“Are they what? Are babies free?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, let me think how to answer that. You don’t have to buy them. Just about anybody can get one to grow inside her. In fact, seems like the less money you have, the easier it is to get one. But after they come out, you have to buy all kinds of stuff for them.”
“Food and diapers and stuff.”
“Right.”
“Do you think that’s why the real mom that grew me inside her didn’t want me?”
“No, she died. Remember? Her sister, the woman that put you into my car, told me your mother had died, and that’s why they had to give you up. You told me one time you remembered seeing your first mama get buried.”
“I do remember that,” Turtle says. She continues to study the peach-pit baby poster. Taylor picks up a magazine and is startled to read news about a war, until she realizes the magazine is several years old.
“Hi, I’m Doctor Washington,” says a tall woman in a white coat who breezes into the room as if she’s run a long way and doesn’t see any point in slowing down now. She has long flat feet in black loafers, and a short, neat
Afro that curves around her head like a bicycle helmet. She looks around the room quickly, as if she might in fact be anticipating a blow to the head. Her eyes settle on Turtle for a moment, but the rest of her body remains tense. She holds the clipboard in one hand and a pencil in the other, poised between two fingers, jiggling in the air.
“Stomachache?” she says to Tuttle. “Cramps, diarrhea?
For two or three months?”
Turtle nods solemnly, owning up to all this.
“Let’s take a look.” Actually she looks at the ceiling, appearing to give it her full concentration as she pulls up Turtle’s T-shirt and probes her belly with long, cold-looking hands.
“Here?”
Turtle nods, making a crackling sound as her head grinds against the white paper.
“How about here? This hurt?”
Turtle shakes her head.
Dr. Washington pulls down Turtle’s shirt and turns to Taylor. “How is the child’s diet.” She states it, rather than asks.
Taylor feels her mind blank out, the way it used to in school during history tests. She tries to calm down. “I make sure she gets protein,” she says. “We eat a lot of peanut butter. And tuna fish. And she always gets milk. Every single day, no matter what.”
“Well, actually, that might be the problem.”
“What, milk?”
The doctor turns to Turtle. “How do you feel about milk, kiddo?”
“I hate it,” Turtle says to the ceiling.
“What kind do you give her?”
“I don’t know,” Taylor says defensively, feeling as if the two of them are ganging up. “The store brand. Two percent.”
“Try leaving out the milk from now on. I think you’ll see a difference right away. Bring her back in, in a week or two, and if that hasn’t taken care of it we’ll check on other possibilities. But I think cutting the milk’s going to do it.” She writes something on the clipboard.
Taylor senses that Dr. Washington is about to move on to an ear or an ankle. “Excuse me, but I don’t get this,” she says. “I thought milk was the perfect food. Vitamins and calcium and everything.”
Dr. Washington slumps against the counter, losing a few of her imposing inches and visibly shifting into a slower gear.
“Cow’s milk is fine for white folks,” she says, looking directly at Taylor when she says this, “but somewhere between sixty and ninety percent of the rest of us are lactose intolerant.
That means we don’t have the enzymes in our system to digest some of the sugar in cow’s milk. So it ferments in the intestines and causes all kinds of problems.”
“Uck. I never knew that.”
“Yogurt may be okay, and aged cheeses. You can give them a try. And some kinds of orange juice are calcium-fortified, that can help you out some with her calcium. If you’re determined to give her milk, you can get the kind that’s lactose-reduced. There’s a large Asian-American population in this city, so you can find that in most of the markets.”
“My daughter isn’t Asian-American. She’s Cherokee.”
The doctor lifts her shoulders in an offhand shrug. “Asian, Native American, African, we’re all in the same boat. A lot of times it doesn’t present until adulthood, but it can start showing up right around her age.”
Taylor can’t understand how such a major truth could have passed her by. “I always thought milk was the great health food. The people look so perky in those commercials.”