Free Dear Digby by Carol Muske-Dukes Page B

actually made me more beautiful than I was before. Though not as beautiful as my poor dead mother—red hair, chocolate-brown eyes. …”
    She fished out a pocket mirror and fluffed out the Afro wig, licked her jagged lips, making a kissy-face, smoothing on a little lip gloss. One eye winked at me.
    Then she smiled at me, straight at me; her pinwheel eyes stopped turning. A ray of sun caught her full-face; like the moon she sent the ray back to earth: the scars shone, her eyes held me in an expression so sweet I could see all of it; she was right. In that moment she was beautiful. Iris Moss was the loveliest woman in the world.
    Later that day, on my way to lunch with Page, I thought about her last remark. She’d jumped up suddenly, her hand over one ear.
    “Wait,” she said. “Wait—God’s talking to me now.”
    She nodded and smiled a few times. “Okay, okay, right. Wait on killing the president? That’s a joke,” she said aside to me. “But listen.” The fingers grabbed me again. “This one’s for you. … God says letters are a good way to ‘read’ people, to get to know them. Everybody on this earth should have a Letter of Identification to carry around to explain who one is. God knows about the Letters, Digby. The advice is: Don’t let letters keep life away from you. Letters should bring life up close.”

Six
    W HEN I TOLD Terence I was pregnant it was in an Upper East Side apartment that belonged to two famous midgets. Well, okay, not midgets exactly, but let’s say individuals of limited size. She was a googly-eyed comedienne whose fame dated from live TV variety show days, and he was the tiny producer of very big budget films. Terence was subletting their apartment from Thanksgiving through Valentine’s Day, roughly the run, on Broadway, of his role in Tiresias (he called it first and second lead)—a pastiche of the blind hermaphrodite’s wittiest sayings and favorite songs. He was Tiresias Number Four in the long and successful run.
    The apartment was spacious but cluttered, and I never got used to the furniture. The famous midgets had scaled all their Louis Quinze down to a height more comfortable for them, which meant that when persons of normal size sat down, they appeared to be relieving themselves on the Aubusson.
    The day I found out I was pregnant was December seventeenth, my birthday, right before Christmas, and I was giving a SIS talk at the University of Pennsylvania. I had spent the entire day driving there with Page (the result of our not grasping clearly the little mileage scale at the bottom margin of the Triple A map).
    My talk was “Women’s Liberation—the Next Ten Years,” and I’d been so lethargic the weeks preceding I hadn’t prepared much of anything to say—I’d ended up ripping a few pages of quotes from the Book of Holly Partz.
    Just before the talk was to begin, I called my gynecologist in New York City.
    “It was positive,” the nurse-secretary said. She sounded tired.
    “Positive,” I repeated stupidly. “You mean I’m pregnant?”
    “Yes,” she said wearily, “that’s how it works, Toots.”
    I put down the phone, walked out of the office my host had lent me as a “private place to look over my notes,” and drifted down the hall and into the library lecture room. There was a podium, a microphone—fifty or so expectant faces.
    Someone introduced me; I got up and stood in front of the microphone and listened to myself breathing—I’d just realized that I was drawing breath now for someone besides myself. I smiled. The audience grinned back nervously. I must have looked strange, standing there listing a little, breathing audibly the sweet, pregnant air of the University of Pennsylvania.
    “I’m positive,” I said into the mike. The audience looked at me. “I’m positive,” I repeated, then added, floundering, “that I wore a diaphragm.” Someone tittered.
    I snapped awake. “This is a quote clinicians hear regularly from women and