The speaker accompanies her aunt Consuela to a dentist's appointment in Worcester, Massachusetts. She sits in the waiting room, surrounded by the office furniture, by adults in their winter clothes, and by magazines. While she waits for her aunt, she reads National Geographic magazine—the young speaker notes that she knows how to read. She looked carefully at the magazine's photographs, depicting volcanoes, the photographers Osa and Martin Johnson, a dead man's body draped on a pole, babies with pointed heads, and black women wearing wires around their necks. The speaker is distressed by the women's exposed breasts.
She reads the entire magazine, feeling too self-conscious to put it down. Then she looks at its yellowing margins and examines the date on the cover. Inside the dentist's office she hears a cry of pain, which she recognizes as her aunt's. This doesn't surprise her. She knows her aunt is a ridiculous person. What does surprise her is the way that her aunt's voice is indistinguishable from her own. She and her aunt are linked, maybe even the same. She has the sensation that she is falling, looking at the cover of the National Geographic magazine from February of 1918.
She tries to reorient herself by remembering that, in just three days, she'll turn seven years old. She thinks about the fact that she is, as she puts it, "an I,/ an Elizabeth," grappling with her subjectivity, individuality, and her existence itself. She wonders why she is the person she is, or a person at all, as she looks around at the clothed legs and the hands of the adults sitting in the room. She feels that her humanity and identity are the strangest things that ever have or will ever occur. She wonders why she is herself, her aunt, or for that matter anybody at all. What are the things, from boots to hands to the terrifying breasts in National Geographic, that bind everybody together? She feels that it is profoundly unlikely that she exists at all, in this space, among other people, overhearing her aunt's cry of pain.
The waiting room feels too big and hot, and the speaker feels as if the room is disappearing under a series of big, black waves. Suddenly, the speaker seems to return to the room. There is a war raging, and outside in Worcester it's a cold, snowy night in February of 1918.
