The Second
Rain hammers at the window as Androulla hoists herself up onto the examination table. It spans the wall of a utilitarian office above Makarios Avenue, a street vibrant with swimwear shops and, now, girls shrieking to escape the weather. The window rattles. Turning her head, Androulla notes that its sill could do with a clean.
“We’ll check everything,” the doctor says, brandishing his transducer, “to be sure. Lay back.”
Androulla draws her knees up. The paper towel shifts up the table with her, and she leans forward to straighten it. As though oblivious, the doctor advances. Androulla stammers apologies as she fumbles with her zip. She didn’t know, when she pulled on her jeans this morning, that she would be shimmying out of them on her back. If she had, she might have worn looser trousers. Or accepted her mother’s offer to accompany her to this appointment.
“For all the cowboys they have here,” Olympia had muttered, this morning.
“Lift up,” the doctor says.
Olympia is wrong about Cyprus, Androulla tells herself as she pulls up her top. Her first short sleeve of the year. The rain comes harder at the window.
“Up,” the doctor repeats, exposing the band of Androulla’s bra.
Her cheeks warm to a matching red. Before she can ask the doctor what he is doing, why he needs to see her undressed, he spurts cold gel onto her stomach.
“Relax.”
“Sorry. It tickles,” she says, as her gasp gives way to a giggle.
He is rubbing the gel around her stomach with the nose of the transducer, making her tense up.
“Relax,” he says again, this time looking away.
She follows his gaze along the wire to a hulking grey machine. On top of it, a screen echoes her insides in black-and-white. She turns her eyes up to the ceiling, commanding her body to soften as the transducer digs deeper into her abdomen. Her bladder cries out, sharply.
“Okay,” the doctor murmurs.
Androulla catches the scent of coffee on his breath. The pressure moves higher up her torso, over her belly button and ribs. As he comes to her breasts, she stills. She takes in his grey stubble and his sun-ripened skin, the rectangular lenses through which he is staring back at her. The cold creeps over her chest before he retracts his transducer.
“Turn your head,” he says.
Heart thudding, she looks to the window. It is a panel of grey, a rare sight in Cyprus. Androulla wills the rain to wash away her discomfort as the pressure returns to her neck. This is it, she thinks. The doctor pauses over the lump that she has been prodding for days. It isn’t a visible protrusion, but one that she felt as she rubbed at the base of her neck. A hardened ball, about the size of a pea, that slid out from under her finger like it didn’t want to be discovered. Not until it had grown, Androulla feared, into something larger and altogether more sinister.
The doctor lets out a grunt. She looks sideways at him. He is leaning closer to the screen, pressing harder at her neck until the growth catches and she whimpers.
“Turn on the other side,” he instructs her, pulling back.
Androulla does as he says. “Am I okay?” she asks, in a voice made small by the weight upon her windpipe.
The doctor keeps his lips pressed firm until the machine gives him an invisible sign.
Finally, he lifts her right forearm. “Where was the previous cyst?” he asks.
She points to the pink-white scar beneath her elbow, grimacing at its tenderness under the transducer. Then she exhales.
“Okay,” the doctor says, as he hangs it up. He hands her a wad of tissue thinner than kitchen roll. “Clean yourself, and we’ll see the results.”
Wiping the gel off her stomach, Androulla casts the tissue into a corner bin. Her skin still feels slick as she pulls up her jeans, but she doesn’t want to ask the doctor for more. He is sitting at another screen when she rounds the corner, indicating a seat across his desk. She takes it, pulsing her leg up and down and surveying the room. Another, larger window with the rain streaking down it. Dark wooden shelves of anatomical models, and books whose titles she cannot focus on.
“I had another cyst, like, ten years ago? When I was fourteen,” she says, to break the silence. “It was on one of my ovaries, and it ruptured . . .”
“Yes,” the doctor says, without looking up from his computer. “You have polycystic ovaries.”
With a ‘click’, the mouse gives way beneath his finger, a printer wheezes into action and he crosses the room. Androulla blinks.
“This is your scan,” the doctor says, sliding a sonogram across the desk as he resumes his seat. “All healthy. There is just one swollen lymph node in your neck.”
Androulla searches the image. “Is that bad?” she asks, looking up at the doctor.
He waves a hand. “This is a benign situation. Probably, it’s because of your acne.”
Her hands rise to her jaw.
“And your acne, probably, is because of your polycystic ovaries. Don’t worry about this.” He reaches for a notepad and pen. “I’ll write you some pills to help with your skin. They’re one-hundred percent natural, no chemicals. You’ll see a lot of improvement.”
“Right,” Androulla says. She lowers her hands. “Sorry, so polycystic ovaries. What is that?”
At the bottom of his page, the doctor signs off with a loose scribble. “You have irregular periods?”
“Sometimes,” she admits.
“This is polycystic ovaries. You have a lot of scarring, you can see here,” he says, with a nod towards her scan. “It’s a common condition which affects the function of the ovaries. You have to take care of them with your diet. No sugar, no carbs. Because you see, with these,” he says, indicating one of several dark patches, “you will never catch a baby.”
