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The Girl in The Yellow Dress
If Dickens had been Mexican, his books
would be illustrated with faces like hers.
She said her name was Elena
Maria Sanchez. She didn’t look a day over fourteen.
It was April, a few months
after I’d hung out my shingle and sent out the junk mail all over the
county to announce my brand new family practice. The room that served as
my waiting room and office smelled a little too much of antiseptic and I
was adding air freshener to my shopping list when my newly
painted, bright blue front door swung open.
I thought she must be the
daughter of a patient. But when she sat down alone in a corner chair,
knees together, shoulders hunched, eyes darting everywhere like a mouse
forced from its hidey hole, I had to conclude that she was here on her
own.
She put me in mind of a leaf
withered and stunted by some blight before it was half grown. The short,
thin fingers that clutched the ballpoint pen as she filled out my
standard form went white with the effort.
Eyes much too big for her face
seemed to avoid where I sat behind my desk trying to catch up on the
never-ending paperwork. Round and dark as hot tar, those eyes flitted
back and forth across the row of framed certificates on my wall. Finally
her eyes landed on me.. “Donde esta...?” She pointed at the wall.
I said yes, “That’s me.”
She tilted her head, and gave
me a troubled gaze.
I was used to that. People
sometimes have trouble reconciling the name, Harper Gideon, on my
certificates and diplomas with my obviously female person. Any attempt
to shorten Harper becomes Harpy. Not exactly an image one wants to
encourage. I prefer to go by my middle name, Nicole.
My dad was a nice white guy.
They met at UCLA. According to her, he went back to Albuquerque without
knowing she was pregnant. She would never say more than that.
She named me Harper after her
own father. Maybe she thought he’d accept me better. She was wrong. He
was annoyed by it. He was a small man, and easy to annoy. He didn’t much
like the idea that I was part white. He was a professor at the
University of Southern California. So much for diversity. My mom died of
colon cancer a couple years ago, when I was thirty-one.
I didn’t come to New Mexico to
find the man who donated half my genes. How could he just dump my mother
like that? And he might not be thrilled at the idea of a half black
daughter.
But for some reason, New Mexico had always
sounded kind of exotic to me.
Feeling like an hulking giant
next to the somewhat shabby miniature doll who sat across my waiting
room, I tried to be reassuring, “I speak very little Spanish.” I keep
my hair straight with a little curl, and some people take me for
Hispanic. But I hadn’t been in New Mexico long enough to learn more than
a few words. “Poco.” I said carefully. “Pequeño,”. Not
sure either of those was right, I held up thumb and forefinger to
connote little.
She nodded and tried to smile,
but it didn’t come off very convincing. “Si, doc-tor.”
“No,” I shook my head quickly.
“I’m not a doctor.” I have just about every medical degree except
doctor. “I’m a nurse practitioner. ”
“Comadrona?”
I shook my head recognizing the
word for midwife. I was certified and licensed as such, but in New
Mexico it’s almost impossible to be a midwife. The malpractice
insurance was out of sight. Enfermera. Nurse. I didn’t know the
term, if there was one, for Nurse Practitioner.
Looking puzzled, she stood. “No
doc-tor?
If I had just suggested she
might prefer Dr. Garcia in Espanola, my life would have been very
different. But she looked so frail and panic stricken that I said,
“Okay comadrona, whatever.” The crazy thing about New Mexico was
I could deliver a baby for a woman on Medicaid if she signs a paper
saying she knows I don’t have malpractice insurance that covers
obstetrics.
“You will have a baby? A
niño?”
She drew back as if I was
trying to give her one she didn’t want.
I glanced at the form she had
filled in with writing so small I could hardly read it. It seemed to be
a mixture of Spanish and English. The space beside Insurance was
blank.
“Is your husband ... su
... esposo outside?” I thought I saw a guy at the wheel of a
blue pickup before the door had swung closed behind her. She wasn’t
wearing a ring, but I didn’t know the word for boyfriend. Whatever he
was, maybe he spoke English.
“No,” she said hurriedly,
sounding shocked that I should even ask. Then, catching my worried look,
she lowered her voice and said again, “No, Señora.”
“Have you tested positive?”
Most women do at least one test themselves.
Two little lines dented the
space above her nose. Nothing else about her face changed.
I crossed the room and took her
hand. “Come. Let’s find out if you will have a niño.”
She followed me to the
examination room and immediately began stripping off her drab little
dress. The fabric had faded so much I could only tell it had once been
bright yellow from the line of dye that still lingered around the seams.
A thrift shop would not have accepted the garment as a donation.
As a nurse, I am meticulous and
systematic. It’s good discipline. It keeps one’s impulses from charging
off in the wrong direction. Still, it was only after she had perched
awkwardly on the table under the bright fluorescent light, that I saw
what I should have noticed before: a slight swelling and purplish tint
of the flesh on the cheekbone beneath her right eye.
No wonder she hadn’t wanted her
husband, boyfriend, or whatever, to come in.
Watching me, she gave her head
a small shake, as if reading my thoughts, then looked away. and wrapped
thin, goose-bumped arms around herself.
The room wasn’t cold, but I
made a mental note to get a wall heater. I wanted my exam room to be
comfortable and cheery. The cheer was already on the walls: big
Peanuts cartoons.
The girl—I could hardly think
of her as a woman—had blood pressure a little on the high side, but
that’s not uncommon. Few women are casual about pregnancy; either they
desperately want to be pregnant or even more desperately do not.
I tried to take her history.
She understood measles and chicken pox but didn’t seem to know when her
last period was. That seemed odd. Most women keep obsessive track of
their cycle.
“Do you want to have a baby?” I
asked.
“No.” Her eyes flashed with
something like fright.
“No. Por favor.”
I remembered that later, on
what was just about the worst night of my life.
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