Sex, Lies and Pap Smears

Name, rank and serial number. Sometimes I like to be boiled down like a Scantron bubble. A, B, C, or D, (and sometimes Y). Because I'm a fraud, I suppose, and a fraud likes nothing more than the legitimacy of multiple choice.

The other day I had my annual exam. It was a new doctor, so I sat in the waiting room and filled out the new patient questionnaire. Yes, no, this, that, last name, first, middle. I hesitated at filling in occupation. Because what am I, really? Unemployed? Lapsed Product Developer? Occupationally Agnostic? The pen hovered over the form briefly before I scribbled in: Writer. And then I handed the clipboard to the front desk and sat back down to read a very riveting article about casseroles in Family Circle.

What do you like? Huh? I looked up and there was one of the nurses whispering to me: What do you like? I thought it a strange question considering I had just filled out a form detailing my sexual history. Long walks on the beach? A little dirty talk? Huh? I must have looked really confused because she repeated herself a third time. What do you write? I saw on your questionnaire that you are a writer. Ah, write, right. Shit. Short stories, I whispered back. Fiction. Children's books. I felt as if I had been caught stealing something. Great! she said. I'm a screenwriter myself. She was wearing one of those square cotton smocks that nurses wear, the kind with a pattern of kittens tangled in yarn. Are you on Facebook? I nodded. I'll look you up! And then she went back behind the front desk to read more about the first day of my last period.

I wonder if Obama ever feels like a fraud. If Stephen Hawking maybe feels as if he is the 'um' in quantum theorum. I remember when I used to go to China for work, how the people in the factories would follow me around their showrooms, how I would stop to look at a frame or a fake flower and they would almost bump smack dab into me. Stop following me so closely, I wanted to say, I have no idea what I'm doing. Instead they would start chattering in Chinese excitedly if my fingers so much as braised a product when really, all I was trying to do was steady myself.

And then sometimes I feel as if I am standing beside me when I hear Zoey call me mommy. Me? You talking to me? I'm a mommy? It is absurd, this life of being who I am. Mommy, Mommy, Mommy. When I was little I would sit in the back seat of my dad's car and stare up at the tiny pin holes on the upholstered ceiling until my eyes went slack and the naugehyde seemed to float down in transparent layers. I would reach my hand up to try and touch the pin-holed phyllo of the ceiling, Susannah, Susannah, Susannah. If you stare long enough, think hard enough, say it enough times it all seems illusory.

Susannah Clay M, PhD. Dr. Susannah Clay M, M.D, DDS, STAT. The Honorable Miss Susannah Clay M., Esq., Jr., CPA. When I send away for catalogs I add a suffix if given the option. (Which may tell you more about why I am sometimes surprised to be a mother, not exactly mature but it's fun.) Who am I? What do I do? The truth does not fit on a line one inch long.____________

I should have written this--Occupation: I'm not really sure right now. Mother, wife, one of the legions of the unemployed. I spend my days on the internet blogging. Looking for jobs. Doing laundry. Thinking. Sometimes I nap. Yesterday I watched The City. You want to know my occupation? It is this: waiter. Not like in a restaurant, but in the world. Waiting for Something to Happen with an advanced degree in Watching. Not quite sure what, or why. Maybe this is it. This today of feeling like a fraud. Maybe that's what we all are. Doctors and lawyers and mothers and writers and physicists, dreamers and pretenders and

I would have written all of that in the margins of the form, and then I would have run out of room. Because that's what it is, anyway. Life--the pressing need to define yourself until you run out of time. Who the fuck cares what I think I am anyway? Susannah Clay M., Writer of Things. I could wear cotton smocks with kittens tangled in yarn, don a papal robe, tattoo your name on my neck. You could stare at me until I become transparent layers of pin-holed plastic floating toward you. 1, 2, 3, 4. Does it matter if you cannot reach your hand up and touch me? Because in the end, none of it matters, none of it changes the cellular makeup of my cervix.