“To understand how fibroids cause bleeding, you have to know what usually allows for uterine bleeding not to occur,” Sophie was saying. This was the part of the ordeal when Sophie pressed her palms together, as if in prayer. I was checking out my boxer shorts, but there were no signs of blood—not that I could see—while Little Ray also held her hands tightly together. My mom was being a good sport, going along with Sophie’s dramatization of uterine bleeding, but Molly was busy with the pancakes at the stove—Molly’s hands were otherwise engaged. Molly wasn’t praying.

“Imagine your uterus like your hands squeezed together,” Sophie was saying. “The inside surfaces of your uterus are two walls, tightly opposed—the endometrial surfaces of your uterus would easily bleed, if the opposing walls weren’t pressed together.” Sophie wrung her hands. “The walls hold the blood in,” she said, praying harder.

The way my mother was wringing her hands, it looked like a new off-season exercise. “Fibroids are irregular muscle masses; they abut the inner surfaces of the uterus, like marbles. Imagine marbles between your hands,” Sophie said to Little Ray. “The walls of your uterus are pushed apart.”

“Fucking marbles!” my mom cried.

“The blood sloughs off anytime, causing irregular or constant bleeding,” Sophie continued calmly. She knew the story, but you can see why it wouldn’t have worked as a novel. “Sometimes the bleeding doesn’t amount to more than spotting. Sometimes the blood really flows,” Sophie went on. Definitely not a novel, I hoped.

We were together a year; we read all of Thomas Mann together. Sophie thought Mann might have managed a novel about uterine bleeding. Fibroid sufferers meet at a women’s clinic; they tell one another the stories of their ruined relationships. I suggested that Mann might have tried this as a novella, or a long short story.

“Maybe there are men who can only be with women who are fibroid sufferers,” Sophie had speculated. Definitely not longer than a novella, I was hoping.

“During my actual period, the flow is much heavier than normal—there’s severe cramping and pain,” Sophie was telling Molly and my mother. “No one wants to have sex with me—not after the novelty wears off,” Sophie said, looking at me. Molly and my mom looked at me, too. I was self-conscious and cold, standing around in my boxers. “I wouldn’t want to have sex with me, either,” Sophie said—more softly, to me. “I wouldn’t stay with me as long as you have, Adam,” she said. When she got to this part, it broke me up—every time—but we’d agreed not to cry in front of each other. Instead, we tried to imagine how Thomas Mann would have written it. Not an uplifting novella.