotions came in handy.

  She would also have to find an inconspicuous way to contact Eleanora to find out if she was healthy. She couldn’t just call her up as a pharmacy technician because that could lead to unnecessary questions. It was curiosity that really got to Maija. She could deal with emotions like anger, frustration, sadness, and happiness quite well, but she could not manage to quell curiosity once it made itself known. Curiosity would sit in the center of her thoughts like a shiny red box with a big gold bow, begging to be opened. She hated the suggestion of being haunted by a person who wasn’t even dead yet; perhaps she would attend the new member meeting for the PTA. She would have to find a way to speak with her.

  At least no one had been injured. Her thoughts were erratic, and her chest felt tight. Maija left the break room and told Tom that she was taking a sick day. Tom mumbled something about telling corporate, but Maija held her hand up to his face, which stopped the flow of words. She walked out of the pharmacy with her purse slung over her shoulder and looked under her car before she climbed in. Ach, she needed a cup of tea.

  Isabella

  Birds and bees, fowl and insect: Isabella tried to understand the connection between these two flying creatures and human reproduction. Euphemisms only complicated the transmission of knowledge. She prayed her mother wouldn’t feel the need to tell her about the birds and the bees, as she’d learned about sex long ago through a friend’s older sister. As her mom drove the Cutlass through the fog, Isabella bit a hangnail and drew blood. She sat stiffly in the passenger seat, holding her backpack in her lap like a life preserver. Her mother turned on the windshield wipers to clear the mist.

  “Oh, my God, Mama! Turn it off!” Isabella yelled. A large brown moth had gotten caught against the glass, only an inch from the wiper’s path. Her mother switched them off.

  “Poor creature.” Her mother slowed the car, and the moth escaped.

  Potholes punctuated the remainder of the ride to Dr. Gott’s office. Her mother seemed tenser than usual. Isabella’s stomachaches were worsening, and in a female form there were so many other organs down there, from ovaries to fallopian tubes, that Dr. Foster, their family physician, suggested Isabella make her first gynecological appointment to rule out ectopic pregnancy, cysts, and endometriosis. She could only imagine what her mother must’ve felt and thought when Dr. Foster even said the word pregnant. She must have freaked out. Isabella had no desire to have sex. Kissing, however, she thought of often when she saw Erik.

  Her mother had told her that Oma had never mentioned to her how babies were made but that she’d managed to make two. When Isabella woke at thirteen to blood in her panties, her mother said, Don’t fret, meita. This is a part of your life now. You are a woman now. And she left a box of tampons under the bathroom sink.

  “So, Izzy,” her mother said. “The exam might feel strange, but it only takes a second, and before you know it we’ll be on our way home.”

  “Okay, Mama.” Isabella clenched her jaw.

  Her mother inhaled, gripped the wheel, and said, “Do you have any questions you’d like to ask me? I mean, about, you know, the—sex.” She whispered the word sex.

  “No.” Isabella wished she had never heard the word sex from her mother’s mouth.

  “Because you know it is only meant for people who are married.”

  “Yeah, I get that.”

  “For making of the babies.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “You’re too young to have a baby.”

  “Mama!”

  Isabella wiped the small beads of sweat from her upper lip and daydreamed about being anywhere but locked in a moving vehicle with her mother skating around a sex talk. When they arrived at the doctor’s office and were assigned an exam room, Isabella said, “Mama, maybe you can wait in the car or the waiting room?”

  “No, no, I should come in with you.”

  “I don’t know, Mama.” Isabella imagined her mother’s awkwardness making the exam even worse.

  “I’ll come in.”

  “Mama, I just—”

  “Izzy, fine, go on and change and I will come in afterward.”

  Isabella sighed, frustrated by her mother’s cluelessness. She wanted to tell her she needed to do this alone. Instead she said, “Whatever.”

  Isabella entered the room, closed the door behind her, and put on the gown. She left her green-striped tube socks on as a remnant of a less naked world. The mint-green gown did not feel fresh, and it was rough against her skin. They’d said “take off everything,” so she had, almost.

  Now she examined the room: Q-tips and cotton balls, tongue depressors and a box of gloves, size extra-large. Dr. Gott must have big hands, Isabella thought, big paws. She opened the first drawer and found open boxes of syringes, small bottles with soft plastic lids, and a cream she couldn’t pronounce. She took a syringe and put it in the pocket of her jeans, which were folded up on a chair with the rest of her clothes.

