“And I’d be doing this until the transplant?”
Her heart crashing five floors.
Eisenstatt acknowledged her question with quietude, perhaps considering the phrasing of his response. “The U.S. registry hasn’t hit any perfect matches yet.”
He admitted this, and Alice felt light-headed, and had to grip the railing alongside the bed.
The doctor was firm: “I don’t want you to go there.” His hands went out in front of him. “We still have plenty of moves to play. There are always new donors. Every day. And we’re starting on other possibilities, including whether we can find a donor with enough key matching categories that we might proceed. Until that comes in, blood can get you jump-started, give you the energy we need you to have.”
“The hardest part is waiting.” This came from some other part of the room. Alice recognized her mincing voice. “But when it happens it all happens very fast.”
“Oh, Dr. Bhakti,” she said. “I hadn’t even realized you were here.”
“And rooms on the transplant floor are the best in the hospital,” Bhakti assured. “Even better than those private suites up on obstetrics.”
With a glance, Alice cut her off. “Thank you, Doctor. You are always a help.”
—
Returning from the little Indian place on the other side of Sixty-seventh, juggling overloaded bags whose scents were causing havoc with his saliva glands, Oliver was a few yards from his intended elevator bank when he heard a mangled version of his name — called as a question, uncertain in its pronunciation.
It had come from the business office. A woman stood there looking like a preteen girl, only done up to look like a secretary in her school play: hair pulled back. Oversize plastic glasses. Black polka dot blouse, pencil skirt, clompy shoes. Nearing, she struggled with a stack of manila folders that were about to capsize. “I thought it was you. Looks like we both got our hands full.”
Now he recognized her: Miss Culpepper. She shifted back and forth on her heels. She had a chance to catch something before it slipped out from beneath her elbow, but instead watched the pages spill to the floor. Eyes Oliver often swore to be dead had grown some kind of inner life. Her face — pretty, if naïve — betrayed exhaustion. It took a second for Oliver to realize she was waiting for him to make conversation.
“I was really glad to see you all got that insurance problem handled,” she said. “Make sure you give my best— Tell Alice my prayers are with her.”
—
Adjacent to the mighty Connecticut River, nestled near the picturesque joining point of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, downtown Brattleboro was full of handsome old brick: a food co-op, gourmet coffee, old-town diners, and high-end bistros. It had head shops and tattoo parlors, as well as a number of bookstores (both new and used), furniture stores (antiques mostly), video and record shops, a classic art deco hotel and adjacent theater that showed new releases and hosted community theater. Former academics gravitated for retirement; college-educated, white-collar hippies found the town a safe place to raise kids. It was civilized without being urban, rural without being too rural, a hub where burnouts and townies and foodies and barbecue aficionados could coexist with old-time country folk and ski bums, and everyone tolerated the healthy flow of weekend warriors: the leaf watchers and motorcycle-riding types.
It was ideal backdrop scenery for a precocious teenager: rehearsing for her high school drama productions and pulling all-nighters so she was ready for the rhetoric sectionals; replicating the best styles and patterns from classic movies and fashion magazines, studying their cooler cousins, Paper and Interview, for missives from Manhattan’s downtown scene.
When Alice looked back, she remembered adolescence as a string of nights twisting herself with longing into a phone cord as she spoke in hushed tones to a best friend, yakking deep into the cold night about boys who barely knew she was alive. It had been endless drives down back roads with the leaves turning above her while Alice and her clique lit clove cigarettes, ate magic mushrooms, and adjusted the dial to get reception on the nearby college’s radio station. Alice relished those sun-dappled summer afternoons at swimming holes, rubbing high-SPF lotions on herself and lying out on rocks high above the falls. She remembered the winter storms she’d survived by holing up with a Ouija board and a stolen bottle of Mom’s sauvignon, steering her dead father toward one absurd question after another: Do you miss me? How hot is it down there?
