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Fri | March 24, 2006

At the Doctor's

Kara, a young girl of sixteen, was a member of the National Honor Society and the Key Club. On Valentine's Day they sent candy grams to their classmates. How this related to the mission of the club had been long forgotten, or not considered to begin with.

In the fall, she found herself at the doctor's office for a yearly physical. Though she imagined the doctor's to be a healthy place, the waiting room smelled like stale vomit. This doctor had graduated from Yale. That was all her mother told her. They filled out forms. They waited for twenty minutes. Then Kara went into a sterile examining room.

After another twenty minutes, the doctor appeared. She was tall, and very pale. Her bony frame was a wooden hanger for a lab coat. When she spoke, her voice sounded distant, thinned out as voices do when they sing out of range.

They said hello.

"How old are you?"

"Sixteen."

"Have you gotten your period?"

"Yes."

"When did you get it?"

"When I was twelve. No, when I had just turned thirteen," she said. She reflected on the day she woke up and realized the meaning of the dark stain she had noticed the night before. Her mother had seemed proud and satisfied.

The doctor did not ask for the story. She looked attentively at Kara but indifferently and impassively.

"Have you had sex?"

It was not an unexpected question but the girl did not enjoy saying that she had not. It seemed to be an admission of immaturity.

"I'm going to have a look at you," the doctor said.

Kara responded to the instructions and lay down on the paper. She found herself coaxed into an unfamilar position. At the touch of the doctor's gloved fingers, Kara lifted her head and glimpsed the doctor's scrutinizing face. She felt the air touch her skin.

The doctor straightened up and the girl sat up on the examining bench. She wondered whether this doctor had sex and could not imagine it. She looked at the doctor's face and thought how dull it looked. There was no color in her face at all; her lips were thin and her eyes, though large, seemed dead.

The doctor seemed to take on a patronizing tone. "I see you have a tan. Do you wear sunscreen?"

"Yes," said the girl.

"Do you wear it every day?"

"Yes."

"You would not have a tan if you wore it every day."

"Okay," Kara said. She suddenly felt she wanted the interview to be over quickly.

The doctor told her to wear a hat—not a baseball cap, but a wide-brimmed hat. Kara promised that she would. She thought to herself that she would not. She answered the remaining questions with the briefest responses possible.

Later Kara realized that she had been wounded—a surprise like suddenly looking at your hand and seeing a cut, though not knowing when or how it happened. She did not like the ghastly, patronizing doctor. She thought angrily that her skin was naturally that color and that she should not look at it with the disapproval that the doctor had looked at her. It was the doctor who was unnaturally pale.

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