PART 1
“Mrs. Vanterpool. Have you ever been seen through a private research facility?”
A consultant asked me that across a desk at Ardenne General, with a folder open in front of her, on the worst afternoon I have had since 2014.
My name is Agnes Vanterpool. Everybody has called me Aggie since about 1952.
I am eighty years old. Three children, seven grandchildren, four great-grandchildren, and a house on Fennimore Street that I have been in since 1971.
I thought there was very little left that was going to take me by surprise.
My husband Rutger died in the November of 2014. He was seventy-six. We had been married fifty years and two months.
After he went I stayed in that house, because everybody told me to sell it and I am contrary.
And for eleven years I had a perfectly good life. My daughter-in-law Soraya rings on Wednesdays. Dov comes on Sundays. The woman next door takes my bins out.
And then about six months ago, something started happening to me.
At first it was just that my waistband was tighter. I am eighty. I put it where you put everything at eighty.
Then my good trousers would not do up at all. Then none of them would.
By about the August I had gone over entirely to loose dresses, because my middle had got noticeably bigger and nothing else would go round it.
And by the autumn I could not bend down to the bottom oven shelf, and I could not sit comfortably in my own armchair, and I was sleeping propped on four pillows.
I told myself it was my age about four hundred times.
And then on a Sunday in the October, Soraya said something.
She is fifty-two and she has been married to my Dov since 1998 and she has never once in those years asked me a direct question about my body.
“Aggie. Can I ask you something?”
“Go on, love.”
And she looked at my middle and did not pretend she was not looking at it.
“Have you talked to anybody about that?”
I laughed at her. “Soraya, I’m eighty. Nothing’s where it was.”
And that woman did not laugh back, which stopped me.
“Please get it looked at.”
I said I would. I did not.
Three nights after that I woke up at about two in the morning with a pressure in my middle that I had never had before.
And then something moved.
That is the only way I can put it. There was a shift, and then a sort of settling, and then a fullness that made it impossible to get comfortable on any side.
I put my hand flat on my stomach.
And it moved again. Under my own hand, through my own nightdress.
I lay in that bed in the dark at eighty years of age and I was properly frightened for the first time since my sister Noemi.
See more on the next page
