Spin It Again

Spin It Again

by Shayla Frandsen

Art courtesy of Shayla Frandsen

R.

R-S-T-L-N-E.
        In the last round of every episode of Wheel of Fortune, the contestant who has earned the most money to that point embarks on one final puzzle. They’re given the letters R, S, T, L, N, and E as help. These six letters are Wheel’s gesture of goodwill, a handhold as the contestant tries to ascend towards the summit of a big win. The potential prizes for a successful final round are impressive: cars, houses, a million dollars. The bonus round is a treacherous climb, though: if the contestant can’t solve the puzzle in ten seconds, not only do they lose the prize, but Wheel host Pat Sajak always tells them what they lost. A typical parting shot of the game show is the credits rolling over the contestant’s face, devastated as they mourn what could have been.
        Seeing something that could’ve been mine is an emotion I’m familiar with. Grief, loss: miscarriages leave room for little else. It’s not a million dollars I have lost, but a promise, a hope of life.
        I have had three miscarriages, each one coming about two years after the last. There’s a neat organization to this, a symmetry that would be pleasing were I talking about practically anything else. Grief is also frequently depicted in movies and on television. How many books have been written about the grieving process? How many times can a person tell you they’re sad, or that they were sad in the past, or that they might be sad in the future? Should I try it now?
        I was sad. I am sad.
        It doesn’t work—the words lose all meaning. My journey of grief is probably nothing new or significant. At the very least, it’s nothing new to others who have also miscarried. I’ve spoken to enough of them to know that we’re all asking the same questions: what’s wrong with my body? Why me?
I find the broad, frequently traveled landscape of grief to be a comfort. It helps me know I’m not alone.
                                                                

In the late nineties, Wheel of Fortune received a crackerjack technological upgrade: a computerized puzzle board. Before this, Wheel hostess Vanna White had to confirm a contestant’s correct guess by turning individual trilons, revealing the letter manually. Her hands would move the trilon like she was closing a door, or tucking a lock of a child’s hair behind their ear.
        The three-sided trilons are individually not much larger than a cabinet door, but together they connect to form words, the words connect to form phrases, and the winning answer tessellates across a game board that sparkles as hot and bright as a roadside hotel sign.
        There’s an old clip of Vanna explaining how the manual game board works. Pat Sajak teases Vanna, calling her “Professor White.” Her silver sequined jacket winking at us under the lights, Vanna starts to demonstrate how the trilons work.
        She says, “Everybody, I’m sure, is curious—”
        Sajak immediately interrupts her. “Well, maybe not everybody.”
                                                                

Discussing miscarriages still feels taboo because “maybe not everybody” wants to hear about this experience either. Broaching the subject always feels like a moment of radical vulnerability, partly because I know so many people who have not miscarried. My mother is one of them. Every time she wanted a child, she and my father just had one. Four pregnancies, four births. My sister is another person who has experienced zero hardship getting pregnant and staying pregnant. I’m surrounded by women whose bodies hum along like reliable home appliances, and I’m happy for them. Why would I not be? Why would I wish my experience on anyone?

S.

I have memories of watching Wheel of Fortune as a child, and I have memories of Vanna White. I saw her as glamorous but unknowable, an applauding cipher with a high-wattage grin and a wardrobe to die for. But it wasn’t Vanna I was most enchanted with. It was the wheel.
        The wheel! It was a Noah’s Ark rainbow of color. There were pastels slotted next to silver sparkles next to slashes of BANKRUPT blacks, LOSE A TURN mustard-y yellows, and dollar amounts in every color of the rainbow. I distinctly remember when I realized that contestants could pick up a piece of the wheel like it was a pizza slice. This discovery of the wheel’s surprising tactile resonance, its consistency of moving parts, was a fizzy hive of pleasure for me.
                                                                

