"With everything that's happened, I'm afraid she's about to break completely. I'm so scared for her. There has got to be something we can do, isn't there?"
    "No, there's nothing. She's a free individual, we can't force her into treatment. There are options available, but since she believes they don't apply to her, she's not going to investigate. She doesn't drink, smoke or

Bitter Cookies
written and illustrated (c) 2004 by Invisible Walrus

 do drugs, so there's no imminent danger to her baby. The only legal option we have is to let nature take its course and hope we can be in the right place at the right time. Unless..."       "Unless?"
   "...I know of someone who might be able to help. But we'll need to be discreet. If she catches on, then things will really start to get out of hand."

happy filing time

    "Well, I'm off. You have a good weekend now!" Cheerily he deposited the promised plate of cookies on the counter, and with that he left his office on Friday afternoon. I waved goodbye. After filing the last of the day's paperwork, I too would be on the way back to my apartment for two days of much-needed rest and relaxation.

    I guess some introductions are needed first. My name is Laura-Marie Wieszikewski, but to make things easier you can leave off the last one-and-a-half names and just call me Laura. I'm twenty-one-year-old recently-single gay woman living in a major city on the west coast. I'm a former fitness coach but have recently changed careers, starting work as a secretary for Doctor Ichiro Kawatta, a research scientist specializing in obstetrics and gynecology. He's known for being a bit unusual, but he's also the one who gave me this job literally off the street. I was flat broke and days away from being evicted, so he was a saviour of sorts. That was a month ago; the job took a bit of getting used to, but now I can't think of anything else I'd rather be doing.

    And before you ask: no I'm not about to have a baby, and no it isn't some strange experiment of his. It's a rare medical condition I can't even begin to spell or pronounce, and with a last name like mine, that counts for something. The exact details are severely icky and I'd prefer to skip them. It's not worth losing your appetite (or lunch) over, trust me. The upshot is that it looks like a pregnancy and feels like a pregnancy - I even get the occasional odd growing twinge and have weird cravings - but there's no unborn child involved. It's just empty fluid-and-tissue-filled space (yes, like I said, icky) and it will continue to very slowly expand until it's treated and removed.

    It's become gradually more noticeable over the past six months or so, and being perpetually under-employed has left me with few options. I no longer have health insurance coverage and the condition isn't life-threatening, so the medical community in general doesn't want anything to do with me or it. Doctor Kawatta is writing a paper on it, but his degree only involves research, he doesn't actually operate on people.

    Many people don't realize how incredibly annoying it is to have a part of your body considered public property, especially when it's not what it appears to be. You try to keep a sense of humour about the whole thing, but it wears very, very thin when the fifteenth nosey-parker of the day decides to make some well-intentioned but boneheaded remark. That's why I enjoy working for a reclusive scientist - his clients and colleagues may sometimes be a little odd in the head, but they've never treated me with anything other than professional courtesy and respect.

service service


    I was born into a family with staunch old-world Catholic (shudder) values. My father's parents immigrated from Poland when he was a child, and none of them spoke a word of English. He didn't like to talk about his unpleasant childhood. From what little I heard, he was constantly teased, bullied or worse for being the foreign kid, and I think he found the church to be a sanctuary. Hard work and study in school paid off for him, and he eventually ended up in administration at one of the major local health clinics, where he met my mother. In short order, I arrived, but I was to be the only one. Reproductive problems seem to run in the family; for the sake of my mother's privacy I won't go into details except to say that reproduction was a loaded subject in the household, one I quickly learned not to bring up.

    Both of my parents were devoutly committed, and I grew up learning my rosaries and Hail Marys like a dutiful daughter. But then the teen years arrived, and I found to my discomfort that the beliefs I had grown up accepting as fact were completely at odds with what my body was telling me. Not that I'm trying to step on the toes of anyone's religion, but if it wasn't for the cachetisms both my parents were brought up with, my orientation might have at least been tolerated even a little bit. I kept it to myself, staying single during high school, and moved out at the first opportunity during my senior year. Only then did I begin to come out to some close friends as I learned to accept myself for who and what I was. Things went well for almost a year. But when my personal life collided with my father's theology, everything started to unravel.

