I took a shortcut to the clinic and bashed my head on the air conditioner coming out of the wall while reading the directions on the bird. Although you would expect the directions to a bird whose head went in and out of a glass of water to be fairly minimal, they weren’t.
When I got to the clinic all the chairs were taken by Hutterites, also not especially a groovy people except for the fact that they are allowed to wear only polka-dot clothing, and the women must wear kerchiefs and the men, beards. My dad buys eggs from them. They are another sub-sect of our larger clan, except they live in colonies. Kibbutz-style. We are all, though, knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door. The same door.
I sat on the floor and kept my face hidden in a big thick book of Bible stories for children. I thought to myself: Dear Jesus, please let me one day hang out with Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and turn all my grief into hits.
The doctor asked me if my dad knew about me going on the Pill and I said of course, you can phone him if you like. He should be at home right now — I can give you the number. I pointed at the phone on his desk and said go ahead. Then I stared at a dot on the wall and astrally projected myself into a Greenwich Village coffeehouse until the doctor said uh, that shouldn’t be necessary and my heart began to beat again.
I thought I had seen a book on his shelf that was titled How to Incorporate Mental Illness into Your Daily Routine. So, he really did understand us. Dr. Hunter was English. That’s what people in my town called anybody who wasn’t Mennonite. He might have been Estonian or Moravian for all I knew. In church The Mouth called him Brother Doctor Hunter and made snide comments about his fancy education. He had a reputation in town as a shit disturber because he believed in supplying birth control for the women here who by going forth to bed and multiplying often had ten or twelve or fifteen kids. He also liked to prescribe antidepressants. He’d written an article for the city paper that said our town has colossally huge numbers of depressed people. He talked about the emphasis here on sin, shame, death, fear, punishment and silence and somehow, God knows how, chalked that all up to feelings of sadness and galloping worthlessness.
The Mouth said the piece was fiction. He said we, the followers of Menno Simons, were used to being misunderstood by outsiders. He’d tried to shut his practice down a few times but that only strengthened Brother Doctor Hunter’s resolve. Either way, he wasn’t particularly cheerful about doling out birth control but then again he was a man on a mission, and missions aren’t supposed to be fun.
Any history of clotting?
Pardon me?
Blood clots.
No.
Do you smoke?
When I’m on fire.
Do you smoke?
Yeah.
Asinine.
Thanks.
I said that’s asinine.
Got it.
I have realized that my personal yearning to be in New York City, wandering around with Lou Reed in Greenwich Village, or whatever, is for me a painful, serious, all-consuming kind of thing and is for the rest of the world a joke. When you’re a Mennonite you can’t even yearn properly for the world because the world turns that yearning into comedy. It’s a funny premise for a movie, that’s all. Mennonite girl in New York City. Amish family goes to Soho. It’s terribly depressing to realize that your innermost desires are being tested in Hollywood for laughs per minute.
seventeen
I walked home down the number twelve sensing the beginnings of my nightly face ache, despite the fact it was the middle of the afternoon. Giant semis filled with pigs and chickens whipped past me at four thousand miles an hour three inches from my left arm. My right eye twitched from lack of stage-four sleep. I decided to cut across town and go to the hospital to tell Lids about my prescription.
When I got there I was dripping in sweat and the cut on my head from bashing it on the air conditioner had started to bleed a tiny bit. My eye also had not stopped twitching. The mean nurse saw me coming down the hall and made a Herculean effort to cut me off.
These are not visiting hours, she said.
Okay, I said, we won’t visit. I kept walking.
Lydia is rather agitated today, she said. She wants to be alone.
No, she doesn’t, I said. By then the nurse had clickety-clacked off to some other dire emergency.
Lids was wearing her so-called normal clothes instead of a hospital gown but she was fast asleep. Her hair was really greasy and she was wearing gloves. They were white and puckered on the sides and had pearl buttons at the wrists.
I sat down in the chair next to her bed and started flipping through The Black Stallion. I wondered if there was a way I could wash her hair for her while she was sleeping so she wouldn’t feel the pain but then with the heat of the room and my own personal fatigue and everything else I fell asleep in the chair and when I woke up Lids was quietly singing “Shine a Light,” the Stones song from Exile on Main Street (an album named for the Mennonite people if there ever was one), and staring at me. It was one of the songs she liked because it talked about the good Lord.
I smiled and said hey, hi, you’re up. Her eyes were even brighter than the last time I’d seen her. Remember when we were Georgina and Alberta: Granny Sleuths? she asked.
Yeah, I said. That was fun. We’d had healing powers. When our gym teacher hurt girls in our class, emotionally, by saying cruel things to them, we could heal them with our powers. For one whole year girls would come running up to us in the hall to tell us what Ms. Weins had said to them in gym and then we would heal them with our powers.
We talked about stuff, about how she was feeling, how I was doing, ordinary things, and then I told her I’d just got the prescription for the Pill. Lids didn’t agree with premarital sex but she told me congratulations and said she meant it. I hope it all works out, she said. It probably won’t, I answered. She nodded.
She asked to see the prescription and I showed it to her and she held it in her gloved hands and stared at it for a long time and then said wow. I know, I said. It was kind of embarrassing and sad. I don’t know why.
You know you have a little blood on the side of your face? she said. I told her about the air conditioner. I showed her the bird I’d bought for Ray.
That is so sweet, she said. She said she missed Ray asking her what she knew for sure. Whaddya know for sure, Miss Voth? Lids’s parents were nice, quiet people. They didn’t really believe in medicine or banks or social insurance numbers, just miracles. They were trying to cure Lids with tomato juice, gallons and gallons of it. Dr. Hunter didn’t get along with them. Lids had once heard him talking to a nurse about her parents and he had called them those holy roller shitsqueaks. Lids told me they were fighting over her soul.
How’s school going, she asked me.
Meh, I said. I shrugged. I told her I had learned that it was illegal to mow your lawn on Sunday morning. Then I asked her if I could wash her hair if I did it really, really gently so that she’d feel hardly anything at all, just warm soft water and a light tender touch of my hand.
At first she didn’t want me to. She touched her head like it was a premature newborn and said she knew it was awful but it hurt so much and I told her again how ultra, ultra gentle I’d be and that I’d stop as soon as it began to hurt and she finally agreed.
The logistics of the thing got pretty complicated. We had to strategize for about half an hour as to how to actually do it. She’d already used up her “air” by walking twice to the bathroom that day so we had to somehow do it with her in bed. Eventually we decided that she would lie diagonally across the bed with her head resting on my legs. I’d have a bowl of warm water right under her head, on the floor, between my feet, and I’d just kind of cup the water in my hands to rinse out the shampoo and it would all run back into the bowl.