I pass almost a whole hour like this. Boredom can be a problem for anybody here, but I am never bored watching my gaunt, yellow peers splash in water or stacking blocks or singing along with Miss Margaret. Two wholesome Down syndrome twins — Dolores and Delilah Cutty, who both have leukemia and are often in for chemo at the same time I am in for the sauce — are having a somersault race across the carpet. A boy named Arthur who has Crouzon’s syndrome — the bones of his skull have fused together too early — is playing Chutes and Ladders with a girl afflicted with Panda syndrome. Every time he gets to make a move, he cackles wildly. It makes his eyes bulge out of his head. Sometimes they pop out — then you’re supposed to catch them up with a piece of sterile gauze and push them back in.
Margaret comes over, after three or four glances in my direction, noticing that my hands have been idle. Child Life specialists abhor idle hands, though there was one here a few years ago, named Eldora, who encouraged meditation and tried to teach us yoga poses. She did not last long. Margaret crouches down — they are great crouchers, having learned that children like to be addressed at eye level — and, seeing my God’s eye half finished and my yarn tangled and trailing, asks if I have any questions about the process.
In fact I do. How do your guts turn against you, and your insides become your enemy? How can Arthur have such a big head and not be a super-genius? How can he laugh so loud when tomorrow he’ll go back to surgery again to have his face artfully broken by the clever hands of well-intentioned sadists? How can someone so unattractive, so unavailable, so shlumpy, so low-panted, so pitiable, keep rising up, a giant in my thoughts? All these questions and others run through my head, so it takes me a while to answer, but she is patient. Finally a question comes that seems safe to ask. “How do you make someone not gay?”
See the peacock? He has crispy lung surprise. He has got an aching in his chest, and every time he tries to say something nice to someone, he only coughs. His breath stinks so much it makes everyone run away, and he tries to run away from it himself, but of course no matter where he goes, he can still smell it. Sometimes he holds his breath, just to escape it, until he passes out, but he always wakes up, even when he would rather not, and there it is, like rotten chicken, or old, old crab, or hippopotamus butt. He only feels ashamed now when he spreads out his feathers, and the only thing that gives him any relief is licking a moving tire — a very difficult thing to do.
Suffer, peacock, suffer!
It’s not safe to confide in people here. Even when they aren’t prying — and they do pry — it’s better to be silent or to lie than to confide. They’ll ask when you had your first period, or your first sex, if you are happy at home, what drugs you’ve done, if you wish you were thinner and prettier, or that your hair was shiny. And you may tell them about your terrible cramps, or your distressing habit of having compulsive sex with homeless men and women in Golden Gate Park, or how you can’t help but sniff a little bleach every morning when you wake up, or complain that you are fat and your hair always looks as if it had just been rinsed with drool. And they’ll say, I’ll help you with that bleach habit that has debilitated you separately but equally from your physical illness, that dreadful habit that’s keeping you from becoming more perfectly who you are. Or they may offer to teach you how the homeless are to be shunned and not fellated, or promise to wash your hair with the very shampoo of the gods. But they come and go, these interns and residents and attendings, nurses and Child Life specialists and social workers and itinerant tamale-ladies — only you and the hospital and the illness are constant. The interns change every month, and if you gave yourself to each of them they’d use you up as surely as an entire high school football team would use up their dreamiest cheerleading slut, and you’d be left like her, compelled by your history to lie down under the next moron to come along.
Accidental confidences, or accidentally fabricated secrets, are no safer. Margaret misunderstands; she thinks I am fishing for validation. She is a professional validator, with skills honed by a thousand hours of role playing — she has been both the querulous young lesbian and the supportive adult. “But there’s no reason to change,” she tells me. “You don’t have to be ashamed of who you are.”
This is a lesson I learned long ago, from my mother, who really was a lesbian, after she was a nun but before she was a wife. “I did not give it up because it was inferior to anything,” she told me seriously, the same morning she found me in the arms of Shelley Woo, my neighbor and one of the few girls I was ever able to lure into a sleep-over. We had not, like my mother assumed, spent the night practicing tender, heated frottage. We were hugging as innocently as two stuffed animals. “But it’s all right,” she kept saying against my protests. So I know not to argue with Margaret’s assumption, either.
It makes me pensive, having become a perceived lesbian. I wander the ward thinking, “Hello, nurse!” at every one of them I see. I sit at the station, watching them come and go, spinning the big lazy susan of misfortune that holds all the charts. I can imagine sliding my hands under their stylish scrubs — not toothpaste-green like Dr. Chandra’s scrubs, but hot pink or canary yellow or deep-sea blue, printed with daisies or sun faces or clouds or even embroidered with dancing hula girls — and pressing my fingers in the hollows of their ribs. I can imagine taking off Nancy’s rhinestone granny glasses with my teeth, or biting so gently on the ridge of her collarbone. The charge nurse — a woman from the Philippines named Jory — sees me opening and closing my mouth silently, and asks if there is something wrong with my jaw. I shake my head. There’s nothing wrong. It’s only that I am trying to open wide enough for an imaginary mouthful of her soft brown boob.
If it’s this easy for me to do, to imagine the new thing, then is he somewhere wondering what it would feel like to press a cheek against my scarred belly, or to gather my hair in his fists? When I was little, my pediatrician, Dr. Sawyer, used to look in my pants every year and say, “Just checking to make sure everything is normal.” I imagine an exam, and imagine him imagining it with me. He listens with his ear on my chest and back, and when it is time to look in my pants he stares and says, “It’s not just normal, it’s extraordinary!”
A glowing radiance has just burst from between my legs, and is bathing him in converting rays of glory, when he comes hurrying out of the doctor’s room across from the station. He drops his clipboard and apologizes to no one in particular, and glances at me as he straightens up. I want him to smile and look away, to duck his head in an aw-shucks gesture, but he just nods stiffly, then walks away. I watch him pass around the corner, then give the lazy susan a hard spin. If my own chart comes to rest before my eyes, it will mean that he loves me.
See the monkey? He has chronic kidney doom. His kidneys are always yearning toward things — other monkeys and trees and people and different varieties of fruit. He feels them stirring in him, and pressing against his flank whenever he gets near to something that he likes. When he tells a girl monkey or a boy monkey that his kidneys want to hug them, they slap him or punch him or kick him in the eye. At night his kidneys ache wildly. He is always swollen and moist-looking. He smells like a toilet because he can only pee when he doesn’t want to, and every night he asks himself, How many pairs of crisp white slacks can one monkey ruin?