Eggs, Cream, and Baby Fever

I walk with her to the women and infants hospital where she was born over 2 decades ago. We have a late lunch at Bert’s, in a booth topped with plates of corned-beef hash, scrambled eggs, biscuits and gravy, and hot chocolates with stiff peaks.

She gets cream on her nose and I move to wipe it off with my finger but reach for a napkin instead, trying to be sensitive to my lesbian tendencies.

In the waiting room, I sit at a brown vinyl couch with an elaborate diamond-shaped perforation pattern. She returns with a heavyset nurse with a trace of a Scottish accent who reminds me of my grandmother. I fantasize about getting down on my knees and pressing my head into her chest, breathing in her powdery scent.

In the days following the procedure she feels herself recoil at the sight of men. The insertion of the copper device cast a pain she had not anticipated. A sense of having been wronged seeped from it into her blood, flashing hot against the thin lining of her uterus. 

The Greeks thought that a womb was not located in a fixed point of the body. The womb was something that floated around the body, and sperm weighed the womb down and made it locate itself. There is a lot that weighs the womb down nowadays.

She says her fear of egg yolks is bound to the mystery of the egg itself, of the reproductive system of the chicken. Her concern is that if the yolk remains intact as it enters the body and reaches a warm encasing stomach, it could believe itself to have returned to its mother and continue its rightful development. 

The egg would not discriminate between the stomach of a small girl or an elderly man, as long as it could sustain a pleasurable temperature. The possibility of unwittingly being passed on a pregnancy from a feathered mammal is reasonable ground for real fright to a child. Or anyone at that.