When I look at the shape my life would have taken without miscarriages, it distorts as if I’m looking in a funhouse mirror. I have had three miscarriages. I also have three children. Each of my children is a perfect pink peach, impossible not to adore. I don’t like to think about how the babies that would’ve come from my miscarriages, had the pregnancies gone to full term, would displace the children I have now. However, I know that if my miscarried babies had been little 40-week success stories, I wouldn’t have been able to imagine my life without them. I wouldn’t have wanted any other kind of children except the ones that I had. Thinking this way is a hypothetical train that I simply refuse to ride to the end of the line.
        I imagine that people who have never miscarried have never dealt in these what-ifs, but I could be wrong. Perhaps they never have to question what other children would’ve been like, because they’ve never faced the possibility of any other children, but I could be wrong. Their bodies have never housed babies that they wouldn’t meet. They’ve never made a list of names for babies that would evaporate into ghosts, and as their body was ridding itself of the useless mass in their womb, they never had to watch blood clots as large as golf balls squeeze out of them, plop on the shower floor, and smear over their toes as the water swept them away to the drain.
        But again. I could be wrong.

T.

Perhaps I’m fulfilling some writerly cliché by admitting that I’m not great with numbers. I once took three extra semesters of Spanish just so I could avoid taking one semester of math. I joke that I actively avoid doing any calculating unless it’s in the mischievous sense of the word.
        After we’d had three children, my husband and I were ready to undergo a permanent form of birth control. We would be able to secure this with help from the insurance provided through my husband’s employer, but with a manual gameboard-sized catch. In order for the insurance company to foot most of the cost of the procedure, they required the requesting couple to provide documentation that they’d been pregnant at least five—five!—times. In other words, I had to prove that I’d done my utmost to breed plentifully and regularly. It was a shocking request. My skin still prickles at the audacity and invasiveness.
        Of course, I’d had six pregnancies in total. There were our three alive children, blonde from oldest to youngest, cherry-cheeked, loud. That knocked out three pregnancies right there.
        But I had to prove that there’d been other pregnancies, too.
        I’d let my first miscarriage run its course the only way I knew how: by letting it bleed out, and sopping up the blood as best as I could. There were buckets of blood, slasher-movie amounts of it. For the purposes of the insurance company, this private miscarriage was unprovable. But when the next two miscarriages came, I wanted to be sure. Did my body really pull this stunt again?
        My desire for confirmation led us to the doctor’s office, to my heels in stirrups and the lower half of my body on complete, naked display. For my second miscarriage, the nurse performed an interior ultrasound with a machine that she called a wand. The wand made groaning and shuffling noises as the nurse waved it up and around my cervix like a fairy godmother of death. For my third miscarriage, they swiveled a probe over my stomach. The results were the same both times: complete and utter silence from the ultrasound. No heartbeat, no movement. My womb was a tomb.
        But this was the proof I needed. The paperwork from these doctors’ visits were the final pieces I needed to send to the insurance company to prove that yes, I had done my zealous and enthusiastic part to get pregnant five times. All that blood boiled down to some simple reports on neat sheets of white paper. It was a math iceberg, safe up above while terrors lurked under the surface.
        It was painful to reach back out to those doctors years after my appointments and request the paperwork that confirmed my miscarriages. I felt like I was living in some sort of authoritarian theocracy, a place in which the activities of my womb were closely monitored, weighed, and judged. I had tried to get pregnant, I had failed, and I was to offer up itemized, numerated proof of these failures to receive financial assistance for a procedure that should have been my decision alone. The minimum-of-five pregnancies policy is still in place at this particular insurance company, to this day. I imagine that I wasn’t the first woman, nor will I be the last, to include at least one miscarriage in the total pregnancy tally necessary for the golden ticket of birth control.
                                                                

The day the new computerized game board makes its debut, Wheel made it a whole production. The episode features a montage of crew members pulling electric wires out of the old manual game board’s various holes. The set grows darker with each act of unplugging.
         “Pulling the life support off,” Pat muses.
        The old puzzle board has a banner of lights that winds all the way around it like a neon serpent circling the game, a mother snake defending her trilon eggs from the advances of time and technological upkeep. The bit’s final shot is the old puzzle board receding into the darkness, the snake-like ribbon of lights flickering once before darkening completely.
        “It’s like saying goodbye to a loved one,” Pat says.
        “It is,” Vanna says. “It is for me.”

