Bible Stories for Adults Read Free Page B

didn’t skewer the fetus. I liked Borealis. He reminded me of Norman Rockwell’s painting of that tubby and fastidious old country doctor listening to the little girl’s doll with his stethoscope.
    Polly and I were hoping for a girl.
    Oddly enough, the fetus wouldn’t come into focus. Or, if it
was
in focus, it sure as hell didn’t look like a fetus. I was awfully glad Polly couldn’t see the TV.
    â€œGlitch in the circuitry?” ventured the ultrasound technician, a tense and humorless youngster named Leo.
    â€œDon’t think so,” muttered Borealis.
    I used to be a center for my college basketball team, the Penn State Nittany Lions, and I’ll be damned if our baby didn’t look a great deal like a basketball.
    Possibly a soccer ball.
    Polly said, “How is she?”
    â€œKind of round,” I replied.
    â€œRound, Ben? What do you mean?”
    â€œRound,” I said.
    Borealis furrowed his brow, real deep ridges; you could’ve planted corn up there. “Now don’t fret, Polly. You neither, Ben. If it’s a tumor, it’s probably benign.”
    â€œRound?” Polly said again.
    â€œRound,” I said again.
    â€œLet’s go for the juice anyway,” the doctor told Leo the technician. “Maybe the lab can interpret this for us.”
    So Borealis gave Polly a local and then inserted his syringe, and suddenly the TV showed the needle poking around next to our fetus like a dipstick somebody was trying to get back into a Chevy. The doctor went ahead as if he were doing a normal amnio, gently pricking the sac, though I could tell he hadn’t made peace with the situation, and I was feeling pretty miserable myself.
    â€œRound?” said Polly.
    â€œRight,” I said.
    Â 
    Later that month, I was standing in the apple orchard harvesting some Jonafrees—a former basketball center doesn’t need a ladder—when Asa, our eleven-year-old redheaded Viking, ran over and told me Borealis was on the phone. “Mom’s napping,” my son explained. “Being knocked up sure makes you tired, huh?”
    I got to the kitchen as fast as I could. I snapped up the receiver, my questions spilling out helter-skelter—would Polly be okay, what kind of pregnancy was this, were they planning to set things right with
in utero
surgery?
    Borealis said, “First of all, Polly’s CA-125 reading is only nine, so it’s probably not a malignancy.”
    â€œThank God.”
    â€œAnd the fetus’s chromosome count is normal—forty-six on the money. The surprising thing is that she has chromosomes at all.”
    â€œShe? It’s a
she?”
    â€œWe’d like to do some more ultrasounds.”
    â€œIt’s a a
she?
”
    â€œYou bet, Ben. Two X chromosomes.”
    â€œZenobia.”
    â€œHuh?”
    â€œIf we got a girl, we were going to name her Zenobia.”
    So we went back down to Boalsburg Gynecological. Borealis had called in three of his friends from the university: Gordon Hashigan, a spry old coot who held the Raymond Dart Chair in Physical Anthropology; Susan Croft, a stern-faced geneticist with a lisp; and Abner Logos, a skinny, devil-bearded epidemiologist who somehow found time to be Centre County’s public health commissioner. Polly and I remembered voting against him.
    Leo the technician connected Polly to his machine, snapping more pictures than a Japanese extended family takes when it visits Epcot Center, and then the three professors huddled solemnly around the printouts, mumbling to each other through thin, tight lips. Ten minutes later, they called Borealis over.
    The doctor rolled up the printouts, tucked them under his arm, and escorted Polly and me into his office—a nicer, better-smelling office than the one we’d set up in the basset barn back home. He seemed nervous and apologetic. Sweat covered his temples like dew on a toadstool.
    Borealis unfurled an