There was a twinge when I went pee. A hook at the end. It almost felt good.
I’d been warned about this feeling before. Urinary Tract Infection. This was the latest in a long list of incidents in this place I couldn’t see or tend. When I put my fingers inside I felt nothing but a little pressure, like it wasn’t really me I was touching. My insides were a collection of happenings: the first, the cyst on my left ovary. I was eleven, sleeping over in a summer girl’s guest bedroom. I woke up at sunrise to a mouthful of spit, and stayed awake swallowing. That morning I went with her family to the Children’s Relay at the town pool. In the deep end, the lifeguard floated saltines on the surface of the water. We were meant to swim to the crackers before they dissolved, eat the pulpy mush, and race each other back to the shallows. At the finish line all cracker was to be swallowed; they would check our mouths. I threw up in the water. The gynecologist’s fingers were the first I had inside me, and then her jellied speculum.
A second cyst, so rare three interns were brought in to look. Before babies are male or female they have a duct, explained the doctor. For girls it disappears but when some vestige stays it forms a pouch. I had just read a book about a tall girl with internal male sex organs, undiscovered until a tractor accident at age fourteen. The book troubled me — the incubating clutch with its invisible hunger and hormones, and the doctor reaching inside like a magician performing a hat trick. No, nothing like that, said the doctor. You’re perfectly normal.
Left ovary, said the psychic. Be careful. You might get to keep it, but it’s probably best if you don’t.
Twins in your family? she said.
No.
All right, she said. But there will be twins.
Bacteria. Spreading from urethra to bladder, my first UTI. The feeling was unsettling, but my mind was on Ruth, waiting by the window in the shared silence of a house put to bed. I was afraid to open the bathroom door and when I did she was gone.
My two previous boyfriends’ mothers were also named Ruth. Luke’s Ruth stood out in the lineup; the others had gray wiry hair, thick socks over thick ankles, bucket-like wool hats that they crocheted themselves. Both walked a large number of dogs, cleaned counters with disinfectant wipes, and made large bland batches of scrambled eggs. Of course there were differences, but these were the ways in which they were the same.
Luke’s Ruth was tiny, powdered pale, with dark, tailored jackets and pants hemmed to expose a whittled inch of wrist or ankle. Her hair was a silky black tussle, and often she fixed it during conversation, her lips pursing bobby pins. I never saw her mouth without red lipstick. She wore her collarbones like jewelry.
Luke showed me postcards of her paintings, black ink swiped across huge blank canvases. Their home was full of art, but none of it was hers: sailboats on the lake, pink dabs for sailors’ faces; children kicking their feet at the end of a dock; a spaniel chasing down a flock of grouse.
Luke left me alone with Ruth in the hotel room while he and Jay played a game of tennis. She poured wine into two paper cups.
“I feel slightly deranged,” she said, holding her hand over her smile. There was a small gap between her front teeth. “Too many miles of yellow lines.” Our paper cups pressed together in a silent cheers. We sat on the bed and sipped.
I thought maybe I would tell her about my infection, but I didn’t. My discomfort stayed in the background during the first leg of the car ride. What I’d expected as we pulled onto the eight-hour stretch of highway was a repeat of my mother’s lore: fifteen, she had a UTI on a road trip to drop my aunt at a psychiatric hospital. My grandmother was behind the wheel. They were driving from Maine to Virginia with cold cloths tied around their foreheads, and Chinese fans in hand. My aunt was in the passenger seat, reeling from a nervous breakdown, afraid of the radio. My grandmother drove all day and night — she would not stop. My mother’s urge to pee was a plague, and the idea of relief was false, just a searing trickle. She crouched in the backseat and peed into a pickle jar. “Don’t come crying to me,” said my grandmother. “I know you’ve been sleeping around.”
“I think they left us here to bond,” said Ruth. “Either that or they’re trying to bond. One of us will. I think we have a good chance at beating them.”
But we were nervous together. The wax on my cup had softened by the second use. The paper warped beneath my fingers.
“What do you see in Luke?” she asked, just as our silence was starting to feel comfortable. I was starving, the wine slippery in my stomach.
I said he was generous, or open. Or sweet.
“I don’t have an answer,” I said at the end of my answer. “I just love him. I don’t know why.”
Another cup of wine.
“That’s right,” she said. “He is sweet. He’s young. We all love him.” She drank from the bottle and handed it to me. It was nearly empty. I put my mouth over the blot from her lipstick.
“I hope you take good care of each other.”
“We will,” I said. “We do.”
“Lovely ladies,” Jay called down the hallway. Ruth and I were punching numbers at the vending machine. Ruth kept punching DD instead of D7. She kicked the machine when it didn’t release her Hershey bar.
“Easy,” Jay said. “My wife the sugar junkie.” His smile was seamless porcelain. He scooped her up.
“I’m famished!” she yelled. She kicked at his thighs. He opened the door and threw her on the bed.
Luke was wearing a new white Sheraton Hotel visor, and so was Jay. I wanted to make a joking gesture toward the visor, and with the same look reprimand him for leaving me alone too long, but he wouldn’t look back at me. He spun the racket handle inside his palm and watched Ruth.
Jay pulled her feet into his lap and rubbed them.
“Be gentle. I broke it kicking the machine.” His hands cupped her foot. Between his fingers I could see her toes wiggling.
“Here, Mom,” said Luke. “Consolation prize.” He pulled another matching visor from a paper bag and fit it over her delicate twist of hair. Her ears stuck out, folded by the weight of the wide white brim.
“So good to me,” she said. When she tried to take it off the Velcro on the band snagged her hair. Her hands struggled at the back of her head.
“Let me,” Jay said, but she yanked free before he could help and tossed the visor into my lap. “We can share it.”
Strands of her hair hung from the Velcro, and I covered them with my hand.
Luke was a generous man, and a sweet man, but I do not remember much. There are still frames I can explore, with their own smells and sounds, and he prowls and paces my memory like its borders cage him.
We went back to our hotel room, adjacent to Ruth and Jay’s, after dinner.
Maybe this night we stood in the shower and soaped each other’s backs and chests, and when I looked at him I said in my head, here I am, here I am, here I am, but mostly I looked at my hand as it soaped and thought about some other thing, like when would he move aside so I could have the hot water.
Or the hotel sheets were shiny and smooth, my legs feeling wonderful because I’d shaved them and the sheets were satin.
Or that was the night he went to the bathroom and drank three glasses of water in a row, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his throat, and said “Will you watch it around my mom?”
I said, “What do you mean?”
“Just take it easy around her.”
“What, I like her.”
“Like drinking. Drinking with her.”
“Why’d you never mention it before? If it worries you?”
“She never drank before,” he said.