All Fours
Chapter 14
by July;, MirandaThe chapter opens with the narrator reflecting on mundane appointments like dental visits and oil changes, contrasting them with her current state of preoccupation with sexual desire. In a gynecologist’s waiting room, she observes two other women: a pregnant woman absorbed in her magazine and an elderly woman scrolling on her phone. The narrator muses on the stark differences in their life stages, imagining the older woman’s body with a mix of curiosity and pity, while envying the pregnant woman’s sense of purpose and excitement. The shared space feels incongruous, prompting her to wish for a symbolic separation, like the fish tank divider at a pediatrician’s office, to acknowledge their irreconcilable experiences.
During her gynecological exam, the narrator interacts with Dr. Mendoza, a holistic practitioner who remembers her traumatic birth experience. The doctor asks about her well-being, including flashbacks to the birth of her son, Davey, who was initially stillborn but survived. The narrator downplays her lingering trauma, surprised by the doctor’s casual dismissal. The conversation shifts to her menstrual cycle, with the narrator hinting at unusual symptoms but avoiding mention of her heightened arousal, which she initially attributes to a non-existent polyp. The exam reveals no physical abnormalities, leaving her to confront her own desires without external justification.
The narrator reflects on the 17 days following Davey’s birth, when she simultaneously cared for his living form in the NICU and mourned the “other” baby she felt had died. She describes the emotional complexity of loving both versions, though over time, tending to the memory of the lost baby began to feel performative. Flashbacks to the traumatic birth, while painful, provide a strange comfort, reaffirming her connection to that primal experience. The narrator compares these episodes to menstrual cramps—unwelcome yet grounding in their visceral inevitability.
The chapter closes with Dr. Mendoza probing perimenopausal symptoms, which the narrator dismisses despite admitting to insomnia and irregular bleeding. Her vague, uncertain answers highlight her disconnection from her own body and identity. The exam ends without resolution, leaving the narrator to grapple with the realization that her desires and anxieties are entirely her own, much like Dumbo’s feather—a placebo she no longer needs. The rubber band on her wrist, a subtle marker of her emotional state, catches the doctor’s eye, hinting at unresolved tensions beneath the surface of their clinical exchange.
FAQs
1. How does the narrator’s observation of the other women in the waiting room reflect her own anxieties about aging and sexuality?
Answer:
The narrator’s detailed observations reveal her preoccupation with the different life stages of womanhood. She contrasts the pregnant woman’s “exciting” phase of fertility with the elderly woman’s seemingly unremarkable existence, projecting her own fears about becoming irrelevant sexually (“dragging your pussy into this same office, decades after all the reproductive fanfare”). Her graphic imagination of the older woman’s anatomy (“gray labia… ball sacks emptied”) underscores her visceral dread of aging. This scene highlights the narrator’s unresolved tension between reproductive purpose and post-reproductive identity, mirroring her own transitional phase where she’s neither young mother nor elderly woman but grappling with midlife sexuality.2. What is the significance of the pediatrician’s waiting room analogy in understanding the narrator’s perspective on generational divides among women?
Answer:
The pediatric waiting room analogy (with separate spaces for sick/healthy children divided by a fish tank) symbolizes the narrator’s desire for psychological separation between life stages. She imagines women’s generational experiences as “evaporating dream[s]” that can’t truly be shared or understood across age groups. The distorted fish tank view represents how each generation perceives others through the warped lens of their own current experience. This metaphor underscores the isolation the narrator feels in her specific phase of life - no longer in the “exciting” reproductive stage, but not yet resigned to elderly invisibility. It also critiques society’s failure to create meaningful intergenerational connections among women.3. How does the narrator’s experience with the “two babies” (the NICU infant and the imagined stillborn) reveal her complex relationship with trauma and motherhood?
Answer:
The seventeen days of simultaneously nurturing the critically ill newborn and mourning the imagined stillborn (“two babies”) created a lasting psychological duality. The narrator describes this as refusing to “play favorites,” showing how trauma forged an inseparable bond between joy and grief. Her continued communication with the “soul in darkness” demonstrates survivor’s guilt and the impossible expectation to honor loss while embracing life. The flashbacks she mentions function like menstrual cramps - painful yet validating, proving she hasn’t abandoned her traumatic experience for conventional motherhood. This paradox reflects how perinatal trauma can permanently alter maternal identity, making routine care (like checkups) emotionally layered experiences.4. Analyze the symbolic meaning of the nonexistent polyp in the context of the narrator’s sexual awakening and self-perception.
Answer:
The imagined polyp represents the narrator’s need to medically justify her sexual reawakening (“deep arousal”). Like Dumbo’s feather, she clings to the idea of a physical anomaly to explain her desires rather than accepting them as inherent. The discovery of no actual polyp forces confrontation with her own agency - the arousal comes from herself, not pathology. This moment parallels her earlier rubber band snap (a hinted-at BDSM practice), suggesting she struggles to reconcile middle-aged sexuality with societal expectations. The scene critiques how women are conditioned to pathologize natural bodily experiences, especially when they defy conventional narratives about aging female desire.5. How does the clinical dialogue about perimenopause symptoms contrast with the narrator’s actual lived experience in the examination room?
Answer:
The sterile checklist of symptoms (“hot flashes? insomnia? vaginal dryness?”) clashes with the narrator’s embodied reality - she can’t confidently answer because she experiences herself as “a radio program” rather than measurable symptoms. This disconnect highlights medicine’s limitations in capturing complex midlife transitions. While Dr. Mendoza looks for textbook perimenopause, the narrator grapples with existential questions about sexuality and mortality that transcend clinical categories. The exchange reveals how women’s health often reduces profound physiological-emotional transitions to binary yes/no questions, failing to address the narrator’s deeper need to understand her changing relationship with her body and identity.
Quotes
1. “There was something wrong about all of us sharing the same room. At the pediatrician’s there was one waiting room for sick kids and another for the healthy ones and a big fish tank in the shared wall so you could stare through the glass at the other kind of kids.”
This quote powerfully captures the narrator’s sense of generational alienation in the gynecologist’s waiting room, comparing it to the segregated spaces of pediatric care. It reflects on how women at different life stages view each other with pity or incomprehension.
2. “For seventeen days there were two babies: one floated in darkness, fairly free and unbothered, and one was laboring in an isolette in the NICU… I loved both babies dearly, passionately, and for those seventeen days I did not play favorites because regardless of the outcome I knew I would always have two babies.”
This poignant passage reveals the narrator’s complex experience of motherhood after a traumatic birth, holding space simultaneously for both the living child and the potential of loss. It illustrates the psychological duality many parents face in medical crises.
3. “A flashback was actually a lot like a period. Involuntary, not easy, but still a relief, to be unexpectedly pulled into something so primeval, almost cozy in its leveling pain.”
This striking comparison between trauma flashbacks and menstruation captures the narrator’s complex relationship with pain and memory. It shows how bodily experiences can become metaphors for psychological processes.
4. “She was asking me to describe myself as if I was a horse I owned when actually I was more like a radio program, an ongoing narration that I could barely recall.”
This insightful metaphor reveals the narrator’s struggle with self-perception and medical questioning. It critiques how healthcare often demands fixed self-knowledge when lived experience is fluid and hard to articulate.
5. “I was like Dumbo thinking the feather made him fly but really it was just him all along. Or Davey. Snap.”
This brief but loaded reference to the Dumbo myth captures the narrator’s realization about self-delusion and misplaced attribution of power. The abrupt “Snap” suggests a moment of painful clarity about relationships and self-perception.