    I met my first and only long-term girlfriend Marlene soon after graduating, when I started work as an assistant at the local fitness club. She was a regular there, and we hit it off immediately. We started dating, things progressed (no, you're not getting the intimate details, that's personal!), and I had been living with her for nearly six months when this whole problem began. I was still in the closet to my parents at the time.

    Marlene was out of town for the weekend and I'd not seen my parents in months, so I decided to take them up on their offer of homemade dinner. Food was prepared as we chatted, and they were insistently curious - what sort of roommate was I living with, and was I dating a nice boy? More than a little clueless, they thought Marlene was a friend and nothing more. I was so exhausted from years of hiding and doing everything in my life under their radar that the truth slipped out despite itself. Things did not go well from then on. At all.

    It was like I was a little girl again, I had forgotten what that kind of fear was like. Most of it's a blur - me shaking like a leaf; the veins on my father's neck bulging out as he asked me with an unnatural, exaggerated calmness how I knew I preferred women if I had never been with a man; my glasses knocked off and broken by a backhand hard across my face; falling and hitting my head on the kitchen floor as I saw my mother run from the room in horror... the rest is a painful mess. The surprise more than anything - I could never fathom how someone who had experienced abuse in his own youth was capable of that level of brutality towards his only child.

 (This space intentionally left blank.
Some pictures should not be drawn.)

    Somehow I made it home, I don't know how. I was in shock - I spent the next two days curled up in bed, nursing my wounds and weeping like a child. I wouldn't go to the clinic, everyone there knew me by way of my father, and I couldn't take the responsibility of making him lose face or even his job over a personal matter. I told Marlene when she returned, and she was naturally livid. But her solution to the problem, as much as it was tempting, went against everything I grew up believing in spite of myself. He may have been a monster to me, but I still couldn't condone murder. I wanted to sweep the whole thing under the table and act like I had no family, to which Marlene replied that it would be impossible for me to hide. That's when the friction began between the two of us. I've not heard from any of my family since, for which I ought to be grateful.

    It seems kind of ironic that less than a month after the dinner incident was when the inital signs of my syndrome first started to appear. I chalked them up to trauma at the time, but looking back it almost seems like my innards decided they were on my family's side and turned Judas on me from that date forward.

all's fair in love and war

    The fallout over the dinner incident, plus stress over what was happening to my body, finally drove the wedge between us. I went from perfectly fit and healthy with a washboard stomach, to having a little pooch, to looking like I swallowed a melon whole, and there was nothing I could (or the doctors would) do. If it was only a matter of my appearance, Marlene and I might still be together, but how on earth do a comitted, avowed lesbian couple explain to others what looks like nothing else besides a heterosexual fling gone wrong? People were talking amongst themselves, and it wasn't to complement my fashion sense in maternity wear.

    I think Marlene was on the receiving end of the worst of the gossip. Didn't you hear? Her slutty switch-hitting girlfriend slept around and got herself knocked up, yet she still keeps hanging on regardless, poor thing. Uh-huh, yeah right. The friction became increasingly worse, and we argued more and more often. She was being childish and selfish, telling me I was wallowing my own problems and I needed to stop playing the "victim" card. Meanwhile I had my best "little harpie" routine going; we were not pleasant to be around. At any rate the result of our last big fight was that I got kicked out.

    I couch-surfed for a few days at a friend's place, and with a few calls and a lot of luck was able to find an apartment. It's not the Hilton by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a personal space to call home without the domestic civil war. The first month's rent and damage deposit meant I would be living on beans and ramen noodles for awhile, but as long as I had a roof overhead I thought I would be okay.

    Then barely a week later my bosses in their infinite wisdom decided that a fitness instructor who was the center of a number of nasty rumours and looked ready to drop a baby on the weight-room floor was not what they had in mind. My being let go was amicable, or at least they seemed to think it was by the standards of whatever planet they're living on. They offered to let me have my job back once my condition was dealt with and I was back to normal. Of course, they didn't say how this was supposed to happen without money. They also said they would give good references about me to any future employers. Gee thanks...

    Anyway, I was on my way back from the food bank, having sat through yet another spiel from kind, sweet old ladies (note the sarcasm) about how there were programs for poor expectant single moms like me, and the baby's father ought to be supporting us, and was it a boy or a girl, and blabbity blah blah blah, before I lost patience and told them I appreciated their concern but I! Am! Not! Pregnant!!! and watched the same gobsmacked expression appear on their faces that I'd seen on so many others, and, and... um, where was I?