  The next drawer was full of tubes of lotion, most with the word glide integrated into the brand name: AstroGlide, SureGlide, GlideRight. She looked at the biohazard waste can and noticed a scrap of tissue hanging out of the top. Doctor’s offices should be sterile so you forget about all the other butts that have sat on the table before yours, Isabella thought—like a thin piece of white paper can actually protect us from one another anyway. Might as well be sitting butt to butt with Mrs. Mulch (who she’d seen in the lobby making a follow-up appointment for something contagious) or Ms. Charlotte (who smelled as though she needed immediate attention). Isabella tore a few sheets of paper towels from the dispenser and put them bum-level on the table, then rested her bare back against the paper. Her gown left much to be desired, as it was nothing like a dress. They should call them aprons instead, or chaps perhaps, she thought.

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Mama?”

  Her mother entered the room and sat down with a stack of People magazines. Isabella gripped the crunchy paper. They wouldn’t find anything inside her unless she could get pregnant just by looking at someone. She remembered seventh grade, when the principal separated the girls and boys for reproductive abstinence education. Coach Seibel, chapped-lipped and red-faced, led the boys, and Ms. Johovic, an ex-army nurse, led the girls. Ms. Johovic was brutal in her description of the female anatomy as an “overly fertile fruit tree that would take the pollen from any bee to make a crabapple.” So romantic, Isabella thought. Ms. Johovic’s chalk drawing of the uterus looked like a cross-section of a fly.

  Thank God for the mobile that hung from the popcorn ceiling and the little origami horses that dangled from a carousel-type structure. Isabella wondered if the horses would keep her from freaking out during the examination. She had no idea how cold the forceps would be and how strange it would feel to shoot the breeze with someone while they opened you up inside and scraped your cervix with a tiny metal brush. Yet the horses danced, and Isabella watched. She heard metallic carousel music playing in her mind. She heard the organ puffing thick notes against the oompa-oompa of the tuba and the twang of a flute. She remembered the Mad Hatter’s un-birthday tea party. The air smelled of candy. Her skin grew dewy with midsummer humidity. The origami horses’ pulpy forms were shocking pink, blue, and yellow. She almost succeeded in leaving the fluorescent confin
es of the paper-toweled table. Then, with one shiver, she psychically returned to Dr. Gott’s examination room, awaiting Her Divinity’s presence.

  She didn’t know how much longer she could stand to wait. Her jeans looked so inviting and warm on the chair next to her mother. She wanted to get dressed. Her mother would understand; she obviously didn’t want to be here either. But then the door opened, and in walked the long-awaited white coat.

  “So.” The doctor looked Isabella up and down. “I am Dr. Gott, but you can call me Polly.” She shook her mother’s hand.

  Polly was an adult-shaped person, not tall but taller than Isabella, and she smelled of vanilla perfume. Isabella couldn’t get a good look at her hands. “It says here that you’re having pains in your abdomen?”

  “I guess. I mean, yes. Dr. Foster said it could just be food allergies or something, but that since I am fourteen, I should get checked out.” Isabella blushed.

  “And when did your last menstrual cycle begin?”

  “Oh, um, two weeks ago.”

  “Okay, and how long have you had pain in your abdomen?”

  “How long?”

  “When did this start?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “About two months, I’d say,” her mother interjected. “That’s when I had to start making peppermint tea for her every night. Yes, two months.”

  “How long does the pain last when it happens?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “An evening. It lasts the whole evening.” Her mother put down her magazine.

  “Okay, Isabella, is that true?”

  She shrugged a yes.

  “Well, let’s take a look then, okay? Just lie back for me and tell me when it hurts.” Dr. Gott pulled out the table extension, which allowed Isabella to rest her legs as Dr. Gott pressed her abdomen in various areas, beginning with the middle. Isabella could feel her lunch still sitting there in her stomach, and she hoped Dr. Gott didn’t think it was a tumor growing inside. The doctor’s large hands moved to the right, then the left, the lower center, the lower left. Her hands were huge. The nails were short. The mobile watched her as this woman pressed her belly. When she reached the lower right, Isabella lurched forward and upright.