December 10, 2024
Image from page 337 of "Gynecology” (1918) by William Phillips Graves. Digitized by Open Knowledge Commons and Harvard Medical School.
There Seems To Be a Polyp On Your Uterine Wall
We sat on the balcony waiting for Sam to come over, and as the sun went down Lea drank barley tea because she’d seen on TikTok that it was good for digestion, and I tweezed my calf hair because I couldn’t afford a wax. Above us the sky turned from cerulean blue to lilac. Rose-tinged clouds drifted over the buildings, and I breathed in the humid mid-August air. As I came up on a year of living with Lea, reflecting on everything that had changed assumed a dramatic importance under the summer sky. I’d only met Lea because a friend of a friend had heard that she had an open room. Sam, her first roommate, had moved into the apartment across the hall after the two of them couldn’t agree on the decor. At least, that was how Lea told the story. I could tell there were other reasons.
Like, for instance, that last month Sam had cussed Lea out for borrowing his apartment key to do laundry and then taking it with her when she left to shoot a commercial in Colorado. She’d brought up their phone call almost every day in the week since she’d returned. She had convinced him he was in the wrong for being “a male aggressor inflicting trauma while she was on a high-pressure job,” even though she had cost him five hundred dollars on a locksmith. So I was not surprised when, once again, our conversation turned to how crazy it was that Sam had screamed at her, even though I had more sympathy for him and felt my face get hot with the knowledge that I was hiding this from her.
“What did he say again when he called me?” she asked.
“He said, ‘I’m being extorted.’”
“Right. So crazy.”
I’d also overheard Lea pretending not to know what was happening. Their conversation went something like:
“Wait, so you lost your keys at work today?”
“No, you took the keys to fucking Colorado.”
“What keys?”
“My keys.”
“But I don’t have your keys.”
“I gave you the keys to do laundry and I told you to leave them under the mat.”
“I just don’t know what keys you’re talking about.”
Next to me, Lea spoke again.
“The thing is, he didn’t need to scream at me like that. I ended up finding his key on my keychain. So it wasn’t lost.”
“Did you tell him?”
She took a long sip of her tea.
“Sam is undateable,” she said. “He’s been that way since high school. He only wants a ballerina scientist. And he actually found one once, but she wasn’t interested. He’s undateable.”
Sam opened the front door and walked in. She didn’t miss a beat.
“Sam, who’s the most insane person you’ve dated? We’re talking about the most insane people we’ve dated.”
“I don’t know,” he said, sitting back in the purple lawn chair beside me and crossing his legs. His dark hair brushed the shoulders of a black button up. “But yours has got to be Erdmann, right?”
Lea rolled her eyes. She loved to talk about her time in Berlin, back when she’d dropped out of Juilliard and gotten into an open relationship with a classical pianist who had paid for her personal trainer and head-to-toe electrolysis. By the time she left the country and enrolled at Columbia, she was strung out and anorexic. I never knew this Lea, and her characterization of this time varied wildly depending on how her life was going at any given moment. When she was getting booked on jobs and going on dates, she saw her younger self as misguided and going to raves for a sense of identity. When she went weeks alone and without work, she waxed poetic about the interesting people she met and gave dramatic anecdotes about Berlin sex parties and doing ketamine in the club bathrooms.
“It’s just ridiculous because I did so many drugs back then and I never got sick.”
“Right, you were just fine when you fled the country and showed up on my doorstep,” he said, smiling. The two of them were surprisingly at ease, considering their recent fight, and that Lea was referring to her possible cancer diagnosis. She’d had chronic diarrhea when she returned from Colorado, and gone to the doctor to get it checked out—“mostly,” she’d said, “to get antibiotics for an infected nipple ring.” The doctor found four cysts: two on her breasts, one her labia, and one on her ovaries. We didn’t yet know if they were benign.
What I hadn’t told Lea was that after Sam was locked out of his apartment for the night, I’d let him stay at our place, and we’d ended up having sex in the living room. It was an accident. He’d invited me to watch Good Time with him and leaned over to kiss me just as Connie realized the bag of stolen money and LSD were probably still in a haunted house ride at Adventureland. The lemon-scent of his cheeks overwhelmed me, and he wrapped one firm, long arm around my back. I remember biting his neck to get closer to that scent, to hold it on my tongue.
Afterwards, I scrubbed my tongue in the bathroom. I returned to my bedroom and lay on the floor, turning the evening over in my head: their phone call, the movie, that scent. I felt ashamed thinking about Lea and Sam, about me and Sam. I became nauseous, and lost in this nausea, I decided that I had done nothing wrong. All I had done was my fuck own friend on the night he was unable to get back into his apartment. I’d meant to ask Lea if she’d ever slept with him, but I never did.