L.

The word miscarriage is bulky and scratchy like a cement block. It has some meanings that do not apply to the puzzle of my personal experience, but all of its meanings are negative. “Miscarriage” can, for instance, mean a “corrupt or incompetent management;” according to Merriam Webster, especially a failure in the system of justice.
         Wikipedia says a miscarriage of justice occurs when a court proceeding has an outcome that is “grossly unfair,” such as convicting a person for a crime they did not commit despite their innocence, and despite the truth. The jury has decided, the sentencing has been read, and the handcuffs have been locked into place, making a clicking noise as if to say, “A miscarriage has happened here.”
                                                                

So, “miscarriage” is a heavy word. And maybe in comparing my miscarriages to Wheel of Fortune, I’m trying to lighten it. Maybe I want to make sure that I won’t scare readers away. I still feel a need to employ all sorts of defense mechanisms when I talk about my miscarriages; I can’t help it. Miscarriages are a jagged topic, raw and devastating. They’re smeared with the secrecy and self-doubt that so much of childbirth and women’s bodies are mired in. Why did they happen to me? Why did the spin of my wheel of fortune have to land here?
        I know that there are biological explanations for miscarriages. This is not a topic so shrouded in mystery as I am perhaps making it sound. Chronic and long-term health conditions, age, uterine and cervical complications, high blood pressure, diabetes: all these and more can cause the loss of a pregnancy. I know, too, that it is often not even an issue with the pregnant body as it is an issue with the fetus itself. Most miscarriages that happen in the early weeks of the pregnancy occur because of chromosomal abnormalities in the baby. The miscarriage happens because nothing is wrong with the body—it is simply doing its job, ridding itself of something it recognizes as harmful and improper.
        I know all this, yet questions still pop up in my mind like brightly lit letters on a game board. Should I have stayed in bed all day? Was it because I ate goat cheese? Should I have lain on my side? Kept my cell phone out of my pocket?

N.

Few people bring glamour like Vanna White. Vanna holds the Guinness World Record for the person who has clapped the most in history (3.7 million times). She took a turn carrying the Olympic Torch. She has been identifiable simply by her first name since before I was born. She’s survived racy photos of herself, taken in her pre-Wheel days, featured in Playboy without her consent. She’s worn more than 7,000 outfits during the show’s run, with no repeats.
        When asked about all the dresses she gets to wear, an interviewer asked, “Does it feel a little Cinderella?”
        “Yes, it does!” Vanna said. She’s originally from South Carolina; her Southern accent is like pie crust, holding everything in. “Or Barbie doll.”
        In May of 1987, the New York Times ran an op-ed by journalist Russell Baker in which he wrote, “I refuse to learn what Vanna White is.”
                                                                

I know that Baker intended to be provocative, but the wording still rankles. What Vanna White is. What was it about Vanna White that most offended Baker? Was it her beauty? Her lightning-quick road to ubiquity, her star shooting to fame? Russell Baker may have refused to learn “what Vanna White is,” but the world didn’t.
        And yes, Vanna is in on the joke. Perhaps she’s learned that she must be. “I’ve dealt with criticism by making fun of my job,” she once told The Washington Post. “I’ll be the first to make fun of it. It’s funny.” This particular method of self-defense, of laughing at oneself before anybody else can, is familiar to me, as I imagine that it might be familiar to many women. Vanna knows what she’s doing—beautiful babe, glamorous and silent supporter—and she has to laugh at it.
                                                                

I sometimes wonder what I would’ve done if all three of my miscarriages had come first, right in a row. Would I have eventually gotten the hint and stopped trying?
        Maybe I would’ve been relieved to give up. It’s more likely, though, that I would have considered myself a failure. I would’ve felt like something was deeply wrong with me, wrong on a cellular level. I know I shouldn’t even write that I would’ve felt this way. I’m still working to burn away the (worthless chaff of) patriarchal teachings I’ve internalized since childhood, telling me that the only important thing about me is my womb’s ability to help propagate the planet. I’m still working to believe that my body is enough on its own.
                                                                

E.