There is a thud as he stamps his page, then tears it off and holds it out to her.
“Okay? You can find these pills in any pharmacy. I want you to take two per day, and in six weeks we’ll see how your lymph node is going on.”
The paper feels like nothing between Androulla’s fingers.
“Thank you,” she says, folding it into her tote bag.
“Geiá sas,” the doctor bids her, sitting back.
It is only as she is settling up with his receptionist, wincing, that Androulla realises they have been speaking in English. Despite her Greek-speaking parents and the year that she has lived in Cyprus, she shies away from technical language. Anything medical, or legal. This is happening more often, as if to secure her status as a Cypriot she must first regress from her strong start of ordering in coffee shops and exchanging anecdotes with her stepfather. She drifts down the stairs of the doctor’s office to the car park, where no one has stopped inside the lines and the rain is falling, steadily. She forgets it slicking down her back as she walks the twenty minutes home to her apartment.
“Oh,” Giannis says, when he opens the door. He stands back to watch her drip onto the mat. “I told you, you should have worn a jacket.”
“Mmn hmn,” Androulla says, kicking off her trainers. She lifts them over the threshold, pulling the door shut behind her.
“Hi, Wife,” Giannis says, as he takes her into his arms.
“Hi, Wife,” she mimics, into his chest.
Despite his familiar chuckle and his old scent like eucalyptus, it is still strange to hear. Wife. He hasn’t stopped addressing her this way in the three weeks since their wedding, as if she has lost her first name despite not taking his second. She is not Androulla anymore, but gynaíka.
“How was that?” Giannis asks, drawing back to look at her. He stops his fingers just short of the growth on her neck. “Did you find out, what . . ?”
She pulls her t-shirt unstuck from her chest. “It’s a swollen lymph node, which is a result of my spots. Which,” she goes on, rolling her eyes at the frown he pulls, “are a result of my polycystic ovaries.”
“Right,” he says, lowering his hand. “What does that mean?”
“It means,” Androulla says, with a long breath out, “I can’t have kids.”
Beyond the window, the rain pummels on. She studies her husband’s brown eyes, his long lashes, the wrinkle of his nose before his eyebrows part.
“You can’t have kids,” he repeats, with his Australian twang. “At all?”
She lowers her bag to the floor. “It’s highly unlikely, with the scarring on my ovaries.”
They stare at each other, until a grin overcomes Giannis’s face.
“Do you know how much money we’re going to save?”
Androulla falls back a step, laughing.
“Honestly, the price of condoms . . .”
“I know. It’s ridiculous.”
“And the rate we get through them . . .”
“Plus it is just, better, without.”
Giannis claps his hands and the sound echoes through their apartment, with its close walls and hard-tiled floors. Androulla gives another laugh and tucks her hair back, cold.
Giannis drops his arms to ask, “You’re not upset by this, are you?”
“No,” she assures him, mirroring the movement. “I mean, it was shocking to hear. But I guess that’s natural, isn’t it? Even though we’ve never wanted to . . .” She lets her shoulders sink down from a shrug.
Nodding, Giannis takes hold of them. “I’d understand if you were upset, though. I’d want to support you,” he says.
“Thanks,” Androulla mumbles.
“You would tell me, wouldn’t you?” he says, squeezing her arms.
She restores her smile. “You know I would. Maybe I need more time to digest it, I don’t know. But for now, I’m excited,” she says, turning the top button of his shirt between her finger and thumb.
“Hmn,” Giannis purrs, tilting his face down to meet hers.
Androulla plucks the button loose with her right hand, placing her left upon his chest to display her new ring. A gold band, stacked above the emerald that she has worn for three years. She relishes the warmth of her husband’s lips and the scratch of his shadow across her chin, her need to crane on her tiptoes to reach him, though he is barely five-foot-seven. He slides his hand down her back and she pulls away.
“Does that make me a bad woman?” she asks.
Giannis’s eyes flicker. “I hope so,” he says.
Androulla’s t-shirt thuds to the floor. They fall into bed, Giannis flinching at Androulla’s cold touch. He arches away from her as he lets out a final moan.
“Fuck,” he breathes into her ear, before he kisses it.
She laughs, rolling to her feet. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
The bathroom light makes her squint after the darkness of their bedroom. She uses paper to dry herself, just as she did at the doctor’s, then stands and faces the mirror. It has a crack in one corner, and flecks of toothpaste from where they brush their teeth. Androulla studies her reflection, her blemished skin and her full lips, the mascara rubbed around her heavy-lidded brown eyes. Semi-circular breasts, arms never as thin as she thinks they should be, though their flesh springs straight back when she pinches it. The breath sags from her lungs. For all the times she has come into her palm, watching the fluid drip from between the legs of a girl online, there is something anticlimactic about the experience. Something that leaves Androulla feeling hollow as she pads back to bed, and Giannis turns off the lamp.
“I love you,” he says.
“I love you too,” she murmurs.
