The Continuity Girl (4 page)

Love, Mums

P.S. No need to worry about ££ as I have arranged a job for you doing whatever it is you do.

Meredith set down her celery stick and dabbed the corners of her mouth with a cloth napkin. Picking up the letter from her
lap, she folded it into quarters and placed it back in its envelope. After a moment of silent deliberation she got up from
the sofa, crossed the room and tucked the envelope into a slim file in her bottom desk drawer labeled
CORRESPONDENCE—THAT WOMAN
.

The green voice-mail light was blinking so she picked up her phone and dialed. The phone company fembot informed her she had
three new messages. She pressed one and was not surprised to hear the voice of her agent, a warm, fat mother of four named
Fran.

“Meredith, it’s me. Happy birthday, honey. Listen, I just got a message from someone in Felsted’s production office at the
studio and they sound pretty ticked off. I just wanted to talk to you before I called them back. Could you call me? Thanks.”

Meredith pressed seven to delete, and then one to hear the next message. Fran again. This time more distressed.

“Meredith. Fran here. Your cell seems to be turned off. The production office called again and I told them I’m waiting to
hear from you. I know it’s your birthday but let’s get this sorted out.”

Next: the same voice, but cooler and clipped. “Meredith, listen. This is important. Felsted’s people are saying you walked
off his set. Is this true? I need to hear from you. It’s your
agent
speaking.”

Meredith was about to hang up when the fembot announced, “One new message has been added to your mailbox. To listen to your
message, press one.” Crunching on her celery stick, Meredith hit one. It was Fran again, but this time frothing with delight.

“Hi, sweetie, it’s me. Sounds like you’re on the other line. Listen, forget about Felsted for now. I just got a call from
Osmond Crouch’s people in London.
Osmond Crouch!
They’re shooting a big feature in England and they want you on the set next
week. You’ve got British citizenship, right? That’s what I told them, anyway. Called completely out of the blue—they got my
home number somehow. I had Viia and Ashton in the tub at the time—there’s water everywhere! I hope you’re excited, sweetheart.
They’re faxing over the contract tomorrow. I hope your passport’s up to date ’cause you’re on your way to jolly old...”

Meredith hung up. Across the room on the granite kitchen island sat the white ceramic coffee mug she had set out to soak that
morning. She flicked on the kitchen halogens, lifted the mug and peered inside. Impressively, the coffee sludge, which only
a few hours ago had hardened into a charcoal-colored resin at the bottom, had dislodged and redistributed itself throughout
the liquid, tinting the remaining soapsuds brown. Meredith emptied the mug, wiped, rinsed, dried and replaced it on the specially
designated hanging hooks in the cupboard. She returned to the sofa and resumed rabbiting down her celery sticks. Eating seemed
to take forever. It was more work than working.

She did not turn on the television. Instead, she stared at the coffee table in front of her. There was nothing on it but half
a glass of red wine, a stack of magazines (
Us, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, American Cinematographer
) and the plane ticket
her mother had sent her. She examined the airline (BA), the class (economy), and finally, the date (Thursday). The day before
Osmond Crouch’s people wanted her in London.

Meredith picked up the phone and, even though it was past midnight, dialed her agent’s number.

She was often early but never late to her annual Pap appointment. It was a superstitious thing.

“Afternoon, hon,” said Hyacinth, the receptionist, fiddling with the radio dial to find her preferred easy rock station.

Meredith snapped her health card on the counter.

As Whitney Houston’s warbling filled the waiting room, she felt her shoulder blades unlock. For some reason she found it strangely
relaxing here. Hyacinth typed her numbers into the computer.

“You’re aware Dr. Stein is on stress leave, so Dr. Veil will be filling in?”

“Is she...okay?”

“Oh, fine. Just needs some time with her boys. And don’t worry—you’ll like Dr. Veil. You’ll be in the hands of an internationally
renowned specialist.” Hyacinth winked. “Dr. Veil’s on TV.”