To kick off its recent 40th season, Wheel introduced another new game board, one created with the same kind of technology used for the Mars Rover. All Vanna has to do these days is wave her hand over the screen. A laser will detect her presence and reveal the letter. The new board is a nifty piece of showmanship in an industry where upgrades never hurt. The hosts remain the same, but the board is an altogether new feature.
        The board changes with time, and Vanna changes, too. The puzzle that Vanna was ready to share with the world back in 1992 was still played on the manual board, that proud, classic relic with all those trilons rippling like a school of fish. Here’s the clue—an actual clue that played to an actual studio audience:
        __ __ __ __ __’ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __
         Let’s play it like a real bonus round of Wheel of Fortune. Shall we plug in R-S-T-L-N-E and see what those yield, just for fun?
        __ __ N N __’ S __ R E __ N __ N T
        What a bounty! Those six letters did a lot of good work. No Ls, but a nice showing from every other letter. There might not be quite enough to solve it; could you solve the puzzle with only these? If not, how many other letters would need to be in place?
        I wonder if you’d need to buy any vowels. Buying a vowel is a difficult but necessary step in the game. A contestant must spend a bit of the money their wheel-spinning has earned them, but with the right vowel in the right place, the puzzle board can open up like nothing else. Sometimes it takes one single vowel—one little letter—for everything to make sense. There comes a rush of realization, and the game is yours.
        Let’s say you buy one vowel. “I”? Nope. Nothing for you there. Same for “O.” What about “A,” though?
        Well. “A” opens it right up.
        __ A N N A ’ S __ R E __ N A N T
         It’s coming together. There are a few letters that still need to get in there, but maybe you don’t need any more guesses—you’ve probably already got it. Here’s the answer to a clue that went up in 1992 in front of a live studio audience for contestants to solve:
        V A N N A ’ S P R E G N A N T
        Vanna miscarried one week later.
                                                                

How did Vanna go on, recovering from a miscarriage after such a public announcement of her pregnancy? News of her miscarriage was reported by a single publication, the Seattle Times, in an article only a few sentences long. Did Vanna White wrap herself up in her own little cave of sorrow, like me?
        I do know that she was back to work soon after, smiling and clapping, mostly silent as always. She famously works hard; never missing a day on the job is part of her whole ethos. I found surprisingly little else about the miscarriage, other than an article clucking about how Vanna’s heartbreak is the exact reason why you shouldn’t announce your pregnancy until after your first trimester has passed.
        Vanna has spoken multiple times about her faith and the support of her fans helping her persist during hard times. She’s also very quick to point out that after the miscarriage, she went on to have two healthy children. Soon after the miscarriage, Vanna’s father told the Orlando Sentinel,“Vanna’s a trooper. She’ll be trying again.”
         Troopers, fighters: the allowed mourning period after a miscarriage is slim, if it’s even existent. Grief feels like a shadow, and miscarriage is a slippery blur within it. There’s no outward evidence of what was lost. There’s no adorable, pillow-cheeked baby. Most of the time, the announcement of the pregnancy hasn’t even been made in the first place. It’s overwhelming, trying to tell people that you had been pregnant and in the same breath that you lost the baby. How can others mourn for you what they didn’t even know was there?
        Despite our mourning, we are also supposed to quickly point out what’s good in our lives. We are supposed to recover quickly. The wisdom that comes with learning to accept both the good and the bad with equanimity is a lovely ideal, and a part of me believes that therein lies peace.
        But there’s also a part of me that bristles. What if I don’t want wisdom—or rather, what if I want to gain the wisdom without experiencing the misfortune? Must the former accompany the latter? But if a clapping blonde game show babe who never wears the same dress twice experiences misfortune, it seems misfortune must come to us all.
        I don’t know if there’s an answer readily available. I’ve had the misfortune, now I’m waiting for the wisdom. I am waiting for that rush of realization; I am waiting for everything to make sense.
                                                                
Can I buy a vowel?