Alice had to make sure her hands did not tremble, but she managed to write a legible Culpepper in her notepad. Small letters followed: “intern?” Without fuss, Miss Culpepper led the family beyond the registration desk, into a short corridor. On the walls were framed, yellowing pictures from bygone eras — wimpled nuns tending to immigrants, beehived nurses aiding the bedridden. An obese woman stood just inside the hallway and was using a rolling chair as her support crutch while she placed manila folders into a filing cabinet.
“Before you can proceed to your appointment,” Miss Culpepper said, her voice high, “I just need to make sure that all your paperwork is in order.” Entering a low-ceilinged cubicle area, she pulled out a chair. The desk surface empty save for a boxy desktop computer (its plastic faded to the color of curdled milk), an opened carton of orange juice, and a series of elaborately framed photos, the same child: smiling in a tutu, smiling with her dollies.
“She has your lovely skin,” Alice said.
Miss Culpepper blinked, a few times, as if figuring out how to respond. Allowing herself another minor grin, she sat, smoothed out the front of her skirt. A few taps at the desktop brought a pair of fresh pages from a printer the size of a minifridge, at rest on the floor behind her. “Review these. If the information on these pages is accurate, the hospital asks you to sign on two individual pages. This first one authorizes us to bill and share the information with your health insurance. Next to the Post-it, please.”
Alice gripped the pen. Keep doing the simple things.
Miss Culpepper kept typing. A new page arrived. “This form, in case your health insurance doesn’t cover the costs, or refuses payment. You acknowledge responsibility for the outstanding charges.”
“I don’t understand,” Alice said. “Our policy covered most of New Hampshire, my chemo induction. There’s no reason to think this should be different?”
The baby rattled and chirped inside the carriage. Three of the lines on the desk phone were blinking.
“By the Post-it,” said Miss Culpepper.
As if this was his cue, Oliver shifted, jutting halfway across the desk. “We signed a proxy that authorizes me to talk about these matters — I faxed it at least three times. I’m sure a copy got to you.” He unfurled a smile designed to be charming. “Miss Culpepper? My wife’s dealing with enough on her plate. I’m sure you and I can discuss this separately?”
Miss Culpepper’s eyes were large, but not engaged, or particularly interested. She nibbled her lip. “We here at Whitman do offer significant financial aid, available for those patients that qualify.” She cleared her throat. “If and when the time comes that you should feel you need help, I can provide you with that paperwork.”
“So nothing’s necessarily wrong with our insurance?” Alice asked her.
“Hospital policy is, we can’t let you see the doctor unless you sign this form.”
“You’re not answering my question,” Alice said.
“Just let me worry about that,” Oliver said. “Okay?”
—
Yes, everything was moving forward. Alice was even remembering to breathe. Even now she was breathing, releasing her worries as if they were doves outside an elaborate wedding. For the third time since her arrival at the check-in desk, Alice apologized for the confusion in getting her slides transferred from Dartmouth. Alice told Beth there had never been a doubt the mess would get straightened out, and she thanked Beth yet again for her patience and competence, and, Alice agreed, it was nice to see someone in person after so much time on the phone — she felt like she knew Beth already.
Squarely in her line of sight were placards informing of the high risk of infection among patients, and asking that any registering patient let the staff know about cold symptoms, and if you had any kind of rash. Holding the sheet with her orders for blood work, Alice turned her torso away from the desk, and began scribbling in her little pad, two lines beneath her notes about Culpepper, reminders for how to identify Beth.
Everything will be fine.
One of the other receptionists was occupied by the task of training a new hire, and the morning’s backlog of patients was lined up behind Alice, with two elderly ladies bonding over the horrible traffic and how worried each had been about missing her appointment. Pushing herself upright, Alice eased between them, apologizing with a deference one normally reserves for royalty. She felt a light-headedness, as if billions of carbonated bubbles were dancing and popping inside her brain. Way to sabotage yourself, pushing that carriage all over the hospital.
She leaned on a chair for support, wiped her brow, adjusted the pinch of the mask on her nose, and took her good sweet time, unzipping, removing, and folding her winter coat.
Your body can only do what it can do.
Over a long thermal shirt, she was wearing a tight, bright yellow tee. Across her chest, black iron-on letters screamed: GOOD GIRLS GO TO HEAVEN. BLONDES GO EVERYWHERE. She was wearing Thierry Mugler jeans strategically shredded with a straightedge razor. She was wearing combat boots with three-inch black rubber soles that were laced to the middles of her calves. She made sure the metallic-blue bob was secure on her head. She straightened her back, though not too straight, and lifted her chin, though not too high — she knew better from being behind the scenes at runway shows, altering and sewing up dresses at the last second while designers barked instructions at models. Alice swallowed the bile that had accumulated in the back of her throat, and, with the poofy jacket a black octopus bulging out from beneath her arm, she returned her focus to nailing each landed step, assuring firm balance. In this way she started back into the waiting room’s garden party color scheme, pastels and soft greens, its walls adorned with Impressionists’ landscapes.
The blood cancer waiting room is how she thought of it.
Golf shirts and elastic waistbands and old-lady Afros and blue surgical gloves, paunches and waddle necks, and oxygen masks and IV stands with clear plastic tubing; elderly people, mostly, reclining or sitting stiffly on comfy couches, their liver-spotted or gloved hands fidgeting, their eyes darting or downcast. They sat in small groupings, usually pairs. Who wanted to go through this alone?
On the nearest couch, a scarf of bright colors was wrapped around the head of a plump woman. A glance showed her to be a fright — swollen forehead, red rashy skin, a huge gauze patch where her left eye should have been, and that ubiquitous egg-blue bandit mask covering her nose and mouth. As Alice passed, the woman’s good eye rose from her paperback copy of A Time to Kill. Her mask widened, scarcely containing an obvious grin. She nudged her husband: his white brush of hair rose from a hardback copy of The Firm; he took in the sight, and broke out as well, his face going joyful.
Alice walked past a patient strapped onto a stretcher; the bored EMT gave Alice a wink.
Past a doctor leaning over and talking softly with two pear-shaped seniors, telling them it would be at least a half hour before results came in. “Maybe you want to get some breakfast? When you get back, just tell the desk to let me know.”
A man looked up: thin as a twig, gnarled, with a grotesquely humped back. His skin so gray it was almost green, his sunken eyes lively, almost joyful as they tracked her.
She noticed an immaculately attired Japanese couple watching her — how excellent the woman’s boots were; Alice would have killed for those boots.
If these people took something from her defiance, she was happy to be able to provide it. In spades and clovers she could provide defiance. God bless them all, she thought.