Lea was scrolling on her phone. Her hair was in a high ponytail and her thick cat eyeliner had been re-applied after coming home from the doctor’s office. I found myself thinking as I had before that if I acted more like Lea, my life would be easier. I would exude more confidence, and people would probably take me more seriously. I often thought about how far she’d gotten as a producer through sheer willpower, and by convincing strangers she was successful and rich even though she’d grown up with basically nothing—her mom died when she was five, and the only reason she’d been able to afford Juilliard and later Pratt was that her dad had been in the military and the G.I. Bill had paid for the whole thing.
“Does my calf look hairy?” I asked.
Lea looked up from her phone and squinted her eyes. “Yeah, you still have a ways to go.”
I sighed. I wish I hadn’t asked.
“I guess the diarrhea made it look like I have a bad diet or something.”
My head shot up. “Why?”
“My blood test said I have high chloride and high triglycerides.”
“But that’s fine, right? Weren’t they checking that cancer didn’t metastasize?”
She met my eyes and lifted her chin. “Right. Now I just need to get this diarrhea in check.”
Sam lit a joint. I kept glancing at Lea, but she stared in the distance, and I got the sense that she was icing me out for using the word “cancer.” I wanted to help her, but I didn’t know how. I’d never seen a friend go through this kind of thing before. When Sam tried to pass me the weed, Lea waved him away and said I probably shouldn’t smoke tonight.
“She gets paranoid when she smokes,” and she gestured to her temple, twirling her finger.
“That’s pretty common,” Sam said.
“Last week, we were at a party and she took a hit of weed and I had to carry her to a chair because she almost blacked out. She has low blood pressure.”
I stared at the joint, which was weaving a trail of smoke in the air that drifted into the upstairs apartment. I didn’t have low blood pressure, or at least wasn’t diagnosed with it, but I tended not to eat a lot and Lea had gained a lot of weight in the year I’d lived with her. She started joking whenever she left for a trip that she’d told Sam to stop by and make sure I ate something.
“Yeah,” I said. “That was pretty funny.”
I reached out my hand and Sam passed me the joint.
“When are you going back to the office?” he asked me.
“Next month. My boss is in France and Greece until September.”
“Whereabouts?”
“I don’t know. I keep trying to look up the names of the places she goes, but I have no idea how to spell them. But she talks about the towns like I’m supposed to know them.”
“Well if you’re not going anywhere after work tomorrow, you could come over to watch a movie,” he suggested. We made eye contact for the first time. Under his thick eyelashes, his gaze was shy, endearing.
“Ooh.” Lea said, “We should watch Corsage. It’s this incredible period piece about an Austrian queen losing her mind after turning forty. It’s great. At one point, she cuts off all her hair and has her lady-in-waiting replace her for royal duties. Actually, we should do the same thing for my doctor’s appointments.” Lea threw back her head and laughed. “Can you imagine? You with black hair?”
During the day, it was easy to distance myself from Lea’s more bizarre conclusions, but as it got darker, and I was surrounded by the sounds of sirens and people shouting in the streets at night, my mind loosened by bodega weed, I felt as though I had stepped over a threshold, passed from a place of boredom into somewhere new and dangerous that I wasn’t sure how to navigate.
“You have good hair,” I said, gazing absently at a woman cooking dinner in an apartment across from us. “I’d do it for you.”
“How’d the appointment with the gynecologist go today, by the way?” Sam asked. “What about your other results? What’d they say?”
“Well, the doctor did an internal ultrasound,” Lea said. “And then she kept zooming the image in and looking at it for a long time, so I knew something was wrong. Especially when she took me to another room and sat me down on this nice chair and pulled up the photos. She told me the ovarian cyst doesn't seem to be malignant, but that it’s two and a half centimeters wide and filled with blood.”
She reached out to grab my wrist, and placed my hand on her upper breast tissue, just under the armpit, and pressed my hand in a circle. “You can feel the cyst in this one,” she said. And there it was: the delicate, bulging cyst. I flinched and tried to pull my hand away, but Lea dug her nails into my skin. Touching it, like thinking about the night Sam had been locked out, made me nauseous, and I was afraid of what these growths would mean for the future. She let go of my wrist and continued.
“Then she said something like, ‘There seems to be a polyp on your uterine wall.’ And it’s ‘not unlikely’ cancer. I don’t know. I began to fog over so the details are fuzzy. But I have to take a large dose of progesterone to try to shed it. And if that doesn't work, they’ll have to do surgery to cut it out or go in with a vacuum. She advised me about pain management in the meantime. Are your periods bad?”
