The Prognosticator

By Katherine L. Hester

It’s a performance, and I know it’s a performance, and the best thing about my line of work is being able to suspend disbelief and believe in that performance, even as I understand that. I’ve always loved being backstage, so to speak. There’s the show — and then there’s the rigging behind the stage. To be able to juggle both is a talent.

Their first time, the women push through the door into the waiting area and when they spot me behind the desk, their faces clear, because I’m not what they expected. What they’ve been afraid of.

Most of the time, the woman come straight to me from the Clinic. There’s another clinic, in Dallas, and one in St. Paul. And one in Los Angeles. (There’s one of everything in L.A.) But my clinic — and I calls it mine because it was all those years ago while working there that I discovered the talent for which the women now seek me out — has for decades had miraculous results. It goes without saying that the women won’t settle for anything less. The Clinic’s reputation is a magnet that draws them. By the time they’re willing to turn their futures over to a place like the Clinic, if there is a best, they will ferret it out.

“Hello.” I warm the timbre of my voice. When I started, I made the decision I’d never allow anything extraneous in the waiting area. Nothing the least bit medical. A bloom nods in the bud vase on my desk, a warm spot of color. My open laptop makes things businesslike. The electric tea kettle squats on its cart, next to the basket of tea bags, neatly nestled packets of herbal promise — Moonrise, Tranquility, White Pearl. Even the mugs on the tray are positioned deliberately, each handle pointed in an auspicious direction. The room smells powdery but not overpowering, hardly noticeable at all.

I take the woman’s hand. She has boney fingers, icy to the touch. “I feel so silly,” she says.

I keep my face neutral. “Not silly at all.” I press the cold fingers. “Would you like some tea before we go back to the consulting room?”

I put more thought into it than I did into the waiting area. Swaddling light; walls painted a shade, darker than lavender, called Sea of Sighs. Overstuffed armchair; box of tissues on the table at its elbow. Tumbler of water beaded with condensation. Even the tissue box goes with the room. Anything garish has been banished. There’s no dust, no beadwork, no words framed on the walls. I’m the antithesis of dust and beadwork and platitudes. (This, I realize, is one reason the women’s faces clear when they push through my office door.)

The woman who sits down in the armchair across from me is fine-featured, although her face is already blotched with emotion. “It’s nice here.” She looks around the room. “Quiet.”

Plenty of practitioners go old school, with a plywood sign in a weedy front yard, an old bungalow rearranged into something that only vaguely resembles a business.

Another part of the show: I’m nothing like they are.

~

The first time was so long ago I seldom revisit it. I was hired as the receptionist at the Clinic three weeks before it happened; I was still dumb, callous.

A job was a job, I said, telling my mother about my new position.

All those years, my mother sighed in response. She was adding up all the extracurriculars she’d had to chauffeur me to in her head. The financial contribution that had made possible the tiny, toney liberal arts college where I majored in philosophy. All of it — wasted on a job that wouldn’t even cover my student loan payment.

But then, on the other hand—that time at the track, my father recalled, eying me speculatively.

I’d driven across town to give them the good news, because after the toney liberal arts college what had there been for me to do but move back to the town where I’d grown up?

My dad had taken me to the track when I was twelve, and the two of us had come home 500 bucks richer. But because I hadn’t liked the seeing the dogs, we’d never gone back. Maybe that had been my first time to predict something before it actually happened.

I’m not sure. I think the track was probably something else altogether. Sheer coincidence, dumb luck.

~

“Tell me,” I say. The woman leans back and closes her eyes. Her history is in the paperwork I asked her to fill out before she arrived. But — tell me, I repeat melodiously. Asking is just another thing that puts them at ease, so blatant, so bald, it can’t even be called sleight of hand.

All the same, it always surprises me, that the woman always do. Tell me. Until me, no one ever asked. Their lives have been pared away. All that’s left is process. If they do this, then that will happen; tickmarks on a chart, rising or falling numbers. Science has refined them until all they have left is their bodies.

Which either work, or don’t. The woman who sits across from me is as nervy as the greyhounds I bet on all those years ago at the track. The woman can’t keep from hurling herself toward knowing, that fleet, uncatchable rabbit. She blinks and stares at me, her eyes glassy.

