Don’t Look Up

Her name is Maria. Apart from the woman who took my money and history and the woman who took my blood, she was the only person at the clinic with whom I spoke. She greeted me in the waiting room. She opened a door—a steel slab that bolted when it closed behind her—and said my fake name. I picked up my things and stood to meet her. A full-figured woman, burnished and dark, with broad bones and a round, open face, that day she wore a sarong striped in brilliant primary colors, and her mass of black hair shot out from her crown at sharply delineated angles. This was my official greeting, she said, now that the necessities—the money, the history, the blood—were behind us. She took my hand and held it a moment. She closed her free hand over our grip and exhaled lightly, her lips shaping a benevolent smile. “Hi,” she said, giving my hand a firm squeeze. “Hi,” I said, and smiled back, though I was sure I’d said that already. She greeted me as if she’d been waiting all day for me, as if I had stepped into the company of friends and she was delighted to have me. I followed her to the reception counter. She reached over the top and picked up the file of forms I’d filled out. “Is this Susan?” she asked, waving the folder to someone in back. “That’s the one,” a woman said. Behind the counter, several women busied themselves at different stations. I couldn’t tell from the clothes they wore what their functions were. They wore blue jeans and T-shirts or gypsy skirts and gauze tops. Only one of them, I noticed, could be bothered to put on a bra. I tried to determine who among them was medical and who was not. The woman who took my blood sat at a desk and, with a dropper, drew samples from a tray of red vials. She dripped the blood in brazen dots across a row of glass slides. When the phone rang, she got up to answer it and settled in at that station, and another woman walked over and sat down in her place. Each seemed capable of doing everything. I scanned the walls for a medical certificate of any kind. I approached the one woman I had not seen leave her seat—the woman who took my money—and leaned over the counter to speak to her.