For some reason, Maybelle’s not sure why, she ate an entire bag of doughnuts yesterday. They were the small ones, mind you, but still. A whole bag. The white powdered kind. Maybelle prefers the ones that taste like they have coconut on them, but those are hard to find when a gal is in the middle of a craving and has only the neighborhood convenience store at her disposal.

Although Maybelle did not eat them in one sitting—more like one sitting (on the floor), one ravaging (at the kitchen counter), and at least one reclining (on the couch)—eat them she did. She had put it off as long as she could, well past noon, but she was craving something soft and sweet, an unfortunate diet buster that’s been sabotaging her more and more frequently these days. Maybe she should ask her gynecologist if this is another disappointing development she can blame on menopause, even though her doctor keeps telling her she’s not in menopause yet.

“You’re not menopausal until a year goes by without a period,” he says as he scoots back from the examining table with a thrust and snaps off his plastic gloves as if he has just won some sort of vaginal duel.

“Even if you have symptoms for some ten years before.” Now he is jotting down notes in Maybelle’s file folder, which seems alarmingly full now that she takes a good, long look at it. Did he just say ten years?

By Maybelle’s calculations, which even Maybelle must admit often skew things in her favor, she’s been at this for two years, easy, by now. Or at least six months, for sure. But regardless of how long it’s been, she knows her body, for goodness’ sakes. She’s been hauling it around for forty-something years, and she senses when one organ or another is out of whack. Like the time in elementary school when she woke up and called out to her mother to say something was wrong with her stomach. Maybelle promptly threw up all over the blue-and-white floral bedspread she had picked out herself not two weeks earlier at JC Penney in the mall. Stomach flu. Or the time more recently when shedoubled over in pain in the Hallmark store while shopping for Halloween cards. “Something’s not right,” she told her husband. Ovarian cysts with an abundance of endometriosis.

Whatever was happening with Maybelle’s body now had to be the worst, if for no other reason than its unpredictable nature. From one hour to the next she did not know if she would be hot or cold, happy or sad, full of energy or down for the count.

“Some women don’t have problems for long,” says her doctor, ushering her from the examining room to the billing office. “Maybe you’ll be one of the lucky ones. But be sure to call me if you bleed for more than three weeks in any one month.” Did he just say three weeks?

Copyright 2008, Amy Lyles Wilson 

When Maybelle empties her pockets before putting her clothes into the wash, she sometimes feels as if she is on an archaeological dig. As she turns the material inside out, she never knows what she might find. Usually she can count on at least one receipt from TJ Maax, because she hangs onto the small, smeared pieces of paper for months after they are of any use. Scared she might need to return a 12-dollar pair of pants bought on impulse—Maybelle loves a bargain, even if it is ill-fitting—or the cracked plate she thought would be perfect under the jade plant in the den.

Always there is loose change. Maybelle and her husband, Precious, have taken to putting their extra coins in an old Folger’s coffee can in the kitchen. They call it the “bank of can.” Every so often Precious takes the can to one of those coin-separating machines at the grocery store. The one at Harris Teeter, he says, is less conspicuous than the one at Kroger, as if he might be worried someone they know will see him and think, “Isn’t that Maybelle’s husband? I thought she married money.”

In reality, Maybelle and Precious love the “bank of can,” for it reveals untold treasure for them when they least expect it: dinner at a favorite restaurant, concert tickets for the symphony, payment for overdue library books.

Sometimes in Maybelle’s pockets there will be a tattered tampon, the wrapper half off, the slender sphere gone useless. It disgusts Maybelle when she finds such a remnant, makes her feel inadequate somehow. Surely if Maybelle were a different kind of woman, a more organized gal or a classier broad, this would not happen. Instead of tooling around town with exposed feminine hygiene products in her pockets, she would sport a zippered Prada case like Sally’s—or at least a plastic baggie—to protect her monthly arsenal. Alas, Maybelle is not that kind of woman.

Instead she is the kind of woman who ends up with matchbooks in her pockets even though she doesn’t smoke. Maybelle tried to master the fine art of blowing smoke rings in college when she thought it might make her seem alluring to the handsome fraternity president in the front row of her political science class. Because Maybelle dissolved into fits of coughing every time she lit up, she may be one of the few folks who believes Bill Clinton when he says he “didn’t inhale.”

It was all for naught anyway, for what Maybelle didn’t know at the time was this: the only thing that would have caused Frat Boy to look her way was a penis. And that Maybelle does not carry around in her pocket.

Copyright 2008, Amy Lyles Wilson