Meredith lowered her bum into the waiting-room chair gingerly, like a schoolteacher afraid of tacks. She failed to take her
usual pleasure in the room’s finishings: the raw-silk seat covers, the fake lilies, the tidy stacks of magazines dating back
to medieval times (Sharon Stone smiled on the cover of one). She didn’t do her favorite waiting-room experiment, the one where
she flipped open a magazine from the top of the pile and one from the bottom to confirm that, even over a five-year span,
the advice inside was exactly the same. (“Wash your hair in vinegar to make it soft.” “Drink cranberry juice for bladder infections.”
“Place cucumber slices over the eyes to erase dark circles.” “Give your man blow jobs to stop his wandering eye.”) Usually
these dribs of common wisdom delighted her, but not today. She was deeply suspicious of change where gynecological practices
were concerned.

Dr. Stein had been a figure in her life ever since high school. As a teen, Meredith would take the subway here, bare-kneed
and itchy under her kilt, and ask quavery questions about boys and fluids. Once, she came in certain she was dying of syphilis
(caught, she reasoned, from a short boy’s groping paw at a school dance), but it turned out only to be her first yeast infection.
She had waited in this very room for her first morning-after pill, her first breast exam, her first of many STD tests (the
truth was, Meredith had had more STD tests than unprotected sex in her adult life). The only hope was that the new doctor
would be as compassionate and rigorous as Dr. Stein.

Hyacinth ushered her into the examination room and told her the doctor would be with her in a moment. Meredith noticed certain
details had been altered since she was last here. The broken cuckoo clock had been taken off the wall, replaced by a Nicolas
de Staël calendar. The small metal-frame desk was messier than usual, jumbled with pamphlets and script pads. Propped on the
corner was a framed snapshot of an almond-eyed toddler peeking over the rim of a giant white teacup. Meredith recognized the
setting as the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party ride at Disney World—

“Ever been there?”

A man in a lab coat was leaning in the doorway. He looked too happy and sharply focused to be a doctor. Not in real life,
Meredith thought, figuring him for a student. Meredith half-coughed, half-laughed, focused intently on the photograph and
wished he would go away. Who wanted to make small talk before a Pap smear?

“My mother believed amusement parks were a religious conspiracy,” she said, gaze cemented on the photo of the child. There
was a gap between the little girl’s front teeth. “She took me to nude beaches in Norway instead.”

“Sounds like a racy gal.”

“She is. Completely nuts. Lives in London. England.”

“You don’t sound English.”

“I grew up in Canada. Boarding school was cheaper overseas, not to mention farther away.”

Meredith wished someone would duct-tape her mouth shut. There was a silence, and when she peeked back she noticed the man
was smiling and had extended his left hand toward her. What an odd thing—to shake with the left, Meredith thought, applying
her palm to his. She wondered if he was allowed to do that. Shake hands. It seemed somehow inappropriate.

“Hello, uh”—he glanced down at the chart—“Meredith. I’m Joe Veil. I’m filling in for Dr. Stein.”

There was an awkward pause.

“Is that all right?” he asked.

Meredith picked at some grit trapped under her right thumbnail. “I wasn’t expecting a man,” she said finally.

“That’s fine,” he said. “I can refer you to someone else. You may have to wait a couple of weeks.”

“I can’t,” Meredith said. “I’m going out of town and I need to do this now. There’s no other time.”

“So do you want to proceed with the appointment then?”

“Not particularly.”

He tossed the chart on the desk and looked at her. “So what are you saying?”

“Whatever.” She glowered. “Let’s get this over with.”

“All right,” he said, closing the door behind him. “I’m both a gynecologist and fertility specialist. I haven’t done much
clinic work in recent years, so this is a bit of an anomaly for me too. Now,” he said, sitting down, crossing his legs and
checking the chart again, “you’re here for a Pap smear?”

Meredith corrected her posture and smiled as if to say, Ah, of course, you are the handsome stranger who is preparing to scrape
my cervix with a Popsicle stick—and I am
completely
comfortable with that.

He continued to leaf through his papers without looking at her. Meredith noticed his wedding band—white gold, fine, a little
loose. She always checked.

“First off, I have the results of your G-test,” he said.

Meredith nodded tightly.