“Mine? Not really. Not anymore.”
“Sometimes I lie in bed screaming on the first day of my period because it hurts so much. But only when you're not around, obviously. I thought that was normal. Everyone gets bad periods, you know?”
She said these words as dispassionately as possible, picking at her nail beds and sipping her tea. Before either Sam or I could say anything, she stood up and suggested we eat dinner. I walked in behind her. Lea had ordered us boba, pad thai, pineapple fried rice, spicy house noodles, avocado green curry, spring rolls, mango sticky rice, and three sides of white rice from the Thai place around the corner. The plastic containers were all over the kitchen counter. As her and Sam got plates out, I heard him ask more questions about the appointment. I didn’t want to be part of it, so I cleared the table.
I picked up the mail and found her paperwork from the doctor’s office. I flipped through the stack, heavy and dull in my hands. I read what she had described just moments before: the discovery of the polyp, and the need to remove it immediately for a biopsy. When Lea had first told me about her cysts, she’d been jet lagged and sick, and in clear need of some sort of support. I’d sat on the opposite end of the couch from her, holding my knees to my chest. I had always thought of myself as a gentle and warm person, but when she’d declared her need for support, I couldn’t find the right words to say. I didn’t know what might offer a sense of comfort. Instead, so far, I’d said almost nothing at all, and when I did speak up, I only found new ways to upset her.
“If you’re so worried, you could marry me to get visitation rights,” I heard Lea say behind me. “For when I’m sick and dying.”
I fumbled with the stack and ended up dropping it facedown on the ground. I took a few steps back, as if her illness, or her unhappiness, or her bad luck—I couldn’t decide which of the three—could infect me through the paper. So this was who I was when things got tough.
“Wait a minute, what the fuck? No way.”
I turned around. Lea was looking back and forth between me and Sam, her arms crossed. “When did this happen?” she asked.
Sam rubbed the back of his head.
“When you were in Colorado.”
“And neither of you thought to tell me?” Lea asked, her voice rising.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said, and ran out of the room.
“No, you don’t.”
I locked the bathroom door behind me. I nearly drowned splashing water on my face. Then I looked at myself in the mirror. I inspected every feature, every mole. I took off my clothes and turned on the shower and started scrubbing my body with the loofah. Lea’s in the kitchen trying to eat away her diagnosis so she can wake up tomorrow and say everything’s fine, I thought. And now she’s going to hate me because not only did I fuck her friend, I also lied about it. I wondered if I’d ever told her I cared for her, touched her arm, maybe even held her. In the year we’d lived together, I’d never done something so simple, so obvious, maybe because I was cold or incapable. I hadn’t wanted to believe it—Lea was sick—and my face disintegrated, washed away by hot water. After Sam and I had sex, I’d told him, the two of us lying naked on the couch, that I found it very difficult to live with Lea, that I’d struggled to get her to understand that my near-constant fatigue was not personal, but we had, nonetheless, a hard time relating to each other. He suggested, tracing a figure-eight pattern on my forearm, that I not worry about it: I simply was who I was. I pulled the loofah from my thigh and realized with some embarrassment that I’d scrubbed my skin raw. I took ragged breaths in and out and watched lines of water run down my red legs. I straightened my back and rinsed off, then stepped out of the shower. I put on a hoodie and sweatpants to hide what I’d done from my friends.
Back in the kitchen, Lea had a floral bathrobe on.
“You take a shower?” she asked.
“Uh, yes. Sorry.”
She twirled, letting the orange flowers that patterned her robe briefly dance up and away from her.
“Sam snagged this bathrobe from set today. “Is it good? Or terrible?”
She walked up to me so we stood face-to-face, her eyes challenging, cautious. She had dropped my betrayal for now, but I knew that when Sam left, she would ask me about it again. I hoped, when she did, that I would finally find the right thing to say: maybe I could start by saying I was sorry, or that I had been too embarrassed to tell her, or that, once she’d gone to the doctor, it felt too trivial to bring up. I took the straps of her bathrobe in my hands and tied them in a tight bow, then stepped back and met her eyes. I took a deep breath, and gave it my best shot.
“Good,” I said. “You look good.”
Brianna Di Monda is the editor in chief for the Cleveland Review of Books. Her fiction has been published in Prairie Schooner, Annulet, Worms Magazine, and The Summerset Review. She is a recipient of the Glenna Luschei Award for fiction and a semifinalist for the American Short(er) Fiction Prize.