Mardi Gras Beads
by Janice Dvorak
[creative nonfiction]
Greg and I stroll the picnic grounds, slowly because it is my first post-surgical outing. His annual company picnics are always themed: Wild West with pony rides and barbeque and lasso contests; Summer Camp with canoeing and hot dogs; Carnival with actual fairway rides and cotton candy. This year, it’s Renaissance Faire, so we’ve gnawed on turkey legs, watched a mock joust, cheered on sack-racing and ring-tossing children, and tried a few games of chance.
I’m winded, but glad to be out of the house. Since my surgery six weeks ago, I have been going progressively stir-crazy. My hysterectomy at thirty-five ended our quest to conceive a child, but my gynecological issues were so severe that from the moment I woke from anesthesia, I have wanted to kiss my surgeon.
We make our way toward the petting zoo (I love goats), dodging the professional insulter, who already made fun of my hunched posture. I resisted the urge to show him my scar and flip him off, but don’t want to test my still-erratic hormones with a second encounter.
The Mardi Gras bead man steps into our path. Earlier, Greg agreed he didn’t know what Mardi Gras beads had to do with the Renaissance, or if I flashed the man for a set, he would get fired or promoted.
I say, “No, thanks,” but the tights-clad purveyor slips a few strings over my head and says, “Give ‘em to your kids.”
Greg looks stricken, but I shrug. I’d already noticed few adults wearing beads, which is why I tried to refuse. I could leave them on a picnic table or pass them to any of the hundreds of sugared-up kids. There are hordes of them, so many, more everywhere I look. Blonde like Greg, loud like me, running and yelling and tugging at their parents.
If I explain, Greg will say I have nothing to be ashamed of, that he loves me, it’s not my fault, that he is happy to focus on adoption. He would say all the things I told myself when each fertility test brought bad news and every treatment failed.
“I’m tired,” I say. We make sure the big shots see us and head home.
I drop the beads on the kitchen table and head to the shower. As I peel off my tank top and shorts, I glance at the mirror. Painted on my chest and neck by sweat and cheap dye are faint dabs and smears of red and green and purple.
Greg finds me there, staring into the mirror at my naked body and the marks it carries. Smudges from the beads; my new pinched navel framed by small incisions where the surgeon inserted her instruments; a long pale speedbump the length of my abdomen from childhood cancer treatments we now know ended my fertility.
Before he can ask if I am all right, without thinking, I say, “I’m sorry.”
“No,” he says and tentatively touches my shoulder. I am pale and shaking, knocked breathless with shame.
If I explain, Greg will say I have nothing to be ashamed of, that he loves me, it’s not my fault, that he is happy to focus on adoption. He would say all the things I told myself when each fertility test brought bad news and every treatment failed, everything I stopped having to tell myself six weeks ago when I woke from surgery stunned by the absence of pain, without the fear of deluges of blood or expensive, painful attempts ending in failure. He would say everything I thought I believed but we can both see in my eyes that I don’t. Everything I don’t want to hear right now, he will tell me again when I let him.
“I just need a shower.” I step into the scalding water to wash off the marks I can.
Janice Dvorak has an MFA from Emerson College. Her work has appeared in literary journals including Willow Springs, The Grief Diaries, and Florida Review, and is included in the anthology, I Wasn’t Strong Like This When I Started Out. She lives outside Boston with her husband.