Dr. Kreushkin opened my legs and then bent each one. He slid his hands into a pair of disposable dishwashing gloves. Before he even touched me, I closed my legs tightly.

“Come, come, I’m not going to bite …”

Denying it meant the idea was going through his mind. If he was searching for the mysterious hole, he wasn’t about to find it for I myself had already looked, and with the magnifying side of my mother’s dressing table mirror where even a pore looks like a crater, and a face, the last thing in the world anyone would want to walk around and face people with.

“Do I have a right to know what you’re searching for? Did I do something wrong? Am I being punished for … something I did?”

Dr. Kreushkin’s eyes widened in surprise, which exposed the upper pink edges of the lower eyelids that have always reminded me of ham.

“Mrs. Lester? Haven’t you taken the time to explain the facts of life to your daughter?”

“I a’ready explain all, she knows ev’ryting dere is to know.”

My mother drew my hair together again and began to toy around with it; she hesitated between a ballerina bun, tight and high on top of my head, or a schoolteacher’s bun, coming loose at the nape.

“Does she comprehend the function of the ovaries?”

I could tell she was about to say I did and since I would not be allowed to contradict her, I spoke up, “No! What are ovaries?”

She dropped my hair back onto my shoulders, shot me a look of contempt, “Egg! You have egg!! So, nosy, you more hap’pay now to know?!”

No wonder egg white had already started seeping out of me, and my mother had two hollow egg shells on her dresser, with a photo of Cecilia and I each inside.

“How can the baby breathe? Is there air in the egg shell?”

Dr. Kreushkin checked my mother’s face and his watch before responding that the egg is more like a seed in a woman’s stomach from which a tree grows than an egg from which a baby hatches.

“But how does the baby breathe in there?”

What I really wished to understand was how much air must be pumped into a woman’s stomach and if the hole weren’t a sort of valve like one used to inflate a bicycle tyre.

My mother scratched the back of her neck and turned to the side as Dr. Kreushkin explained to me the miracle of life, that because the earth used to be entirely covered with water and we all originated from the sea, a woman’s stomach contains water during pregnancy and not air. He was just revealing how an unborn baby at one point develops short-term gills, a residue of evolution, when my mother censored his speech with a shift of her ice-blue eyes in his direction; she handed me back my underwear.

I was overtaken by unexpected bliss. How logical it all suddenly seemed. Noah’s ark had sailed the flooded earth, the waters after forty days subsided, and now on land, high and dry, there lingered puddles in a woman’s stomach. Newborns’s eyes, Mrs. Wella had told us, are always blue, be the infant red, black, yellow or white. Noah’s flood has lingered, I thought, in places long forgotten.