“Same old story.” The woman’s voice is harsh. “Right?” She reaches for a tissue. “But if I could just know this time…”

Occasionally one needs trappings, props. I oblige. The slap of cards on the table, the chink of coins tossed. Others are simply on their way back from the Clinic to the office. They stand in the waiting room worrying the buttons on their coats. If I can just tell them, they can go ahead and cry and then get about their business. Instead of breaking down in some bathroom stall somewhere.

If you do this, then this will happen.

There’d been one baby. The woman fixes her eyes on my face. And then there’d been another. And then a third. Plus all the other times. The doctors said that was impossible, it was too early. It’s scientifically impossible to know such things.

The woman has been at this for so long. More than anything. She lowers her face to the bowl of her hands.

“Not impossible,” I say. The woman looks up, shredding the white flag she plucked from the tissue box in distress.

~

The truth is, you aren’t really supposed to want one. Until you are supposed to want one.

But even then, the wanting is dumb and animal, suspect. No wonder it’s so hard for the women to reach out and grab opportunities while they still can.

Enter the Clinic.

At the Clinic, I scheduled the women’s appointments and explained protocols. Of steps to take, of shots to give themselves, and when next to visit the office.

Some women could not come to the Clinic in in the mornings.

Some could not come to the Clinic in in the afternoons.

Some were free only on weekends.

Some could not reveal over the phone why they were calling the Clinic because someone might overhear. In those situations, I learned to play a round of twenty questions that circled around the word the women couldn’t, wouldn’t say — the wanting — like water around a drain.

That very first woman had been heavier than she should’ve been. Or maybe too thin. I don’t remember anymore. Maybe she’d been anxious, maybe she’d been breezy. Blonde, brunette. Maybe she’d been brusque to the staff in their scrubs (the indignity! I thought every morning, yanking mine on). Maybe the woman had sent in cookies after each procedure to thank us for the hours she’d spent, her feet up in stirrups.

I, on the other hand, most definitely did not want. The last thing I needed was to be thought dumb. (Although, I posed the question to myself —what did I think working as a receptionist made me?) As I handed the card with the woman’s next appointment on it across the counter and my fingers brushed the woman’s, skin to skin was all it took, half a second, a spark of electricity that jumped.

You are! I blurted out.

Are what?

Are — nothing.

But it was too late.

After it happened a few times, I cautiously mentioned it the doctors, who scoffed. A spark? They had no time for sparks.

I tried backing away from knowing — it was such a hot potato!

But so many women! Ten or twelve a day. Word got out.

Their uncertainty is a terrible thing. If I can tell them the truth before even science can, they will pay me.

~

I reach for one of the woman’s tendoned hands, capturing it between mine. The pulse beating in the wrist is a little bird. I press her thumb against the pale skin.

Sometimes the answer hides from me.

“I think…” But then I have to look away from the hope blazing in the woman’s face.

You can’t make your living from lies, I told myself the first time a woman cornered me in the parking deck as I left the Clinic.

I know you can tell, the woman insisted. Please. I’ll pay you.

You can’t make your living on lies.

But, O, the fact is, you can. People do every day. The women are paying for peace. Want weighs more than logic.

I excuse myself and leave the woman alone in the consulting room. After waiting the usual twenty minutes, checking the clock. I knock and slip back into the dim space I carved from this bland office block.

The woman looks up.

If I let myself, I can predict what comes next. Can let my own lips shape the woman’s words.

“I wish I could stay here forever,” she says.

Once I show her out of the room, I’ll have to remember to empty the wastebasket of its solitary crumpled tissue. The next woman who walks in has to be able to convince herself, that she’s the first in the history of the world, to ever set foot here.

—

About Katherine L. Hester

Hester’s collection of stories Eggs for Young America was awarded the Bakeless Prize and named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in publications ranging from Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards to Madridnofrills.com. She has also held residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site. Although much of her life has been spent shuttling back and forth between Texas and the deep(er) South, she now finds herself living in Madrid, Spain. www.katherinelhester.com