    Oh right, I was crying. I had a shopping bag full of no-name white bread in one hand and a box of assorted pastas under the opposite arm (those are the only two things the food banks around here seem to carry), and I was making the half-hour walk back to my apartment with tears streaming down my face. I was at the end of my rope, rent was past due and I was so broke that I couldn't even take the bus. I had to walk everywhere, which by that point was an endeavor in itself.

the trudge

professor Laura

    That's when I met the good doctor for the first time, on his way to his car from the pizzeria he had just finished having lunch at. He called to me, "Excuse me ma'am!" I assumed he was yet another well-wisher wanting to put his hands on my fundus, so I turned to put some distance between us. But he started walking quickly toward me.

    (At this point I should mention that even if I was straight, which I'm not, Doctor K is no catch in the looks department. He may be a sweetheart deep down, but he falls squarely into the 'mad scientist' demographic and fits the part so perfectly on the surface that it's eerie. At first glance he can seem almost scary. I've been told he's great fun to be around on Halloween.)

    It's been my experience in the past that being approached by strange males in public rarely ends well. Though I've always enjoyed doing the girly, pretty routine, I'm attracted strictly to members of my own sex and have never had the slightest romantic interest in guys. But too many of them won't take a hint and just keep on trying to hit on me - or at least they did until this illness put what amounts to an 'occupied' sign out in front of my body. Now I get treated like an invalid or a container, I'm not sure which. A few of the boys still try to sidle up to me regardless, and that gives me an even weirder feeling. I was expecting the rumpled, wild-haired Columbo-type striding across the parking lot to be one of these, and was bracing myself for the worst.

    It was to my shock that he then called me by name and offered his business card. "I understand you're looking for work. How's your typing speed?" I warily asked him how he knew me, and he responded that I had been mentioned to him by my doctor. (My former doctor, might I add; it seemed typical that she would break confidentiality after treating me the way she had. Pardon me, but I'm sick here and getting worse. You don't know what it's like for me. Don't you dare say the problem will turn around on its own, pat me on the head and send me on my way.)

    As you might gather, at first I was unhappy and suspicious about the grapevine which had sent this new doctor across my path, an ob-gyn specialist no less - surely there was a hidden agenda brewing. But he pled to be heard out and eventually I gave in. It was nothing to do with my condition, he said; his regular secretary had needed to resign this past week due to a family crisis on the east coast, he was in a panic looking for a suitable replacement and my name had come up in conversation. He understood that my health situation was not what it appeared to be; I was welcome to stay on staff only as long as I felt comfortable, and my first two weeks would be paid up front.

trying not to be convinced

    I was qualified if a bit rusty, though I didn't recall ever mentioning to my regular (former) doctor about getting a work placement at my father's health clinic during high school. The whole setup with Doctor Kawatta offering me much-needed employment upon first meeting me, seemingly at random in a public place, smelled very fishy. But it was overwhelmed by the several hundred dollars I owed various people, including a landlord far scarier than any mad scientist. As the old saying goes, the devil you know or the devil you don't. Doctor K himself seemed honest, and more than anything I desperately needed a paycheck. So I accepted the job.

    And here I am a month later, finally settling into a routine. It hasn't been easy, the learning curve was quite steep, but it pays well and the people are fun to be around. My debts are almost all taken care of, and I enjoy the work so much that I have no intention of ever going back to my former job. I hadn't thought of myself as a pink-collar type, but compared to sweating to techno music for eight hours a day, I'm beginning to see the upside. Plus there are some perks you won't see in a help-wanted ad. Today during lunch, Doctor K was demonstrating to me a mental relaxation technique he was doing research on. He also shared with me some cookies he had baked for a collegue who didn't arrive. He promised me the rest of the batch if she was a no-show for the rest of the day, vowing that a good home-made snack would start to put things right and help me feel better. Like I said before, he's a sweetheart - he can tell that my disorder has been getting the best of me lately, even though I've tried not to complain.

missing you

    My life is mostly quiet outside of work hours - sometimes the office staff will go out for a dinner, but most of my friends lost touch with me around the time I moved out. It feels so lonely sometimes. I know Marlene and I argued and fought like feral cats toward the end - there are some nasty wounds that may never disappear - and yet I still miss snookie-bear. I miss her sweet voice, her wild frizzy hair, her spinny sense of humour, the way she would make breakfast in bed for both of us... I wish we were still at least on speaking terms. But I don't dare pick up the phone - the messages she sometimes leaves on my answering machine frighten me enough. I know the things she keeps saying can't possibly be true, but in my heart I'm scared to death. I wish there was someone to hold and snuggle, who would tell me none of it was real and I was safe again. Even a simple hug would do. But who would want me now with what I've become?