How many daddy figures had she chased — in books, in movies? How many corner booths in ethnic and world restaurants had she appropriated, she and the rest of that self-proclaimed deadbeat club of friends, cherishing every townie’s glance at her blue hair, their secondhand ensembles? On prom night she’d sat on the steps of the city hall and passed a bottle back and forth and watched the sun rise over the mountains, her head firmly lodged on her best friend’s shoulder. From a few trips a year to real cities, Toronto, Boston, Manhattan, she’d gotten enough sophistication — what she’d thought of as sophistication — to realize, totally, she needed more.
When she arrived in Manhattan for college, she gravitated — inevitably, insistently — toward the East Village, the concentric circles of its colliding worlds. She trolled art gallery openings for free liquor, bluffing and nodding her way through conversations about the pieces; she missed a friend’s horrid band when they finally made their drunken, two-in-the-morning CBGB debut, instead occupying the abattoir that passed as that club’s bathroom, doing a bump off the end of an apartment key held by a lanky boy with perfectly feathered hair. The status quo: flailing to hold a pose at Integral Yoga; struggling to keep the beat to live drummers at a Saturday afternoon Afro-Brazilian dance class; grinding her hips all night at Pyramid, or Save the Robots, or Area, or Limelight; scraping together, in change, at three in the morning, the five dollars necessary for one of Yaffa’s sunshine veggie burgers (“side of quinoa thanks”). One New Year’s Day, green-gilled and still hungover, she’d sat for hours, until she seriously could not feel her ass, atop one of the side-row pews in St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery, watching the Poetry Project’s marathon fundraiser with her gay friend, and had gotten what she’d waited for: Jim Carroll, mop-headed and junkie-thin (just how you wanted him to be), had read a short story, and, after him, downtown goddess Patti Smith had scratched out a gravelly, goddessy chant of a song, and then, to top it off, a wonderfully round and cheery Allen Ginsberg had ambled up and, to the holy hush of the packed, breathless church, read a half-assed, dashed-off excuse for a poem. Afterward, in the church’s back room, she’d felt privileged and joyous when Ginsberg had slicked down his famous bushy eyebrows and — showing far more grace and charm and effort than he had onstage — unabashedly hit on her friend.
Discovering just who you were, refining who you wanted to be, choosing to root that life below Fourteenth, on streets free of franchises, amid a small teeming outpost that stood against the white-bread homogeneity that Reaganism kept jamming down your throat; for Alice, this included an added bonus: sightings — all of the other spectacular one-of-a-kind freaks; club kids coming back from a bodega with some veggie juice while in full night-crawling regalia (hair conically spiked, faces shining with glitter, wearing only high-heeled combat boots and newspaper-made bikinis); dreadlocked girls in geisha robes and corsets of body latex busily hauling bongos from rehearsal. That so many others were making their own explorations — grabbing, discarding, combining, without any kind of map, purposefully throwing away all instructions — excited her. So Alice hosted sushi-rolling parties where her girlfriends chanted rap lyrics; she attended seminars on Transcendental Meditation, staffed a tent that did free Wigstock touch-ups and fixes. Between slurps of borscht from the all-night Polish diner, Alice argued about foreign film with modern dancers, volunteered to sew the costumes for underground theater troupes who had no choice but to be unwatchable. She let herself be drawn in the nude, photographed in bondage gear, doing it for friends, for love, for art, for the hell of it; yes, even that de rigueur, eyeball-bleeding stretch where she fell under the seductive spell of the death of the author. And still kept winding herself in phone cords, despite her hangovers and cotton mouth, trying always to get to the other side of yet another cute, selfish, shitty, unreliable boy. She studied her patterns and color schemes, made skirts gratis for friends, haggled for a secondhand mannequin at the Chelsea Flea Market, used the flimsy dummy to model outfits that she re-created from film stills. She cried and delivered food, both for and with God’s Love, marched and chanted and raged against the police protest barriers with other ACT UP protesters until her hands were frozen and her throat was raw. Alice mourned the gorgeous lanky boy Ginsberg had hit on. She celebrated the man he had been. She was a woman now, indulging, absorbing, borrowing, embracing, pushing against, piecing together.