From CRYBABY

My partner C.C. and I made an appointment with a fertility specialist. Dr. Saadat’s Beverly Hills office was filled with heavy furniture and photo albums of babies and their grateful parents. I expected to see a lot of thin, aging white women in the waiting room—the sort of people who were hung up on reproducing their own beautiful genes. As it turned out, all kinds of women filled the waiting room and the photo albums. A queer Latina couple with sparkly fingernails, the beaming mother of African-American triplets, a Persian woman with long straight hair, and a hyperactive toddler. 

Dr. Saadat was teddy-bear chubby with a relaxed Farsi drawl. Had he treated same-sex couples before? we asked. Yes, many. Were there any risks of ovarian cancer? Because I had a family history. Only if you do more than twelve cycles, he said. I was thirty-three. No one was worried it would take twelve cycles. Being thirty-three in a fertility office was like wearing a crown and a sash. 

Dr. Saadat said he’d order some basic tests. C.C. and I parted ways at the elevator to go to our offices on opposite ends of the city. As I was crossing the street, C.C. pulled up in her red Honda. She leaned out the window and yelled, “Hey, Mama, lookin’ fertile!” and I laughed.

*

The word endometriosis seemed to fall from the sky. I think my friend Nicole was the one to mention it, as a possible cause of her irritable bowel issues. My mind grabbed it and began to sew a story, like a pearl around sand, like rogue endometrial tissue around an intestine. Hadn’t I always had really bad menstrual cramps? Hadn’t my mom had endometriosis?

Later, when fact and fiction collided and erupted in the form of breast cancer, I would remind myself of this: My first self-diagnosis came before any actual diagnosis. I never had endometriosis. It all began with fiction. 

In early June I went to another office in Beverly Hills where they put a tube in my uterus and shot purple dye up my fallopian tubes, where thawed sperm might one day swim. The test made my abdomen cramp harder than even my worst period. The tech who administered it said my left tube was fine, my right might be blocked. Or it could just be a spasm.

I started to cry. The tech slowly backed away. He dealt in hysteria only in the most historical/mythological sense. He wanted no part of female emotion. 

After the dye test, I felt like I was dragging my heart around on the ground, tethered to a frayed string. C.C. said, “I’m sorry, I should have gone to the test with you.” As the weeks went by and I continued to mope, C.C. started to rescind her sympathy a bit. What was the huge deal? 

What was it? Certainly nothing I could name. And yet it was as if something I’d been trying to name my whole life—a particular kind of internal wrongness that would rain fire upon my attempts to find love—had been dyed purple and made visible.