    I've had to opportunity to poke around in the doctor's library, and one thing that all of the research I've read seems to agree on is that my internal womanly parts are probably damaged beyond repair. The results of the yearly pap smear were normal like they've always been, but my periods were sporadic and unpredictable back when they actually occurred. Things are so off-kilter now, Aunt Flo hasn't visited in nearly ten months and I don't see her returning anytime soon. It's funny, I hadn't thought about having kids until I found out I can't. Not ha-ha funny, more like weep-into-your-dacquiri funny. I wasn't even close to being prepared - I always figured I had another ten or fifteen years ahead, and if things somehow went wrong my girlfriend and family would be there to help and support me. Ah yes, bask in the irony - I'm a pariah apart from them all and barren, but the maternity department of the local department store loves me - they know I'll be coming back for a long time.

    But things aren't quite as horrible as I'm making them sound. The date of initial application for my medical coverage is just around the corner - Doctor Kawatta is constantly reminding me that my forms will be here in just a couple of weeks. If the insurance underwriters don't have an embolism about my "pre-existing condition", and whichever specialists they assign me to are half as human as Doctor K, I guess maybe something might eventually be done about the extra twenty-five percent of my body that was never supposed to be there. Not that I'm holding my breath, but it's a nice thought.

    Besides which, being employed by someone who judges your job performance on typing speed (rather than the number of pushups you can do) is its own reward. As long as my fingers don't swell into sausages from fluid retention, I'd say this is steady work. Doctor K is kind and compassionate about what my body's been putting me through, without being nosy and pushy, and that's all I really could ask for. (And hot damn can he bake a tasty snack!)

    So here I sit on a Friday night, laid out relaxing on The Couch'O'Doom, watching a rerun episode of CSI while chowing down on some absolutely scrumpious oatmeal-raisin cookies my boss the eccentric scientist was nice enough to whip up in between his experiments and research papers. I ought to thank him with a casserole; I know he likes

but i'm not dead

kick it one time

-- OW! dammit --

(It's beginning, they said it would be any day now...)

    "Hi, mommy! The food is good, but you could at least acknowledge that I exist! That's what he told you would start happening again when you ate those cookies. Isn't hypnosis great? It's about time too. I'm tired of being ignored. You're about to see a lot more of me..."

That hurt! It felt like something
kicked me in the stomach, hard...
Something alive, squirming around
and kicking from the inside!...
But that's impossible. How? I...
(Oh please Mary Mother Of Jesus, no.
I didn't want it to be true, please, please no...)

Doctor's notes: Subject referred at joint requests of former partner, GP and OB-GYN; was borderline delusional and refusing all treatment, and deteriorating as her pregnancy progressed. Experiment of hiring her as a replacement secretary to better keep her under observation has gone well - she is a courteous, reliable employee. Increased mental and emotional stability are gradually becoming evident, but memories of incestual assault are deeply repressed and as a result the subject remains in complete denial regarding her advanced gestation. She still insists in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary that she is unable to bear children and must instead be suffering from some exotic gynecelogical disorder! Have tried therapeutic hypnosis and suggestion, but cannot yet judge effectiveness of said treatments. Will reassess progress on Monday morning.

-end-

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(One new message... Thursday, 9:36 pm...) Hi honey, it's Marlene. I understand if you still don't want to speak to me, but please just listen. What I said to you last month when you walked out, I was angry and frustrated but that's no excuse for the way I acted. I'm so sorry for losing patience with you. You deserve better than to go through all this alone, and so does the baby - where he came from isn't his fault, and it especially isn't yours. I'd like nothing better than to be his extra-mamma. I'll be waiting to hear any news about you, so please call and let me know how things are. I still love you, honey. Namaste. (click... end of messages.)