The notification on my phone didn’t even make a sound, just a flat vibration against the oilcloth table at 4:14 in the morning. My seventy-eight-year-old body had been giving me trouble for months, and Arthur had spent half the night complaining about the draft from the hallway while I lay awake staring at the popcorn ceiling. I knew something was off before I even put my feet on the cold linoleum floor. I just didn’t know how bad it was going to get by the time the week was through.
I like to think of myself as a woman who understands the math of the body, but living in a small coastal town like Bayou La Batre means everybody knows your business before you even schedule an appointment. Dr. Miller has been running the clinic on Main Street since Jimmy Carter was in office, and his waiting room always smells faintly of stale peppermint and damp wool. My daughter, Brenda, had been nagging me for three weeks about my digestion, saying I wasn’t eating right, but Brenda worries about everything from the tide charts to the price of shrimp.
Arthur didn’t even look up from his crossword puzzle when I grabbed my canvas purse off the hall tree. “Don’t let him give you those blue pills,” he muttered, his ballpoint pen scratching against the newsprint with that dry, irritating rhythm that used to charm me forty years ago. “They make your mouth taste like old pennies.”
The clinic waiting room was half full of neighbors I’d known since the consolidation of the parish back in sixty-two.
Clara Henderson was sitting by the radiator coughing into a lace handkerchief, and young Bobby Higgins was in the corner nursing a sprained wrist he got down at the docks. I sat down on the Naugahyde chair, feeling that familiar pinch in my lower back, and watched the second hand on the wall clock crawl around the face. The silence in the room was heavy, broken only by the hum of the old soda machine in the hall.
When nurse practitioner Sarah finally called my name, I stood up a bit too fast and had to catch myself against the doorframe. Dr. Miller was already sitting on his tall stool, flipping through my chart with those thick, liver-spotted fingers that had delivered half the babies in Mobile County.
“Alright, Martha,” he said, not even looking up from the yellow paper. “What are we complaining about today?”
I sat down on the rolling stool and smoothed my skirt over my knees.
I didn’t even care how undignified it sounded anymore because I hadn’t slept a full night in three weeks. “Doc,” I said, leaning forward so Clara out in the hall wouldn’t catch every word through the thin hollow-core door. “I can’t stop farting. They’re silent, but there’s no smell at all. But I’ve let out twenty in the past five minutes sitting right here in this room.”
Dr. Miller stopped writing. He lowered his pen, slowly turned around on his stool, and looked at me over the top of his bifocals with that heavy, professional stare he’d perfected at Tulane back in the seventies. He didn’t laugh. He didn’t even blink. He just reached into the sample cabinet behind his desk and pulled out a small brown plastic bottle with no label, just a white sticker marked with a black cross.
“Take one of these every morning before breakfast,” he said, handing the bottle across the Formica desk. “And come back and see me next week. We’ll see where we stand.”
I pocketed the pills, thanked him, and drove the Buick back home through the humid Alabama air, watching the pelicans dive over the bayou. Arthur was still sitting at the kitchen table when I walked in, though he’d moved on to the sports section. He didn’t ask how it went, because Arthur rarely asked anything he didn’t already have a sarcastic answer prepared for. I put the brown bottle next to the sugar bowl and went to work peeling potatoes for supper.
The next seven days dragged like a wet sail. Every morning I swallowed that little white pill with my chicory coffee, waiting for something, anything, to shift in my gut. My stomach felt bloated, like an inner tube left out in the midday sun, but I kept my mouth shut around Arthur because complaining to him only made him retreat further behind his newspaper. Brenda called twice to check in, and I lied both times, telling her the doctor just gave me some fiber supplements and told me to walk more down by the marina.
By Tuesday of the following week, the weather had turned that thick, oppressive gray that usually means a squall is blowing in from the Gulf. My joints ached, my head pounded, and I could barely focus on my stitching. When 9:00 AM rolled around again, I was back in Dr. Miller’s waiting room, staring at the exact same water stain on the ceiling tile.
Sarah called me back quicker this time, almost like she knew I was at the end of my rope. I didn’t even wait to sit down on the stool before I let him have it.
“Doc, I took the pills,” I said, my voice shaking just a little bit with frustration. “The farts are still silent, but now they stink! They smell like rotten eggs and old fish bait, and Arthur won’t even sit in the same room with me anymore.”
Dr. Miller leaned back, crossed his arms over his white coat, and gave me a long, steady look that made the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up. The clinic was dead silent except for the rain starting to tap against the windowpane.
He didn’t reach for my chart. He didn’t look at my stomach. He just smiled, a thin, crooked little grin that didn’t reach his eyes at all.
“Great,” Dr. Miller said, loud enough that I knew Clara could hear every syllable right through the wall. “We’ve cleared your sinuses. Now let’s work on your hearing!”
I just sat there on the rolling stool because my brain kind of stopped working for a second. The words hung in the air between us like woodsmoke on a calm morning, smelling of sulfur and old shame. My sinuses. Not my bowels. My sinuses had been plugged up so tight for a month that I couldn’t smell a single thing, which meant I’d been sitting right there in the examination room letting loose twenty silent ones without having the faintest idea what I was inflicting on everybody else.
I didn’t say a word back to him. I stood up so fast the stool spun around and hit the metal trash can with a loud clatter.
“Martha?” Dr. Miller called out as I grabbed my canvas purse and yanked the door open into the hallway.
I didn’t answer him. I walked right past Clara without even nodding, pushed through the heavy glass front door of the clinic, and stepped out into the pouring rain without my umbrella. The humidity hit me like a wet blanket, but all I could hear in my ears was Arthur’s voice from the breakfast table three weeks ago, telling me I didn’t need to go to the doctor at all because he already knew what was wrong with me. He’d been holding his nose at dinner every single night for a month, letting me take the blame for every silent little cloud while he sat there smiling behind his crossword puzzle.