The GnRH analogue test (commonly known as the G-test) was a new procedure that gauged female fecundity by measuring both ovarian
function and the state of the ovarian reserve. Meredith had asked Dr. Stein about it after reading a magazine article on the
high incidence of perimenopause (prematurely aged eggs) in professional females in their mid-thirties. It was the results
of a G-test that had kicked off Mish’s two-year insemination obsession, and Meredith (who was a couple of years younger) was
determined not to get stuck with an abdomen of raisins at the age of thirty-nine. She knew it was a pragmatic, preliminary
investigation—but what was so romantic about fertility anyway? What, after all, was responsible for the desire to have children
other than an involuntary biological twitch? What separated it from hunger or the urge to draw breath? On the other hand,
what made it any less important? Why fight it, Meredith thought, when you can
do it right
instead? And so she convinced Dr.
Stein to administer the G-test, a noninvasive procedure involving one blood test and two inhalers of gaseous hormones meant
to stimulate the pituitary gland and measure rate of ovulation. The whole thing seemed like a pretty good deal in the end:
Meredith endured a bit of dizziness and paid a thousand bucks in order to count how many eggs were left in her basket. This
information, in turn, promised to give a rough picture of her window of fertility in coming years (she thought of it as the
“pre-premenopausal period” and sometimes before sleep would say it aloud three times fast).

Meredith closed her eyes and quickly opened them again. As she had suspected, Dr. Joe was just as male and married as he had
been three-quarters of a second before.

“Okay, lay it on me.”

“First of all I want to make sure you’re aware of how the G-test works. You know we give you hormone treatments in order to
stimulate your pituitary gland, which controls the ovulation function in your reproductive system, and this way we are able
to determine both rate of ovulation and—”

“Yes, I’m familiar with how it works, Dr. Veil. Just the results, please.” Meredith noticed yet again how she sounded unintentionally
bitchy when she was nervous.

“All right.” He lifted the clipboard closer to read what was written there. “It seems that your ovulation rate is somewhat
depleted, which is not unusual for a woman of your age. You’re thirty-four?”

“Thirty-five.”

The doctor flipped back to the questionnaire portion of the test.

“A smoker?”

“Never.”

“Right. Well, that’s good. Smoking decreases ovulation rate dramatically.”

“But you thought I
might
be a smoker. Isn’t that bad?”

“Not necessarily. Your results show that your ovulation rate is lower than it probably was a decade ago. But what I’m saying
is, this is normal. How long have you been trying?”

“I haven’t yet. I was just wondering for when I
do
try. I mean, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I should
start
trying.
Or at least
trying
to try.”

“So you’ve been thinking about trying to try to conceive?”

“That’s right.”

“Do you mind if I level with you?”

“Absolutely not.”

“As I mentioned, I’m a fertility specialist at Women’s College, which means I spend most of my waking hours trying to get
women pregnant.” He paused, looking slightly perplexed. “In a manner of speaking.”

Meredith smiled, then she thought of Mish, of the ribbon of blood unfurling down her inner thigh.

“Most women who come to me are not as forward-thinking as you,” Dr. Veil went on. “They end up in my office at the age of
forty or later, after they’ve been trying with their partners off and on for five years. We do everything we can, but by that
time, more often than not, it’s too late.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that if you really want a baby, you should start trying as soon as you can. Within the year is my advice.”

“This year!” she accidentally shouted. “How am I supposed to fit in having a baby this year? You talk about it as if it’s
just a matter of putting in the effort, like ‘Don’t forget to clean out those eaves troughs before winter comes.’ It’s crazy.
I don’t even have a boyfriend. I haven’t been on a date in months. I work all the time. I barely have time to take care of
myself, let alone someone else. I have no family here. My friends are either turning into their parents or are completely
fucked up.”

He waited for her to finish before starting to speak. “Meredith, you seem pretty pulled together—”

She interrupted him with a sharp laugh. “You know, that’s what everyone always says about me. I seem so together. So on top
of everything. So under control. But you know what I feel like inside? A bomb site. A disaster area.” She opened her eyes
wide and pointed to her chest. “I am Beirut.”