Lilah Gillespie was totally not pregnant.
Lilah was thirty-two and had never been pregnant—because she had always been careful. Lilah was not pregnant this time, because she’d dry swallowed two morning-after pills in a CVS parking lot in the front seat of her Honda Accord. But she had not swallowed them the morning after, it had been two mornings after. Within the recommended seventy-two hours, but pushing it a little. Plus, she had chased the pills with a large cold brew. What if coffee was contra-indicated? What if caffeine adversely affected the pills’ magic baby-preventing chemicals?
The pills just seemed so small. Two little dots in a whole lot of packaging, $49.99 on sale. She placed them carefully in her mouth, worked her tongue around until she could toss them back with saliva. She wanted to feel them go down, so tiny, so easily lost. They claimed an 89% effectiveness rate, if taken within seventy-two hours.
Lilah made an appointment with a gynecologist to be absolutely certain she was in the clear. To be absolutely certain she was not pregnant with the one-night stand whose name—she was 91% certain—was Todd.
Todd had not wanted to be careful.
He slyly tried to maneuver himself inside her.
“Are you kidding?” she said. “We hardly know each other.”
It was true, yet they were being intimate in a way she’d never been with so many people she loved. Certainly never with a woman, though her best friends were women. Such different kinds of love. What would that kind of love be like, intimacy with a woman? Lilah was perplexed how sex was rarely shared with the people she cared for most, yet accessible with a stranger.
Lilah had tried to be careful with Todd. She’d hunted around her bathroom for condoms, certain she had a box. She discovered it tucked behind tampons, Band-Aids, nail polish remover. The condoms were two months expired. “Goddammit,” she cursed, but two-months expired didn’t seem expired enough not to do it with Todd.
Lilah arrived at the appointment on a Friday morning to find the gynecologist’s office was celebrating Halloween a day early. The receptionist dressed as Jesus. She wore a flowing white robe, a draped purple sash. A thick fake mustache and cotton-ball beard, the kind children wore to play Christmas pageant shepherds.
Lilah had never seen a Halloween Jesus. “Y’all go ahead and sign in.” Lilah glanced around to see if another woman had slipped in behind her, but she was the sole subject for whom the “y’all” was intended. Did so many women come in with babies growing inside them that Jesus acknowledged that plural? Or was it just a nice Southern thing? Like the French “vous,” used in singular formal to show respect to elders?
A woman wearing a cardboard box led Lilah into the examining room. Her head poked out of the box, holes cut for her arms. A stack of paperbacks was glued onto one shoulder, an alarm clock and tissue box on the other. She wore a lampshade like a hat. “Get it?” she asked, taking Lilah’s blood pressure, squeezing her arm in a vaguely pleasant way.
Lilah nodded. “You’re a bedside table?”
“I’m a nightstand. A one-night stand.” The woman made a clucking sound with her tongue to punctuate her joke.
Lilah said, “Ah,” and thought, what the fuck?
The one-night stand handed her a paper robe with a limp plastic string.
Lilah undressed quickly, tossing her clothes on a chair. She slipped on the paper dress that was as light as gas station paper towels.
The gynecologist entered, a cowgirl. Straw hat, boots, denim skirt. A bolo hung over her snap-up Western shirt. She did not acknowledge her costume: no howdy pardn’r, no yee-haw, Lilah laid back on the table and opened her legs, slid down and pressed her heels into the stirrups. All Lilah could think was: Cowpoke.
The gynecologist exuded the calm of a yoga instructor. Lilah wondered if she normally wore a white jacket, or if she dressed for examinations in street clothes.
While she prodded, the gynecologist made steady eye contact. She rested her hand gently on Lilah’s.
Lilah had never gotten turned on during a gynecology exam before.
She confessed, “I think I might be a lesbian.”
“For Halloween?” the gynecologist asked.
“No,” Lilah said. “Well, I suppose.”
It seemed absurd: to learn to love women, when she had exhausted herself learning to love men. Would she have a better chance, pretending to be someone else? Or was she finally becoming herself?
Frederica Morgan Davis holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she worked for Ecotone. She is the prose editor for Shenandoah, and her work appears in storySouth, the Barely South Review, and Press Pause Press. Her work can be read on her website. She feels very lucky to have studied at Tin House Summer Workshop, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers, SLS, and One Story. A far flung West Virginian, she lives and writes in the redwoods of Northern California.
Photo by Anna Shvets.